Playing Defense (Corrigan Falls Raiders)

by Cate Cameron

  So I wasn’t too surprised when she said, “No, a movie’s a good idea. I think…I think a bit of public time might be wise.”

  Not what I wanted to hear, but I kissed her again anyway. Less intense this time, but still a good kiss. “Okay,” I agreed. “Movie. Excellent.”

  “Awesome,” she corrected.

  And she was still there, her body tight against mine even if our lips were apart, so I wasn’t going to argue with her. “Awesome,” I agreed, and I let myself stand there just a little bit longer before heading off for practice.

  Chapter Eight

  I had always thought of myself as a person with a lot of self-control. I was disciplined, rational, and calm. Practically Vulcan, really.

  All of that flew out the window when I was within pheromone-scenting distance of Chris Winslow. I floated back into the house after our driveway make-out session and it was like… Well, I’ve never been stoned, but it was definitely like reality had been somehow altered for the better. The tile felt warmer under my chilled feet, the walls a more serene and soothing shade of taupe, the sunlight streaming in through the windows a bright, cheerful affirmation of everything that was right with the world.

  Then my mother said, “Claudia? Come into the kitchen, please,” and it was like she was attaching weights to my body that would have been floating easily without her interference.

  I almost ignored her. Almost let myself float right up the stairs to my room where I was sure I could levitate above my bed for a while, thinking about Chris and the way his body made my body feel…but my reality hadn’t been altered quite that much.

  So I trudged into the kitchen and stood by the doorway, waiting.

  My mom glanced in my direction, then away, then back again for a longer look. “I should take a photo of you,” she said, sounding almost amused. “I could call it ‘Teen Attitude.’”

  I nodded. “Because any resentment I might feel is just because I’m a teenager. I’m angsty, or hormonal or something. It couldn’t have anything to do with you treating a friend of mine as if he’s a lower life form.”

  Her sigh made it clear she’d hoped for a better response but hadn’t really expected one. “He’s the same life form as you,” she said, as if I’d been the one acting like he wasn’t. “But what exactly do the two of you have in common? You’re going to hockey games. I assume you’ll see some sort of action movie tonight? Or maybe he’ll make a grand concession and see something slightly more cerebral, but it will be as a favor to you. A favor you’ll be expected to return, in one form or another.” Her raised eyebrow made it clear she knew what form she expected the favor to take. Gross.

  “Maybe we don’t have to have all that much in common,” I said defensively. Because, really, she was right. It was hard to think of any common bonds between me and Chris, beyond the physical. He’d been going to the same school as me for more than a year, been in several classes with me, and we’d never exchanged a word or a glance. There was a reason for that, wasn’t there?

  “For a friendship?” my mom said easily. “No, maybe not, if you’re just casual friends. But for something more serious? To be good friends, or to be romantically involved? I think you’d need to have things in common. Don’t you?”

  I wasn’t sure what I thought. I definitely didn’t think he was a gorilla. But he was really different from me, wasn’t he?

  My mom’s smile was kinder than it had been for a while. “I know, it’s exciting. He’s a very handsome boy.” She waited for my response, and finally seemed to take my silence as agreement. “The problem is…if the relationship is just based on the physical. If you’re both attracted to each other, but that’s all… Claudia, how many other girls could share that with him? How many already have? We both know how ridiculous this town is about hockey, so there’s the added status boost, right? You’ve got so much going for you beyond being a pretty girl, but he doesn’t care about those things. He doesn’t value your intelligence or your ambition. How could he, when they’re both so foreign to his experience? So for him, you’re just one more pretty girl who’s interested in a handsome hockey player.” She paused long enough to let it sink in, then said, “Is that all you want to be?”

  I wished I could go back in time and not come into the kitchen. Or a little further back in time so I could have just stayed out in the driveway with Chris forever. I could have stayed lost in that warm, Chris-flavored haze instead of dealing with whatever the hell it was I was feeling there in the kitchen. “He’s a good guy,” I said lamely. “He likes me.”

  “I’m sure he does,” she agreed softly. Like she was setting the groundwork for our big female bonding scene when he dumped my ass. Or, really, when I realized he’d never even picked my ass up, not on a permanent basis.

  I didn’t want to talk to her anymore, and she didn’t try to stop me this time when I headed upstairs. But instead of floating, now I was trudging. I flopped down on my bed, stared at the ceiling, rolled over, and buried my head under the pillow, and I yelled. My voice was muffled and indistinct, but still enough to make me feel at least a little bit better. I sat up and stared at the stack of books on my desk. I had some homework, but not much. Mostly, I should be working on the practice questions for the math contest that was coming up in a few weeks. It was sponsored by the University of Waterloo, the school I really wanted to get into, and rumor was they weighted the contest results even more heavily than grades when they were deciding admissions.

  That was the school I wanted. The contest was the way to get into the school. The contest was the way to get what I wanted. It was totally clear, totally logical. My path was obvious.

  And still, I flopped back on the bed, grabbed my pillow, and yelled into it again. I didn’t want math, I wanted Chris. Well…I wanted math and Chris. I wanted to do math on Chris’s body, tracing equations on his abs, calculating the angle of his shoulders and the rate of change in the pressure of his lips. And when I was done with mathing him, I could move on to chemistry, and physics. Maybe even a little biology. And then I could start all over again.

  I sighed and rolled off the bed onto my feet, then squared my shoulders and walked resolutely to my desk. There was no Chris. There was only math.

  So I got to work. But I admit, there was a part of my mind wondering what movie we should go see. And another part wondering what would happen if we followed his suggestion, and didn’t go see a movie at all…

  …

  When I got to Claudia’s house, I turned the truck off and walked up to the front door instead of calling her and telling her to come outside. That was a tip from the guys on the team after I told them about the less-than-friendly parents. The team had quite a few other ideas, too. Some made sense, like being really careful what I said around Claudia’s parents and asking her for ideas on how to handle them, but others seemed a bit… I don’t know, a bit old-fashioned? Or else kind of sleazy. Like, there was no way I was going to buy flowers for Dr. Waring. That had been Christiansen’s idea, and he was just a rookie, so probably he was full of shit. But I knew he was dating a minister’s daughter back in Albany where he grew up, so maybe he knew what he was talking about. Ministers and doctors are kind of the same, maybe?

  Still, I couldn’t pull something like that off. So I was empty-handed as I stood on the Warings’ doorstep, and I felt like a fool. This whole thing was awkward, and it was definitely a compliment to Claudia that I was going through with it. But I couldn’t really think of a way to make the compliment clear to her that didn’t involve me ranting for a while about her psycho mom or, worse, make it clear that I actually was a dumb jock who was way beneath her notice. So I figured I was going to have to just let it go.

  Her dad was the one who answered the door, and he didn’t sound totally hostile. “Hi, Chris. Come on in.” But then it took me a minute to remember if I could call him just “mister” or if he had some extra title, too, and by the time I figured that out he seemed to have kind of given up on getting a greeting o
ut of me. “Claudia’s in the living room.”

  Which seemed to mean I was supposed to be in the living room, too. Shit, had I agreed to watch a movie at home with the whole Waring family? I hadn’t done that, had I? I’d said go to a movie…hadn’t I?

  I was relieved when Claudia stood up and I saw she had her jacket in one hand. Her mom was looking at me like she thought I smelled bad, and when she asked, “What are you planning on seeing?” it seemed like she was setting some sort of trap.

  “Uh, I don’t know.” I looked at Claudia. “I don’t even know what’s playing, to be honest.” There was only one theater in town, a multiplex out by the only mall. “I figured we could just go and see what’s on? Unless you had something you wanted to see.”

  There was a look between Claudia and her mom, but I had no idea what it meant and didn’t really feel like working too hard to figure it out.

  “That sounds good,” Claudia said when she and her mom were done glaring at each other. “Let’s go.”

  “So we’ll expect you back in a couple hours?” Dr. Waring asked.

  It sounded like a question, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t. I decided to keep my mouth shut. I’d drive Claudia home whenever she wanted to come home, and not a second before. So the timing wasn’t really up to me.

  “We might get something to eat afterward,” Claudia tried.

  “Call to let us know, please.”

  Claudia nodded to her mom, then jerked her chin toward the door, telling me to get moving. I guess she’d given up on words entirely, and I couldn’t really blame her. It sure seemed like her mom was looking for an excuse to start something, and getting out of there without saying too much was probably safest.

  So I headed for the door, Claudia behind me, and we didn’t say anything until we were in the truck, out of the driveway, and halfway down the street. “Sorry,” Claudia finally said.

  “Is it going to be a problem?” I was usually pretty good at ignoring things, but I didn’t think Claudia was.

  Claudia sighed. “I have no idea. It’s not pleasant. She’s… She loves me. She means well. She’s just…”

  “Wound a little tight?” I suggested.

  That earned me a snort of agreement. “But really, so am I, usually. I take things seriously. I’m not like you.”

  I wasn’t sure how to take that. “What do you mean? What am I like?”

  “You’re relaxed. Happy-go-lucky. The opposite of me and my mom.”

  “Well, not the opposite. There’s stuff I care about.”

  “No,” she said quickly, “I didn’t mean you don’t care. But you don’t let yourself get twisted up about it.”

  That was normally true. I had a feeling I was getting pretty twisted up over Claudia, though. The idea that her mom’s problem with me might actually get in the way of us spending time together? Yeah, that was enough to tighten my stomach in a completely unpleasant way. Damn, was that what the two of them always felt like?

  No. Maybe her mom, but not Claudia. “You’re not all that uptight,” I said. “You care about stuff, but it’s good stuff. Like, school or whatever. It’s good to care about that. You don’t let it get in the way of you doing what you want.”

  We were at the movie theater by then; one good thing about small towns is how little time it takes to get anywhere. So I parked the truck and looked over to find Claudia frowning at me. “Did you catch the part where I’d never even kissed anybody before you?” she demanded. “Do you really think that counts as not letting school get in the way of doing what I want?”

  “Well, I’ve been thinking of that more in terms of you saving yourself for me. Or having really high standards that no guy before me has been able to meet. I wasn’t thinking that you’d have been madly making out with guys if you weren’t so distracted by your math homework.”

  “I would have been,” she said solemnly. “I would have been madly making out with guys. Lots of them. I have no standards at all. It was only the math homework that saved me.”

  Damn, I liked this girl. But it would probably freak her out if I showed her just how far-gone I already was, so I made myself be just as serious as she was pretending to be. “I didn’t know that. Thanks for your honesty.” And then I let the smirk work its way out. “I can’t help noticing that there’s no math in the truck with us right now. But there is a guy…”

  She grinned at me, then frowned. “I can just about guarantee my mom will grill me about the movie. We have to go see something.”

  “I’m paying twenty bucks for an alibi?”

  “I’ll pay half.”

  I shook my head. “I’m not worried about the money. And, okay, this is all new for her, right? If you haven’t been dating much—”

  “Haven’t been dating at all,” she corrected.

  “Yeah, okay. You haven’t been dating at all. So a guy showing up all of a sudden is going to throw her off. That’s not weird, right? It doesn’t mean she’s going to stay tense.”

  “Well, past performance isn’t always a good predictor of future performance, but sometimes it’s the best we’ve got. And based on past performance? I think we should expect her to stay tense.”

  “So how do you deal with that? Like, do you talk her into letting you do what you want, or do you just ignore her, or what?”

  “Usually?” She looked down at her hands, then back up at me. “No, not usually. Always. Always before, I’ve just…gone along with her. She’s usually right, is the thing. She’s smart, and she thinks things through, and she makes good decisions. So I go along with her.”

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to know, but I made myself ask anyway. “Are you going to do that this time?”

  She stared at me, her eyes wide. “I don’t know,” she whispered.

  It didn’t make me mad, exactly. But it made me a lot more aware of that uncomfortable tightness in my gut. I was getting way too into this, considering the person I was into it with wasn’t sure it was even worth standing up to her mother over.

  Something to be aware of, for sure. I needed to keep this as casual as Claudia was, not let myself build it up into something it wasn’t. Casual. Okay, good. I could do casual. So I smiled and nodded toward the list of movies on the outside of the theater. “Anything you want to watch?”

  She sighed, like the decision was too much for her. “Let’s just go to the next one that starts.”

  “Okay,” I agreed. Casual. Easy. Yeah, it seemed like she was in a hurry to get into the theater so we could stop talking, but maybe she was just… Okay, I couldn’t really think of another explanation. But that was fine. Maybe Claudia and her mom would have worried about it, but not me. I was the opposite of them. They were the smart, refined ones, and I was the babbling idiot who didn’t know what was going on and couldn’t even pass math class without help. Fine. That’s who I’d be.

  I jumped out of the truck and met Claudia around the front and we weaved our way through the parked cars between us and the entrance. I said hi to a few people and noticed Claudia leaning forward, letting her hair cover her face. Hiding. She was embarrassed to be seen with me. Excellent.

  “You can still eat popcorn, right? Even though you’re vegetarian?”

  She looked at me like she was trying to figure out how to break the news about corn being a vegetable, so I added, “The topping. They say it’s real butter, and maybe it is. So do you eat dairy?”

  “I do,” she said. “Yeah, popcorn’s fine. I love it.”

  So I paid for the tickets and she paid for the snacks, and we made it into the theater just as the lights were dimming and watched some stupid zombie movie, and for the first time since I’d met her, I was spending time with Claudia and wishing it was over. It wasn’t that there was anything wrong with what we were doing.

  It was just that I’d gotten a taste of how much better it could be, and trying to go back to not caring about her, trying to be casual, was pretty much impossible.

  …

  The movie was stu
pid, and Chris was…different. I know, we were sitting in a dark theater. We weren’t supposed to be having a conversation or anything. But still, he was off. Because I’d said I wasn’t sure I was going to stand up to my mom.

  Which made sense, of course. How else should he react to that?

  I spent the middle third of the movie—the part where the zombies were chasing everyone and killing people and generally being gross—trying to figure out how I wanted Chris to react. In a perfect world, one where he was crazy about me and I wasn’t just the latest in a long string of conquests, how would I want him to deal with my mom?

  It took me longer than it should have to realize that I’d want him to do exactly what he was doing. I’d want him to sit back and follow my lead, since it was my mom being the problem. The trouble was, I wasn’t giving him anything to follow.

  The band of human survivors had walled themselves up in an abandoned factory when I leaned over to Chris and whispered, “Are you really into this movie?”

  He shook his head. “Not really, no.”

  “Can we get out of here?”

  We’d sat next to the aisle so he’d have somewhere to stretch his long legs, so it was easy to leave without disturbing anyone. “Right outside?” he asked when we were in the lobby.

  “Is that okay?”

  “Sure.”

  Once we were outside, he hesitated on the sidewalk, clearly waiting for the next step in whatever my plan was. A few people were walking by and looked at him, but I couldn’t tell if they were interested because they recognized him from the team or just because he was tall, handsome, and immobile in a pedestrian area.

  I made myself reach out and take his hand, and he looked at me with cautious surprise. “Can we walk a bit?” I asked.

  He looked around, then said, “Where?”

  It was a good point. We had the choice of the theater parking lot, the mall parking lot, or crossing the street and strolling through the Home Depot parking lot. “Maybe we could sit in the truck.”