Authors: Lauren Gilley
Jordan stared into the near space a long moment before he lifted Jo-like, turquoise eyes. “Yeah. It is.”
“Well there ya go.”
He sighed and nodded, gaze dropping to the drink in Tam’s hands. “What are you doing?”
“Let this be a lesson in always wearing a condom: morning sickness isn’t fun for anyone involved.”
“She feels bad?”
“Like shit.” He saluted his brother-in-law with the Sprite and left him alone with his going-to-get-fired thoughts, worried about how much worse Jo would be when he returned.
But upstairs, Jo had changed, folded up her clothes on the counter, and was sitting up with her back to the tub, knees raised, face in her hands. She gapped her fingers when she heard him come across the threshold and peered through them.
“Feeling better?”
She shook her head.
Tam crouched down in front of her. “Take this.” Both her small hands peeled away from her face, the skin red where they’d been, and wrapped around the glass, dislodging bubbles from its sides that fizzed toward the surface.
You sound like a parent
, Beth had told him, and he was suddenly struck by how vulnerable and child-like Jo seemed like this. She’d been so put-together the past year – making his lunch, ironing his shirts, sending him random, sweet texts and stroking his tattered nerves when they got the best of him – and suddenly all those little things got dumped over his head with a great big heaping of
duh, dumbass
. Jo was not the juiced-up-on-love nineteen-year-old he’d left five years ago. The girl he’d married was this maternal grownup who put every effort into making his world a better place in which to live.
He was such an idiot, and it was taking her illness to bring about the realization.
“Will you please let me take you to bed now?” he asked, needing for her to let him be the one who cared.
“I can go by myself,” she said, not sounding like that was possible.
She gathered herself, but Tam didn’t let her go any further than that, moving around and sliding his arms under her knees and shoulders. She went willingly when he picked her up, her head settling against his shoulder, and it was further proof that, yes, he had needed to take her home.
Of all the times he’d lifted her up off her feet in their years together, it had never been because she had to be carried. As he took her down the hall and lowered her down onto their bed like she was made of glass, he felt the edges of old, crusty mental scabs get plucked. He watched her take a miniscule sip of Sprite, then she curled up on her side, the drink balanced precariously on top of the sheets.
Tam moved it to the nightstand and busied himself with undressing, stowing shoes and belt in the closet, dirty clothes in the hamper.
She’s fine
, he told himself. It was early for a Friday night, and he wasn’t sleepy, but he climbed in beside Jo anyway.
Her eyes popped open; they were glazed with moisture, sparkling blue-green and full of unshed tears.
Tam moved lower in the bed and dropped his head on the pillow so they were face-to-face. “I’m sorry you feel this bad.”
She swallowed, throat working. “You probably don’t want to sleep with me. I might puke on you,” she said, voice trembling.
Translation: she thought he couldn’t handle this.
“You can puke on me,” he assured. “I won’t mind.”
Her lips quivered in a lame attempt at a smile. “Hope you mean that.”
“I do. You want an arm?”
Her nod was grateful, and he felt some of the tension leave her shaking body as he laid his arm across her pillow and pulled her up onto his shoulder. He knew body contact was probably the last thing her stomach wanted, but he also knew the tears weren’t just physical – she wanted to know he was there and not resentful. They both needed an arm.
She was asleep within moments. Tam clicked off the bedside lamp and lay staring at the ceiling in the dark, listening to the shallow pattern of her breathing.
**
Jordan had left the house that evening with a condom in his back pocket and cab fare if he needed it. He’d spent the cab money on pizza and beer, and the condom was still in its wrapper.
But he was in a good mood. Especially as he plugged his phone into its charger and saw that he had a new text message. From Ellie.
She’d taken his phone back at the restaurant, chin still cupped in her hand, shooting him cautious glances from the corners of her gray eyes, and typed her number into his phone book. “I might regret this,” she’d said, and then handed over her own phone.
He opened the message and, of course, writer that she was, she texted in complete, correctly punctuated sentences.
I still might regret this, but thanks for tonight. Not the humiliation, but the listening. And the last part.
The last part kept looping through his brain: the promise of what would make losing his job worth it.
“You’re such a girl,” he muttered to himself.
But the text he sent back was:
You can thank me later
.
A winking smiley face sent him to bed a happy man.
13
E
llie spent the rest of her weekend questioning her own intelligence. The scene on the floor of the kitchen with Jordan felt like a clip from a movie she’d watched, and in a way, it was. She’d orchestrated it as such, her head full of cotton, her poorly disguised contempt for what passed as romance these days bubbling up to the surface. As the memory of his lips on hers became less vivid, as excitement faded and urgency cooled, doubt – prickly and insistent – began to build in the pit of her stomach.
What in the hell had she been thinking? She had a whole semester of HPS to get through and here she’d made a big, bold, out of character pass at her instructor.
She felt slightly sick to her stomach on the drive to school Monday morning. So distraught the night before, she’d read the wrong story for American lit and then embarrassed herself during the class discussion for which she wasn’t prepared. In Intro to English Studies, she stared sightlessly at the white board and waded through waking nightmares in which Jordan brought her Friday night descent into sluttiness to attention in front of the entire class.
By the time she reached the basement level of the convocation center, her palms were clammy, knuckles white on the strap of her purse.
Paige was waiting up against the wall by the classroom door, playing with her phone, thumbs flying over the touchscreen. She was wearing her horn-rimmed, pink plastic glasses today, the lenses useless, her eyesight fine. She thought they were a “statement.”
“Where’ve you been?” she demanded. “I thought you weren’t gonna show.”
“Why wouldn’t I?” Ellie shrugged, casual, but she lingered outside the room. She’d spilled all the details about Friday two nights before, so there was no sense playing dumb, but Ellie was doing it anyway. Sign number…she’d lost count…that track coaches had a stupefying effect on her.
Paige gave her a cut-the-shit look from behind her pretend glasses, mouth scrunched over to the side. “I swear, sometimes, I’m the smart one.”
“Meaning?”
She checked for eavesdroppers overdramatically and then dropped her voice to a notch below stage whisper. “Do you think he wants to lose his job? El, he is not going to say anything in front of everyone. Think about it.”
That was the problem though: she’d thought about it until she couldn’t decide if it was anticipation or dread coming up the back of her throat.
“You’re right,” she said woodenly.
“Um, duh.” Paige peeled away from the wall and entered. Ellie took a deep, not so steadying breath and followed.
Jordan wasn’t there yet, but most of the students were, their voices like the chattering of so many birds. Ellie slid into her desk and didn’t bother to take out her HPS notebook – she’d converted it to a place for jotting the sudden onslaught of fiction notes that plagued her throughout the day – and instead studied her nails (they needed repainting), trying to think calming thoughts. Tranquil forests, fields of heather, all of that crap. And her breathing pattern remained steady until the edge of a skateboard tapped at her shoe.
Her gaze flicked from her nails all the way up the jeans, punk rocker grommet belt, and Russell Athletics t-shirt to the smiling blue eyes of the guy who sat behind her. His black hair fell in messy spikes across his forehead, his eyes the stuff of teenage dreams, his lazy, white smile downright lethal. He had sharp canines and a roman nose that made him just imperfect enough to be dazzling in a real-guy sort of way. Had Ellie’s new definition of the ideal man not been a track star with curly hair and zero percent body fat, she might have felt her pulse pick up. Instead, she groaned inwardly.
“Hi,” he said and with just one word, Ellie knew that he knew everything. “We haven’t met.”
“No we haven’t,” she said, groaning outwardly this time.
His smile stretched and he chuckled. The skateboard moved off her foot as he swapped it to his other hand and extended his right. “Tam Wales.”
She accepted his shake, wishing the floor would open up and swallow her. “Ellie Grayson.”
“I figure you already know who I am.”
“Yes.” She dropped her eyes to her desk, feeling spots of color blossom in her cheeks.
“Well I don’t,” she heard Paige say indignantly, and was grateful when Tam took his seat behind her. “Who are you?”
“Jordan’s brother-in-law. Are you the mouthy roommate?”
“I am
not
mouthy!”
“That’s not what I heard.”
“Well you heard wrong!”
“Yeah…that’s
exactly
what a non-mouthy person would say.”
“I don’t think I like you.”
Knowing Paige, and knowing that there was a chance of escalation, Ellie lifted her head to intervene…and saw that Jordan was at his desk. He’d come in unnoticed, the class still noisy and social, and was booting up the computer and overhead projector. She had a moment to study him without drawing attention to herself and took it, stomach doing a school girl somersault.
He was in a knockoff brand black polo shirt, gold KSU basketball shorts and blue Nike Shox. Under the bottom of his desk, she could see the chiseled knots of his calves; never before had she taken any kind of note of a man’s legs, but Jordan’s were spectacular. In jeans, too, she’d realized Friday.
His hair looked like it had air dried that morning, like a whole mess of tawny cowlicks. She liked the messiness, was getting to a point of infatuation in which she wondered what it would feel like between her fingers.
So pathetic
.
He lifted his head and scanned the room, his eyes – though she knew it was cheesy to think so – turquoise as they passed over the other students and settled on her. His face gave nothing away, but suddenly her mind was full of the memory of those eyes staring down into hers, his skin beneath her hands, his mouth settling over hers. The doubt in the pit of her stomach was overtaken with heat. A chill went shivering down her spine. Expression impassive, Jordan held her gaze just long enough to convey that he was very much still thinking about Friday, and then he cleared his throat and started class.
**
She was in brown leggings, flats, and a gauzy white tank top that was pin-tucked at the waist and then draped down to mid-thigh. Her hair was up, bangs dark and glossy across her forehead. The deep blush across her cheekbones looked like more than cosmetics and her gray eyes were sparkling with a hundred different questions he couldn’t take the time to discern.
Jordan had played mental Ping-Pong all weekend with the wrong and right of Friday night. He’d run pro/con lists and berated himself for being such a should-I-or-shouldn’t-I girl about the whole thing. If he couldn’t even enjoy a casual hookup with the lifted and plasticized likes of Janet Jennings, then he was at a crossroads at which he needed to make a decision. Laying eyes on Ellie today - one corner of her pretty, rose-petal mouth lifted in an uncertain smile – made the decision for him.
When he was done with his exercise science spiel for the day, he dismissed class and watched, impatience drumming his fingers on the desk top, as his students gathered their things and filed out, noisier than kindergarteners. Tam gave him a shit-eating grin on his way out. Paige waggled her brows above the rims of obnoxious, pink-rimmed glasses. And then Ellie was the only one left, lingering in the no man’s land between her desk and his, black nails fiddling with the hem of her top.
“Hey.”
Her blush deepened, if that was possible. “Hi.”
Jordan checked his watch. “We’ve got fifteen minutes till the next class has to be in here. Run go shut the door.”
Her brows slipped up under her bangs in surprise, but she complied, returning to his desk afterward and perching on its edge. She let her bags land on the floor, the straps sliding down her arm and pulling at her top, the lacy edge of one ivory bra cup visible before she tugged it back into place. “If you’re hoping for another mauling,” she said with a grin that wavered with stress, “it’s not happening here.”
He had to smile. “Nah. I’m pretty stupid, but not stupid enough for that.”
She nibbled at her lower lip.
“You alright?” It was an effort to soften his voice, to lever some real emotion into it, but it could be done, and he did it now, watching the instant relaxing of Ellie’s shoulders.
“Fine,” she said with a little self-reprimanding head shake. “Beer makes me…well, anyway, I’m sorry you had to see that, but I’m fine. Really.”
“You could give me a run for her money in the bitter department.”
She glanced away from him, toward the cinderblock wall behind him, the lip nibbling devolving to outright chewing. Regret flickered across her face. “I’ve never been a fun date.”
Someone, most likely Gym Guy, had worked her self-esteem over with a crowbar. Not her sense of self or personal determination – the sharp, clear ring to her voice when she talked about writing was proof that she was perfectly happy being Ellie – but when it came to the way she viewed herself through men’s eyes, the picture was skewed.
“You don’t wanna deal with that shit,”
Mike had told him about girls with such issues years ago. But then Mike had gone and married Delta. And Jordan had the memory of Ellie’s hands tracing the grooves between his ribs to make him think that she could be worth the effort.
“You aren’t actually afraid of me, are you?” he blurted before he could stop himself. He’d said it half-jokingly out in her driveway, but it was a legitimate concern. Of all that was wrong with him, “scary” had never been an issue. Skinny and aloof, sarcastic when he shouldn’t be, but no one had ever found him intimidating…At least, not up until now.
“No.” Her eyes snapped back to his, wide and certain. “No,” she repeated. “But the male gender as a whole hasn’t given me much reason to trust it.”
Trust
– that wasn’t a word that came up too much when he met girls in bars or at house parties. Trust for those girls was relative. If you weren’t a serial killer or rapist, you were safe enough to “trust” for one night. Her definition of the word went deeper than that.
“And you don’t date casually, do you?” he asked, not sure if that was disappointing…or something else.
“No.” She twitched a sideways, apologetic smile. “I wish I did, but I’m just not hardwired that way.”
No matter how much he’d harassed Jo about it, at fifteen, Jordan had fallen hopelessly, head-over-heels in love with the girl who sat two rows ahead of him in Biology. At sixteen, he’d worked up the courage to ask her out. At seventeen, he’d given her a sterling silver promise ring and, ironically, a promise to get her a better one when he could afford it. He’d let an angelic face and condescending laugh override all his Olympic dreams – they were stupid dreams, after all. He wasn’t going to the Olympics.
But then he hadn’t been going to a college that had offered him a scholarship. And then he hadn’t been running competitively at all.
And now he was sitting behind a desk wearing basketball shorts to work, teaching uninterested college kids about lung cancer and the food groups and wondering how his life had gotten so turned around.
For some reason, a pretty brunette saying sorry for being a serious dater, the fall-in-love type girl, left him a little less jaded and lot more certain that what he was about to say was what he really wanted, and not a reflex. Not a line to get her into bed.
“I’ve been a very casual dater for a while now,” he said and watched her expression fall, “and it’s not fun for shit.”
A sudden, startled smile darted across her face. “Really?” she asked like she didn’t believe him. “Are you going to be the first guy to
ever
say that?”