Thin Love (17 page)

“Don’t call me that.”
Simmering calm,
he thought.
This is simmering calm
and Kona’s own frustration began to bubble. He took a step and she retreated, sidestepping until the coffee table separated them and Kona hated the distance, hated that her cool tone was affecting him. He opened his mouth, licked his lips to keep them from cracking against his hot breath, but Keira wouldn’t let him excuse anything away. Hand up to silence him, she let that distant tone fill each syllable. “Is your rough draft finished?” Kona nodded, not sure she’d let him say anything at all. “Good. Please get it to Miller in time. I’d appreciate it.”

When she turned to leave, Kona moved, catching her before she could make it to the front door. “Listen to me for a second, okay? Tonya, this morning…” He paused, fighting for words that didn’t sound like pathetic excuses. When nothing came to him, he waved his hand, “that was nothing.”

“It’s none of my business what you do away from our class, Kona.”

“I just meant—”

“In fact,” she said, smiling, and Kona didn’t like how quick the grin came, how there was no warmth in it. “I don’t give a shit about what you… do.” Eyes downcast, glancing over his dick, Keira’s lethal smile faltered. “The only thing I care about is my grade and if you don’t turn in the rough draft—”

“I’ll turn in the damn draft.” He cut her off because he was pissed. He was mad that she was playing off whatever she was feeling because she was somehow disappointed in him. And, she was lying. She had to be. Those great blue eyes became wet and Keira blinked, lashes moving like a fan and Kona knew she was fighting whatever emotion had her angry at him. It pissed him off. She did. She confused him and the tone, her dismissive attitude did nothing but frustrate Kona.

“Good, then we don’t have a problem.”

Again she turned to leave, but Kona took her elbows, backed her against the wall so she’d look at him. “Why are you pissed at me?”

“Why the hell would I pissed at you?”

That calm was fractured, rendered useless by the lick of heat working over her cheeks. He knew she wanted him. He knew seeing Tonya here this morning had hurt her. She was just too damn stubborn to admit it. “You jealous?”

“Excuse me?” He didn’t expect her laughter. He didn’t expect her to be cruel, condescending with one small laugh. It stung. “You think I’m jealous that you’re passing along STDs to the female student body? Get over yourself, Kona.” When she pushed against his chest, he caught her fingers, holding her struggling hand against his chest. And then, the heat coiled tight, rose up to swell between them. It was the same unexplainable sensation he’d felt the night of her attack; the same thing that crackled the air that day at the hospital. It was bitterness and want, peeking out from his anger, from her jealousy, and right then, Kona moved closer, leaned against her and he didn’t have to hold her fingers still on his chest.

They stayed there, challenging him, taunting him. But the venom in her voice, the anger in her expression did not shift in the slightest. “I wouldn’t be jealous of Tonya Lucas if you paid me, Kona. I know what she is. I know what you are. I knew that before we were assigned this project.” Kona could smell the hint of caramel and coffee on her breath. He watched her expression, the small curl of her mouth, the tremor that bumped a tiny pulse on her cheek as she pushed him back, still standing too close with that tempting mouth just inches from him. Lips that were sweet, words that were poison. “People like you never fucking change.”

Five… six… seven rings before Leann pulled Keira’s phone off of the charger and silenced it.

“You know she’s going to keep calling until you answer.”

But Keira didn’t want to hear her mother’s voice. She didn’t want to do anything but lay on her bed and make herself sick on Doritos. She had a meet in the morning, one she knew she wasn’t prepared for, but her temper had not waned much since she left Kona, and carb loading in the worst possible way was the only thing that helped mollify her anger. Her guitar was less than four feet from her and she couldn’t even bother to reach for it, to make those strings and her father’s finger grooves work their magic on her temper.

“Why isn’t your voice mail picking up?” Keira’s cousin moved around the room, digging through her clothes, slinging pumps and wedges across the floor. When the dorm phone started to chime, she threw it onto Keira’s bed, barely missing her temple. “It’s her. Answer the freaking phone, Keira.”

“No. She’s just going to bitch at me.”

Keira heard her cousin’s curse; low, vicious little words that should have made her blush, and she smiled, thinking of her mother’s reaction if she could somehow hear her niece. “Fine, be a little shit.” And then the smile moved off Keira’s face as Leann took the call. “Hello, Aunt Cora, how are you?” The saccharine tone was rude and Keira was sure her mother was telling Leann not to be glib. “Oh, yes, she’s right here, stuffing her face with—”

“Are you stupid?” Keira said, jerking the phone out of her cousin’s hand. “You know you know what a psycho she is about junk food.” Leann gave Keira the finger, then returned to her digging before the girl had a second enough to clear her throat. “Mother?”

“Keira, what in God’s name are you eating?”

She pulled the phone against her chest and growled at her cousin. “I am going to kick your scrawny little ass.” She knew her mother was still talking, likely asking questions and, sure enough, when she returned the receiver to her ear, the lecture hadn’t even slowed.

“… irresponsible. With your hips, you have to be extra cautious of what you eat and your skin, Keira… how often have we been to see the dermatologist? You know what junk food does to your…?”

“
Mother.
Please. Leann was joking. I’m not eating anything.” Her cousin’s glare was ridiculous—tightened eyes and a severe line pulling her mouth that made Leann look old. Keira ignored her, then cringed when she heard her mother’s long breath on the other end of the phone.

“Well, that’s good at least. You can tell Leann I don’t appreciate her little joke.”

“Oh, I’m sure she knows that.”

“Yes, I’m sure.” There was something off in her mother’s voice, as though she was waiting for Keira to fill the small beats of quiet that generally were never allowed in their conversations. “Awkward silences are rude, Keira,” she’d always told her. Her mother was waiting, expecting and with her head still muddled by Kona and Tonya Lucas, Keira couldn’t remember what her mother wanted.

“Um, so, why did you call?”

Another long exhale told Keira she’d already made a mistake. Slumping against the bed, she curled her knees to her chest and watched Leann flutter around the room like a bee. “Keira, really? Have you forgotten? Mark was so looking forward to seeing you. He called, of course? I knew he would when Steven told me he gave the boy your number.”

The only comfort came to her behind her closed eyelids. Her mother was meddlesome, nosy, and Steven seemed to agree that Mark was a perfect match for her. He’d apologized when he called three nights before, said he didn’t want her to think he was falling in line with her mother’s plan, and after the awkwardness passed, Keira had shuffled around her discomfort until his laughter relaxed her, until she had half-heartedly agreed to a date. She’d already put it out of her head, too consumed by distracting her thoughts from Kona.

“He called. We’re supposed to be meeting up tonight.”

“What do you mean ‘meeting up’? Isn’t he taking you out on a proper date?”

“Mother, it’s not like that. It’s casual.”

There was a brief pause and Keira could almost hear her mother’s thoughts, the interworkings of agendas, calculating ways in which Keira could make Mark helpless to her “female charms.” Her mother’s term, definitely not hers.

“Hmm, casual isn’t terrible, I suppose.” It took her mother three full seconds to switch tactics and then she was off with a litany of demands and questions. “What will you wear? Make certain your hair is off your neck. It’s one of your better attributes. Men like necks and a lot of skin, but don’t dress like a whore…”

Keira didn’t have the energy to argue. She didn’t care that Mark Burke was a nice guy. She didn’t care if she impressed him or not. The voice on the other end of the phone had her head throbbing at the base of her skull. The constant refrain of direction was old hat, something Keira had heard her entire life. “Pretty girls do this,” and “pretty girls don’t do that,” over and over until her mother was satisfied that she understood. She never had. She never wanted to. That voice felt like a weight around her neck. It crippled her most times, had her forgetting who she wanted to be; it made her doubt she had the stomach to walk away from this life one day. Her mother’s directives had become a fat mass in her gut and the older she got, the bigger that tumor of expectation felt.

Defeated for the moment, Keira could only offer random mumbles of “I know” and the occasional “yes, Mother” as the woman babbled on, dictated, instructed like a sergeant sending his men off to battle. And there was the threat, something dark her mother tried to hide behind sighs, behind veiled words she played off as advice. “Don’t screw this up, Keira” and “Don’t disappoint me” whispered behind each demand. There would be consequences. There were always consequences.

Keira didn’t notice the tears forming in her eyes.

She kept the phone nestled on her shoulder and leaned her head against the mattress, ignoring the instruction, and around her, Leann’s constant bustling went still. She thought her cousin may have left in the midst of Keira’s marching orders, but then a hand on her ankle had her setting down the phone on the floor when she sat up.

You okay? Leann mouthed, her cousin’s annoyance at her earlier pouting clearly gone.

“Same as always.” She frowned when an errant tear slid down her face, then rolled her eyes at herself before she rubbed her face dry and picked up the phone again. Her mother hadn’t taken a breath, had started up a stupid line of questioning about what lingerie Keira would wear. “Okay, I got it. Don’t worry.” And then she hung up the phone.

Leann crawled next to her on the floor, scooting to the end of the bed to grab Keira’s guitar before she sat next to her and handed the instrument over. Her cousin knew what she needed, knew how to ease the anger that had been simmering all day. This was more than her mother’s usual expectations. This was about the pressure of pacifying the woman, and it was about Kona. It was about shock and disappointment and the heartache she didn’t want to admit came from seeing what he’d done that morning.

Hands on the strings, Keira’s fingertips followed in the grooves, sliding on the frets and she felt calmer, like each hollow in the wood was a sedative she couldn’t do without.

She sang Leann a song. Her cousin had always been her single audience, the only person Keira knew would never tell her she wasn’t good enough, wasn’t anything but blessed. The words came to her from her childhood; something about lyric and starlight and promises her father made.

Music made her weep. She remembered the steady strum of her father’s guitar, the sweet whine of his low voice, songs he sang to himself so that she couldn’t tell if he could even carry a tune. He wrote words on brown paper bags. He collected stacks of thick, rough paper in a shoe box and they became a dozen lessons to teach her, a thousand words that sought to guide her, to show her that the world was not what her mother believed. Her father’s looping scrawls were guidelines, that box of broken dreams, his map of what she could have.

“It will be different for you,” he’d told her. She was his child and the good parts of her mother that had not been killed by greed and money and social standing. “Try to collect the stars, Keira. Put them in your pocket, send them in an envelope to another version of yourself, one that is older, one that understands your mother better. That way, when you’re older, when you know yourself a little better, that collection of stars will fill you up, remind you of the nights we sang our songs, of the days when you smiled with me.”

Those days had not lasted, became infrequent and sparse and Keira forgot about the stars. She forgot to send that letter and when he died, when her mother and all those impossible expectations got too great for him, Keira took those brown bags smudged with her father’s words and she stuffed them in the casket, underneath a tailored jacket he’d never worn before. She wanted them next to his heart.

But music still made her weep. Not every song, not every note, but when something came to her, when she heard the hint of her father in the rhyme and lyric that danced in her head, she cried. That had been his legacy; the small whisper of his hope, the bright, incredible anticipation of happiness he believed she would have some day.

Sitting with her cousin, telling her that story in each note she sang, made Keira happy, made her vanquish all the intolerable things her mother wanted her to be; the cruel way she tried to make sure Keira would become that person she wanted her to be.

When the final note vibrated into silence, Leann sighed, a contented little exhale that broke the melancholy in the room.