From Keep You

I have been so, so excited by my blog traffic as of late. I really can't believe so many people out there keep coming back to see me. UK, Russia, Germany, France, Canada, New Zealand, Latvia, Poland, Finland, Sweden, China...wow. I'm psyched. Thank you guys for sticking around!! It makes me think I'm not THAT crazy.

Because it's a scary-ass market for a newbie to the publishing world like me, I want to thank all of you who've purchased my book and continue to encourage the doubtful. An outcast to the end, I'll keep fighting the popular crowd one realistic relationship at a time. Keep You is only $5.99 (for Kindle). I'd love to hear from some more of you!

19

Now

 

           Jo remembered the October twelfth of her eighteenth birthday like it had happened only a moment ago. It was one of a handful of memories preserved with aching detail, so crystalline, so perfect, she could pull it up at will and watch it unfold behind her eyelids like a favorite movie. The smells and sounds, the sensations, all of it was permanent.

            She remembered the smell of dawn creeping through her cracked window: dew, leaves beginning to go crispy in the trees, wood smoke. Autumn, coming hard and fast, a cool, sweet sucker punch end to summer. She’d crossed to the window barefoot, toes digging into the oatmeal carpet, already dressed in her favorite jeans, her favorite black waffle weave shirt, and a gray hoodie. Her socks were slung over her shoulder, her Nikes dangling from her fingertips. There had been condensation on the window panes, giving them the look of sleepy, half-closed eyelids.

            She remembered throwing up the sash and poking her head out into the prickly, dew-soaked morning. The world had been a tribute to the color gray, the patch of sky directly overhead still midnight blue, still holding onto night, but the gray was overtaking it. A thousand birds chirruped in the oaks lining the drive, and down below her, standing next to her Mustang, his hands jammed in his jeans pockets against the chill, had been her Tam.

            He’d been her Tam that morning; not Mike’s friend, not the kid who bummed Beth’s cooking, but a person who was all hers.

            His face had looked pale in the glimmering twilight, his hair black, falling in its usual spikes across his forehead and over the tops of his ears. He’d been wearing a white AC/DC t-shirt, the one with the big lightning bolt on it from the High Voltage album cover. She’d known the jeans he’d had on, her favorites, the ones so dark they were almost black, tight in the ass and hips, boot legs over his red and black sneakers. He’d been wearing his leather jacket, the one with the motorcycle collar.

            “Joey,” he’d called in a stage whisper, a straight, white grin flashing up at her like he had a glow stick in his mouth. “Get your sweet ass down here.”

            At the time, she’d thought it might have been the best morning of her life. And now, with graduations and underwhelming accomplishments under her belt, she could look back on it and say with certainty that, yes, it had been the best morning of her existence.

            She remembered tip-toing past her parents’ room and down the stairs, skipping the creaky step, testing each placement of her foot to be sure she didn’t make any noise. She’d turned the deadbolt on the back door with painful slowness, silent, careful. On went her shoes and socks, like molasses in winter she’d let herself out the back door and shut it behind her, and then she’d taken off, springs beneath her feet, running around the side of the house to the drive.

            Tam hadn’t cared that she’d launched herself at him, that she’d flung her arms around his neck and wrapped her legs around his waist, or that she’d stretched up and asked to be kissed rather than waiting for it. That morning he’d been an exuberant kid with her, squelching laughter as they walked, hand in hand, down the drive and down the block to where he’d left his car on the curb beneath a street lamp.

            This morning reminded her, painfully, acutely, of that morning five years ago. As she leaned forward in the Louis XIV chair by her hotel room window and laced up her gray and orange Nikes, she could feel cool air radiating off the dew-frosted glass beside her cheek. She could imagine she smelled dawn, and all its crispy-leaved glory, even though it was June. And Ireland. She would not have been surprised to fling open the window, lean out it and see Tam waiting for her in his AC/DC shirt, telling her to get her sweet ass down there.

            “I’m gonna head down, okay?” Jordan was doing restless laps around the little oval coffee table between the foot of his bed and hers now that he’d finished with his pushups and crunches. He was in a plain gray t-shirt, black gym shorts and his own Nikes – blue and gray – the white cord of his ear buds dangling around his neck. He raked a hand through his flat, bed head curls and headed for the door to their room. “Meet you out front on the drive.”

            “Okay.” She laced her other shoe as he left.

            Dinner the night before had been a self-induced torture session with Ryan. He’d drilled her about all the usual things meathead boys drilled dates about: where she worked, why she worked there, why she hadn’t been dedicated enough to pursue an actual veterinary degree. Had she been in a sorority? What did she do for fun? She didn’t like “dork” movies, did she? Because he wasn’t cool with that. What word would she use to describe herself? What kind of music did she listen to? Really? That kind of music? How many kids did she want?     

            She’d felt like she was on an impossible game show she had no chance of winning, and though the flat disinterest in his eyes had been telling – he saw zero compatibility between them – he was going to feign as much interest as he could so he could fuck her by the end of the week. And for what? She’d realized men like him enjoyed the challenge of bagging girls who weren’t their type. It proved something in their tiny brains. And when she’d realized that the answer to his last question had been I don’t care, so long as they have those gorgeous blue Wales eyes, she’d excused herself and gone to bed.

            Jordan had suggested a dawn run to clear her head, and she’d thought it had sounded like an excellent idea. When she was suited up, she grabbed her own iPod from her purse and slipped out into the hall.

            Much like the fortress it had once been, the resort castle of Billingsly never truly slept. As Jo made her way down the cavernous, maroon-carpeted hallway, she passed staff members who bobbed their heads in polite greeting. The housekeeping staff wore traditional black dresses with white aprons and caps, reminding her of something off Downton Abbey. It was a tip of the hat to times past, and one that she found charming, just like the iron umbrella stands outside each room door and the brass knockers. There was never any forgetting that you were in a castle and not a random Hyatt somewhere.

            Breakfast was being laid out in the dining room – she could smell its rib-sticking, greasy flavors heavy on the air – and wait staff were whisking trays down the corridor to her right as she descended the massive grand staircase. There was more maroon carpet and heavy, oak bannisters polished to a sheen. Marble floors waited below her, a wrought iron chandelier that looked medieval but that had been retrofitted for electrical look-a-like candles hung above her. She felt a bit like a princess descending into a ball. A princess in track shorts. And a ball of employees.

            Outside, fog hugged the ground like something out of a Sherlock Holmes adventure. It was white and viscous, like dragon’s breath, and it pooled around Jordan’s feet where he stood out on the drive in front of the fountain. Steam licked up off the tumbling waters in its three tiers, and beyond, the moat might well have been on fire for the smoke it produced. With so many churning vapor clouds, the perimeter forests were only ghostly shadows, dark spots against a white sky, and the lake and lands beyond were invisible.

            “Kinda spooky,” Jo said as she crossed the drive, stretching her arms up over her head. “I half expect the Highlander to come charging out at us.”

            “And I don’t have to be faster than him,” Jordan said, “just faster than you.”

            “This place has really brought out your chivalrous side, brother.” Which was only half a joke. He had defended her to Mike yesterday, after all.

            “’Kay. Enough chatter.” He took off at an easy lope that was a laughable fraction of the speed he was capable of, but he did not, Jo noticed, pop in his ear buds. She followed, sucking air and thick fog down into her lungs, the soles of their sneakers making the lightest of pattering sounds against the pavement.

            They’d gone maybe twenty yards when a shadow loomed up out of the mist. Jo startled and shied hard to the right, leaving the drive, pulling up to a skittering halt. Her heart leapt against her ribs like a bird trying to leave its cage. A tall, masculine figure stepped through the layers of swirling fog to intercept Jordan who greeted him with a series of palm slaps and arm slugs.

            She’d figured out who it was before he spoke, and by that time, she was pissed.

            “Hey,” Tam said and gave her another of those searching looks he kept throwing at her, his expression guarded, his eyes seeming to glow in the gray morning, full of questions she couldn’t seem to decipher.

            “Jack the Ripper much?” she asked, scowling at him, as the severe dichotomy of her emotions threatened to rend her in two. She wanted to bitch slap him. She wanted to feel that thick hair of his sliding through her fingers the way she remembered. She wanted him to disappear back into the fog. She wanted him to hold her, to kiss the top of her head and call her “Joey”. “You trying to scare the shit out of us?”

            A troubled little frown skittered across his face. “Jordie asked me to come running.”

            Jo looked to her brother. “I did.” He shrugged. “I didn’t think it would hurt.”

            Remind me to kill you later, she thought, but was determined to maintain her I-love-Ryan charade and act as if having Tam near her didn’t nearly make her schizophrenic.

            “Good?” Jordan asked, looking between them. “Okay, good.” He popped in his ear buds and started off ahead of them. Jo broke into a jog and Tam fell in beside her.

            Then Jordan, the little shit, kicked up his pace, his stride ground-covering in a way Tam couldn’t reach and that she could only dream about, and promptly left them alone together.

            It was as if he’d planned it.

            No, he had planned it, and Jo didn’t know if that made him sweet, or terribly evil.

            She jogged alongside Tam, close enough that she could have lifted her arm and caught his ribs with her elbow, listening to the steady intake and release of air from his lungs. Her mind was spinning in a hundred directions, trying to devise an escape plan, but she kept running and she knew that, deep down, what she really wanted to do was stop thinking altogether, to exist in the same space as him for a little while. To let this mythical, surreal morning full of fog transport them back to a time when he’d been the boy waiting in her driveway on her birthday.

            No! she screamed internally. She couldn’t think that way. She knew their issues, the pain he’d caused her, could not be erased by the physical sparks that lingered between them.

            But that didn’t mean she could stop wanting to just pretend for a little while, for him to be “her Tam” for just a little slice of stolen time.

            She didn’t realize she’d slowed to a walk and then finally halted until Tam was facing her, hands on his hips, breath pumping his chest until it strained the plain white t-shirt he wore. She could see the hard points of his nipples in the cool air, noticeable beneath the thin cotton.

            He stood in front of her like he was her future, but he was her past instead.

            It would have been ludicrous to pretend that Jordan hadn’t just set them up. “Did you know what he was gonna do?” she asked.

            He shrugged. “I had an idea.”

            So he’d come on purpose. “Then why’d you go along with it?” her tone was accusatory, her voice slicing through the fog like a knife.

            He met her gaze, unflinching, his eyes impossibly blue. “I wanted to see you.”

**

            Tam wondered if the morning of her eighteenth birthday had crossed her mind at all. The fog, the smell of dampness – it had brought that memory rushing back to him, as clear as a photograph, as warm as she’d been beneath him. There had been times, when he’d been with other girls, when he’d shut his eyes and pretended it was that morning again, that it was Jo’s lips against his ear, whispering encouragement. In his dreams, he relived it; going deep inside her, his breath sawing out of his lungs, every bad thing in his life going away as he slid in and in and her body became the place he was supposed to be. The place he needed to be. When he told himself that it wasn’t possible to crave a girl, and then, when he was sated, and falling asleep, to crave her brain and heart too, he’d remember that he’d had that, that it had been real with Jo.

            And that he’d thrown it away.

            Jo slicked her hands back along either side of her ponytail, a move that squeezed her breasts together and gapped the front of her tank top. Her shirt was gray, the sports bra beneath neon yellow. The girl had never been able to match lingerie to her outfit and he’d always loved that.

            That October morning he kept thinking about, when he’d parked behind a shopping center that hadn’t come alive for the day yet because that had been her birthday wish, to do it in the backseat, she’d had this barely-there pink-and-purple polka dot bra on beneath her black thermal knit.

            But the look she was giving him now was not full of rapturous worship like it had been then. She had her hips cocked, her eyes challenging.

            “You wanted to see me,” she repeated, and then made an unhappy sound in the back of her throat that was half-cough, half-laugh. “Unbelievable.”

            Tam had never had any trouble picking up a girl. The jacket, the eyes…give them one of those slow, shark smiles and they were asking him if he was busy later. Right now, it wasn’t a skill he was especially proud of because he knew he couldn’t use on Jo. She liked the shark smile, the jacket, the eyes, but not in the way the other girls did, not because she thought any of it made him mysterious. She had never been a one-night with the lights off, shameless kind of girl. And when it came to Jo, he wasn’t that type of guy either. He didn’t want to charm her, to lure her, to trap her. He was embarrassingly, devastatingly in love with her. She was fresh air and freedom, everything bright, shiny and warm that had ever been in his life. She was home. And all the drinking and fucking in the world wasn’t going to make him feel that way about some other girl.

            For all those reasons, he turned into a desperate, sappy dumbass in her presence. He had no tricks up his sleeve. And as she stared huffily at him, he knew telling her what she was to him would fall on deaf ears. If he was going to mend fences, he had to do it slowly. And he’d be lucky if she would even let him try.

            “It’s not what you think,” he lied, holding his hands up to her palms-out in a classic defenseless pose. “I just wanted to talk.”

            Her eyes narrowed with suspicion. “Four years later and suddenly you wanna talk.”

            He’d underestimated her level of bitterness. “We gotta try sometime, right?”

            She folded her arms beneath her breasts, looking very much like her older sister, only with better tits. “Why would we?”

            Tam sighed and raked a hand back through his hair. He deserved this, he really did. “Because this is awkward.”

            Her mouth twitched. “I can stand awkward for a week.”

            “Joey,” he sighed, and watched her whole body tense, shock smoothing all the tension off her face and leaving something startled behind. The nickname, he realized with grim satisfaction, still pulled strings inside her. “Mike and Jordie and I are all still friends. And they’re you’re family. Can’t we just let all that old stuff stay old stuff and at least be friendly?”

            He watched her chew it over. Pain flickered across her face and then was shoved to the side. Her eyes moved away from his, getting lost in the mist somewhere. She looked a hundred miles away. “There’s an awful lot of old stuff.”

            “I know.”

            “I don’t wanna unpack it.”

            “Me neither,” he lied. Well, sort of lied. He didn’t want there to be anything to unpack. He wanted to rewind time and make himself turn around. He’d imagined it a thousand times: he pushed the wet hair off his face and charged back through the rain, back to where she was shaking like she meant to come apart. He covered her body with his own, sheltering her from the driving downpour, pulled her to him with hands on her hips and told her how sorry he was against her damp, curling hair. She took him up to her dorm and they shed their wet clothes on the bathroom floor, the hot water a shock on their cold skin when they climbed into the shower.

            “How ‘bout a truce?” he asked. “For the family.”

            Her eyes flicked up to his and she chewed at her lower lip. “For the family, huh?”

            “There’s enough drama this week without us adding to it.”

            She conceded him a point with a nod.

            Tam knew Jo, knew her inside and out, and he knew the smile she attempted wasn’t true, nor was the shrug that made a go at casual. “You’re right. Enough drama.”

            They stared at one another, fog swirling around them, the scent of dew and dawn shooting up Tam’s nose and making him nostalgic. There were a hundred things he wanted to tell her and he wondered if the same were true for her.

            “So truce?” he finally asked.

            “Truce.”

            The light sound of Jordan’s sneakers signaled his perfectly-timed arrival, which made Tam wonder if he’d been lurking in the mist, listening to them. “Let’s go, drag-asses,” he called, never breaking stride.