Bayview Heights Trilogy (10 page)

“Yeah, well, you’re pretty special.” His
voice was deep and low and curled inside Cassie, making the shirt
she’d just donned feel like a thermal blanket. Heat rose to her
cheeks.

Coughing, she dropped her gaze down to the
papers, then back up to his face. “We should, um, do this. I have
to leave...”

He stared at her a minute then drew back. “So
do I. I have to be in town court at six.”

“Then, let’s get this lesson planned.”

Sixty minutes passed. Mitch was a fast
learner—he’d already internalized what she’d told him before about
planning a lesson. He had good ideas, was flexible when she told
him some wouldn’t work, and his wry sense of humor slipped out more
than once. By the time they were ready to preview the movie,
Cassie’s emotions were churning. The close proximity, his
intelligence and surprising sensitivity were impossible to
resist.

Which was why, after she got up to start the
video, she pulled out a chair on the other side of the table,
farther away from him.

Mitch didn’t miss the distancing gesture, and
he was grateful for it. She’d been so close he could smell
her—something light and fresh, shampoo or lotion she’d probably put
on that morning. Had she rubbed it over her legs, now encased in
those damn leg-things that he had trouble keeping his eyes off?
God, did she put that outfit on to torture him? He laughed at
himself. That wasn’t Cassie’s style. She was no femme fatale. She
didn’t even wear makeup and obviously spent little time on her hair
in the morning. As the tape began, he wondered idly when the clean,
fresh-scrubbed look had started to appeal to him.

Through sheer force of will—something he had
perfected to an art—Mitch kept his mind on the somber video. He
watched kids tell heartbreaking stories about using inhalants
because they thought they weren’t dangerous, because they were
legal, because they kicked you up so fast you got a great buzz
quickly and cheaply. Though he’d heard them before, the stories
wound their way into his heart; he tried to suppress the emotions,
but he couldn’t.

The last kid was Vietnamese. Mitch leaned
back as he watched the boy, about the age Tam had been, recount how
being a minority in a white culture had driven him to drugs. Would
Tam have done that? Would Mitch have been able to preclude the
loneliness and isolation that the young man on the screen so
wrenchingly articulated? He could still see Tam’s sad black eyes
stare at him from across the compound, could still remember the
laughter bubbling out of him when Mitch gave him the little
portable radio that Kurt had sent. Suddenly, superimposed over the
images was a blinding flash...and screams. Terror gripped
Mitch....

“Mitch?” Cassie’s voice penetrated the dark
reminiscence. She’d gotten up and moved back to the seat next to
him. Her hand clutched his arm. “Mitch, are you all right?”

Focusing on her face, he consciously slowed
his rapid breathing. “I’m fine.” His words were clipped. He looked
down to see both hands fisted. He immediately unclenched them.

Gently, Cassie rubbed his sleeve with her
fingertips. It felt good and helped settle his heartbeat.

“What happened?”

More in control, he looked at her. Concern
had darkened the color of her eyes to warm steel. “Nothing. I’m
fine.”

“You don’t look fine. You look—”

Scraping his chair back, he shook her off and
stood. “I said I was fine.” Jamming his hands in his pockets, he
walked over to the TV. “The waste I see upsets me sometimes.” He
knew she knew he was lying. He ignored it and angled his head to
the video. “I told you this was good. It will affect the kids, too.
Let’s talk about some points to discuss after the movie’s
over.”

Watching him for a minute, Cassie finally
nodded. “Sure.”

Fifteen minutes later, Mitch rose and picked
up his coat. “It’s almost six. I’ve got to go.”

Cassie stood. “Okay.” She smiled. “We’ve got
a pretty dynamite lesson, don’t you think?”

“Yeah.” His shoulder muscles were tense, and
his back felt as if he’d been carrying an eighty pound knapsack
down a jungle trail. He shrugged into his coat and briefly massaged
his neck.

“You seem tense.”

“It’s been a long day.”
And I didn’t get
a lot of sleep last night. I kept dreaming about a wet body encased
in white terry cloth
.

“Exercise can help.”

“I work out every day.”

Cassie’s eyes roamed over his shoulders and
chest. “I believe that.” He felt her appreciation deep in his
gut—and lower. Damn.

“Ever play volleyball?” she asked.

He remembered the pickup games in Nam. “Once
or twice.”

“After your court appearance, you could come
to Hotshots. We can always use new team members.”

More than anything he’d wanted in years,
Mitch longed to accept the invitation and all that it implied. But
getting close to this woman, becoming a real part of the school,
was not in the cards for him. He couldn’t risk the emotional
involvement.

“I don’t think so,” he said coldly.

For a minute, she looked as if she was going
to argue. Then she shrugged, and he got a glimpse of what she must
have been like as a student at this school. Pretending she didn’t
care. Taking the blows to her pride with feigned nonchalance. “Suit
yourself.” She walked over to her desk and sat down.

He scowled. “What are you doing?”

“I’m going to read some of the kids’
journals.”

He glanced at the clock. “Why don’t you take
them home?”

“I’m not going home,” she said without
looking at him. She picked up one of the notebooks. “I’m going to
work here until it’s time to go to the game.”

“Here?”

“Yes, of course, here.”

He glanced at the windows, glazed with
January frost. Through them, the school grounds were dark and
deserted. “It’s pretty late to be here alone at night.”

“I’m not alone. The janitors are here. And
there’s a wrestling match at the gym tonight. The school’s open to
walkers, too.”

After a moment, Mitch crossed to the doorway
and inspected the hall. It was dim—and completely empty. “You’re
far away from all that action. You can’t even hear it. And no one
would hear
you
if something happened.”

Cassie looked up at him and gave him an
indulgent smile. “Mitch, I walked the streets of Greenwich Village
alone when I was fifteen.” Her smile faltered. “And worse.”

“What’s that got to do with this?”

Purposefully, she looked at the clock. “It’s
five of six, Captain. You’re due in court.”

He didn’t like this, but there wasn’t
anything he could do about it. And he was running late. “All
right.” He glanced down at her legs in the formfitting pants. “At
least put the bottoms of that sweatsuit on so you don’t catch
cold.”

Her laughter followed him out of the
room.

It irritated him. He was feeling a lot of
things right now, but mirth had nothing to do with any of them.

o0o

“DAMN IT!” CASSIE SWORE as she stuffed her
legs into her purple sweatpants.
Aren’t you cold? Put the
bottoms of that sweat suit on. It’s pretty late to be here alone at
night.
Who did he think he was, Sir Galahad?

She plunked down on her desk chair and
flipped open a journal. Though reading about her students’ daily
thoughts and feelings was a favorite part of her paper load, her
mind wasn’t on Nikki Parelli’s latest poem.

Admit it, Cassie. You liked his
concern
.

“All right,” she said aloud. “I liked it.”
Disgusted with herself, she reached for the cup of coffee on her
desk. After Mitch left, she’d taken out the light snack she’d
brought and eaten half of it. She fingered the lettering on the
coffee cup. It read, “Experience is the toughest teacher. It offers
the test first, and the lesson after.”

Cassie’s experience had taught her well. It
wasn’t safe to depend on anyone. For thirty-five years, she’d only
trusted herself—with the exception of Seth Taylor and maybe Lacey
Cartwright, the one student at Bayview Heights who had befriended
her. But no one else.

And your lack of trust ended your
marriage
.

Still, she wouldn’t be sucked in by an
enigmatic man with green eyes that hid painful memories. Something
had happened to him while they were watching the movie. She hadn’t
a clue what, and he wasn’t about to tell her.

She respected that. A private person herself,
she didn’t expect everybody to spill their guts to her.

Johnny would call her a liar—tell her she was
always trying to get all of the students in her class to open up.
She leaned over and dug through the pile of notebooks until she
found his. In today’s entry, she saw at the top Johnny’s precise,
controlled handwriting. “Not private. Read this.”

Breathing a sigh of relief—she let the kids
pick what they wanted to share and never violated that trust—Cassie
scanned Johnny’s entry. “I’m okay, Cassie. Don’t worry about the
gang. I know you don’t think I know what I’m doing, but I do. I’m
in control, and I’m going to be all right. I hate working with
Lansing, though. He’s an SOB, and he thinks he’s so tough.”

Just like you, Johnny. He’s so much like
you
. The thought came out of nowhere and stopped her
short.

It bore some consideration, but not tonight.
She tossed the journal down on the desk. Restless, she got up,
adjusted the blinds and tidied the reading area. She was passing
the doorway when she felt a chilling gust of air—as if someone had
left the outer door open. Peeking into the corridor, she saw the
door down at the end of the hall was closed. Puzzled she went back
into her room and decided that she was not going to make much
headway with the journals tonight. Maybe she could work on a new
bulletin board. Yanking open her middle desk drawer, she pulled out
the key to the storage area that connected her room with Zoe’s. She
crossed to the back of the room and jabbed the key in the lock,
leaving it there so she didn’t lose it. The kids teased her all the
time about losing her keys.

As she switched on the storeroom light, she
blinked. The fluorescent bulb flickered briefly before it lit to
full capacity. Then it dimmed. Cassie hated the light in here. It
was unpredictable and gave off an eerie glow. Stepping farther into
the narrow, twelve-by-five area, stacked on each side with shelves,
she reached up to the top one for the construction paper. Unable to
grasp it, she dragged a low stool over and had just gotten hold of
her material when the door to the storeroom slammed shut. Cassie
came down off the stool and grabbed the door handle. She twisted
it. Nothing happened. Levering her body, she shoved at the door
with all her weight behind her. It didn’t budge.

Oh, great
. She tried to visualize
what she’d done with the key. Had she relocked the door after she’d
opened it? Damn. She and Zoe had talked about the problem of this
room locking so that you couldn’t get out from the inside, but they
hadn’t filled out a work order to have it changed.

Cassie began to pound on the solid-core
wooden door. “Hank…somebody...I’m in here! Hey, somebody!” After a
few minutes, the palms of her hands stung and they were red. She
slid down to the linoleum floor and sat with a thunk. Her knees
propped up, the toes of her sneakers hitting the opposite row of
shelves, she leaned back. The air was heavy, and the light above
hummed. It flickered and dimmed again.

Taking a deep breath, she thought of all the
work sitting on her desk that she could be completing. She pictured
the mounds of laundry in the corner of her bedroom. And she
visualized the volleyball game beginning without her. Cassie hated
wasting time. It almost killed her to sit through repetitive
faculty meetings and unproductive committee meetings.

It’s pretty late to be here
alone...You’re far away from all that action...You can’t even hear
it... And no one would hear you if something happened.

Suddenly she felt chilled, though the
storeroom was easily ten degrees hotter than her classroom tonight,
and getting warmer by the minute. No, her imagination was playing
tricks on her. Mitch had spooked her, was all.

Mitch. For a brief minute, Cassie let herself
imagine being trapped inside here with him. Closing her eyes, she
could feel his hands at her waist—squeezing gently at first, then
grasping tighter as his lips came closer to hers. Maybe he’d ease
her down to the floor. What would his body feel like covering hers?
If she thought really hard, remembered really well, she could
almost conjure the smell of him tonight—the utter masculine,
alluring scent that was his.

Damn. It was going to be a long night.

o0o

DAMN. IT HAD BEEN a long night. The court
appearance had dragged on, then Mitch had stopped at the station to
get his messages. He should go home, relax and go to bed. From his
car, he stared at the pink neon sign. Hotshots. What the hell was
he doing here?

We can always use more team
members
.

He closed his eyes, telling himself he should
simply drive away from the old converted warehouse. But the image
of clinging purple spandex pants kept him from leaving. He could
still feel the grip of her strong fingers on his arm. And he could
still hear her slightly husky voice asking if he was all right.

Restless, he’d tried to call Kurt earlier,
but his brother was unavailable. And Mitch was tired of being
alone, tired of being on the outside, tired of not being like
everyone else.

So he’d come to Hotshots.

He hadn’t changed his clothes, though. He had
no intention of actually playing. No, he’d just order a beer, sit
on the sidelines and enjoy the game.

Mitch climbed out of his car and made his way
inside. The volleyball courts were in the back, so he stopped at
the bar, got a draft beer and walked slowly to the rear.