Remington's Tower

by Katharine Sadler

  “That was really fun,” I said to Worthy, who had stopped next to me. “We should do it again.”

  He gave me a small smile and nodded, but there was a sadness in his expression I hadn’t seen before. “Sure, I’ll let you know next time I go. And you let me know if you go. Don’t hike alone.”

  I gave him a mock salute. “Sure, thing, Dad,” I said in my best little kid voice. Worthy smirked and took a step away and my phone beeped. I only got texts from my uncle or my cousins, so I was going to ignore it, but Worthy was already walking away without a glance back.

  I pulled my phone from my back pocket to see a text from Byron. “Suweet!” I said, before starting after Worthy at a jog. “Hey, wait up!”

  He stopped and turned to look back at me. He didn’t look pleased. “Did you forget something?”

  “Relax,” I said. “What crawled up your ass in the past two minutes?”

  He shook his head and gave me a weak smile. “I’m sorry. Just thinking about a paper I have to write.”

  “You have a paper to write? Sucks to be you. I’m on my way to your place to play touch football.”

  Worthy tipped back his head and laughed.

  “What’s so funny?” I asked. “Shouldn’t you be crying about missing out on all the fun? Or don’t you like football?”

  He gave me a wide-eyed look like I might be crazy. “No, I just think it’s funny that Byron has warned all of the guys off dating you, but he’s inviting you to a game of touch football with that gang.”

  I stopped in my tracks, so shocked I just stood there for a minute opening and closing my mouth like a fish. “He did what?” I finally sputtered.

  Worthy looked a bit like he wanted to turn and run away, like I might be about to go a little crazy. He had it all wrong, I was well past crazy. “I thought you already knew. I mean you said—”

  “I said he’d been warning the guys off. Like, don’t pick on my little cousin, or don’t hook up with my cousin. Not don’t date my cousin. What the hell does he think? He can keep me from having any social life at all?” Already my mind was whirring with anger and plots to get back at my cousin. Behind me, Worthy was saying something, but I didn’t hear a word. I stomped along, trying to punch holes in the sidewalk with my feet.

  “Wait,” I said, stopping so suddenly Worthy ran into my back. I spun and put my hands on his shoulders. “What did he threaten them with?”

  Worthy dropped his gaze to the pavement. “Remy, I think you should calm down, and—”

  “Argh!” I said. “Why do guys always say that? I don’t want to calm down. I want you to tell me what Byron threatened them with.” Not that I thought I was so irresistible those guys had to be threatened to resist asking me out, but my cousin loved throwing threats around. It was his lifeblood.

  “Look, Remy, I’d love to tell you, but Byron—”

  “Ah-ha,” I said, poking him in the chest. “You’re afraid of the threat. You’re still afraid of my cousin.”

  Worthy rolled his eyes. “I’m not going to tell you, Remy, so you can just—”

  “Chicken,” I said, standing on my toes and going nose to nose with him.

  He swallowed hard. “Remy—”

  “Bock, bock.” I put my fists in my pits and did a little chicken strut. Then I crowed like a rooster. I do a really good rooster.

  Worthy bit his lip and his face got red. Psychological warfare was so easy to use against men. They fell under its power every time. I was just about to crow again when Worthy ducked and swept my feet out from under me. He dropped me gently to the ground and started tickling me.

  I am embarrassingly ticklish and somehow Worthy knew it. He tickled me until I was gasping for air and wriggling like a puppy off the leash for the first time. “Uncle,” I yelled.

  “What was that?” he asked, laughter bouncing around his own words. “I can’t hear anything over your screeches.”

  I had to say uncle three more times before he finally stopped. I was laughing and squirming so much, it took me a moment to realize his hands had stilled on me. His big strong warm hands had stilled on my ribs and he was staring down at me with melty amber eyes and a soft smile. The look on his face made my chest tighten, but before I could wonder what he was thinking, he leapt off me and offered me a hand up. I ignored his hand, stood with as much dignity as possible, adjusted my shirt and my shorts, and tried to force away the smile that had gotten stuck to my face somewhere in the middle of all the tickling. I brushed the grass and twigs out of my hair and the dust off my clothes. When I finally looked up, Worthy was smiling, too, but his eyes were brown again and the vulnerability I’d seen on his face was gone.

  “That was fun,” I said. “But it doesn’t change the fact that you’re a chick—”

  He lunged at me and I turned and ran as fast as I could to Byron’s frat house. One thing growing up with four older cousins taught me was how to outrun them all. I beat Worthy to Byron’s and ran straight to my cousin, knowing that Worthy wouldn’t attack me in front of Byron. Byron was standing on the large front lawn in front of their three-story, farmhouse-style frat house, surrounded by a group of about ten guys.

  I wrapped an arm around Byron’s broad shoulders, and tried to catch my breath. Worthy stopped when he reached us, put his hands on his knees, and dropped his head. “I want to be on her team,” he said between gasps for air.

  Byron looked back and forth between me and Worthy for a while, his frown deepening. “What happened to you two?” he finally asked.

  I shrugged. “We just went out on a date. I was about to take Worthy back to my room and have my way with him when you texted me about the game.”

  Whatever air Worthy had gained was sucked back in the wrong way, and he started coughing so hard I was a bit worried about him. Byron, however, only had eyes for me. “You’re lying,” he said.

  I walked over and started smacking Worthy on the back, hard. Hey, I was trying to help him out. “I’m not lying.”

  “You are,” Byron said, finally smiling. “You’ve got a tell.”

  No, he did not. I stopped smacking Worthy’s back and stepped up to my cousin. “You take that back. I don’t have a tell. I’m a better liar than you any day of the week.”

  Byron put one strong hand on my shoulder and grinned at me, and I snapped. “I challenge you,” I said.

  Byron shook his head. “Sis, you don’t want to do this.”

  “I do.”

  “Fine,” he said. “What’s the game?”

  “Poker, tonight. After the football.”

  “Gotta date tonight, Sis. How about tomorrow?”

  Something inside me boiled over. I was so sick of being babied and protected and caged. I was sick of being underestimated. “New challenge right now. Your threat against mine.”

  “Remy, I don’t think—” Worthy said behind me.

  “I don’t care what you or anyone else thinks,” I said. “This is about honor. I’m going to prove I don’t have a freaking tell. Right now.”

  Byron looked at Worthy, then at me. “Fine. I don’t know what you’re going on about, but if it’s that important to you, challenge accepted. After the game. We’ve been waiting all afternoon to have enough guys to play and half the guys here have to get to work in an hour.”

  I spit on my hand and extended it to Byron, he spit and we shook. Deal done. I was fired up and ready to play some serious ball at that point.

  Worthy and Byron somehow got to be team captains, and Worthy did pick me for his team. I was over the moon excited to have an opportunity to go up against my cousin before the challenge. Worthy was the quarterback, because he’d played some ball in high school, and he picked me to be a running back. Pretty risky move, considering he’d never seen me catch a ball. I had to say I appreciated his belief in my unproven ability. So I played hard for him. I ran hard, I caught hard, and I hit Byron hard every chance I got.

  “This is touch football, Remington, not tackle,” Byron said, after the t
hird time I’d brought him to the ground by slamming into his knees.

  “Man up, By,” I said, as I climbed to my feet and patted his head. “Want me to go inside and get your pads for you?”

  Unfortunately, my drive to sack Byron at all costs lost us the game point. Worthy seemed a bit miffed, but I figured he’d get over it.

  After Byron and his team were done cheering about winning, they all started to wander off.

  “Not so fast,” I yelled. “We still have a challenge.”

  Byron and his buddies turned around, but no one moved toward me. “Didn’t you get enough revenge on the field?” Byron asked, rotating his shoulder like he might actually be hurt.

  “You ready to admit I don’t have a tell?”

  Byron shook his head, looking a bit like a sad puppy. I didn’t buy it for a second. His cute baby of the family tricks never worked on me.

  “Then you and your friends get back over here and let’s have this challenge.”

  The guys were ribbing Byron and pushing him around, but I ignored them.

  “What’s the challenge, Remington?” Byron asked. I could see the competitive drive in his eyes and I knew I had him.

  I gave him my sweet as sugar, innocent, little girl smile. “It’s like this, Byron. I understand you threatened these men with some sort of bodily harm if any of them dared to ask me out.”

  Byron glared in Worthy’s direction, but Worthy just shrugged. “I didn’t know it was a secret, man.”

  “I suggest we play it like this,” I said. “We each state our respective threats and the boys here will stand in front of the person whose threat they fear the most. The winner is the one with the most believable threat.”

  Byron growled low in his throat. “I don’t like this.”

  “Then make sure your threat is more believable, tough guy.”

  Byron glared at the men around us. They ranged from downright gorgeous to rather unfortunate, but none of them seemed to be wilting under my cousin’s glare, which was a very good thing. “Okay, guys, we all know who you’re going to side with here,” he said, “but just in case you need some reminding, if any of you ask out, lust after, imagine naked, or flirt with my cousin, I will go into your room while you are sleeping and I will remove one of your testicles from your body.”

  I tried not to wince, but seriously, who would really believe he would do that? Of course he wouldn’t risk his career and his future by removing a man’s testicle forcibly from his body, but Byron had been prone, since childhood, to making grandiose threats. I doubted anyone ever believed he’d follow through, but he was big enough and growly enough that people tended to back down even if they didn’t believe his threats to the letter. I blamed his flair for the dramatic on his namesake. “Ooooh,” I said with a shudder. “I know I’m scared. Now, fellas, here’s my threat: I will whisper in the ears of all of my girlfriends that each of you has a venereal disease of one sort or another, and I will make sure they share that information with every girl they know, and on and on. The rumor will spread faster than fleas on a coon hound until every girl on campus knows that you are unclean.”

  The faces of several of the men paled and one guy started to sweat. “You’re going to do that if we ask you out, lust after you, imagine you naked, or flirt with you?”

  I smiled and shook my head. “No. You see, I’ve had a rather sheltered life and my cousin here would like my life to continue to be sheltered. That’s not what I want. If you do not ask me out on a date within the next—”

  “Wait just one—” Byron said.

  I held up my hand. “We spit on it, cousin mine.” I waited for him to acknowledge the futility of argument and continued. “You each have fourteen days to schedule a date with me and take me out. If you do not, I will carry out my threat. Now gentlemen, whose threat are you going to bet on?”

  Without any hesitation, all of the guys lined up in front of me. I looked over at my cousin to commence gloating, but I noticed Worthy wasn’t in my line. When I found him, standing off to the side, he just shook his head and smiled. “I don’t believe either one of your threats, and I don’t date anyone under duress.”

  I tried not to show my hurt. I knew we hadn’t had the smoothest of meetings, but I thought we were friends, at least. I didn’t think it would hurt him to show a little support and get coffee with me sometime. I pushed the hurt down and turned to my cousin, whose face was flaming red. I decided to give him some time to cool down and started setting dates with the ten guys lined up in front of me.

  ***

  I knocked on Byron’s door, my phone filled with ten new phone numbers and ten dates scheduled for the next two weeks. “Go away,” he yelled at me.

  I pushed the door open and stuck my head in. “You know I love you more than moon-pies, By-By.”

  “You have a funny way of showing it,” he said, his tone sulky. At least he wasn’t mad anymore.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have done that so publicly, but you’d already made it public. I want to be normal, to fit in, to have a life. I want to date guys and have fun. I thought you understood that.”

  “There’s a big difference between that and watching you go out on dates with the assholes I hang out with.”

  “They can’t be assholes if they’re your friends,” I said, putting an arm around his shoulders and hugging him close. He could act the part of coarse redneck when he wanted to, and he could even seem tough and scary to some people, but my cousin was nothing but a big old softy and he wouldn’t put up with friends of his mistreating any woman.

  “They’re good guys for the most part, but there are a lot of assholes out there, Remington, and you’ve never had any experience with any kind of guys.” He looked down at his lap and turned over his hands. “I told Dad he was making a mistake, not letting you go to school or anywhere at all, but he was so stubborn. I never understood…”

  He looked at me, but I just shook my head. “I never understood it either, Byron, and believe me we had our share of knockdown, drag-out fights about it. I was willing to be homeschooled, if he would just let me go out and be around other people every so often, to join a church group or the girl scouts, something, anything, but he always refused. I swear…” I stopped myself, not wanting to voice my fears aloud.

  “What?”

  “He seemed to be getting worse last year. The paranoia and the…the anxiety. He woke me up three times a week, worried someone was trying to break into the house.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” Byron asked.

  “You were doing so well at school and I didn’t want to worry you. Plus, he’s so convincing, By, that I started to believe there might really be something going on. Someone giving him trouble at the shop or something. It got to where I stopped asking to go to college because I was afraid to leave him alone. Then one day, he just up and changed his mind completely, said it was time for me to go.”

  “I thought you told him you were twenty and he couldn’t stop you,” Byron said, his smile softening the anger I heard behind his words. Whatever his faults, Uncle Leon was a good man, and none of us wanted to see him hurt.

  “Yeah, I might have said that, too, but I wouldn’t have left him like that. He told me I had nothing to worry about and it was time for me to go out and see the world.”

  “Thought you were going to follow in his footsteps and be a mechanic.”

  I shrugged, because I wouldn’t have minded that life. I liked working on cars and I loved the mountains. I would have even been able to meet people, working in his shop. “I thought that was the only way I was going to get out of the house, but he said he didn’t want that life for me, that I deserved better. He was almost to the point of pushing me out the door, he was so adamant on me getting out of the house and going to college. Of course, I had to go to Maple Ridge University, but at lease he let me go somewhere.”

  Byron’s brow crinkled, but he shook it off. “Well, you’re here now and that’s what matters. So I’m going to give y
ou a crash course in staying safe around college men.”

  I left Byron’s room a half hour later, my head swimming with dating advice, from ‘don’t go back to a guy’s room alone’ to ‘don’t ever leave your drink unattended’ to ‘just pretend you don’t hear it if your date farts.’ I was a bit intimidated and a bit amused and very glad I had Byron’s friends to practice dating on. I don’t like to admit to being scared of anything and I know I’m tough and strong, but some of the scenarios Byron painted were downright frightening. I sort of hoped he was just exaggerating to keep me single, but the sincerity in his eyes was hard to ignore.

  I was lost in those thoughts when a heavy hand landed on my shoulder. It was dark and I was alone, so I spun and raised my hands in a fighting position. I stopped myself before I rammed the side of my hand into Worthy’s throat. He raised his hands and took a step back. “Calm down, ninja warrior, Byron asked me to walk you home.”

  I sighed. “It’s three blocks and I have pepper spray. There was no reason for me to disturb his phone call.” Worthy didn’t need to know I’d snuck out as soon as Byron’s phone rang, because I was desperate to avoid his lecture on safe sex.

  Worthy shrugged. “Then you’re an idiot. You can be the strongest woman in the world and there will still be a man out there stronger than you. It’s just biology and physics. Don’t give Byron a reason to worry and don’t walk home alone at night.”

  I could have picked a fight with him over his bossy tone, but I was tired and I knew he was right. “Why didn’t he come himself?”

  “He was still on the phone, and I saw you leaving on your own. I made an executive decision.”

  “Who was he talking to anyway?” As far as I knew all of Byron’s friends lived in the frat house with him, and I was curious about his life. Just not curious enough to hang around for the sex talk.