Reaching First (13 page)

Tyler stepped to the side, purposely blocking Emily’s view so she didn’t have to respond. He had no idea what exactly the cocksucker was talking about, but he got the gist. Despite the left-over energy pumping in his veins, he managed to keep his voice even when he said, “You and your friends would be happier eating lunch somewhere else.”

“Or what?” Holloway was like a blind hound, too stupid to realize the buzzing sound in front of him was a wasp’s nest.
 

His friends, though, were faster on the uptake. “Come on, Caden,” one of them said. “The food here is shit, anyway. Let’s go back to the clubhouse and get another round of Bloodys.”

Holloway took a step back. Maybe he
wasn’t
as dumb as he looked. But then he craned his neck to look at Emily. “Okay, Bluebell. I get it. Your little prick-tease in high school was good enough to get you a free dinner. But you’ve really upped your game. Now you have a pit bull fighting your battles. Do you actually put out for him?”
 

He heard Emily gasp. He saw Caden’s friends step back, silently admitting their buddy had gone too far. He tasted salt and iron at the back of his throat, the ghost of schoolyard fights.
 

He didn’t even feel his fingers twisting the pussy’s shirt. All he knew was that he smelled fear-sweat and onion-breath, sour enough that he wanted to slam the asshole’s forehead into the edge of the table. Better to punch him in the gut. Teach him a lesson about how to talk to a lady.
 

Tyler’s fingers curled into a tight fist, and the motion felt
right
, like finding a ball with the sweet spot of the bat. He imagined his arm pulling back. He pictured his body twisting, harnessing momentum. He knew what it would feel like when his knuckles exploded against the meat of the softer man’s belly, against the padded bone of his jaw.

But he couldn’t do it.

No matter how much the fucker deserved it, Tyler couldn’t beat his face to a bloody pulp. Because he’d be back in a courtroom faster than he could say his name. Because Emily would have to testify against him on the witness stand.
 

Because it was wrong.

With a fierce push, he shoved the guy back a couple of steps, out of arm’s reach. Tyler jerked his hand into his pocket and pulled out his wallet. He tossed a couple of bills onto the table.

“Let’s go,” he said to Emily.
 

He couldn’t look her in the face as he helped her from the booth. He pretended that his short, sharp breaths didn’t fill his lungs with the strawberry scent of her hair. He kept himself squarely between her and the frat boys, not relaxing until he’d taken her keys, opened her door, watched her settle behind the wheel of her car.

She stared straight ahead, her jaw set like stone. Her cheeks were still pale, like she was washed in milk. She gripped her steering wheel and blinked hard, her hands trembling. She didn’t look at him, didn’t speak. He couldn’t tell if she was embarrassed, or if she was afraid of him, afraid of what he’d almost done back there.

“I’m sorry,” he finally said, the words cutting his throat like glass. “I shouldn’t have… I needed to…”

He reached out to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear, but she flinched. And that’s what broke him.

He shoved her car door closed and stomped to his truck. He slammed his own door shut and rammed his key into the ignition, twisting it with enough force that it nearly broke off. He threw the truck into reverse and cleared the parking space before jamming the gearshift into first.

He waited then, hands trembling, foot shaking on the brake. For a second, he thought she was going to get out of her car, cross the parking lot and sit beside him.

But she didn’t.
 

Instead, she started her own car and backed out of her space, as carefully as if she was doing heart surgery. And she didn’t look back as she drove away.

She wasn’t surprised when the knock came.

It was nearly midnight. She’d watched the Rockets lose, a ten-zip shut-out, made even more miserable by an hour-long rain delay. After the bitter end, she’d turned off the television and gone down to the kitchen to make herself a cup of peppermint tea and sit on the couch in the dark Resource Room. She stared at the gleaming bookshelves and thought about how much work she still had to accomplish in the next three weeks.

When the brass knocker fell, she put her empty mug on the gleaming hardwood floor. She opened the door and stepped aside, refusing to meet Tyler’s eyes as he slipped in. She closed the door after him and shot the bolt, fastened the security chain as if there were something especially dangerous to keep outside.

But the danger wasn’t outside. It was in the room.

Not danger, like she feared he would hurt her. No matter what he’d done that afternoon, she knew there was no chance of that.

But there were other types of danger. The danger of losing control. Of losing her way. Of not being able to say what was right and what was wrong and what she wanted from this impossible man.

She retreated to her corner of the couch, pulling her feet up to rest her chin on her knees. He paced the room like a feral cat for a full minute before he threw himself into the other corner of the couch.

“I didn’t hit him,” he said.

“I know.”

“He would have deserved it, if I had.”

She shook her head.

“What the hell, Em? What happened with you two?”

She shook her head. “It was a long time ago,” she said, even if she didn’t really believe that. She forced herself to meet his gaze. “Don’t make this about Caden. You and I had problems even before he got to Callie’s today. You dropped the ball, Tyler. On the kids’ furniture. On the filing. On anything that isn’t your choice, exactly what
you
want to do. And when I called you on it, you practically knocked out a guy—”

“An asshole—”

“A
guy
,” she repeated, “you’d never even met before. You can screw up your own sentence, and I can’t do anything about it. You can forfeit your community service and start a public brawl and head back for general sentencing. But I feel like you’re trying to bring down Minerva House too.”

“That’s not fair—”

She waved her hand, taking in the room around them. “I thought you understood why this is so important to me. I thought you wanted the court order to work. But now, when you’re getting close to the end… What is it? Are you bored? Are you trying to sabotage
yourself
, or just me?”

“That’s not it!”

“Then what? What made you draw so many lines in the sand?”

* * *

The question hung there. He could tell it cost her a lot to ask. From the look on her face, she was terrified of the answer, terrified he was going to say he didn’t want to help
her
, didn’t want to be with
her
.
 

And so he had to tell the truth. Even if it sliced him up inside. Even if the three words ripped his guts open and spilled them across the floor. For the first time in his life, he said, “I can’t read.”

“What?”

Jesus Christ, she was going to make him say it again. “I can’t—”

“No, I heard you,” she cut him off. “But… I just… You graduated from high school, right? Before you were drafted by Texas?”

He was light-headed, like he’d just been bulldozed by a batter running through the bag. The roof of his mouth burned, and he realized he was close to hyperventilating. He had to move, had to pace, if he was going to have a prayer of making her understand.

“They tried to teach me,” he said. “Back in elementary school. Middle school too. I flunked out of fourth grade, and my mother cried for a week, but Daddy went down and talked to the principal. He brought in my Little League coach and everything. They reached some agreement, and I moved up to fifth grade with all the kids I knew. Daddy said he’d skin me alive, if he ever caught me being that lazy again, and that was the summer I learned how to lay tile. Part of my punishment for slacking off.”

“But how do you… You have to sign contracts, don’t you? For an awful lot of money?”

“My agent goes through them before I ever see a thing. I sign where he tells me to sign. He earns his five percent, and he doesn’t ask any questions.” The words were bitter in his mouth.

“How do you get through…everything? Reading a map? Ordering off a menu?”

“I end up eating a crapload of salads I don’t want.” He tried to make it a joke, but she wasn’t laughing. “That’s why I thought Artie’s would be such a great place that first night. Nothing goes wrong, ordering in a steakhouse. Unless you bring a vegetarian to the party.”

Dammit
! That was pity on her face. Like he was something broken. Damaged. He’d spent his entire life hiding the truth, making sure no one ever shot that kind of look at him. Sure enough, she said, “You poor thing. I can’t believe your parents would let that go on, year after year. Your teachers. Your coaches…”

“Look, it’s not anyone’s fault. My daddy had it right from day one. I’m a lazy son-of-a-bitch. Too stupid to do more than swing a bat for a living.”

“That’s not true!” she gasped like he’d slapped her.

But it
was
true. He’d heard the words for as long as he could remember. Shit-for-brains, his daddy called him, almost as often as the old man used his real name. How many times had he been punished for “forgetting” to do his homework? How many times had he been laughed at by his brothers for bringing home Cs, Ds, Fs on his report card?
 

Emily still stared at him, her eyes wide in the dark room. She still hugged her knees like she needed to protect herself. No. Like she wanted to protect him. Like she wanted to help him, even though there wasn’t a thing in the world anyone could do.

So he wasn’t surprised when she said, “You’re
not
stupid.”

* * *

He wasn’t. He must have created dozens of coping mechanisms. His memory skills had to be off the charts—she’d heard him repeat names, phone numbers, addresses, never realizing he was bypassing the need to read them later. Whatever disability he had, it hadn’t kept him from the detailed work of renovating the house.
 

Why should it? The man’s hand-eye coordination was unequaled. He hit hundred-mile-an-hour fastballs every single day.

“It has to be dyslexia,” she said. She’d come across plenty of cases of the learning disability in her social work. In college, she’d even volunteered at an after-school program for kids with low self-esteem. One of their major goals had been identifying DRDs, developmental reading disorders.
 

Sort of made her feel like an idiot, missing all the signs here.

Tyler paused in pacing long enough to shrug. “My mother said that, early on. They kept me after school every day in second grade. We worked on sight words, phonics, all that stuff to get me over the hump.”

“What happened?”

“I learned better ways to fake it.”

His bitter admission twisted her heart, even as she protested. “But there are new things now! Dr. Raster has a pilot program where he’s teaching dyslexic kids how to read ebooks.”

“Who?”

“Hugo Raster. One of the consulting docs at the hospital, at my old job. He’s putting ebooks in special fonts, flashing a word at a time on the screen. It’s working for a lot of kids.”

“Great for them.”
 

She heard the dismissal in his voice. How many gimmicks had he tried in the past? How many teachers had tried to unlock the closed-off parts of his brain? And how many times had he been defeated, left feeling even more stupid, even less capable than when he started?

But she’d
seen
the work Dr. Raster was doing. She’d collected information about it for Minerva House clients.
 

“I have flyers,” she said. Even as the words slipped out, she knew she was oversimplifying things.
She
might be eager to share new resources, but Tyler’s hopes had been dashed too many times.
 

She wouldn’t give up, though. Not without a fight.

She crossed to the brightly colored wall display and selected the appropriate piece of paper. It was so easy for her—even with a dozen other papers from the hospital offering related services to families in need. What would it be like, to never be able to read those words, to never be able to skim over a headline, a menu, an ad?

She turned toward Tyler and found him staring at her, the smallest of smiles edging the corners of his lips. “What?” she asked, confused by his change of mood.

“When I walked in here, you thought I was some sort of wild animal, probably better off in chains. Now, you’re doing everything you can to help me.”

“I didn’t think you were an animal!” Her protest was automatic. But she
had
been afraid. Afraid for what he would do to himself, to his future, because he couldn’t keep his temper under control.
 

Now that she knew his secret, though, so many things made sense. Of course he was angry. The world scraped against him a thousand different ways before breakfast, throwing information at him that he could never comprehend.

“Please,” she said. “Call Dr. Raster. Just talk to him once. If it turns out to be a waste of time, I’ll never mention it again.”

She saw the wariness on his face, uncertainty tinged with embarrassment. But she saw something else there—hope. Tyler
wanted
something to change. He
wanted
to get past the wall that had fenced him in his entire life.

As a social worker, that was the thing she looked for. Her clients might have complex problems, complicated lives that could never be fixed by a single program, by a solitary intervention. But when they wanted to change, she was able to help them. She could guide people in taking a first step, steady them as they prepared to take another.
 

Tyler took the paper.

She felt a rush of joy.
This
was what she’d trained for.
This
was why she’d chosen her career.
 

He folded the flyer twice and slipped it into his back pocket. “I’ll call in the morning,” he said, holding her gaze like he was swearing to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.