Windswept (11 page)

They all laughed. Even if it was aimed at him, he didn’t care. He was too blissed out, for one thing, and happy to hear the guys laughing, for another. It had been a pissy month for the squad. A month of grim looks, tight lips, and regrets as every one of them wondered how to turn back the clock and do something differently to save their colleagues’ lives.

“Hayes looks like he had a hell of a weekend,” Murphy laughed. “Who is she, man? Is it that sweet thing who keeps beating your ass in the pool?”

He shook his head but couldn’t wipe the huge grin off his face. It had been a hell of a weekend, and not just for the time they’d spent in bed. They’d wandered around Central Park for half of Saturday, which had been one of those sunny, late winter days that felt like spring could be found right around the corner if only you walked enough. Mia had petted every dog, pointed out shapes in the clouds, and told him about summers spent sailing in Maine on some little boat her grandfather owned. A boat Ryan had never, ever imagined he’d see, not in a million years, because he was so busy marveling at the novelty of a woman who was just as much fun to spend time with outside the bedroom as between the sheets.

She’d dragged him to a museum on Sunday, too. An exhibit of some artist who painted blue horses and yellow dogs and red cows and other kooky shit any ten-year-old could have drawn, except Mia said they were great. She told him all about them, most of which went in one ear and out the other, except for the important stuff. Like how warm her hand was in his as she dragged him from one painting to another. How wide her grin stretched, how bright her eyes shone as she stood speechless in front of each painting before sighing in satisfaction and loping off to the next like a filly who couldn’t decide which corner of the pasture had the greenest grass.

He’d still been reliving all that, so it didn’t seem that important to stop the guys from joking around, even when they took things a little too far.

“Look at him!” Murphy cackled. “Hayes didn’t just get laid, he got done.”

“Done good, I’d say,” Ken added in his muddy Long Island accent. “Earth to Ryan, hello?”

He waved them off and pulled on his trunks.

“She a talker, Hayes?” Ken pitched his voice high. “Oh, Ryan, baby! Harder, harder!”

It wasn’t that far off, actually, but he kept his lips sealed.

“Check his back for claw marks, guys.”

He threw his stuff in a locker, knowing they wouldn’t spot a thing, because Mia had kept her arms high over her head, clutching the bed posts, trusting every inch of her hot flesh to him. Trusting him to bring them both so high, they could have peeked down at the penthouses of New York.

“No marks. Maybe you weren’t man enough to drive her crazy, Hayes.”

Oh, he’d driven her crazy, all right. Just like she’d done to him.

The guys kept up the banter all the way through the showers.

“I say,” Ken cackled in that crazy laugh of his that hadn’t been heard in a dark and dreary month. “It’s a good thing Hayes finally got fucked to the eyeballs.”

Yes, it was crude. Yes, it was stupid. Yes, he ought to have reined it in before they turned the corner to the poolside and practically bowled over someone walking past. Ryan had to grab the woman’s arm to keep her from falling over.

“Sorry!” he blurted, settling her back on her feet.

“No prob—” the woman started to say, flipping the hair out of her face. She stared at him with huge blue eyes. “Ryan?”

“Mia?”

Ken chose just that moment to follow him out of the showers, talking nonstop over his shoulder to the other guys. “Like I said, it’s a good thing Hayes finally got fucked to the eyeballs by some pretty little thing. Maybe he’ll share some around with you piss-poor…”

Ken trailed off, but Murphy was coming up behind him, grinning a mile wide. “What’d you say her name was, Hayes?”

“Mia!” the dive instructor called from across the pool. “Why don’t you bring the squad over so we can get started…”

His gut sank faster than a torpedoed ship as his red-cheeked, outdoorsy, fun-loving girl went white as chalk. Mia clenched her fists and looked at him in a way she’d never done before. Not that
Ryan, I really like you
look.

Not that
Ryan, you’re really sweet
look.

More like a
Ryan, you’re the scum of the earth
look.

Two more guys piled out behind him, oblivious to what was going on.

“Did you try it with her in the shower, Hayes?”

“Yeah, did you lather her up? Or did she lather you down?”

Someone elbowed the guy into shutting up, but it was too late. Mia’s face went from so pale she was practically translucent to raging red, and she stretched tall and bristling and thoroughly outraged.

“So, which of you New York cops do I report sexual harassment to? You?” She stabbed a finger in Ken’s direction, then moved on. “You?”

Murphy took a step back and stuck his hands up.

“Or you?” Her eyes narrowed on him. Ryan Hayes, stupidest dumb-ass cop ever to hit the five boroughs, because he’d let one offhand comment snowball into
this
.

Her finger shook slightly, but she stood her ground, because Mia was Mia, and once she started something, she never, ever quit.

He looked at her now, staring at her toes in the moonlight, and waited for her hands to curl into fists and let him have exactly what he deserved.

She didn’t and she hadn’t, though. She’d turned on her heel, strode to the corner of the pool set up for the course with a whiteboard, and glared. Glared and glared and glared as the other instructor got them into the pool for the first exercise of eight interminable hours of hell, which Mia spent in stone-faced silence, looking at the guys like they were a bunch of miscreants who didn’t deserve the time of day. Which they pretty much were.

Even when they came back from a brief lunch break she didn’t say a word. And if she noticed the black eye he’d given Ken the second he had the chance, she didn’t comment.

Ken had been easy to make up with, even if it took Murphy steering him over after a fifteen-minute cool-down time to force them to try again.

“I’m sorry, man,” Ken said. “I didn’t think she was your…your… Well, I just didn’t think.”

Which pretty much summed it up, didn’t it?

“Are we good, man?” Ken held out a hand for a fist bump which Ryan halfheartedly returned. Yeah, he and Ken were good. He and Mia, on the other hand…

She sat across from him now, the midnight breeze teasing her hair, casting uncertain shadows over her face. Mia, sitting eighteen inches and a world away from him right now. If only a fist bump were all it took to make them all better again.

“I’m so sorry, Mia.”

There it was again, that ridiculously inadequate word.

He’d hung around the pool for an hour after the class ended, waiting for a chance to talk to her, only to be told by the other instructor that she’d left by through the back door.

Classy Mia Whitman, reduced to slinking out the back door. Because of him. The nauseous feeling he’d been fighting all day grew.

Every honk of city traffic, every voice on the street was an accusation as he made his way home at the end of that miserable day. The couple of days he’d given Mia to cool down turned into a week and then into two, and two weeks was too late, because she was gone. The woman who opened the door to the apartment Mia had been subletting only knew that the previous occupant was gone. Where Mia had gone, how he could get in touch, the woman had no clue.

Gone. Mia was just gone. Gone from the pool where they’d done their morning laps. Gone from the apartment. Gone from his life.

The spring that seemed so promising withered away, and winter came back with a vengeance, slushy and cold and gray, especially on weekends when he wondered why the end of a short-term relationship would prompt a thousand mournful questions every day.

“Okay, she was pissed off,” Ken had said at around that time. “But didn’t she kind of overreact?”

That’s what he thought, too. At least at first. But then one utterly depressing Sunday morning that ought to have been a really great Sunday morning he could have spent with Mia if he hadn’t been such a dick, he let his itchy fingers do a little snooping on the Internet and followed the hunch that had been growing in the back of his mind.

Mia Whitman, sexual harassment.
He typed it in as a search term. Hit enter. Waited.

Nothing.

He stared at the screen for a while then typed again.

Mia Whitman, Olympic swimming.
Because a woman who swam like Mia had to have been that good, or at least close, right?

And bingo: pages and pages of swim meet results dating not too far back with Mia’s name at or near the top. Lots of top-ten, even top-five results in major collegiate meets with times that made him whistle, they were so fast. He scrolled through another three pages of results before a headline jumped out at him.

Collegiate Swimmer Puts Past Behind Her for a Shot at Olympic Gold.

By the time he got three sentences into that article, his blood was boiling.

For most competitors, this week’s Olympic Trials are a chance to realize a dream. For one, it is a chance to escape a nightmare,
the article started.
For years, Mia Whitman chased her dreams with an intense training regimen: morning workouts, evening drills, with barely enough time for a shower, meals, and classes in between…

He skimmed through the next part then slowed down again.

Henry J, a fellow student at Tufts, wired the camera after hours in the showers…

The women’s squad couldn’t have suspected…

If it had been a newspaper in his hand, he would have crumpled it up and thrown it away, wishing he could take back what the guys in his squad had said.

“Did you try it with her in the shower, Hayes?”

“Yeah, did you lather her up?”

He took five long breaths and read on.

The videos circulated through several fraternities before being brought to the attention of campus police…

Sexual harassment lawsuit filed by head of women’s squad…

He shook his head more with every line. It was one of those no-win cases where a woman had more to lose by bringing a man to justice than in letting him get away. But Mia had stuck to her principles, pressing charges and making the case public, thus bringing a maelstrom of exposure upon herself. He could picture the whispered comments she must have had to endure.

“Hey, isn’t that the chick from the videos?” some fraternity bastard would snicker on the way to class.

“Hey, baby, want to lather up for me?” the jerk’s buddy would add.

Ryan weighed an imaginary bat in his hands and pictured how good it would feel to put it to work on guys like that.

Now she wants to put that all behind her,
the article said.
“All I want to do is swim my best,” Whitman said, refusing further comment…

He scrolled ahead, looking for the results of the Olympic Trials. He ran a finger down line after line of names, times, places until he finally found it: Mia Whitman, women’s 800m, fifth place. A tight finish in which she’d missed her chance by a fraction of a second. The end of an Olympic dream.

He’d sat in front of the screen for a long time, scrubbing his face so hard, he probably wouldn’t have to shave for another couple of weeks.

No, Mia hadn’t been overreacting. Not one bit.

Mia sat very, very still, trying to hold the tears back. A mish-mosh of tears, because no matter how often she told herself the memory of stupid comments wouldn’t hurt her, they still did. But at the same time, the sight of Ryan looking at her, droopy and inconsolable as a saggy-eyed basset hound, pulled from a whole different well of sorrow.

She knotted her fingers together and groped for something to say.

“You told them,” she said, and it came out somewhere in between a disbelieving whisper and an angry hiss. “You told all those guys at the pool you were sleeping with me!”

Ryan shook his head. “I didn’t tell anyone.”

God, did he have to look so…tragic?

“They all knew!”

“Not because I said anything, Mia. I swear.”

She folded her arms and tried to look convinced of herself. “Sure.”

“Mia, when a guy has the best weekend of his life, the men who know him can tell.”

Part of her threatened to soften, because it had been the best weekend of her life, too. Their fourth one together, and it just kept getting better each time. Enough that she’d been working up the nerve to tell Ryan about her grand plan. How she’d wrap up the job in New York in another couple of weeks and head to the Caribbean to sail her grandfather’s boat. How she really wouldn’t mind if he’d visit her on the boat, because maybe they could keep this magical something up for a while longer. Maybe even a lot longer. They could spend some time sailing the Tropics and afterward come back to New York and…

She slammed on her mental brakes. Maybe she’d been dreaming too much. Maybe Ryan wasn’t the sweetest guy ever, but just another prick.

“What kind of people do you work with? Hang out with?”

His eyes narrowed and went fierce. “Good people, Mia. Guys who put their lives on the line.”

“Yeah, and other peoples’ reputations.”

His lips quivered but didn’t produce a sound, so she went on.

“What they said about me was disgusting. Demeaning. Do you know what it feels like, being the conquest guys congratulate each other on?”

“You are not a conquest, Mia.” His voice was low and firm. If she hadn’t been so mad, he might even have sounded scary.

“No, I’m just a great weekend fuck.”

“I didn’t say that!”

“You did! You said—”

“What did I say?” His voice went from harsh to pleading. “Think back, Mia. What did I say?”

“You said… you said…” She clenched her fists and scoured her memory. Hadn’t he said… Or maybe he was the one who…

She searched and searched and came up blank.

Okay, maybe he hadn’t actually said much.

“Fine. Maybe you didn’t say anything, but that’s just as bad.”