Quarterback Bait (10 page)

Chapter Fifteen

Landon

September 1
^st

It took me to the second frickin’ week of school to wise up.
I'd followed Clay Hoskins to a big Alpha Phi party on Frat Row, and there the
pair of them were. Lip locked on the grass, in plain sight, for everybody to
see. I was shocked that
The Daily Texan
hadn't been invited to this
oh-so-public photo-op.

When we saw them, Clay put a steadying hand on my shoulder
like he was afraid I'd pull out a glock or something. But what shocked me most
was how vacant I felt, watching them gnawing away at one another's faces. I
thought for a second about how we'd probably looked, the few times I'd ever
gotten Zora to make out with me in public. (“What am I, a Kardashian?” she
liked to say, whenever I so much as tried to nuzzle her on the shoulder in
public. Which I never actually got, because as far as I could tell she
aspired
to be a Kardashian.) I didn't think she'd ever looked so focused while kissing
me. Regardless—what they were doing didn't look too fun. Denny was pawing at
her like a virgin on death row, his hands squeezing and pinching her flesh. And
though Z looked 'into it,' I detected no joy in her body. She kissed like she
was out to prove someone wrong.

“That's some shit, man,” Clay offered, shaking his heavy
dreads back and forth. “Can't believe your girl would dog you like that.”

“I'm a little more surprised at my best friend,” I said. And
as if on cue, there the bastard went again—swooping in for a hickey. A few
freshmen girls in teetering party heels paused on the sidewalk to point and
laugh at Mr. and Mrs. Billy Bob Thornton, who were now just about fucking in
plain sight.

“I hate to say it, but I'm not,” Clay murmured. I smiled
wryly at my buddy. He'd never made a secret of the fact that he wasn't Denny's
biggest fan, but it was nice to hear some solidarity. I wondered why it'd taken
three years of college for me to start hanging out with Hoskins. I mean, of all
the jags I spent my time with, he was definitely one of the better dudes.

Denny, at long last, caught on to his audience. He pulled
himself away from Zora with the suctioning sound of a plunger, and when he met
my eyes I watched his face blanche with fear. Z took another second to realize
what was happening, but when she saw me and Clay across the grass her eyes
narrowed. She pulled a compact from the back of her jeans and started to primp.

“Landy,” Denny said, his voice coming out
strangled-sounding. “I can explain, man. Z and I were just...”

“Save it, man.” I looked from best friend to girlfriend,
then back again. It was strange, feeling nothing. I knew what I was supposed to
feel—betrayal, fury, even sadness—but none of these would come. Seeing them
together just struck me as...empty.

“He doesn't even care, Denny,” Zora piped up. I was
surprised to hear a harsh edge to her voice—here when I'd been thinking she was
as jagged-sounding as it was possible to get. “He hasn't paid any attention to
me since we got back together. I could be fucking his step-sister, and he
wouldn't care.” She sounded more bitter than any twenty-two year old had a
right to be. But I felt something then—a slight little twinge of pity for Zora.
She wasn't entirely wrong, after all. We'd never been a good match for each
other, but I sure hadn't been holding up my end of the boyfriend deal.

Still, I remained silent, feeling braced by Clay's hand on
my shoulder. After a few more seconds I turned to my buddy and flicked my head
in the direction of Frat Row. As we turned, I could see them gaping, turning to
each other all outraged. I don't know what they expected of me. But I do know
that as I left those two in the dust, I felt the weirdest lift in my shoulders.
Relief.

Chapter Sixteen

Ash

September 1
^st

“You're settling in okay?” Anya asked for what felt like the
three-hundredth time. Mom had made it her prerogative to visit my closet of a
dorm room four times already, though I'd only been at college for two weeks.
I'd never seen her so hands-on about anything. My new roommate, Lotte, was
demonstrably un-amused about this third addition to room 6E.

“Yes, Anya,” I repeated, as my mother fussed with a
mini-fridge magnet. “Is everything okay? You really didn't need to come
celebrate my first quiz in Organic Chemistry.”
Especially as you didn't know
until today I was taking that class,
I added silently. Our relationship was
one built on my independence. It felt strange to fuck with the formula.

“I know, baby, I know,” Anya said, running her fingers down
the silk curtains Carson had made for me. “I'm just happy to visit, you know.
It can get a little lonely in the house without you.”

Lotte sighed dramatically from her desk corner, and I took a
dainty step towards my mother. We could at least talk in lower tones, if she
had to talk so much.

“What do you mean,
lonely
? Didn't you get married a
few weeks ago? How's the Pastor?”

Anya's smile was delayed on its
way to her face. She'd never been an excellent liar, but I was surprised to see
how much effort it seemed to take for her to approximate newlywed bliss. I set
down my orgo book, sighed, and really looked at my mother.

“Everything's going okay with you two, right?” I said
slowly. But mom had made a decision to play her cards close to the chest. She
nodded furiously at me before getting up to hunt around the room for her purse.

“Mom? Did I say something off? You know you can always talk
to me, right?” But Anya had already reached the door, and seemed married to her
ruse.

She nodded tightly again, eyes wide, smile manic. “Just don't
be a stranger, sugar,” she said, blowing me a kiss. “And hey, I like that.
Mom
.”

Unexpected Anya visits aside, college was a mixed bag so
far. Lotte didn't seem too interested in exploring UT's vivacious social life,
which made studying in the dorm easy, but friend-making less so. Melanie, my
old pre-college study buddy, had reappeared to drag me out to a few mixers.
Together, we'd made it to a few floor shin-digs, in the name of being social.
I'd let a tall, Korean basketball player give me a hickey at a kegger. I'd
played a game of Truth or Dare with my suitemates that resulted in my making
out with Lotte's favorite teddy bear. Classes were actually challenging, more
so than at any point in high school. But despite all this, I did feel like something
was missing.

“It takes a while for a new place to feel like home,” Nate
had told me not two nights before, over Portobello burgers at Kerbey Lane.
Oh—and I'd also been spending some time with Nate. “I remember my freshman
year. It took a month for me to find my people.”

“Oh, the
Star Trek
Fan Club was that hard to track
down?” I'd grinned. He'd rolled his eyes. It was easy to talk to Nate. He and I
were so similar. Ever since the wedding reception (where Dempsey had offered to
foot half the dinner bill, attempted to dance with me, and ended the night with
a sweet, chaste kiss), we'd been casually kicking it. I got to hear all about
his incoming crop of freshman hell-raisers, and he got to give me sage advice
about the “formative years.” Everything was peachy-keen.

In fact, there was a lot to like about Nate Dempsey. He was
only twenty-three (“completely respectable,” in Carson's estimate), he was
soft-spoken and sarcastic, and we could talk easily about books and music. On
our third date, he'd introduced me to Nirvana, and I hadn't been able to take
In
Utero
off shuffle since that day. He was as kind and considerate as
step-brother Landon was cagey and erratic.

And last night, we'd finally had The Conversation. Nate had
walked me up to my dorm room doors and taken off his glasses, so I could catch
streaks of moonlight bouncing around his blue eyes.

“I had a really nice time tonight,” he'd murmured, bending
low. I'd smiled and presented my face for our usual good-night kiss, with
minimal tongue action. I’d thought we'd both been in the business of taking
things slow. But then, he'd leaned just the slightest bit further, breaking
some invisible barrier we'd spent the past two weeks ignoring. I'd felt
something thick and hard and insistent through his jeans.

“I would really like to come up,” Mr. Dempsey had whispered,
so close to my ear that his stubble scraped my cheek. His hands, meanwhile, had
found purchase on my bare arms. He'd begun stroking me, in the slow, soothing way
one strokes a pet. I'd waited to feel the pull. But it hadn't come.

“Lotte's cramming for her first Econ test tonight,” I'd
said, instead of something sexy and invitational. I don't know why I made the
decision so fast, nor why I was so...un-turned on. Dempsey was cute, he was
smart, he was older. Easily the best guy who'd ever wanted to date me, in any
city, at any school. I'd kicked myself as he walked off towards his bus stop.
Luckily, he hadn't seemed too disappointed when I ended the evening with a few
vague bumps against his nether regions and a soft, long make-out sesh. At the
end, he'd wiggled his eyebrows in a way that telegraphed:
next time, you're
not getting out of it.

Now, I regarded my mother from the dorm window. She
meandered in the direction of the parking lot, seeming to take her sweet time.
It occurred to me that as Anya had never attended college, maybe the place
itself contained mystery and excitement for her. Maybe that was why she
visiting so often. Or maybe she was finally trying to repair our fraught
relationship, and play the part of the mother who'd always been around to give
a damn. But something else told me that she'd been lying before, by the
curtains. Maybe her and the Pastor's honeymoon phase had reached its inevitable
conclusion.

The idea of a 'honeymoon phase' prompted a freaky flash of
an image in my mind's eye—there was me and Mr. Dempsey as doddering old folks,
sharing the newspaper over a breakfast table. I tried to imagine kicking it
with the AV teacher for any kind of long haul. Didn't they say half the world
found their soul mates in college? Was this all how love worked, perhaps? A
kind-enough guy met a kind-enough woman and they began a good-enough life
together?

“You're not going to pass any test if you keep staring off
into space like that,” Lotte said, rattling her water glass to secure my
attention. I listened to the cubes clinking against the glass, and thought
about the man who
hadn't
kissed me two nights ago.

It had been so many days since I'd seen my step-brother.

There'd been a moment.

At the wedding reception, as the bride and groom slurped
spiced shrimp from the tines of one another's forks. Landon had clinked his own
utensil against his girlfriend's wineglass, because he himself was drinking
Johnnie Walker in a low tumbler. Everyone at the table had stopped their
chewing and guffawing, like it was some insane surprise that the Best Man would
make a speech.

His face was red from the whiskey, and the first two buttons
of his dress shirt had popped open. He swayed when he stood. But the words that
tumbled out of his mouth surprised me in their eloquence.

“I think we all know love is rare,” Landon started. “It's a
scary thing, to even ask someone you like those first questions: do you want to
see me? Do you want to see me for a few more hours? Do you want to put your
mouth on my mouth? Do you want to wake up next to me?” The small crowd
tittered, but I felt my cheeks start glowing red again. I suddenly couldn't
look at him. I looked at my napkin, instead.

“Pop, I remember how you called me at football camp—just a
few short weeks ago—to sing Anya's praises, 'I've found the one son!' you told
me.” Landon had started gesturing with his tumbler. Its contents seemed
perilously close to sloshing over the sides. I watched Zora's grin tighten.
“And here's the thing—it's magic, isn't it? There is an element of the divine
to this thing called love, and it's that urgency, that total inability to
explain yourself, that makes it right.”

Anya was crying gently into her napkin, and Carson, beside
me, was rolling her eyes. I should have figured she wouldn't buy into any of
this lovey-dovey hooey. My sis was too cool.

“Sometimes, it's this simple: you meet a girl, and you know.
It's right. And you think to yourself: hey. We fit, me and her. There's a
feeling, a magical, freaky feeling that you share before you even exchange
names.” I knew his eyes were on me before I looked up. Shockingly, awfully, it
was then that Mr. Dempsey chose to slide his palm across my back. His gesture
felt somehow protective.

People were still applauding when our eyes finally
connected. Landon looked like he was trying to smile for a second, but couldn't
muster.