Playing Defense (Corrigan Falls Raiders) (15 page)

Chapter Thirteen

“I don’t
know
how I did on the contest,” I told my mom for what felt like the fiftieth time. My dad was there at the dinner table, too, and he seemed just as ready for a topic change as I was. My mom, on the other hand? I think she must have smelled blood in the water, because she was
not
letting me swim away. Our dinner table had become a feeding frenzy, and I was the meal.

“You have
some
sense of how you did. The first questions are always easy, right? So you did fine on those. What about the others? Did you complete all the problems, or did you run out of time? Are you worried that you didn’t offer clear enough explanations, or that you didn’t get the right answer at all?”

“I don’t
know
,” I repeated stubbornly. I honestly didn’t. I was jumping back and forth from thinking I’d done okay, or maybe even well, to knowing I’d totally bombed it. I’d never felt like this after a contest before, and I didn’t like it. And my mom was
not
helping.

“Did you feel prepared?” she asked.

And that was what this was really all about. “It’s a test of all the math I’ve learned in the last seventeen years,” I said. “Spending a few hours more prepping for it really wouldn’t have made a difference.” Or maybe it would have. But I’d torture myself enough with that thought; no need to invite Mom to join in.

“Chris did fine, though?” my dad asked. I wasn’t sure if he was trying to help me, trying to help my mom, or just blundering around cluelessly.

“It doesn’t matter how
he
did,” my mom said. “Academics aren’t important to him. His
future
isn’t important to him.” She shook her head and laid her fork down on the edge of her still-full plate. “People like him, living in the moment, not caring about anything…they’re never going to accomplish anything
real
, Claudia. Someone with no goals of his own can’t help you reach yours, but he
can
get in the way of them.”

My phone vibrated in my pocket, and I knew it was probably Chris, texting me that practice was over. I ignored it, focusing so hard on my plate that I wondered if the food was being reheated by the power of my gaze.

My mom wasn’t done. “We need to move forward,” she said.
We
. Her and me, I guess. Like it was
our
life we were planning. “If the contest results aren’t what we hoped for, we’ll have to make sure that everything else is absolutely top-notch. You need to take this as a challenge. A call to arms, perhaps.”

A call to arms. I thought of Karen, of our stupid idea about backing each other up and marching into battle together. I’d forgotten that this math contest wasn’t team-based, and that universities admitted individual students, not groups.

My phone vibrated again, and I pushed away from the table. “Excuse me,” I said, already halfway to the sink with my dishes. “I’ll go study.”

“
Study
,” my mom said. “Not talk on the phone.”

I didn’t answer her. And I didn’t answer Chris’s texts, either. I just went upstairs and tried to lose myself in calculus and chemistry. The equations on the page were balanced and made sense. I could control them, and I needed a bit of that right then.

…

“She’s not texting back?” Karen asked carefully. She’d seen enough of Claudia and me in the days since the math contest; she knew that “careful” was the only way to be.

“Maybe you should try.” I said it without looking at Karen or Tyler. What would it mean if Claudia texted Karen back when she was ignoring me? Nothing good, that was for sure.

And Karen clearly realized the same thing, because she didn’t pull out her phone. Letting me live in denial for a little longer. “She’s probably hurrying to get here. The roads aren’t good, so she needs to concentrate on driving.”

That was all totally possible. Claudia had wanted to meet us at the arena instead of me picking her up at home, clearly as one more attempt to keep me away from her mom. And the roads really
weren’t
good: not a full-on blizzard or anything, but unexpectedly icy for that time of year. Which, of course, just made me start worrying that Claudia was in a ditch somewhere. But the town wasn’t that big; if anything serious had happened between her house and the arena, we’d have heard the sirens.

“I’ll wait for her,” I said. “You guys go ahead.” We’d just finished a Sunday afternoon game and only had a few hours of freedom before curfew. Claudia had said she could either come watch the game or come hang out afterward, and I’d chosen the hanging out. I’d had another really good game, and there’d been scouts in the stands and agents, too, and a couple of them had talked to me after the game, which was pretty huge. I’d played hard, just like I’d been practicing lately, and it was clearly all paying off. Everything was coming together, and I’d wanted to tell Claudia about it. But standing there, waiting, I was wondering if I was going to get the chance. But none of that was Tyler’s or Karen’s problem, and if I had to deal with whatever was going on with Claudia, I’d rather do it without an audience.

Which Tyler seemed to understand. He tugged Karen toward his truck, and she frowned like it was against her better judgment but went with him anyway.

Claudia showed up about ten minutes later, and my irritation dissolved as soon as I saw her face behind the steering wheel. She didn’t look good.

She pushed her door open as I was walking toward it, jumped out and slipped on the icy pavement, recovered, and then tumbled into me. My jacket was open and she sort of burrowed inside, wrapping her arms around my waist and burying her face in my chest.

“Bad drive?” I asked.

She squeezed me a little tighter, and I hugged her back, trying to make her feel a warmth that was more than physical, and we stood there like that for quite a while. Finally she pulled away enough so her mouth wasn’t pressed against my sweatshirt and said, “She just won’t
stop
. None of it’s all that bad, but it never
ends
.” She straightened a little and finally looked up at me. “I’m sorry I was late. She wouldn’t let me get out the door.”

I nodded. I didn’t really understand, I guess because it had been too long since I’d lived with my parents, and because even when I
was
living with them it had all been fairly relaxed. I couldn’t think of a single time I’d had trouble getting out of the house because my mom was busy yelling at me, and really couldn’t imagine how I’d have felt in that situation. But I guessed I didn’t have to worry how
I’d
have felt, because it was pretty damn clear how Claudia was feeling.

I kissed the top of her head. “You want to get in the truck, or your car? You’re going to get cold out here.”

She nodded slowly, then hit the button to lock her car and shoved the keys in her pocket. “You drive. Where are we going?”

“Where do you want to go?”

“No,” she said, pushing away from me. “That’s all we ever do. You take care of me, you worry that I’m cold even after I’ve left you standing in a frozen parking lot for almost half an hour, you’re fine with whatever I want to do… It’s not fair, Chris. I want to be more awesome with you.”

“I’m not complaining.”

“No, you never would.” She shook her head. “But that doesn’t mean it’s right. So you tell me. What do you feel like doing tonight?”

Well, that was too much of an invitation. I didn’t say the words, but I grinned at her, waggled my eyebrows, and expected her to laugh at the suggestion. But she didn’t.

“Sex,” she said like she was talking to herself.

“Just kidding,” I said quickly. “I mean, not kidding, but, you know, I’m fine. We can just hang out.”

“It’s not like it’s a big thing for me, either, though,” she said, clearly thinking as she spoke. “I’m not religious. I don’t think it’s a sin or anything. I know about birth control and how to protect against disease. I’m not
afraid
of having sex with you, and I know you’d like to. So why haven’t we done it?”

“Because you don’t feel ready.”

“Because I’m too selfish to compromise even a little, even when it’s something that’s important to you and not important to me.”

I shook my head and opened the door on her side of the truck. She climbed in, and then I said, “As sexy as it is to think about you compromising and doing this thing that you don’t really care about, as a favor to me? No. Don’t do me any favors.” I shut the door and took a deep breath as I headed over to the driver’s side.

I climbed in and started the engine so we’d get some heat. “You want to get something to eat? Karen and Tyler went to play pool at the Domino, I think. You want to do that?”

“What, you’re going to make me beg?” She was trying to sound like she was joking, but there was something wrong in her voice, something shaky.

“No. No begging. I just don’t want to have sex with you. Not like that.”

That was when she started crying. Shit.

We just sat there for a bit, me staring out the windshield wondering what the hell to do, her staring out at the same view, with tears running down her cheeks.

“I have no idea what’s going on,” I finally said. “I know you’re… I don’t know, mad at me? For distracting you before the math contest. I get that, and I’m sorry. But I don’t know what I can do about it now. I know I don’t want to be involved with you doing something
else
that you regret afterward. I don’t want to take the blame for the contest
and
sex. No thanks.”

“That’s what you think I’m doing?”

I was too tired for this, and I had no idea what to say anyway, so I just shrugged.

“I don’t blame you for the math contest,” she said in a small voice. “I blame
me
.”

“For being stupid enough to spend time with a guy like me. Right? For letting me distract you, for taking your attention away from what’s really important so you can waste it on a loser with no future.”

She stared at me, and I turned to stare back. “I know I’m not good at school,” I told her. “But I’m not totally stupid. I know what you’re thinking.”

“My
mom
is thinking that,” she whispered. “Not me.”

“Oh, okay,” I said. “My mistake. Guess it must have been your
mom
who’s been avoiding me all week.”

She didn’t have an answer to that, at least not right away. So the two of us sat there, staring out at the darkness, waiting to see what the hell came next.

…

“I lied,” I said after we’d sat there for a while. I’d built up as much courage as I could, so the next step was just to go for it. Chris was worth it. “When I said sex wasn’t important to me, I was lying. When I made it sound like I’d be doing you a favor. It’s easier to think of it that way… I don’t know why. But I thought about sex the whole drive over. I think about it a lot. I think I’m ready. I want to.”

“Why?”

“Because… I don’t know. Why do
you
?”

“It feels good.”

He wasn’t giving me a lot to work with, and it was so out of character for him that I didn’t really know how to react. “So I guess that’s why I want to, as well.”

“Okay. So maybe we should do it sometime.”

“Sometime.”

“Yeah. I mean, any reason it has to be tonight?”

There were so many reasons. I started trying to organize them, hoping to come up with a sort of thesis and some supporting arguments, but then I just blurted out, “I want to shut my brain off.”

“What?”

“I feel like it’s just
going
, all the time. Some of it’s useful, like for schoolwork, but sometimes it’s just stupid and negative, worrying about stuff I can’t control, hearing my mom yipping at me, regrets and doubts and fear, and…” I slowed down and realized exactly how true my words were. “The only time it stops is when I’m with you. When you’re touching me, I’m just
there
. It’s you and me without all the extra crap.”

“Like
thinking
? When you’re with me, you turn off your brain? The part of you that you value the most?”

I wanted to cry again. “Everything I say, you’re flipping it around. I don’t want to fight with you, Chris.”

“You just want to use me for my body.” Any other time he would have laughed while he was saying it, but not that night.

“It’s not about your body,” I tried. “It’s
you
. I want to be with you for who you are, and for how you make me feel.”

“Really?” He turned around in his seat now and looked right at me. “So if you could go back in time, and say no to Mrs. Davidson when she asked you to tutor me…or if you could just not invite me into the Sisterhood, or whatever… If we’d never hooked up, that wouldn’t be better for you? You wouldn’t be happier right now if you’d never met me?”

I didn’t answer right away, and he smiled bitterly, like he knew the answer I wasn’t giving him. “You’d have aced the math contest, right? You and your mom would still be tight, without all this fighting. If the girl you used to be saw the girl you are now, a girl sitting in an arena parking lot, crying, with some random jock—that girl wouldn’t be too impressed, would she?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. I was going to say I didn’t care, but Chris spoke too quickly.

“A lot of guys are wondering what I’m doing with you,” he said. Not like he wanted to hurt me, exactly, but at least to make a point. “Lots of
people
, not just guys.”

I braced myself, waiting to hear about the puck bunnies or whatever. But he didn’t hit me quite that hard. Instead he said, “And I’ve just ignored them. Because I like you. A lot. I want to be with you, and it’s nobody else’s business who I’m spending time with.” He frowned at me. “You worry about being immature. You don’t have a job, you don’t drink, don’t have sex, don’t like to drive. But none of that really matters, in terms of growing up. But caring as much as you do about what your mom says?” He shook his head. “It’s either a sign that you really
are
still a kid, or it’s a sign that you kind of believe her. Right? I mean, is there some other way to look at that?”