The Big Hit

by Jamie Bennett

  “Really? What?” I was very intrigued, mostly by the idea that it sounded like he had been thinking about me.

  He swung the truck around a curve. “I bought a house.”

  “You did? Here, in Michigan?”

  “I’m not planning on driving you to Oklahoma today,” he answered. “I was hoping to fix it up a little before you saw it. I think it’s going to need some work.”

  It sounded as if he wanted me to like it. He really had been thinking about me. “I’m excited to see it, in any condition. What made you buy it?”

  “I was thinking over the summer that I needed a place to unpack those boxes. Hang up my diploma.” He slid another sideways look at me.

  “Knox! You really graduated?”

  “I only needed that one class here at Emelia Schaub College. I passed it, with your help.”

  “I didn’t do anything,” I protested. “Did you go to Oklahoma to march in the ceremony? Do you have pictures? Did someone record it for you?”

  “They mailed the diploma to me with a letter saying congratulations,” he said. “I didn’t go. I didn’t want the circus.”

  “Oh,” I responded, deflated. “That’s too bad, because it’s really an achievement. It would have been nice to walk across the stage with everyone to commemorate it. Congratulations,” I added belatedly. I thought about baking a cake, maybe, to celebrate. If I was going to see him again.

  “I was thinking about you over the summer.” He made another turn. “I finished that book and started on the shifter and alien one. So far, it’s not so bad. What are you reading now?”

  “I stopped with the wolf stuff.” They had seemed to bring up a lot of memories. “Right now, I’m reading a lot of Mafia books.”

  “True crime?”

  “No, fiction about women who get involved with underworld people and at the end they marry organized crime dons. Although, when I say that out loud, it sounds like they’re making pretty bad life choices.” Then my heart froze a little, because I thought again about what Tatum had told me, about Knox getting in trouble with the police. And just as I thought of her, she answered the message that I had sent saying I had left the stadium. She texted a picture of herself, smiling with an older man I didn’t recognize, but then she explained:

  Tatum: This is the Woodsmen mascot! The guy under the Hank the Hunter costume! He’s not very tall so it’s good I didn’t wear the shoes. We’re going out right now. Screw “Nico” or whatever his name is, I can hardly remember. Where did you go?

  Me: I’m with Knox.

  Tatum: I’m going to send you directions about how to maim him with your lip gloss, just in case. That’s what I should have done last spring at Ginger’s with that guy when I hid in the bathroom, and I know now that it really works.

  She sent detailed instructions, with pictures, as I wondered how she knew that it really worked, and if there was a man in Europe who had been maimed by her makeup. I stuck my phone in my purse and my fingers brushed my lip gloss as I did it.

  “Maybe I’ll try Mafia books next,” Knox commented, making me jump. “I’ve been busy with the Woodsmen and getting the house. I haven’t been there yet.”

  I turned to stare at him. “You never saw the house you bought?”

  He made another turn, from the narrow road we had been on to an even narrower one. “I saw pictures. I hope it’s nice.” He turned again onto a dirt road, a two-track, and we bumped along it for a while, with me amazed that I’d be the first person to see the house along with him.

  But when it finally came into view, “nice” certainly wasn’t the correct word for Knox’s house. Huge, yes, and also penal—just like a penitentiary, square and flat, unadorned. It reminded me of a giant military barrack or some kind of asylum. “Oh,” I said, searching for something complimentary to say as he turned off the truck. “Look at the beautiful trees you have. And, uh, it’s is such an interesting color.” The entire thing, roof and trim included, was a dark, grey-tinted green.

  “It’s Xanadu. That’s the name of the color, that’s what the real estate agent called it. It’s painted the same all through the inside, too.”

  “Oh. Well, that probably was very cost-effective.”

  “I’ll show you why I bought it.” Knox got out and came around to my side, opening the door for me. He held out his hand like he had before when I had ridden in his truck, but this time, he didn’t let go. “It’s pretty rough ground,” he commented. It just seemed like a gravel path to me, but I certainly wasn’t dropping his hand, either. He shifted his grip so that our fingers were intertwined. We walked around the Xanadu house and when I saw what it faced in the back, I understood exactly why he had bought it.

  “It’s just beautiful,” I breathed.

  Lake Michigan stretched out before us, blue and endless. Knox’s house was on a big bay tipped by dunes at either end, with a wide sand beach lining the shore. The sun was getting stronger, and the little waves sparkled. It seemed like we were the only people in the world.

  “Now, this is nice,” he agreed.

  “Can we go in right now?” I leaned and tugged his hand a little, but of course, I wasn’t moving him. “Come on,” I urged. “Your first swim as a homeowner.”

  Knox eyed me. “Do you have a bathing suit on under that?”

  I blushed and hunched in my shoulders. Tatum had picked my clothes and they were the most revealing things I owned, a V-neck t-shirt that clung and my shortest cut-offs. “No, but we can wade. Come on.”

  The bottom of the lake was sandy in front of his house and shallow for a ways out. “I think I can see a sandbar!” I told him excitedly. “You could swim to it. You could have a boat, if you wanted. I don’t know how to sail, though.” I had let go of his hand to toss my shoes onto the grass, and when I looked up, he was watching me.

  “I don’t know how to, either. We could learn,” he said. “You must be a good swimmer.”

  “No,” I told him. “Funny, since Dylan McKenzie is my brother, right? He tried to teach me, but I never got very good. I don’t drown, but I don’t do any of the strokes correctly.”

  “Me neither. We could learn that, too.”

  I felt a funny, mushy feeling in my chest at the way he kept saying “we.” I nodded, not wanting to talk in case my voice was weird.

  Knox kicked off his shoes too and then, as I watched, he pulled off the t-shirt he was wearing. “That was my first Fan Day,” he remarked. “I even forgot that today was Fan Day. I was there at the stadium to work out and talk to the trainer about my shoulder…Daisy? Hey, Daisy?”

  For years, I had read books about women seeing men naked and their odd reactions. How their mouths got dry, or they were short of breath, or they felt faint or something. To me, it had always sounded like they were just experiencing anxiety. I had personally seen plenty of swim meets on TV with plenty of muscular, cute guys, and I hadn’t ever reacted like the women in the books. But no, it wasn’t anxiety that I was feeling at the moment, looking at Knox naked. Half-naked, from the wide shoulders that looked at least twice as broad as mine, down to arms that rolled with ropes of muscle, a chest and stomach with chiseled lines around his pecs and abs, and two crevices in a V that led down below the waist of his shorts. Down to his…area that I was now staring at.

  “We don’t have to go in.”

  He was taking my dumbfounded, lust-filled gawking as hesitation about the water, thank goodness. “No, I want to,” I said. “We should go in. To cool off. In the water.” I was talking like how I wrote on Domenico’s old typewriter, in short bursts of words, waiting for the keys to catch together or for it to ding angrily at me. I turned around, away from the gorgeous wall of muscle that was Knox’s body, and rushed into the lake. Waves splashed my clothes, but I didn’t care at the moment. I needed to divert my dirty mind, my throbbing body parts, and my hungry eyes from him. I was acting like the yoga women did on the group chat, like he was just a sum of parts instead of a person. But oh, what parts…

/>   I bent and grabbed some rocks to skip. “Did you grow up around water?”

  “Nothing like this, where you can’t see the other side. I couldn’t believe this place when I moved here. Lake Michigan is like the ocean.”

  “Like the ocean, but even better, because there are no sharks,” I corrected him. Only eight skips. I could top that. “Not that I’ve seen the ocean. I’ve never left the state.”

  “Not to see your brother swim? Wasn’t he in the Olympics?”

  “Two Olympics. He won seven gold medals, two silvers, a bronze.” I heard some splashing as Knox came closer. “I watched him from our living room. Isn’t that terrible? I never saw him swim in a big competition, only on TV. Even when he was at the University of Michigan and they had meets there, I couldn’t go. I mean, I could have gone but I…” I sighed. “I missed out because of being too anxious and afraid. I’m not anymore, not really.” But then I thought of Dylan and Julia on their trip this summer and instead of skipping a rock, I just threw it as hard as I could in anger.

  “You have a pretty good arm,” Knox told me. “Show me how you skip so well.” He held out his hand and I gave him a nice, flat stone.

  “Like this.” I moved his fingers. “Index there, now your arm straight back.” His first one made 11 skips. “That wasn’t bad, for a beginner.” I had to up my game.

  “Why did you get so mad just then?” Knox asked. He bent to look for rocks, and tucked his hair behind his ears so it wouldn’t dip in the water. I liked being able to see more of his face.

  “I was just thinking how I still do have problems. I could have gone to Europe this summer, and New York. Dylan wanted me to come, but I was too scared. I didn’t go, and now I’m so angry at myself. Maybe I won’t ever have another chance like that, and I missed it. I’m tired of missing things.” I threw another rock. “I wish I wasn’t so…”

  “I thought you said that before, you couldn’t leave your house. Seems like you’ve made a big leap from that.”

  “I have! And I’m glad. I honestly am, and I appreciate how far I’ve come, how lucky I am. But something about this summer…it’s just been a hard summer. I kept reading about the yoga girls hopping from place to place, and Tatum was going everywhere, and you left, and Dylan couldn’t come home. Everyone was off doing something exciting, seeing new places and things, and I was sitting in a hot attic.” I stopped the whine. “It sounds like I’m feeling sorry for myself and I guess I am. Not going with my brother, missing that trip, it made me very sad. I went back to my therapist, trying to get myself to the point where I could do it, but there wasn’t enough time before Dylan and his wife needed to leave.”

  Knox skipped another rock, and I thought that it may have reached Wisconsin. “Nice one,” I said admiringly.

  He nodded his acknowledgement. “I wasn’t doing anything very fun, if that makes you feel better. Nothing new, either. I was in a gym or on an indoor field for most of the time I was gone. When I wasn’t getting PT, massages, cryo, PRP, acupuncture, HBOT, cupping, you name it.”

  I nodded. Those were all things my brother had done, too, to try to fix or maintain his body. “No, that doesn’t make me feel better! I wouldn’t want you to be sad just because I was. I wish one of us had been enjoying the summer.”

  Knox looked out across the water in the direction his stone had gone. “I usually don’t think too much about how I’m feeling, but one morning a few weeks ago, I was driving the rental car over to the gym, and I realized that I didn’t want to do it. Not at all, not any of it. I’ve always had this, I guess like a burning? Some kind of thing inside me that made me want to play, want to pound it out on the field. I didn’t feel it anymore.”

  “Maybe you will, when the preseason games start. Maybe you need the competition.”

  “Maybe.” But he shook his head. “I don’t think that’s it. I decided this summer that this season is definitely my last, if my body can keep going or not.”

  “Wow. That’s a huge thing.” I remembered my brother struggling over his decision to retire, and he still second-guessed it. I glanced up at the Xanadu-colored house. “Is that why you bought this place? To live here when you’re done with football?”

  Knox didn’t answer that. “Let’s go in and look at it. I’ll help you.” He reached out to me and I took his hand, even though I didn’t need a lot of help walking up onto the beach. “Sit,” he directed me, and I placed myself on one of the two big rocks at the edge of his lawn. Knox crouched down and picked up my foot, and then he used his t-shirt to brush off the sand.

  “Thank you,” I said, in a voice that was more like a whisper. I watched as he carefully, gently, removed every grain from both my feet and then shook out his shirt.

  “There you go.” He smiled at me. I thought about the game replays I had watched this summer. In one of them, he had tackled the other team’s quarterback so hard that the guy had been taken off in a cart. This was the same man, the one sitting at my feet.

  “Thank you,” I said again, this time a little stronger. “I’d like to see the inside.” We went around the front and Knox unlocked the heavy door.

  It felt dark in the house when we walked in and out of the sunlight, but I realized that it wasn’t just the contrast to the brightness outside that made it seem so dim. Even when he turned on the lights, it was dark. Almost all the walls were, in fact, painted the same grey as the exterior siding and there didn’t seem to be enough wattage to fully drive the shadows from the corners. We toured quietly, walking from one tiny, low-ceilinged room to another. The windows were high and small, and the kitchen was in the middle of the building, with no windows at all. It was the strangest house I’d ever been in.

  “The real estate agent told me that the guy who built this was a survivalist,” Knox commented. He was looking at the kitchen appliances, swinging open the oven door. “The basement is some kind of bunker.”

  “That will be good if there’s a tornado,” I responded. “Or even in a bad thunderstorm, you could take cover down there.” I searched for something else. “These cabinets look very sturdy.”

  “It’s awful.”

  “Well…”

  “It’s awful,” he said again. “Like a fucking cave.” He didn’t sound angry as much as disappointed. “I knew it was going to be weird, but this is worse than I imagined. I don’t fit in here. You look like you’re wilting.”

  “Not at all! I think that with a little paint, this place will be fine.” And if he could find someone to raise the ceilings so he didn’t have to duck. “You have to remember the most important part,” I said, as I stepped close to link my arm with his. My hand couldn’t even grip around his bicep. This time he let me pull him, to lead him back through the warren of rooms to the exit to the back yard (in its unusual location in the laundry room closet). I pushed open the heavy, metal door to show him the view of the lake. “Think, if you painted everything bright white, changed out some windows, and added French doors so you could look at this. Every time you see it, it will make you happy, in the winter when it’s frozen, white ice, and in the fall when it’s choppy grey, all the time. You’re so lucky to have this spot on the lake.” I looked up into his face to see if I had convinced him, but he wasn’t admiring the view. He was looking down at me, and smiling.

  “Maybe it would be better,” he agreed. “I’m feeling better about it already.”

  I found myself smiling back, because I already felt better, too.

  ∞

  “God, he’s a pig!” Tatum complained, and threw a pickle slice at me.

  “Don’t pelt me with your food!” Luckily, she had very bad aim due to poor follow-through. “It’s certainly not my fault that the mascot guy is married,” I told her.

  “I’m not sure if he really is. He told me that he has a ‘common-law’ wife. Do we even have that in Michigan?”

  I shrugged. “If we do or we don’t, I would stay away from a man who says he has any kind of wife.”

  She sighe
d, and slouched down in the booth of the restaurant where we had met for dinner, so I could hear about her afternoon and also so I could avoid my neighbor Shelby’s “surprise” party to introduce me to men. “There I was, flirting my head off in front of Nico and wasting all my time with the mascot guy, and he was married, or married-ish. And Nico didn’t even look my way.” Tatum picked her pickle off my plate and ate it. “The whole Fan Day was pointless. For me,” she added, and raised her eyebrows significantly in my direction.

  I ignored that comment and took another bite of my sandwich. It was fun to be out with a friend again. I realized I should have said yes to Shelby all the times she had asked me to go out with her over the past few months, even if maybe it would have been hard. I had cut myself off for no reason, pouting and hibernating. “Really, Tatum? There was no one else at Fan Day who caught your eye?”

  “Oh, plenty of them were eye-catching!” she assured me. “But it didn’t seem to be mutual.” She sighed. “The braids made me look too young,” she complained, “without the tall shoes to age me. When I talked about my school health project and taking their vital signs, they thought I meant middle school.”

  I snorted. I couldn’t help it, and then Tatum started to laugh, too. “I’m so tired of that!” she said. “You don’t know how it is, since you’re walking around on stilts all the time.”

  “Do you mean my legs?”

  “Yes, your long, gorgeous, stilt legs! Oh, that reminds me.” She pulled open the bag that she had placed on the bench seat next to herself. “I felt like I needed to go shopping to cheer myself up after the mascot fiasco, and I got some things for you.” She held up a tiny scrap of red lace.

  “What is that, a garter?” I asked. “Thank you.” I wondered when I would ever have the occasion to wear it.

  Now she snorted. “A garter! No, silly, it’s a thong.”

  “A what?”

  “A THONG,” she repeated, but very loudly. The two men at the table next to us looked also, as Tatum stretched it out between her thumbs and I could see the miniscule amount of fabric that was supposed to cover all my, um, feminine areas. The rest of the diners in the deli with us could see it too.