Keep You (21 page)

             
She was in a lilac dress that clung to the sinews and curves of her body, cinched tight around her tiny waist. Her gold-and-mahogany hair was pulled back at the crown, off her cheeks, her ears, and spilled down her back, catching in the wind. In her fingerless gloves and her riding boots, she could have been a wood elf, a beautiful, deadly archer from some medieval fantasy novel. Both her sea foam eyes were open wide, sparkling, affixed to her target. And around her neck, the light glinted off a sterling silver letter J that he had given her for her eighteenth birthday.

             
“A slow pull,” their instructor, Finn, cautioned her, and then grunted in approval as she drew her right arm back with graceful calm, drawing the bowstring tight up against her cheek. “Steady now. Deep breath and hold.”

             
There was a soft
twang
as Jo’s fingers released and the string snapped back into place. It was a small bow, without too much tension, but the targets were close enough that the arrow was there before they saw it moving. It thunked, quivering, into the yellow, just to the right of the bullseye.

             
“Aye, there ya go,” Finn said.

             
Randy clapped. “Atta girl!”

             
Jo’s cheeks flushed a pretty pink, pleased, as she lowered the bow and turned to regard them. He waited for her eyes to touch his, and when they did, it fed his hope that she hadn’t carved him out of her heart with a butcher knife and left him for dead.

             
And then that shithead Atkins had to go and ruin everything. “That was great, babe.”

             
Randy and Jordan made identical grunting sounds at the jackass’s liberal use of “babe.” Tam felt his hands curl into fists and forced them to relax. This was not a high school kid. Atkins could probably bench press Jordan – no sense in starting a fight he couldn’t win. But the righteous fury was there all the same. He was realizing it was a good damn thing he hadn’t had any real interaction with her in the past four years because hearing other men call his girl “babe” was not good for his mental health.

             
“I wish I could do that.” Lie: Atkins had done nothing but bitch to Mike about the concept of archery.

             
“Well,” she said with a shrug, “we’ve all had a little practice.” Lie: she could have shot a man dead from horseback like a Navajo and she knew it.

             
“Seriously, Jo,” Mike said. “You’re supposed to be with Delta.”

             
“Aw.” Randy did Tam’s job for him, slipping between Atkins and Jo, putting an arm around his daughter’s shoulder and giving her a squeeze. “Leave her alone. She doesn’t wanna be stuck having tea parties.”

             
It was so true, Tam had to grin.

             
“And it literally is a tea party,” Jo said, rolling her eyes.

             
In his friend’s defense, Tam knew that every millisecond that Delta didn’t get her way, she vented her wrath on Mike. But still, going after his sister in an effort to kick the dog seemed inexcusable. “You better head that way, then,” he snorted, “you might actually learn something about being a lady, if it’s not too much trouble.”

             
Leave her alone, jackass
, was on the tip of Tam’s tongue, but Jordan beat him to the punch, verbatim.

             
“You’re being such a princess, dude,” Jordan said. “Maybe
you
need some tea party action.”

             
Mike slugged him in the shoulder, not so good naturedly and Jordan rubbed his wounded limb, frowning. “You’re hilarious.” Mike turned to Jo. “I am so dead serious right now, Jo. If you screw up this wedding somehow - ”

             
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Randy boomed. “You don’t get to talk to your sister like that.”

             
Mike didn’t back down. “She - ”

             
“She’s here, ain’t she?” Randy said. “We’re all here. And all you do is give us shit.”

             
Tam couldn’t remember ever hearing the old man reprimand one of his kids, and maybe that was why Mike’s teeth clicked together like a steel trap.

             
When they were kids, Tam might have followed Mike as he tore off his gloves and stormed back toward the castle, muttering to himself. He didn’t hold any sympathy for Mike anymore, but the afternoon had been ruined anyway. Finn, who’d stepped keenly to the side while words were exchanged, reappeared and began pulling arrows from the targets. Randy said something to Jo that left her rolling her eyes in a sweet way.

             
“My big brother the prima donna,” Jordan said with an annoyed head shake. “He ruins everything. Jo,” he pulled the Velcro tabs on his gloves, “forget about you; the dumbass is gonna ruin his own wedding.”

             
“He’s under a lotta stress,” Atkins defended, and earned four bewildered glances for it. “What?” He shrugged. “He is.”

             
“He’s under Delta,” Tam corrected, and heard both Walker men laugh. “And there’s not a dominatrix getup in the world that could be worth all this.”

             
Atkins was exactly the kind of guy who loved that kind of joke – the guy who told his buds all the dirty details of every hookup he’d ever had, the kind that had cell phone video of his girlfriend in the throes that he passed around on poker nights. He was also the guy who pretended to be better than that in the presence of a girl he hadn’t yet screwed, but who he wanted to screw, so his big shovel face crimped with displeasure.

             
“Hey, show some respect,” he told Tam, and turned away in a show of mock disgust. “Jo,” he asked, and Tam wished he was still armed, imagining a quivering, feather-tipped shaft sticking out the back of Atkins’ head. “You wanna head in and grab a late lunch?”

             
Tell him no, tell him no
.

             
But she put on her best smile and said, “I’d love to.”

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 bang 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.