Keep You (27 page)

             
Her heart was a panicked bird trapped in her ribs. “Because I’m not a man and I don’t need to get laid every ten minutes to prove my gender,” she snapped, hoping anger would take some of the sting off all the pain she was dredging up to the surface. But it wasn’t working, and the tears started to come. “And,” she said in a broken voice, watching his eyes take on a wounded sheen that made the urge to cry all the stronger, “because none of them were you.

             
“I wasn’t being a hormonal teenager when I told you – told you that I loved you.” She closed her eyes and drew in a shaky, deep breath full of hiccups. “You were – were like my brother. You were my closest friend.” The pain was acute now, sharp and swift like a heart attack. “You were a part of my family – and you – you – and I didn’t
understand
, Tam. I still don’t – I – I…”

             
The gentlest of touches against her cheek brought her eyes fluttering open, her lashes heavy with tears. The old Tam was in front of her. Not the animal from the bar who’d ripped into Ryan, not the awkward guy with the beer and small talk across Mike’s coffee table from her, not the lurker at the Brooks’ garden party. No, this was the Tam who still frequented her dreams, who’d pressed his forehead to hers and told her he would take good care of her.

             
His eyes were haunted and ruined, and his thumb traced down her cheek as her tears continued to fall. He touched his forehead against hers again, in that sweet, familiar way she remembered.

             
“Please don’t cry.” His breath smelled like Jameson.

             
A ferocious bolt of lightning, thunder on its heels, tore open the night sky beyond the window, turning the bedroom a brilliant shade of white. Tam’s eyes were electric and she could see herself reflected in them a moment: crying and pathetic, small and pale.

             
“Please don’t cry, baby,” he repeated when the cannon blast of thunder had dulled to a distant rumble. His eyes closed and his face tensed as he took a deep, shaking breath. “I hate that.”

             
Jo’s hands found the front of his shirt and gathered it, fingers digging into the soft, worn, still-damp cotton. She knew, the moment she touched him and felt the way his body was trembling, the same way her hands couldn’t stop shaking, that they were done talking. She closed her eyes and waited, because she was too raw and scraped-clean inside to be the one to reach out again, not after he’d been the one to walk away. When he kissed her, she couldn’t stop the whimpering sound that came up the back of her throat. He interpreted it correctly, hands spearing back through her hair until he was cradling the back of her skull, his lips opening against hers.

             
As thunder tolled and rain lashed at the window, she wanted to pretend, for a little while at least, that he loved her, and she slid her arms around his waist, flat palms stretching up toward his shoulders, clinging to him the way his mouth clung to hers.

**

              “Hi.”

             
The rain that had threatened all day was delivering its last warning, a few fat drops hissing against the brick sidewalk of KSU Place apartment complex on the edge of campus. Students were jogging toward the building they stood against. Empty potato chip bags and cans of soda tumbled over one another and got caught up in the Mondo grass planted at the edge of the walkway. The crepe myrtles scraped together as the breeze tossed up a fresh handful of rain pellets. Thunder teased their ears.

             
Tam wrapped his arms around Jo as she stood up on her tiptoes and pressed a hot, smacking kiss against his lips. He held her to him when she started to settle back down, pressing her body to his, chest and hips and kneecaps touching, his chin on top of her head, breathing in the cheap Suave coconut shampoo smell of her hair.

             
“What?” She laughed and tried to wriggle free. He let her go, reluctantly, a hand lingering at her elbow.

             
“We should talk.”

             
“Okay.” She was still breathless from her walk from the parking deck, cheeks flushed in the late summer heat. The breeze swirled her hair across her lips and she pulled it away with a finger, looking up into his face, frown blooming when she saw the expression he hadn’t been able to shake during the ride over here. He’d checked himself in the rearview and thought he looked like a man who’d been handed the worst news of his life. Fair enough. “Okay,” she repeated, puzzlement in her voice, “about what? Are you alright?”

             
“No, I…” he trailed off because he hated this, because he kept thinking there had to be a way to do this differently.

             
“Tam.” She always said his name just the right way: she gave it meaning, breathed a purpose and a spark into a word that had, before, always just been what people said when they addressed him. It meant something to Jo, and not just because she’d doodled it in the margins of her chemistry notes. “What’s wrong?”

             
Everything, Joey. Every damn thing in the world is wrong
. Another vicious burst of wind slapped at them, pushing him into her as her shoulder bit into the brick wall of the dorm building, and the rain finally soaked through its barrier and began falling to the earth in angry, shifting waves.

             
“Some things have happened lately.” He had to raise his voice a notch to be heard above the driving sheets of water. Now that the first words were out of his mouth, he felt like someone had rammed a butcher knife between his shoulder blades, and the only way to drop this bomb was hard and fast and light out of there before either of them could make sense of it. “And I’ve realized it’s not smart for you to be with me.”

             
Jo ignored the rain, shoving impatiently at her hair again, pale brows snapping together. “What? What the hell are you talking about?”

             
“This is going to hurt like hell, but I’ve got to say this, Joey, for both of us.”

             
Her eyes grew big, round and disbelieving. He knew when she figured out what he was getting at, because both her palms slammed into his chest, shoving him back into the rain. “Are you kidding me?” she demanded. “Are you fucking kidding me? Tell me this is a joke, Tam. Tell me, I swear to God…tell me this is some sick-ass joke.”

             
She was furious. Of course she was. She wasn’t going to take this lying down. “Look at me, I’m not kidding.”

             
“Wha – how…
why
?” She thumped him again, harder this time. “
You are not breaking up with me!
You are not! You have to actually
be together
in order for that to happen!”

             
A lump the size of a watermelon got stuck in his throat. “I know you’re mad now, but in a few months, you’ll - ”

             
“Mad?” she screeched, lunging up into his face. “Do you think this is
funny
? This is
not
funny, Tam!
Stop doing this
!”

             
“Jo.” He grabbed her by the shoulders and gave her a little shake, hard enough that her teeth clicked together. The eyes that stared up at him, livid and turquoise and devastated, almost made him back out of this. But then he thought about his dad. And the gun. “This isn’t a joke and I’m not trying to hurt you on purpose. But I can’t see you anymore. We can’t hook up anymore. There can’t even be a ‘we.’ We’re done.”

             
He released her and watched rain dribble down out of her hair and across her face. She swiped at it furiously, her lips quivering, her hands shaking. “I love you.” It came out like a strangled snarl. “You
know
how much I love you.” A sob tore out of her and she looked like it frightened her. She choked it down but another one came out. “How can you stand there and
say that
?”

             
“Because…” The sight of her like that would stay with him forever. He hated himself in that moment. Get drunk, eat a bottle of oxy and chase it with a nice razor to his wrists kind of self-loathing. But he made himself put the final nail in the coffin. “I can’t keep you, so there’s no sense pretending anymore.”

             
And then he put his back to her and walked away, thunder growling at him, rain whipping at the back of his head.

             
But the acute, physical hurt of it all was too strong, so he went back.

Later.

When it was dark.

When the storm still raged.

Jo still had tears streaking down her lovely, pixie cheeks and he wiped them away with the pad of his thumb and asked her please not to cry, because he hated it when she cried. Her kiss tasted salty from the tears, but she was soft and warm and pliable and pulled him into bed with her, her fingertips sliding up beneath his wet shirt, leaving scorch marks on his skin. Her clothes were filmy, small little things and he didn’t care if he ripped
seams and tore straps because he just needed to get to her, all of her, with the same driving urgency that hastened her hands at his belt buckle.

His skin remembered hers, his hands followed her curves the way he recalled, and he wasn’t patient enough or clear-headed enough to drag it out and make it last. A deep, soft breath left her lips when he entered her and her fingernails dug into his arms. The smell of her shampoo, coconut like before, filled up his nostrils as he rocked in and out of her until he came, and the peace he’d missed descended. She fit into his arms like she was made to go there after, and he was pulled deeper into a black, swirling vortex of sleep that left him feeling…

Sea sick.

And sore.

And his head…oh, Christ his
head
.

Tam cracked his eyes a hair and wished he’d been born without them, lids clamping shut again. There was light everywhere.
Vibrant, yellow, bouncing sunlight coming at him from all angles. He inhaled and the smells of sweat and perfume and whiskey shot all the way up his nose and punched the back of his throat. His stomach rolled like he was on a boat and he thought he might vomit, only he didn’t have the strength to push up on his arms and puke over the side of the bed like a proper hangover victim.

Hangover.

Bed.

Oh, fuck me…

No, Jo had done that for him.

Despite the car alarms and flash bombs going off in his foggy brain, the sex he was certain about. He’d been
dreaming of that night four years ago when he’d dumped her, and somehow superimposing last night onto the end of it helped just a little. But not much, because someone had taken a ball peen hammer to every inch of his skull and he really, really needed to hurl.

He groaned and heard a rustling sound from somewhere else in the room.

“Ah. It stirs.” Jordan. Not the voice he’d been wanting to hear.

“I’m dead.”

“No, you just wish you were.”

It took what felt like ten minutes to get both his eyelids cooperating, and another ten to ease up on his elbows so that he could
– squinting like a madman of course – assess the situation. He was on his stomach amid the tangled sheets and coverlet of a bed, presumably Jo’s bed. It was daylight. Jordan was reclined back in the bed opposite him, dressed in sweats that probably counted as pajamas, watching TV.

He was naked under the covers. He could feel the cool sheets h
itting him everywhere. “Oh, shit.” Tam rubbed at a gritty eye with a fist. “Did you…?”

“No,” Jordan said firmly, still staring at the tube. “I gave you guys an hour for…
whatever
…and then listened outside the door for fifteen minutes to make sure all was silent and I wasn’t about to walk in on something that made me wish I’d been born blind.”

“Good boy,” Tam groaned and lowered himself back to the mattress. This upright business was overrated. “Where’s Jo?” Even talking hurt, the words reverberating inside his skull like singers’ voices at an amphitheater.

“Dunno. She was gone when I woke up.”

So scratch sober mornin
g chat off the list; she was clearly not over everything, not that he blamed her.

“I had to come back in here,” Jordan went on. “If I’d bunked somewhere else, everybody would have wanted to know why. It’s not like I
wanted
to come back in here, you know. But I was trying not to blow you guys’ cover.”

“’
Preciate it.”

“You owe me big time.”

“Stop talking.”

“Say it nicely and I might.”

“Stop fucking talking.”