Wrecked

by Jeannine Colette

  “What are you doing?” Adam’s voice bellows through the open room.

  I look up at him and give him a what-the-hell-do-you-think-I’m-doing expression.

  “You couldn’t wait ten minutes?” He’s shaking his head and looking down at me like I’m a little kid who needs to be reprimanded. “These supplies are donated. You can’t waste them because you have zero patience.” He moves me out of the way. Then, he picks up the board that’s four feet high by eight feet wide and throws it on the other side of the room as if it were a piece of paper.

  “What did you do that for?” I ask, hands on my hips, my foot tapping in annoyance. “You should at least see what I did before you deem me a complete fuckup.”

  He lets out a deep growl and then stalks over to the other side of the room. He picks up the drywall, which is thankfully still intact. He brings it up to the wall, and just as I knew it would, it fits perfectly. Adam blinks a few times, his brows pointed down. It’s as if he can’t believe a little tart like me can actually do something useful.

  Instead of saying sorry or something positive, he holds up the board and says, “All right, get screwing.”

  My mouth is open, slack-jawed, from how rude he is. Instead of getting on my knees and screwing the board like he wants me to, I take my tape measure and utility knife, turn on my heels, and walk toward the door.

  “Where are you going?” he asks.

  “To find someone else to work with.”

  “I want to get something straight. I put my ass on the line for you. Harper will happily process you, and I will gladly look the other way.”

  “I’m here, aren’t I? I’m doing the work. Didn’t know I had to do it glued to your Neanderthal self!”

  “I don’t think you understand how this works. You’re the criminal. I’m the officer.”

  His words make me halt, and then I turn around so swiftly that my hair flings me in the cheek.

  “No, Adam. You’re the asshole. I’m the idiot.”

  I walk out of the room in search of a more appreciative partner.

  I spend my morning working with a crew of volunteers who seem more than happy to have my services. We spackle and tape the living room of the third house, and no one talks while we work. The hours slowly pass by, but the job gets done.

  I’m standing on a ladder, spreading compound on the wall, when I see the orange hue of Adam’s shirt through my peripheral vision.

  “Some worker you have here, Adam. This one knows how to get her hands dirty,” Toby says.

  I don’t turn to see Adam’s expression. I just keep working.

  “I’m surprised she’s still here. Thought she left.” His baritone makes my pulse pick up.

  “Left? She’s been here, busting her ass, all morning. Wouldn’t have gotten this complete without her.” Toby pats Adam on the back and starts to walk out of the room. “Come on, time for lunch. You coming, Leah?”

  My stomach is grumbling, but the idea of sitting down in the same area with Adam is rather unappealing. “No. I’m good. You guys go. I’ll be out in a bit.”

  “All right. Come on, man, let’s take a break.”

  Toby walks out of the room, but that vision of orange is still hovering in my peripheral. He’s just standing there. I can’t bring myself to look back at him.

  After what feels like an eternity, Adam finally leaves, and my shoulders relax. I clean off my tools, put them away, and then wash my hands. I walk out the back door.

  There is a large tree in the field, a perfect spot to get shade from the afternoon sun. I sit down on the grass next to a patch of marigolds, rest my back on the trunk, and close my eyes, remembering a time when Adam and I were close.

  “You’re gonna miss that shot.” He walked past the locker room doors that led to the indoor basketball court at our high school, wearing a pair of track pants and a sleeveless tank. His toned arms were on full display as he carried a duffel bag in one hand with a backpack slung over the other arm.

  “Thanks, Captain Obvious,” I said with a goofy grin and an eye roll. I bent my knees and took another shot but missed. “Why are you here so late?”

  “Practice ran long. I’m supposed to pick up Nina. She’s gonna be pissed that I’m late,” he said from the side of the court.

  I retrieved the basketball and dribbled it. “Oh, that’s right, your girlfriend,” I said in a singsong, teasing voice.

  Adam shook his head at my missed shot. He put down the bag and backpack and started walking toward me. “Gimme,” he said with outstretched hands.

  I tossed him the ball.

  “Your feet need to be shoulder width apart for good balance with your shooting foot slightly ahead of the other.”

  Standing next to him, I mimicked his actions. Apparently, I was doing something wrong because he looked at me like I was a toddler walking for the first time.

  “Here, let me show you.” Adam moved to stand behind me.

  His long, lean eighteen-year-old body was flush against mine. He towered over me, having just hit some incredible growth spurt that had changed him from boy to man overnight. I wasn’t the only one who had noticed. The female population of our school had been going ballistic.

  Adam took his hand and placed it on my right leg, extending it out and showing me the proper form. “Bend and flex your legs with each shot. Like this.” His knees were bent behind mine as his hands guided my hips, showing me exactly how I was supposed to move.

  He grabbed my arms. “Your forearm and wrist should extend in a straight line when you shoot. Now, look at the target. Never take your eyes off the target. And shoot.”

  Holding the ball, I leaned up and took a shot. It went in.

  “I did it!” I jumped up in the air and spun around, landing me face-to-face with Adam.

  My heart began to race, my skin igniting. It was the closest we’d ever been.

  Looking up, I saw his dark eyes peering down on mine. We were standing close, so close, his breath on my skin. My chest rose and brushed against his.

  Adam licked his lips, leaning forward just a touch. I braced myself for contact when, suddenly, he backed away.

  He grabbed the ball from the ground and started dribbling it around me. “Come on, best three out of five.”

  “Three out of five what?” I stood motionless.

  “You want to play basketball. Let’s play.” He dribbled up to the net and took a shot, making it in perfectly. Retrieving the ball, he bounced it again.

  “I don’t want to play. I have to play. Mr. Ruggers made it my intramural requirement for gym. I have to learn the rules of the game, or I’ll fail.”

  “Basketball is your gym requirement?” Adam said, shocked. Too shocked.

  Clearly, he thought I wasn’t athletic enough to play a sport.

  I put my hands on my hips. “For your information, I like basketball.”

  “No, you don’t. You like dance. You should be taking impressionist movement with Mrs. Lauer.”

  He was right. I should be.

  “It was full. And, personally, I think Mr. Ruggers is just punishing me for the ruckus I caused at the basketball championship game last year.”

  With a laugh, Adam leaned back. “Oh, yeah. That’s probably right. You had the entire stadium on their feet, chanting, ‘Howl at the foul.’” Shaking his head and smiling, he said, “You caused a huge brawl. They had to stop the game to clear the players from fighting.”

  I looked down and shuffled my feet. “Okay, it wasn’t my finest moment. Sue said it was a ridiculous call, and I got a little carried away. I didn’t mean for anyone to fight.”

  Adam dribbled the ball in between his legs and around in a circle. “You were right though. That ref missed the call. I was one of the people chanting along with you.”

  “Doesn’t matter. Now, I have to do drills, learn different shots, and play in order to pass the class.”

  “Why isn’t your boyfriend out here teaching you?”

  “Brad got a c
all and took off. I don’t know where he went.”

  “He just left you here?” Adam took another shot, and the ball went in. “Come on, I’ll teach you.”

  I did a double take. “You’re gonna teach me basketball? Now? What about Nina?”

  Adam shrugged. “She can wait. Now, come here, and show me what you’ve got.”

  We played almost every day for five months. When the weather got nice, we would move our lesson to the schoolyard, and then we started meeting in his driveway. We spent those nights talking about everything—school, friends, movies, life. He was getting ready to graduate and go away to school to become an architect. I was just a wide-eyed sophomore who was settling into a deep Matthew McConaughey obsession. We laughed, and we played, but mostly, we talked.

  A slight breeze brushes the hair from my face. It feels nice and peaceful after a morning of manual labor. I’m about to fall asleep, but the breeze stops.

  I open my eyes and see jean-clad legs standing in front of me, blocking my wind. I look up, and Adam is standing above me, holding two brown paper bags in one hand and two Cokes in the other. He holds out his hand with the bags.

  I don’t move or say a word.

  He raises his head to the sun and takes a deep breath that puffs out his chest. When he looks back down, he closes his eyes, shakes his head, and then takes a seat on the ground next to me.

  He places a bag on my lap and props a Coke on the side of my hip. He proceeds to open his bag, taking out an apricot, a sandwich, and a cookie.

  I look in my bag and see that I have the same.

  “Is this some sort of peace offering?” I ask.

  Adam takes a bite of his sandwich.

  I open my sack and start with the cookie. “Who made the lunches?”

  With a mouthful of sandwich, he replies, “Me.”

  I turn my head to him in surprise. “You made lunch for the whole crew?”

  “No.” He pops open his soda and takes a sip. “You still eat your dessert first?”

  “Yes,” I answer. Then, I swallow my cookie. “Wait, what do you mean by still?”

  The side of his mouth rises just barely, as if he’s recalling a memory. “When you used to come to my house, you always asked for a piece of pie before dinner. I remember my mom saying it would spoil your appetite, and your reply was, ‘What if I choke and die during dinner? Do you really want me to die, not having dessert on my last day of life?’”

  Adam laughs lightly. I, on the other hand, am dumbstruck that he remembers this. I didn’t think Adam remembered anything about those days.

  When he looks back at me, the slight rise of his lip is gone. Maybe it’s because I’m staring at him with the most confused expression.

  I shake off the oddness of the moment and say, “Well, you know, a branch from this tree could fall on my head and knock me unconscious. Do you really want me to die, not having devoured that delicious cookie?”

  Adam looks out into the field and says, “No. We wouldn’t want that.”

  We sit in silence and eat our lunches. Our feet are stretched out before us, and the breeze is back to whistling in the trees.

  “Must suck, huh?” I say, the first to break the silence, talking into the open air. “Having to give up your Sunday to babysit me?”

  “No. I’d have been here anyway.”

  I raise a brow. “You volunteer here a lot?”

  “Three times a week. I work a four-day shift, and I’m here the other three.” His words are nonchalant, like every twenty-five-year-old guy gives up his days off to build houses in the heat for people he doesn’t know. “If you want to come Tuesday, you can knock off a few more hours before your night shift.”

  I have a lot of questions but don’t know which one I want to ask first.

  I don’t get a chance to ask any because Adam opens his mouth and says, “I take it, Bob Paige taught his kids how to do construction?”

  I laugh at the absurdity of his comment. “My dad? Use a tool? If by tool, you mean, a KitchenAid mixer, then, yes, he taught us everything he knows. If you mean a hammer and drill, the answer is no.”

  He looks at my hands clasped around a ham sandwich. “Who taught you?”

  “What? You think a girl with an ass as fine as mine, who makes the best Long Island iced tea in town, can’t hang a wall?”

  He shrugs. “Kinda. Yeah.”

  I shake my head at his assumption. I should be a bitch and argue with him, but instead, I tell him the God’s honest truth. “You know how boys sign up for the dance elective in high school to meet girls? Well, I signed up for shop to meet boys.”

  Adam lets out a low laugh, but I can’t tell if he’s laughing at me or because he actually thinks what I said is funny.

  “How’d that go for you?”

  “It’s how I met Brad.”

  The mention of his dead best friend changes the aura around him. The light laughter in his voice falls, as does the carefree expression on his face. In its place is a look that turns serious.

  “That’s right. I forgot.” The wall he momentarily let down is back up.

  I take a bite of my sandwich and chew. I swallow and carry-on, “Turns out, I like working with my hands. There are a lot of things I’m good at that no one gives me credit for.”

  The muscles in his forearms tighten and release. His mouth opens and closes just barely. For a man whose every movement is precise and calculated, he seems to have a hard time with deciding what action he wants to present at this moment.

  “Leah, what you said earlier.” He pauses for a moment. Those onyx eyes look at me the same way they did last night. “I’m the asshole. But you’re not the idiot.”

  Not expecting an apology of sorts, I just stare back at him and wait for the rest of it—the part where he reprimands me or says something demeaning about my career, my bar, my dress, my personality.

  Instead, he says nothing.

  In silence, I accept his words for what they are, and we finish our lunch, sitting under the tree. When it is time to head back, I know I should say something. He’s about to walk toward the house when I place my hand on his forearm and pull him back.

  He turns to me, and I suddenly feel awkward.

  I’ve never been shy with words, but something about the way his arm has gone stiff underneath the pads of my fingers and how his pecs rise without an exhale makes me freeze. My mouth is without sound.

  Adam looks down at my hand on his arm and stares at my skin touching his. His face forms a frown, and I’m dying to know what he’s thinking.

  But I’ll never know because he jerks away.

  “Don’t touch me,” he says.

  I stand and watch his back as he walks away.

  chapter FIVE

  “What a jerk,” Suzanne says from her spot on an upside-down crate in the stockroom of The Bucking Bronco.

  “I know, right?” I’m counting the cases of Absolut.

  The room is small and windowless, lined with metal shelves. It’s strictly known as the liquor room and where we keep the booze. There’s a room under the bar where the beer is stored and another in the back near the kitchen for the food.

  “You get arrested, and he comes in and makes this deal with you to keep you out of trouble?”

  I mark the number of cases on the paper in front of me. “It’s like he wouldn’t even listen to me when I said that I was not behind the goddamn wheel.” I look up from the clipboard and move over to the Grey Goose.

  “Well, that other officer, sure, he should have listened to you, but how dare that awful Adam Reingold act like some knight in shining armor by saving your ass and your dreams of owning a bar.”

  There’s a dramatic air to her speech that causes me to stop what I’m doing as I swivel my head.

  I point my pen at her. “You’re being facetious.”

  She pushes her glasses up her slim nose and shrugs one shoulder up to her ear. “And we haven’t even touched on him rescuing you from being attacked by Nico.�
�

  “Rescued? I shouldn’t have been there in the first place. I could sue the town for that.”

  “Why don’t you?”

  “Because…” I try to think of a reason. Not coming up with one, I tap my foot in frustration and toss her a frustrated glare. “Shove it.”

  Suzanne laughs, her shiny pink lipstick spread across her widened grin. “Even though Adam’s kind of a dick, he should know you by now. Your reputation precedes you. Hell, you’ve made me drive some way-too-tipsy girls you were concerned about home because you were short-staffed and couldn’t leave.”

  I shake my head. My eyes focus on the laces of my sneakers. “I don’t think he pays attention.”

  “No, I suppose he doesn’t,” she says.

  There’s a moment of silence as I move on to the bottles of rum and make notes on my clipboard.

  “You never talk about Brad.”

  My pen stops moving on the paper. “What’s there to talk about?”

  “Nothing. Everything. It’s kind of nice that you and Adam are working together. I think you need to hash that out.”

  “You want us to talk about how someone we were both incredibly close to had a heroin addiction that we were so damn blind to that he died as soon as it started?” I close my eyes and bite the inside of my cheek hard. “Speaking of which, did you have any clue Victoria did drugs?”

  Suzanne’s hands quickly rise in defense. “Absolutely not.” She lets out a huff in disbelief. “And no one’s heard from her since Saturday night. I’ve asked around. She made some random post yesterday about her new leggings, so I know she’s alive. Where exactly is the question.”

  This town is going to hell.

  Emma says she’ll never return. She wants to live in a city, any city. Cedar Ridge is just too small for her.

  Dad always says to her, “Big city, big problems.”

  The opposite isn’t the same for small towns. Our issues seem to become magnified under the microscope we put each other under. Brad died seven years ago, and here we are, still trying to keep the bad stuff away. Doesn’t seem to be working.