Keep You (6 page)

             
But that little spark of hurt he’d seen before she could hide it…that was the sort of thing that reminded him there had been a past tense before this present. And it was like a knife between his ribs.

             
“Tickets,” he said, and handed them over. “I’m guessing Jess wants them in the notebook?”

             
Jo forced a tight non-smile of acknowledgement and stood, stowing the folded paperwork in her purse. “Thank you. I’d hate for my brother to have to come down.” He heard the bitter note to her voice and knew that, had things been different, they might have been tangled up on a sofa somewhere together, sleepy, her hand playing with the zipper on his sweatshirt while they both commiserated about Mike’s idiocy.

             
Instead he followed her back through the kitchen and down the hall to the door. He studied her as she prepared to step out into the night, and then he saw it – the tiniest tremor of her lips as she pulled in a deep breath.

             
Before she could enter the shadows of the front walk, he said, “You look good, Joey.”

             
She paused, her shoulders stiffened, and then she walked away from him.

**

              She made it all the way to the car, unlocked the door, then collapsed into the seat and locked herself inside. She wanted – needed – to make it out onto the road before she let herself crack apart, but Jo’s hands found the wheel and curled around it until her fingers went numb. She sagged forward and rested her forehead on her knuckles.

             
“You look good, Joey.”

             
One line. One meaningless, nothing line and she was turning into a quivering bundle of heartache. She willed herself not to cry and somehow she didn’t, but her eyes stung behind her closed lids and her breaths came in huge, rattling draws that shook her body.

             
She hated Tam, she despised Tam, she wanted to throttle Tam.

             
But she’d never not loved him and that was why one small sentiment could send her reeling. For all the praying and hoping and wishing that she didn’t care, she did care. She didn’t want him back – how could you want something you never had? But just seeing him took a ball peen hammer to the hastily taped-together fragments of her heart.

             
No way in hell was she surviving Ireland.

8

Then

              “Don’t distract me,” Jordan said, fidgeted yet again with his cue stick, closed one eye, stuck out his tongue, and then proceeded to miss his shot, the striped six pinging crazily off the felt bumpers of the pool table. “Aw, damn it.”

             
The pool table was the traditional green, its legs heavy pillars of dark wood. It was second hand, the felt full of nicks and a couple cigarette burns. There was a sticker on the inside of one leg that read
Property of Busby’s Bar
. It dominated the rectangle of basement space at the foot of the steps that wasn’t laundry station or Mike’s room.

             
But to Tam, it was a luxury he could only dream of, which was why most Saturday afternoons saw him in the Walker basement listening to Jordan complain about his missed shots.

             
“You really suck,” Mike said and walked around the table, trying to find a shot amongst the remnants of his brother’s attempt.

             
Mike was a freshman at Kennesaw State and talking about transferring to Georgia State. He had a job stocking shelves at Publix and had buzzed his pale blonde hair down to his scalp. He’d developed an affinity for brightly colored Polo shirts and Axe body spray. He had a puka shell necklace. All the rest of his friends were classmates, all of them with this secret inside knowledge of Professor Kline’s physics class, all of them talking about accounting like it was somehow interesting. Post-high-school Mike was a whole new person.

             
But Tam was the same. Same hair, same clothes, same crappy job. Same lack of future prospects. So he was grateful that today, as a November rain storm blustered around the house, Mike’s new life wasn’t parading in front of him. It was just him, Mike, Jordan and Jo.

             
Jo, who was one month into her sixteenth year and who Tam shouldn’t have been staring at across the table. At some point in the last several years, the littlest Walker had gone from gangly pre-teen to hot jail bait. And what made it even hotter was that she had no idea. She was still Jo, still trash-talked and goal-tended. She drove like a maniac. Her hair still had a tendency to come sliding out of her ponytail in complete disarray.

             
But she wore the softest touch of makeup now. Her face had lost any trace of ambiguity – she could call herself a tomboy all she wanted, but she was completely and totally feminine in a physical sense. The curves had come; the gentle flare of slim hips that offset her dainty waist. He’d spent all summer at the pool watching to see if her breasts would fall out of one of the half a dozen candy-colored bikinis she’d tortured him with.

             
Now, he watched her rub chalk on the tip of her cue and then fought a smile as she reached to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear and left a blue smudge on her cheek. He knew his growing infatuation was wrong – she was his friend’s sister, hell, she was
his
friend, not to mention anything untoward that happened between them would be illegal. He could go to jail for touching a sixteen-year-old.

             
Not that he‘d thought about it. Nope. Not at all. He certainly hadn’t been thinking about it when he’d traced her ear with his tongue ring back in June. No, that had been totally appropriate.

             
And it wasn’t as if there was a shortage of girls with which to amuse himself. He had girls his own age,
legal
girls, experimental girls who didn’t blush crazily when he smiled at them. He was not some horny, desperate loser who couldn’t control himself.

             
But that didn’t stop his eyes from plunging down the deep V of Jo’s black t-shirt as she leaned over the table and lined up her shot. Her blue-green gaze was fixated on the cue ball, so she didn’t notice his stare, biting her lower lip as she put every ounce of concentration into the shot.

             
“
Michael
!”

             
Beth Walker’s voice came echoing down the stairs and Jo’s hand jerked reflexively. Cue stick met cue ball at a crazy angle and the white sphere rocketed across the table.

             
“Shit,” Jo said under her breath as the cue ball collided with the eight and sent it neatly into the corner pocket, losing her the game.

             
“Way to go, midget,” Mike said, then cupped his hands around his mouth and returned his mother’s yell. “
What
?!”

             
“
Can you come up here, please
?”

             
His face twisted into a petulant frown, but he racked his stick and started up the stairs. “Coming.” He snorted. “Jo threw the game anyway.”

             
“You better be glad I did,” she fired back, seemingly unoffended. “I was beating your ass.”

             
“Uh-huh,” he said, and disappeared around the curve at the first landing.

             
Jordan laid his stick on the table. “I think Mom wants to go over his student loan app with him. This could be awhile.” He quirked his brows. “Gonna grab a drink. You guys want?”

             
“Blue Gatorade,” Tam and Jo said in almost perfect unison.

             
Jordan laughed and headed up the stairs shaking his head. “I keep saying, Tam, you’re too good for Mike.”

             
A nice thought, but not a true one. Tam wasn’t too good for anyone. If anything, he was well beneath the level of the girl he’d been left alone with.

             
Jo fiddled with the hem of her clingy black top and leaned back against the table, socked feet crossing at the ankles. There’d been a time when there’d been no traces of awkwardness between them, but he could feel it now, and wondered if her mind was spinning back to the summer, to that day in the clubhouse hallway, because that’s where his own brain seemed to keep taking him lately.

             
He itched for a smoke, but knew Beth would pitch a fit if she knew he’d lit up in any room of her home. He leaned back against the wall instead, arms folded over his chest, mirroring Jo’s stance. “How’d you do on that pre-calc test?”

             
He’d helped her last week with a page of practice equations that had made his own mathematically-inclined brain hurt. Her head lifted to meet his, a happy smile lighting up her pretty little face.

             
“Aced  it! Your trick about the decimal places was right.”

             
Warmth surged through him at her praise. “Yeah?”

             
She nodded, eyes dancing. “I got a ninety-eight. I think I might actually pass this class.”

             
“C’mon, like you ever doubted it.”

             
“I did,” she insisted.

             
“You’re gonna be a vet. Do vets fail things?”

             
She scrunched up her nose. “Guess I’ve backed myself into a corner then, huh?”

             
“That’s kinda like putting a mongoose in a corner – gonna fight its way out eventually.”

             
She laughed: a sharp, bright punch of sound that echoed off the ugly concrete walls and raised the appeal of the basement greatly in his estimation. “My God, you are
such
a dork.”

             
None of the girls he dated called him a dork, much less thought of him as one. A casual observer might have said Jo was mistaken, that she was younger and more naïve and misinterpreted him. But a casual observer would have been wrong. He grinned. “Guilty.”

             
“Hey, can I ask you something?” She became suddenly shy, hands folding together, her expression unsure.

             
“Shoot.”

             
“It’s just that, since you helped so much with my math, I thought you might be able to help with this too.”

             
“What?”

             
She took a deep breath. “I sort of…need a male opinion…from a male who isn’t related to me.”

             
So it was a guy/girl problem then. He was amused and troubled at the same time, but put on the gravest, most serious face he could manage. “Okay.”

             
She touched the fingertips of both hands together, then dropped them against the fronts of her thighs, rubbing at her jeans in a nervous tic. “Let’s say,” she met his gaze with trepidation shining in her eyes, “that I were to ask you out. As in on a date.”

             
Tam felt his eyebrows jump up his forehead. “Are you asking me out?”

             
“Theoretically.”

             
“Okay.” He fought to control his smile and managed to turn it into a smirk. He rubbed at his chin. “Okay. Theoretically.”

             
“Now let’s say,” she continued, “that you didn’t want to go out with me.”

             
“I wouldn’t
not
want to go out with you.”

             
She blushed, a deep shade of pink blossoming in her cheeks. “But let’s say you
didn’t
.”

             
He made a show of frowning and watched her blush deepen. “Theoretically?”

             
“Yes, theoretically.”

             
“Well, theoretically, if I was trying to spare your theoretical feelings – which I wouldn’t have to if this wasn’t all theoretical – I’d probably tell you that I had to work or something. Family wedding. Make up some excuse.”

             
Proud of his answer and also shocked by what he’d more or less admitted, he wasn’t prepared for her reaction.

             
Jo groaned and covered her face with her hands. “I knew it,” she said through her fingers. “I just knew it.”

             
“What?”

             
She exhaled, looking deflated, and let her hands fall away. “My friend Megan wanted to go doubles to the movies this weekend, and she kept saying Todd Harrison - ”

             
“Todd Harrison?” he interrupted, recalling a vague memory from high school of a freshman with a bad acne problem. “Isn’t he that douche lacrosse guy?”

             
“She said he liked me.” Jo ignored his comment and pressed on. “And he’s cute – his face has cleared up, you know – and I thought, well, I thought that if I asked him out - ”

             
“He turned you down?” Tam scowled. “Are you serious?”

             
“He said he had to help his grandmother move something heavy at her house and…” she trailed off as he continued to stare at her. “I know, I know, he totally blew me off.”

             
Tam was overcome by the urge to knock half of Todd Harrison’s teeth down his throat. “He’s a dumb shit.”

             
But Jo wasn’t looking at him anymore, didn’t see the rage flicker across his face, because she was staring at the toes of her socks.

             
“Did you, what, like him or something?” He hadn’t intended his voice to come out sounding so harsh, but Jo’s head lifted, eyes a little wide.

             
“No,” she said, “but it’s never fun to get rejected. I mean, I know I’m…”

             
“What?”

             
“Not the girl that gets the guy.”

             
“You’re stupid.”

             
He blurted it out before he could stop himself. The truth just came bubbling out because it was too obvious and too true not to bubble.

             
Jo’s brows twitched. “Excuse me?”

             
“You’re stupid if you think that.”

             
“Why?” She bristled. “Because there’s dudes lining up to prove me wrong?”

             
Tam was aware, in a more rational part of his brain, that he was entering dangerous territory. There was a fine line between boosting her ego and doing something he shouldn’t…especially when he knew that doing something he shouldn’t was the course of action he’d been itching to take. “Look.” He raked a hand back through his hair, feeling a little nervous himself. “There are guys who like you.”

             
“Oh?”

             
“There are.”

             
She tucked her hair back behind her ears and met his gaze with a look that was both sad and pleading at the same time. She looked like a girl resigned to her fate. A beautiful girl resigned to a fate that most definitely wasn’t hers. “They sure have a strange way of showing it,” she said.