The Dangerous Hero (4 page)

"Dude. You just turned about ten shades of pale. What's going on? You having a stroke or something?"

"I know her. No wonder we had a connection. I
know
her. Goddamn it, Jeff." He slammed the heel of his hand down on the table, making the beer bottles rattle. "I didn’t recognize her."

Jeff was regarding him with interest, his golden eyebrows raised into his hairline. He took the precaution of rescuing his beer from the shaking table. "Are you saying what I think you’re saying? She’s an old hookup of yours? And you forgot?" He chuckled. "I'm so glad I'm not you."

Stephen was still shaking his head, as if to annihilate the nest of cobwebs that had been interfering with his memory. "Not a hookup exactly. She was just a kid. Too young for me, too young for everything I wanted to do with her. Did do with her." He stopped as more memories swamped him. She had been a sweetheart—warm, friendly, fun to be around. He had liked her. A lot.

His friend was laughing at him. "Not cool, forgetting a beautiful redhead like Viola."

"She wasn’t a redhead then. Her hair was short and black and sort of Goth. Black nail polish and fake tattoos. She looks so different now." That sounded lame. "Fuck." Another memory surfaced, not so pleasant this time. "She’s Percy Quentin’s daughter."

"Well, yeah. Everybody knows that."

"I didn’t. Nobody thought to mention it to me."

"You needn't sound so snarky. It’s not something Viola talks much about."

Stephen was surprised at the upsurge of resentment that took him. Thinking about Percy Quentin always made him angry. Percy had been his mentor. He had taught him a huge amount about his craft. Stephen had admired and respected him. But Percy had scuttled that. Stephen had done something stupid and Percy had retaliated with epic Shakespearean rage.

"How come she changed her name? It used to be Viola Quentin."

"The usual reason," Jeff drawled, looking at him as if he suspected Stephen had lost a few brain cells since last they'd met. "She got married."

Stephen swore.

"And divorced," Jeff added, grinning. "Relax. She's single. Not even dating anyone as far as I know, although there's a guy in the English department who's angling after her. He was at the thing today. David Somebody."

Stephen groaned as he remembered the symbolism of murder guy. Yeah. David Somebody had had his eye on Viola, but there had been no glimmer of interest from her, and David Somebody wasn't her type—that much he knew instinctively.
He
was her type. She was his type. They were the same bloody genus.

He envisioned her again as she had looked in the elevator, her eyes closed in erotic concentration, her head thrown back against the wall, strands of shining auburn hair coming loose and framing her lovely face. Her lips damp and swollen from his furious kisses, her shirt unbuttoned and pushed aside, the rosy tip of one breast visible, all hard and pointy from his caresses. Viola. She was even lovelier than she'd been at seventeen. Why had she ever dyed that stunning red hair?

Watching him through half-closed eyed, Jeff said, "No reason to be worried about that guy; he’s no rival. On the other hand, there's me."

Stephen came out of his reverie. "What d’you mean, you?"

"I like her. I've been mulling over the prospect of asking her out. Not only is she easy on the eyes, but I think she might be, you know, fun."

Stephen felt a surge of that old territorial competitiveness that had always enlivened his friendship with Jeff and, upon occasion, threatened to wreck it. They had a long history of being attracted to the same girls. "No way, Slayton. She’s mine. No mulling."

His friend cocked his eyebrows, looking mischievous. "We could share. Three-way?" He sketched a brief, vivid scenario.

Stephen began to laugh. "No. Dick. Aren't you seeing someone?"

"Not really. Casual stuff only. But hey. Don't get all prickly. If you can win the lovely Viola, I won't poke a stick in it, but it looked to me as if she’d be more likely to take a flogger to you than offer herself up in sweet surrender."

Remembering the way her body had surrendered to his in the elevator increased the ache in his genitals. It had been like that all those years ago, too—strong, almost magical chemistry, the kind where you knew with absolutely certainty that you were compatible in the bedroom, that everything would be smooth and easy there, and that your desires were not only strong, but also complementary. "I’d prefer it the other way around."

Jeff snorted. "When you knew her before, was she into the kinky stuff?"

Having known each other since their teenage years, he and Jeff had always been open with other about the ups and downs of their sex lives. He could tell Jeff just about anything.

"I thought so, but I really wasn't with her long enough to be sure. I was just a kid myself, remember. It was crazy hot, but afterward I felt like I’d molested her. Her father was my mentor." He muttered a curse. "I haven’t thought about her for years. I guess I must have buried the entire incident. I mean, who wants to think of himself as a child molester?"

"Wait. How old was she when this happened?"

"Seventeen."

"You’re off the hook, then. The age of consent in Massachusetts is sixteen."

"How on earth do you know that?"

"I’m a resident advisor at the college; it’s my part of my job to know stuff like that."

"Ah, okay, makes sense. I did figure, afterwards, that Percy was just blowing smoke, but the guy intimidated me in those days. I was young and stupid, and I felt guilty for maybe doing something to a teenager against her will."

"But it wasn’t against her will, right?"

"No, no, not at all; she was very passionate."

"Anyway, this was what—nine years ago? You were what, 21? Lots of teenage girls have older boyfriends."

"Still. The time was out of joint for us. Plus, she was a virgin."

"And you initiated her?"

"It didn’t go quite that far, but it was intense." Jeff was his best friend, but even so, he didn’t require all the details. The odd thing was how vividly Stephen remembered the details. Viola had been hungry for knowledge. She had seized each new experience with enormous zest. She had been adventuresome, unembarrassed, and willing to try anything. Her joy in her own blossoming sensuality had been wonderful to behold. "We went from never even touching to tearing each other’s clothes off in, like five minutes. It was that crazy. It all just came out of nowhere." The way it had come out of nowhere a few hours ago in the elevator. "I fell for her. I wanted to protect her and take care of her and be her white knight forever." He shook his head at the wonder of it. "The whole thing was insane."

"Sounds like it," Jeff said dryly. "So, is there any chance that the lovely Viola is drawing the same blank about you that you drew about her?"

"No." He wasn’t sure how he knew this, but he was absolutely sure of it.
Just how good
is
your memory?
"She was pissed." He felt his pulse jack up as, again, he relived the interlude in the elevator. "She wouldn’t give me her number." Why hadn't he pushed a little harder? "Do you have it?"

"I don't think so," said Jeff, pulling out his smartphone, "but I do have access to the faculty directory." He thumbed a few keys then handed the phone across the table to Stephen, who pulled out his own device and entered the contact info. He stood.

"Thanks. I'm gonna step outside and call her."

"Now? It must be after midnight."

"I have to."

"Stephen?"

He stopped, looking back at his friend.

"Make your date for tomorrow. Tonight you're mine. Completely." Smirking, Jeff began to sing along with the song playing on the jukebox. "You give your heart..."

Stephen flipped him off as he headed for the exit.

It was pouring outside, so Stephen dashed across the bar’s small parking lot to take shelter in his car. He wanted to think for a few minutes before he called her. He couldn’t blow this; he had to do it right.

Sitting in the driver’s seat of his car with the rain thrumming on the roof, Stephen fell into the past. He had met Percy Quentin when he'd signed up for a writing seminar offered during his senior year at college. Percy had been that year's writer-in-residence.

He'd gone ill-prepared to the first seminar, not having read any of Professor Quentin's books, and not expecting much. He thought creative writing courses were a waste of time. He'd envisioned a guy with the name Percy Quentin to be stilted, effete, and possibly British. He’d figured him as the author of comedy of manners novels set in F. Scott Fitzgerald's day.

But Quentin turned out to be more of Hemingway type than a Fitzgerald. He was big and burly, with thick auburn hair and a neatly trimmed beard. He wrote hard-boiled mystery novels featuring a sarcastic, in-your-face private detective who took no shit even while relying more on brains than brawn to solve his cases.

Like his hero, Percy took no shit in his seminar. Rather brutally, he made everybody who signed up write a five page short story—no advance warning or time to plan—on the first day of class. Anyone who didn't meet his rigorous standards would be ejected from the seminar. More than half the class was gone by the second session. Stephen was permitted to remain.

There followed a semester of the most difficult, challenging, infuriating, and terrifying class Stephen had ever been a part of. Percy dominated each two-hour session with his fierce, relentless critiques of everything his students produced, and he succeeded in reducing several of his students to tears with his withering comments on their efforts. Stephen’s stories received their share of Percy's scorn, but after he cooled down and stopped wanting to throttle the bastard, he'd usually he had to admit that Percy was right.

He liked the challenge of trying to meet the crazy man's high standards. He worked hard, focusing most of his energy on his writing. He learned and he improved.

At the end of the semester, Percy invited him to participate in an independent study project with two other students. They were each to write a novel. His fellow students both grew discouraged by the end of the school year—their final year—but Stephen was well into his novel by then and had made up his mind that writing was to be his career.

Percy was not encouraging. He had been honest from the beginning with his students about the unlikelihood of any of them ever getting their work accepted for publication, but Stephen was ambitious and tenacious.

His own father had died when he was sixteen and left him a small inheritance, so he mapped out a five-year plan where he would live frugally, write all day, and do some bartending in the evenings to make ends meet. If at the end of five years he hadn't succeeding in finishing three books, getting an agent, and earning his first advance, he would endeavor to find a more stable and lucrative career.

After graduation, Percy had volunteered to help as Stephen continued his work on the novel. They had become friendly. They'd had found other things in common too—they both liked basketball and film noir, and Percy taught him to fly fish. He spent a weekend late in May at Percy’s cottage on the Cape, and he and Percy had fished, sailed, scuba dived, and eaten fantastic seafood while also talking books, films, and writing. The weekend had been so much fun that Stephen had gladly accepted when Percy suggested that he come down every weekend to go over the latest chapters. These weekends sometimes stretched into entire weeks.

The routine had been idyllic until the last weekend in June, when Percy’s daughter turned up to spend the rest of the summer with her father. Stephen hadn't known that Percy had a daughter, and he expected her to destroy the male camaraderie. But by the end of that first weekend, he’d decided she might not be so annoying to have around, after all.

Viola was easy-going and quick to laugh. She was good at the same sports that Percy loved and that he, too, was learning to enjoy. She had gone fly-fishing with her dad in Belize (for tarpon and bone fish), Montana (for trout), and Alaska (for salmon). She could tie her own flies. She could sail and she could windsurf, a sport he wanted to learn. In the water she was quick and graceful.

In the evening, she played poker with him and her father. Sometimes he and she dueled each other on the Xbox. Surprisingly, she was just as good at computer gaming as she was at outdoor sports, and he endured several epic kickings of his digital ass at her hands.

She seemed to have no awareness of him at all as a male. None. As far as Viola was concerned, he was one of her dad’s cronies, and she treated him with the same cheerful affability that she extended towards her dad.

Having assigned her to the kid sister category, Stephen had initially ignored her feminine qualities. He wasn’t into her Goth look. But it must have been something she’d adopted for high school, because when her fake tattoos washed off in the sea water and her black nail polish chipped, she didn’t bother to renew them. Slowly, her true self seemed to emerge, and he began to take notice.

She was tall and gangly and still a bit coltish, as if she hadn’t quite adapted to her long legs, but she was fit and active, and the real curves hidden under her shapeless T-shirts were revealed when she stripped down to her bikini for water-oriented sports. Viola in a bikini was definitely worth a second look.

There was an attraction between them, but it thrummed along beneath the surface. He felt it more and more as the summer went on, but she didn't reciprocate. She had a boyfriend back home in California, and she spent numerous hours on her cell phone talking to and texting the guy. At some point towards the end of summer, they broke up, and she’d cried a little on Stephen’s shoulder. He’d assured her, with all the authority of his status as a recent university graduate, that she would meet all kinds of interesting new guys in the fall when she started college.

This had remained the status quo all summer, until that last crazy weekend.

It was funny—he could still remember exactly how it had happened. How everything had changed. It seemed so sudden, but it must have been coming on slowly. She'd tried to teach him to wind-surf. He couldn’t seem to get the knack of it. When he finally succeeded, they'd whooped and laughed and spontaneously hugged in the water, and lightning struck. Just like in the elevator. Sparks, fire, conflagration.