Quarterback Bait (8 page)

Chapter Eleven

Ash

July 29
^th

Carson took a drag of her cigarette, then blew smoke across
the grey living room like a crop-duster. Though she'd allegedly (and very
reluctantly) come to Pastor Sterling's house to help me and mom pack up the family's
jewels, my sister had basically taken one look around the rambler and parked
herself on the couch. While our mother's giggles could be heard somewhere in
the back of the house (apparently in response to all the funny jokes I'd never
heard the Pastor make), it was clear that I was the only one who'd be packing
today. With a confusing mixture of rage and curiosity, I'd been shoving items
from Landon's childhood home into cardboard boxes for more than an hour.

“I don't get it. Why isn't Wonder boy here? It's his house.”
Carson stretched her long body across the couch, her damp skin creaking along
the plastic. There was not a bit of AC at the Sterling's. I had to admit—I was
surprised by the condition of their house, especially given how well Landon put
himself together. His hair and clothes were forever on point, despite the
grimness of this... shack. It seemed like companies and UT alums were always
trying to ply him with commercial contracts and swag, local celeb that he was.
But so far, I'd discovered ancient dust-bunnies in the living room, baked-on
food stains in the kitchen, and a whole unexpected ecosystem on the front lawn.
It was hard to imagine a Pastor living like this. It made even mom’s and my
thin-walled rental look like a Bellagio penthouse.

“Have you seen his room yet?” my sister asked, her eyes
suddenly narrowing. Though I'd been careful not to tell her much about Landon,
I had a hunch that Carson knew more about my non-relationship with the
stepbrother-to-be than I'd felt like letting on.

“No. And Carson, that's private—I'm not going in there.”
“Are you kidding? Whenever one has an opportunity to snoop as good as this
one—why, it's a moral imperative.” Biting her lip with glee, she sprang from
the couch. I heard the screen door clatter at the back of the house. Anya and
her old man were tottering out into the garden. We had the place to ourselves.

“Carson! Carson, I mean it!” My voice caught in my throat as
I trailed behind my sister's colorful caftan (the thrift shop purchase),
watching her open doors and shut them with a cheesy smile on her face. There
were only about three doors on the main floor, and two of them were closets. At
the exact same time, our heads swiveled towards the stairs.

Carson went first. With all her yoga and Pilates BS, she was
much springier than I was. I feebly continued protesting—“It's not even really
his room, you know! He has an apartment on campus!”—but knew it was too late
when I saw my sister, looking rapt in a doorway. We'd found his room. Landon
Sterling's private, childhood room.

“Moral imperative,” Carson mouthed again, impatiently
pushing a thatch of flyaways off her face. She took a theatrical Bugs Bunny
tiptoe, and was over the threshold. I sucked in some air and followed suit.

I don't know what I expected, exactly. Maybe more of the
same apparent absence of a mother figure—dirt in corners, piles of laundry. But
what I noticed first was how clean Landon kept his room. There was a child's
rug on the floor, white but printed with Thomas the Tank Engine and friends,
and this had remained surprisingly pristine despite what I assumed were years
of use. The little bedroom was also well-lit, being tucked away in the corner
of the house. You could see both the street and a slice of the backyard via the
high, clear windows.

Carson was fingering two football keepsakes, pinned to the
wall with thumbtacks—one a signed Longhorns jersey, another something from
PeeWee football. Along the same wall was a neat constellation of Polaroid
photos. I drifted towards these, and immediately discovered young Landon,
grinning up at a camera from behind a big cake. He looked about six in that
photo. His dark hair fell in front of his face in a big, overgrown flop. His
eyes contained the same child-like glee that they had on the night we'd been
introduced—yet in the picture, he was missing two front teeth. Adorable.

And in every subsequent photo, Landon looked the same:
thrillingly alive, glad to be there, honest, excited. There were a few
professional shots of him in football gear, with one knee in the grass and a
helmet in his hand. Another of him in his graduation cap revealed a boy who was
flirting with the camera like there was a pretty girl behind it. My eyes moved
down: there was Landon and some scowling senior boy I thought I recognized from
that damn party Melanie had dragged me to. In this Polaroid, Landon and his pal
held tallboys and wore glittery specs bearing the numbers “2011!” A New Year's
party.

At the center of the makeshift collage were two photos of
Landon with women. On the left was one of him and a statuesque date. She was
beautiful and haughty looking, and despite my best intentions I immediately
felt a pang of jealousy on seeing him with his arm around this unsmiling model
type. Didn't help that Landon had his lips on the model's cheek, and his eyes
were closed with bliss. I reached out and pressed my thumb lightly over the
pretty girl's face, so it was just him, leaning down to kiss no one in
particular. I smiled.

The next—and final—photo was an older one, a Polaroid going
crispy yellow at the edges. I immediately realized that this was the first pic
acknowledging the Pastor, who looked young and almost dapper in his uniform,
with his crew cut, and square jawline. Landon was nowhere to be seen. I
searched for evidence of a date in the corner. I decided the snapshot had to
have been taken sometime in the late 80s, before the Pastor had fought in the
Gulf. He was standing beside a woman, lightly touching her shoulder. She was
smiling in the same way Landon did, in every other pic—with a pure kind of joy
in her features. Her hair was dark like her son's, and her bone structure as
defined. His mother.

“Like what you see?”

I jumped about a foot in the air. When I turned around,
Carson was nowhere to be found—yet there was Landon, his jaw scrunched and brow
furrowed in a way that made it hard to believe he could have ever been that
grinning, silly boy from the photographs.

“Landon. I...”

“What the
fuck
are you doing in my room?”

“We're...I'm...” His eyes were narrowed with cruelty. He
looked at me like he didn't recognize me. And then his gaze traveled from my
face to my pointer finger, which was resting on the white rim of his mother's
picture.

“You need to get out.” He took a menacing step towards me. I
noticed for the first time that he was dressed to the nines—or at least he had
been, the day before. He wore a crumpled dress shirt opened a few buttons at
the neck and dark tuxedo pants. A suit jacket was slung over his shoulder.
Seeing the fire in his eyes, I fought the urge to ask him where he'd been the
night before—but no sooner had I decided to cower than my own temper rose up
like a wave. This sack of shit couldn't intimidate me. We'd established that
the night we met. I wouldn't be spoken to like that, by him or any other man.
In a show of defiance, I stood up straight and puffed my chest out.

“You watch the way you talk to me, Landon,” I purred flatly.
“I was just trying to help.” Then, for emphasis, I took one long look around
the rest of his room. The tidily made up bed. The panel of trophies. The old
clunker computer, taking up most of a desk. It meant nothing. None of this
stuff meant anything. Let
him
pack it up.

I held my chin high as I sidled past his muscular body,
though he didn't move an inch aside to let me pass. I inhaled a sweet breath of
his cologne, and the slightly earthy smell of his skin. He'd been drinking the
night before, I could tell. Once in the hallway, I heard the door slam shut
behind me, so loud it sent a shock through my system. I could no longer hear my
mother's giggling outside, but Carson was doubled up along the far wall,
apparently tickled to completion about leaving me alone to face off with the
thug. I smacked my sister on the exposed expanse of her thigh, rigid with rage.

“Nice playing look-out, jerk!” I hissed—but Carson seemed
unfazed. Beyond the shut door, I could hear water stuttering on in some corner.
I hadn't realized Landon had a bathroom to himself in his bedroom. I wished I
could have gotten a glimpse at that, too.

“You just looked so doe-eyed, gazing at his pictures like
that...” Carson wheezed, wiping tears from her eyes. After another half-minute,
her storm finally seemed to be abating, while my own face remained red.

“I don't know what you're talking about,” I said, fanning my
hands through my hair out of habit. Today's white-blonde streaks were almost
the color of my fingertips.

“Oh, baby—I think you do.” Together, we listened as the
shower sounds amplified beyond the door. He was pulling back a curtain, in one
violent, swift gesture. I imagined his tuxedo pants falling to a puddle around
his ankles. I imagined his thick, hairy shins like tree trunks, stretching up
to the muscly base of him. I imagined what was swinging between his legs, straight
and thick as my wrist, slightly turgid with feeling. I imagined his narrow
hips, the symmetrical scoops of his ass, then the hard cage of his chest,
humming with fury, caged only by the second skin of dark down. His hair, wet in
the shower. His liquid brown eyes, fierce with instinct.

“Oh, Lord,” Carson said. Without my realizing it, she'd come
to place a warm, dry palm on my cheek. “Don't worry, kid. I won't tell anyone.”
Her own eyes were heavy with sympathy—something I could never abide. Especially
not from Carson, who was supposed to know better. The Bennett women didn't need
sympathy. The very best—heck, perhaps the only good thing—we'd inherited from
our mother was a stubborn sort of pride.

I shook myself free of her hand, then padded back down the
rickety staircase to the many boxes in the living room. My mother and her
husband-to-be kept a silent vigil there, holding hands on the couch in front of
the TV. I expected a ribbing out for my abandoning the work, but they both
looked preoccupied.

“We've set a date, darling,” my mother said in my direction,
as I came in. I could hear another preacher, prattling from the television. Go
figure. Pastor Sterling probably loved him some
700 Club.

“This Saturday. At the church.” When I looked at my mother
next, she had little pearls of tears on her lower eyelids. The Pastor had
turned to look at her, too. His eyes were kind. Even his withered turtle neck
and his tiny head, topped by that outrageous baseball cap seemed...sweet, in
that moment. He looked like an echo of his son in those photographs. Joyful.

Carson slid a hand around my waist from behind, managing in
her expert way to avoid making eye contact with our mom. She whispered so only
I could hear: “Don't forget. You've got two weeks until you're outta here. Two
weeks. Anyone could do that.”

Chapter Twelve

Ash

July 23
^rd

I ran down the hallway, flip-flops thwacking against the
tile. It was hot in the school, and cool sweat dripped down my back like the
trails of ice cubes. Nobody bothered to turn on the AC during summer. Or on a
Sunday, for that matter.

Which was just as well. High-school had looked like hell to
me, so why shouldn't it feel like it, too? This would hopefully be my last trip
to Lee, anyways. I needed some final, blasted piece of paper to secure my early
enrollment at UT—my very last test scores as a high school student.

I was starting to get excited. But as with most moments in
my life in which great change had been promised and later reneged, I was also
wary. I'd been to a few college parties, after all, and been largely
unimpressed with the pickings on display. There was definitely an extent to
which the cheerleaders and the football team at university seemed like the
cheerleaders and the football team in high school. And I wondered: would the
popular kids at UT be as capable of cruelty as they had been while wandering
these hallways? Was I actually preparing to enter into some new world in which
I was to be taken seriously?

“Hold up, cowgirl!” cried a familiar voice. And lo, it was
Mr. Dempsey—idling around the school like always. He wore a wrinkled Weezer
t-shirt and square-framed hipster glasses. In the month or so since I'd seen
him last, he'd grown out his goatee and the grey-flecked mop of hair on his
scalp. The new look suited him, I had to say.

And for my part, I was finally allowing some of the Texas
in. At Carson's urging, I'd started to take advantage of some of Austin's
amazing food, which had helped me fill out my typically narrow hips. I'd ceded
to the weather, also, allowing myself to be dragged out to the Austin hot
springs once or twice with my sister and her bohemian bunch. We'd lay out on
the rocks so long that even after multiple applications of sunscreen, I'd
become the teensiest bit tan. Which was a first.

In begrudging prep for the wedding, I'd also allowed my
sister to “do something about that rat's nest.” She'd hooked me up with a
stylist friend of hers, who'd tamed my Winehouse-level bouffant into something
sleeker—a razor-length bob that fell to my chin. I felt older and more
comfortable in my slightly altered skin, less like a person who liked to hide
in her hair. I felt, at last and fully, like I'd expected to on my eighteenth
birthday. Like a woman.

“Damn girl…” Mr. Dempsey said affably, immediately biting
his lip after the fact. “I'm sorry. That's no way to talk to a student.”

“
Former
student,” I corrected. “Don't forget, I'm
outta here. No senior year for this lady. I'm early enrolling in UT.” I hoped
he couldn't see the moisture collecting in little pools below my armpits, or
beneath and between my breasts. I opened my mouth wider, to keep from panting.
“I'm just darting in to grab my official transcript, or some shit. Who knew
college had so much red tape?”

Dempsey laughed. I realized, as he tossed his hair back,
that I'd never learned his first name.

“Hell, we're gonna miss you around here, kiddo!” We both
laughed at that. “Well, I will, anyways. Hey, how's your summer going?” He'd
fallen into a slow lope beside me. We were only a short jog from the
counselor's office and I had somewhere to be, but it was so nice to see a familiar
face that I decided to let it slide. We'd mosey.

“It's alright. Trying to get ahead on the reading list.
Tutoring some middle-schoolers for extra cash. Hanging out with my sister when
I can.” The words sounded lame on my tongue, so I finished this litany with a
roll of my eyes. He laughed again, and I remembered I had once thought Carson
and Dempsey could make a good couple. Suddenly, I was less sure.

“My mom's getting married.”

“Oh, wow! When?”

“Umm. Today.” Now it was my turn to laugh. In the back of
Landon's best friend's pick-up, my borrowed dress was currently bunched up in a
white dry-cleaner's bag, waiting for me to slither into its silky clutches and
become Maid of Honor. The dreaded L and his thug-y friends were out in the
parking lot right now, waiting for me. It hadn't been my idea of a thrill to
hitch a ride to the ceremony with the Hulk (a.k.a. my step-brother-to-be), but
my mother had insisted it would be good bonding time for the pair of us, who
had so far done very little to create a harmonious picture for our parents.
Also, Carson—that scheming B—had complained of car trouble.

“Like, right now? You're going to your mother's wedding?”
Mr. Dempsey rolled his eyes, and stretched his pale arms over his head. He
wasn't much taller than me, a fact I found comforting. “Woof. You like the
guy?”

I conjured the Pastor, who'd looked a little more than
halfway handsome in our kitchen that morning. He'd elected to wear his Purple
Heart, over a rented dark blue suit. His thin, greying hair was pressed back,
and he'd shaved. Watching Landon pin the boutonniere
on
his father
, I thought I could once again glimpse a little bit of the man
he used to be. The man from the photos.

Still, this seemed like far more information than Mr.
Dempsey required. “He's kind of a nut,” I sighed. “Runs a storefront church
downtown. That's where they're getting married, actually.”

“Huh.”

“But he makes her happy,” I polished the words with a
practiced smile. This was my line of defense, from now until the day I'd leave
the house:
he makes her happy.
And he really did seem to. Anya had been
more normal these past few weeks than I'd ever seen her. No signs of an episode
to speak of.

“Look at you. So mature.” By now, we'd reached the front
door of the office. An abbreviated staff clicked around inside, answering
phones, checking e-mails. The wardrobe for summer school administrators seemed
to be way more permissive than the school's dress code the other nine months of
the year. I spied the jiggling, bare arms of the office secretary, Ms. Dove, as
she struggled with the copy machine.

Beyond Mr. Dempsey's tiny fro, I could see some of my
caravan, lurking beyond the school's front doors—Landon, Denny, and the tall
hot stick figure Landon had brought as a date. Landon's friend Denny had
admitted that he was an alum of Lee High—and it was easy enough to imagine him
skulking around, teasing the likes of me with the other meatheads. In true jock
form, he appeared to be busy chucking tiny pebbles at the school's upper
windows. Denny's smile had a cruelty to it, but to watch Landon throwing stones
was like watching a little boy playing a game. He was all smiles. Meanwhile,
his pouty-mouthed girlfriend—the one from the photographs—leaned against the
brick wall and scrolled through her iPhone, looking bored.

“That's your crew, huh?” the AV teacher asked, his voice
lower than I remembered it ever being as his eyes swiveled in the direction of
my own. I snapped back to attention. I really did have to run. We'd be late to
the ceremony if it took forever for me to get a copy of my transcript.

“My stepbrother-to-be and some friends, yeah,” I sighed and
rolled my eyes. “They really liked high school, if you know what I mean.” Mr.
Dempsey smirked. He glanced back at the gang, his eyes narrowing in Denny's
direction.

“That little shit looks familiar, actually.
Demon-something?”

“Denny? I dunno him so well, he's a friend of Landon's.”

Landon
. His name still
felt strange on my tongue. After the incident in his room, I'd barely spoken to
my stepbrother. I was starting to think we would just always be like this,
smoothing over the events of one crazy night as if it had never happened. It
made me sad, but at the same time I wished I could forget our whole initial
attraction. It would be easier to just be sorta cordial frenemies.

“Well I'd hoped one of those strapping young fellas out
there was for you,” Mr. Dempsey ventured. He smiled at me shyly. This was
something I was just beginning to realize, that very summer—how everything a
man said could seem so flirty, if you were listening right.

“You know, I'm going stag.” I bit my lip. Over his shoulder,
I could see Landon and his Kardashian-doppelganger fall into an easy kiss. He
put his hand in her hair. She thrust her tiny waist against him. An idea rang
through my mind like a bell.

“This is really weird,” I started. “But—you're not doing
anything right now, are you? Do you want to be my date to the wedding? I mean,
since I was never your student. And I'm definitely eighteen now.”

I blushed. So did Dempsey. It had been impulsive to
ask—impulsive, like those ice cubes, sliding down my spine. But at least if I'd
ruined this relationship, I wouldn't run the risk of seeing Dempsey every
single holiday for the foreseeable future. What did I really have to lose?
“Let me get my blazer,” the AV teacher was saying. Suddenly, I felt light
fingertips around my sweaty waist. He looked straight into my eyes. And I have
to admit: there was a sexiness to him, some intriguing, adult pull. His face was
unlined, and wholesome as an apple. And hell, for all I knew, he was a
student-teacher probably in his early twenties.

“I'll meet you at the car,” I said, raising an eyebrow.
Wait
till Carson sees me.
“And thanks. You're really doing me a solid.” I almost
felt like my favorite self again—the bawdy, theatrical, fearless self I'd been
working so hard to hide from the Pastor and Landon. I rose to my tiptoes and
kissed him lightly on his stubbled cheek, before ducking into the office.