Dream of You (25 page)

             
Maybe impending motherhood was making her soft, or maybe she was just a sucker for a genuine show of social fear, but Jo got to her feet and straightened her Rolling Stones t-shirt .“Hi.” She put on her best smile and extended a hand the other girl took with trembling hesitancy. “I’m Jo.”

             
“Tam’s wife?” Her voice shook.

             
“Yeah.”

             
A tremulous smile made an appearance. “You look like your brother.”

             
“Don’t I know it.”

             
“I’m Ellie.”

             
And because she was feeling extra generous, Jo leaned in to give her a fast hug. “I swear we’re not scary,” she whispered.

             
But as she caught the look on her brother’s face over Ellie’s shoulder, she wondered if maybe he’d told her differently.

**

              Ellie could feel her heart rate beginning to normalize. Observing Jordan’s siblings and their spouses was a calming process of detail digestion; she catalogued information and didn’t have time to worry about the awkward tension she’d created out in the parking lot.

             
Jordan’s younger sister, Jo, truly could have been mistaken for his twin. They had the same hair, though Jo’s was long and thick, and the same blue-green eyes. She was slender like her brother, athletic, casual and comfortable and self-assured.

             
The other sister, Jessica, was blonde, green-eyed and sleek all over like a sports car. Cool. Stingy with the smiles.

             
And if Delta wasn’t a Victoria’s Secret model, she’d missed a damn good chance to be one. She was the kind of woman who could have made burlap a fashion statement: elegant, sophisticated, beautiful to a point of implausibility. She and Jo were both pregnant, an oddity made all the odder by the knowledge that Delta’s husband, Jo’s brother Mike, was longtime friends with Tam.

             
Mike and Tam couldn’t have looked more mismatched. Tam was, as usual, in dark jeans, a red flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up over his white t-shirt, his black hair rock star fabulous. Mike was tall, broad-shouldered, square-jawed, and blonde with big hands and a big voice and his sister Jess’s green eyes. A total prep in Dockers and Ralph Lauren.

             
Jessica’s husband Dylan was a shorter, narrower, dark-haired version of Mike – posh, quiet and disinterested.

             
“Kick his ass, Joanna,” Jess said through cupped hands. They were playing girls against guys in two lanes, the alley pulsing with Top 40 hits and spinning with colored lights around them. Jo and Tam were up to the line at neighboring lanes, Jo concentrating in earnest, Tam trying to distract her so she’d turn loose of a bad throw.

             
Ellie watched the proceedings, sipped her Diet freaking Coke and pretended she didn’t feel like the biggest outsider in the world. Jordan was sitting with the guys and hadn’t glanced her way so much as once. Which wouldn’t have bothered her if not for that horrible, regrettable moment in his Jeep that kept growing in significance and horribleness in her mind with every passing second.

             
“So, Ellie,” Delta said beside her, “when do you graduate?”

             
Jessica coughed and it sounded suspiciously like
tactful
.

             
Ellie, with a shaking deep breath, realized Jordan hadn’t told them anything about her, and this particular line of questioning was bound to be damning. She tucked a thick lock of hair back behind her ear to stall and tried to convince herself that this woman who looked like an earth bound goddess wasn’t about to judge the hell out of her. “Well.” She hated the way her voice sounded. “I’m hoping to be done in just three years. I’ll have to go straight through every summer, but I really don’t want to drag it out.”

             
Delta’s brows were the slender, sexy arches girls used tweezers, razors and pencils to achieve. They plucked upward in mild surprise. “So you’re just starting then?”

             
Embarrassed, she sighed, “Yes,” and tried to scrape together a smile.

             
With a flash of golden tresses, Jessica’s head whipped in her direction. “You’re a freshman?” she asked in an even, polite tone that was nothing but civil…but somehow furthered Ellie’s shame.

             
“Yes.”

             
Someone else might not have noticed it, but cursed by details, Ellie caught the disapproving way Jessica’s green eyes narrowed. “What’s your major?”

             
“English.”

             
“You want to be a teacher?” Delta asked.

             
“A writer, actually.”

             
“Oh,” both women said in unison and Ellie had never felt more cursed to be eighteen.

             
“Oh” was what everyone said when she told them about her writing. “Oh” was that dreaded combination of who-does-that and you’re-weird. “Oh” was doubt, disinterest, and a thousand reasons why she was insane for wanting to bank her future on words and paper. It didn’t matter how mature she thought she was; in the eyes of her elders, she was a naïve, dreaming little child, eighteen and sleeping with her professor like all those ditzes with the damp panties in the contemporary romances she abhorred.

             
She shouldn’t have come.

**

              Jordan had never really liked Dylan Beaumont. Quiet, he’d always given the impression of having assimilated into the family, but never truly had. When they watched a game, he
watched
the game, and couldn’t be bothered to interact with the rest of them. Generically good-looking, tall, fit, the Ken doll to Jess’s Barbie, he was a Top-Siders and sweater-tied-around-his-neck kind of guy. A wine snob, a foodie, a golfer. Walt was his favorite Walker – save his wife, of course – and Jordan had always been of the impression that Dylan wasn’t a Tam fan.

             
Jordan had spoken to the guy maybe twice in the past year, which was the way he preferred things, so it was getting irksome how “friendly” Dylan was tonight.

             
“How’d you manage that?” he asked, leaning forward in his chair, conspiratorial, eyes alight with interest as they skipped over to the neighboring row of chairs to land on Ellie. Always so detached and above whatever base things the lowborn Team Tam Walkers were discussing, his sudden friendliness was more than suspect.

             
Jordan propped an ankle on the opposite knee and pretended not to be bothered. “We met at school,” he said, and intended to leave it at that. Ellie was having some sort of panic attack, and he didn’t want to add a lecherous brother-in-law to the equation.

             
The smile that cut across Dylan’s face could only be described as creepy. “How old is she?”

             
Jordan traded a look with Mike, who rolled his eyes.

             
“Why, you gonna call the school board?” Mike joked, but Dylan was watching Ellie with unswerving fascination.

             
Tam was returning with a spare to put up on the board against his wife’s strike, and Jordan took the opportunity to get rid of the jackass drooling over his date. “You’re up,” he said, not friendly, and kicked the side of Dylan’s shoe.

             
“Creep-ass,” he muttered when he was gone.

             
“Come on, now,” Mike said, “he just wanted to give your lady friend his stamp of approval.”

             
“He wanted to give her something,” Jordan grumbled, stealing a glance over at Ellie who was doing a valiant job of covering her terror.

             
“At the risk of sounding like a creep-ass too,” Tam said, and lowered his voice a notch, “how old
is
she?”

             
“Eighteen,” Jordan admitted on a sigh. He knew it sounded bad. There was no way, without making a total ass of himself, to press upon them how insignificant her age was because she was the smartest damn girl he’d ever been out with.

             
Mike whistled. “Shit.”

             
“Like I need you to tell me that,” he said. Tam was grinning like an idiot. “What?”

             
“You’re so defensive. It’s cute.”

             
“I’m not a bit cute.”

             
Mike smiled too. “You kinda are.”

             
“Both of you, bite me.”

             
Up at their lane, Dylan was offering Jess a, “Good job, honey,” but his eyes were on Ellie as she got to her feet.

             
“Go, Jordie.” Mike thumped him in the arm with one of his giant fingers and he realized that if Ellie was up, so was he.

             
He gave Dylan a very pointed glare on his way to the ball return and was ignored.
Jackass
. But the guy at least returned to his seat and Jordan was, for the moment, alone with Ellie.

             
The ball return was shared between their lanes and she stood on the opposite side, clicking her black nails across each ball, selecting one with a care that wasn’t necessary. Her hand was shaking, just the slightest tremor that belied the indifference she was trying to project.

             
“You doing alright?” he asked in a voice that cut just above the music that pounded around them.

             
“Mmhm,” she murmured, and slid her fingers into the holes of the green ball Jo had been using.

             
“Ellie - ”

             
But she was moving away from him and Jordan felt like he watched all her beautiful veneer – the good, shiny, sweet impression he’d developed of her – crack and come sloughing off.

             
She was just like all the rest of them.

**

              “Hey, let me ask you something.” Jo scooted across Delta’s empty chair when she had the chance and leaned in close to her sister, thankful her morning sickness was on the ebb; otherwise the Dior perfume Jess had dipped herself in would have sent her gagging to the restroom.

             
Jess arched a brow. “This sounds secretive.”

             
“It kind of is. Well.” Jo worried her lower lip with her teeth. “Okay, not a real secret, just, please don’t say anything in front of Tam because I know he’ll get paranoid.”

             
“Oh, he’d
never
do that,” she said with a snort.

             
“Yeah.” Jo rolled her eyes and then inched even closer, Jess’s hair tickling against her cheek. “I keep getting these calls at work,” she said, and regretted it immediately. Saying it out loud was the equivalent of dousing all her shadowed worries with a spotlight. She felt stupid.

             
But now Jess had been told and there was no taking it back. “Calls?”

             
“Hangups, really,” Jo said with a wince. “Someone calls and asks if anyone named ‘Wales’ works there and when I take the phone, he disconnects.”

             
Jessica blinked. “There are about five things wrong with that.”

             
Jo sighed. “I shouldn’t have told you.”

             
“He? You know it’s a man?”

             
“That’s what the girls at the desk say.”

             
“And he asks for ‘Wales’ and not ‘Walker’?”

             
“Yeah.”

             
Jess frowned. “I don’t like that
at all
, Jo. If someone was trying to track you down, why hang up? How many times has this happened?”

             
Wincing, she admitted, “Three,” and winced some more at her sister’s tongue clucking.

             
“You need to tell Tam.”

             
“He’ll freak.”

             
“Maybe he should.”

22

             
T
he Cape Cod was a shining little beacon in the middle of its sprawling, wooded lot, tree limbs dancing in the rectangular panels of light the windows threw across the lawn. The wind was picking up, the first fallen leaves of the season scuttling across the drive in the Jeep’s headlights.

             
Jordan had spent the whole drive from the bowling alley hoping his two beers of the evening would clear his head and give him a more forgiving perspective on the evening; but so far, that hadn’t happened. He’d begun his night with the slap-in-the-face realization that he was starting to truly care about this girl, and was ending it with the bitter disappointment that, as it turned out, she was just as much a princess as every other walking pair of tits. The nerves he could understand, but the anger…that he couldn’t account for, and it was pissing him off.

             
“Well,” he said as he threw the Jeep in park in front of the home’s single garage door, thinking he’d grumble a half-assed goodnight and let her walk herself up to the door. But Ellie had the door open and was slipping out into the night, the wind snatching her hair around her shoulders, before he could come up with anything sufficiently shitty to say. The passenger door slammed shut and her high heeled boots clipped against the pavement as she cut across the beams of the headlights and headed up the front walk.

             
Okay, now he was
very
pissed.

             
He killed the engine and followed her, the waving shadows on the sidewalk like mile markers on a highway that kept jumping, giving her the advantage.  Her walk was on hyperdrive, that furious, efficient, high-heeled gait he was convinced all females developed in the womb, and she was at the door, fitting the key in the lock before he caught her.

             
“Hey!” He didn’t mean to shout, really he didn’t, but he was amped up. And the wind was this groaning, physical entity tugging at his clothes. So he did shout, and slapped a hand against the door right above the knob before he could take up the reins on the confused bundle of emotions tumbling through him.

             
“What?” Ellie was just a silhouette in the alcove of the front stoop, but her voice was strangled and tear-choked. Caught unaware, it slithered right between his ribs and coiled around his heart before he could put up a defense against it.

             
He hadn’t prepared for crying.

             
“What - ” Jordan started and then halted, tempering the sharpness of his voice with a deep breath. “What’s going on with you?” he asked and thought it almost sounded gentle.

             
In answer, the keys rattled, the lock turned with a series of clicks, and Ellie dove into the honey-warm glow of the foyer without answering. Jordan followed, catching the door and then locking it behind him, giving her a chance to precede him into the kitchen. He had no idea if Paige was home – hoped like hell she wasn’t – and waited, ears strained to the shuffling, groaning inhale and exhale of the old house. The only human sounds were Ellie’s heels on the kitchen tile, and her shaky deep breaths that rattled with emotion.

             
She’s fucked up
, an internal voice offered. Normal chicks didn’t burst into tears because you took them bowling and introduced them to your sisters. Normal girls were fun. Normal girls weren’t so damn sensitive.

             
But that wasn’t true and he knew it. Jordan sagged back against the door and his eyes did an aimless sweep of the foyer: antique sideboards, the glass and brass lantern above him, the discarded socks tossed over the post at the foot of the stairs. He didn’t for a second think “normal” was anywhere close to ideal. Normal was jaded and sleepy-eyed and kicking him out of bed before the sweat had cooled. Normal was no-strings and no love and nothing but cold comfort.

             
Ellie was, he’d come to think, fucked up in the best possible way. He’d spent a month and change marveling over how abnormal her sweet, soft, bookish nature was, and he desperately wanted to think that tonight was an anomaly, and not her true colors bleeding through after all this time.

             
You’re fucked up too
, he reminded himself, and went into the kitchen.

             
The place was a shambles, every surface cluttered with batter-sticky bowls and spoons. The KitchenAid mixer was locked back in the upright position, its whisk dripping big globs of something white down onto the countertop. Ellie had shed her light jacket on the back of a chair and shucked her boots. Barefoot, she stood at the island gathering spilled chocolate chips in one hand while she dashed at her eyes with the back of the other.

             
“Ellie,” he said, and her acknowledgement was a flutter of her dark lashes against her cheeks. “What horrible thing have I done to get you this upset?”

             
Which was apparently not the question to ask because her face crumpled – brows plucking together, lips trembling, nostrils flaring – into a maze of lines and tears and she shook her head until her hair slid forward like two great panel curtains to hide her from him. “Nothing,” she choked out. “Just, please, go away. I’m sorry.”

             
Sorry
. It was the most frequently used word in her vocabulary. She was always sorry for every little benign thing she did in front of him. If he ever got his hands on her ex, he was going to beat the ever loving shit out of him.

             
“Did one of the girls say something?” he prodded, moving toward her a step at a time.

             
“No.”

             
“Did Dylan say something?” He bristled at the thought.

             
“No.”

             
“Did you not want to go tonight?”

             
“No, I did.” Another shattered breath left her in a rush. “I did. It’s just…”

             
He was beside her now, close enough to hook a finger around the long, curling drape of her hair and tuck it back behind her ear. Her cheek was smooth and cool as porcelain against the pads of his fingers, her hair slippery as silk. In the harsh light of the fluorescent tubes, he saw mascara-tinted tears at the corners of her eyes and felt her lean away from his touch, her head tilting.

             
“El.” He traced the delicate line of her jaw with his thumb and she sidestepped until his hand fell away. She might as well have put both hands against his chest and shoved for the shock it gave him. “Goddamn. You’re messed up, aren’t you?”

             
Her eyes snapped up, lashes wet and spiky with tears, the irises glinting silver as she turned the full effect of her wounded gaze on him and questioned everything.

             
“Yes,” she said. “I am. Tonight…tonight reminded me what’s really going on here, and because I’m so ‘messed up,’ I’ve been thinking in ways I shouldn’t and I - ”

             
“What’s going on?” he interrupted her, his anger coming back full force. “Would you like to tell me what that is? ‘Cause I’m fucking lost at this point.”

             
She blinked slowly, her tears liquid crystal as they slid down her cheeks. Her expression was heavy. Resigned. “I’m
eighteen
. I’m a freshman and this stupid kid and
your student
. They looked at me tonight and…God.” She heaved another breath and looked like she might collapse, a warped, humorless smile cutting across her face. “It’s my fault; I know that. Here I started to think that…and then there’s your family, and here I am, Coach Walker’s affair, and…and…I guess I just wasn’t ready to be reminded of that, is all.”

             
Jordan raked both hands back through his hair, wishing he could dig through his scalp and skull to scratch at his knotted brain. “My affair?” he repeated, incredulous and bristling with anger he didn’t know what to do with. He didn’t get angry. He didn’t get demonstrative. But suddenly he wanted to
hit
something. “What in the
hell
is wrong with you?”

             
The tears began to fall in earnest. She sniffled. “I’m no good at being a trophy.”

             
“A tro - ” He cut himself off, pacing away from her before he snapped. He got as far as the stove before he doubled back. “Is that how you think I treat you?” he asked, biting off each word, teeth snapping together. “Like a trophy? Huh? Am I
that
big of an ass?”

             
“No.” She leaned back with a start. “No, of course not.”

             
“You think, what, because I take you to meet my family I must be showing you off to them?”

             
Still crying, Ellie lifted her chin to a defiant angle. “Isn’t that what men do with girls like me?”

             
For the first time in recent memory, maybe even ever, Jordan exploded. “Well clearly
someone
did it to you! Jesus Christ! I took you because I wanted you with me! Because it was a couples thing and I wanted to take
you
! Do you get that? You are smart - ” He started ticking attributes off on his fingers, her eyes getting big as silver teacup saucers. “You’re funny when you’re not scared to fuckin’ death. You’re so goddamn hot I wanted to poke Dylan’s eyes out so he couldn’t look at you.

             
“Do you think I want to go out with a student? That I’m some sickass perv who gets off on teenagers?”

             
She dropped the chocolate chips on the counter and banded her arms around her middle, like she was shielding herself from his meltdown.

             
“But I’m crazy about you, damn it,
despite
all the things that make you a ‘trophy.’ Not because of them. Whatever some asshole did to you before, stop putting it on me!”

             
Ellie put a hand over her mouth to cover an emotional hiccup, her eyes red-rimmed and glittering.

             
Outburst ended, Jordan felt the adrenaline bleeding out of him, guilt building up in its wake, the stirrings of suppressed chivalry and kindness coming up to the surface.

             
Ellie took a breath and let her fingers trail down to her throat, her gaze pleading. “I want so badly to believe you,” she said just above a whisper. “But I can’t…can’t keep doing this if it’s all just pretend. If you…” She didn’t finish, but all the same, she gave him the perfect opportunity.

             
This was his chance. His out. He could tell her he had no future plans and was just killing time with her.
I hate it for ya, sweetheart, but we both know this isn’t going anywhere
. He might not have another moment like this; it might be his only shot at a clean break.

             
Instead, he closed the distance between them, buried his hand in the soft hair at the nape of her neck, and tipped her tear-stained face up so he could kiss her.

             
Feather light at first, he covered her mouth with his and waited.

             
And waited.

             
And then she fell against him with a shuddered exhale and molded her lips to his.

             
He kissed her gracelessly, his tongue plunging deep into her mouth, sliding against her tongue, catching her lips with his teeth. He palmed her ass and pulled her in tight to his hips, until the friction of grinding against one another wasn’t enough.

             
Sex fixed nothing, a lesson each of his siblings had tried to impart at various times. It impaired judgment and further heated emotions that maybe should have been left alone to cool. But Jordan was sick to death of how much thinking Ellie had done for the both of them tonight.

             
He threaded his fingers through her belt loops and lifted her up onto the island, sending a silver mixing bowl tumbling off the other side that hit the tile with a crash. They both ignored it, her hands spearing through his hair as he started in on the dozens of dainty pearl buttons at the front of her shirt. Her chest heaved under his touch, and he flicked a glance up through his lashes to her face: her cheeks tight with drying tears, lips parted as she watched him.

             
The halves of her top parted and he pushed it back on her shoulders. She was left in a bra that was all sheer, buff colored lace, her breasts round and perfect, nipples rosy buds that strained against the fabric. Her hands left his hair and she slipped her blouse off her arms. Her bra clasp opened with a little
clip
sound and she let the straps slide down, the cups falling away.

             
Rarely in all his experiences had a girl ever looked better with her clothes off. With corsets and girdles, gel inserts and those damn Victoria’s Secret bras that added two cup sizes to less than stellar racks, false advertising was rampant. Ellie had breasts men dreamt about. And they were real.