Secondhand Smoke (Dartmoor Book 4) (3 page)

              “Nah. It had nothing to do with Jazz. Or us,” he added with a sigh. “Tonya’s pregnant.”

              Carter hissed. “Shit.”

              Tango regarded his passed-out friend, sprawled across the orange carpet, snoring, his brow knotted with a worry the alcohol hadn’t been able to dim.

              “Yeah. Shit.”

Two

Samantha checked her ensemble in the floor-length mirror in the corner of her room. Another day teaching her first-year Shakespeare students, another conservative outfit she’d put together off the Kohl’s clearance rack. Oh Professor Walton, what a glamorous woman you are, she thought with cold resignation.

              Today she wore a gray pinstriped pencil skirt, a white sweater set, and pumps with sensible, clunky heels perfect for a day spent at the lectern. Her dark blonde hair was in its usual thick braid, tidy now, but waiting to slip loose a piece at a time and grow wild over the course of the day. Her eyes looked dull behind the lenses of her glasses. Lenses that magnified the crow’s feet she was starting to have thanks to lots of late nights up reading.

              She needed to get more sleep, drink more water, eat more vegetables.

              She needed a makeover.

              But she needed to get her little sister up, because Erin couldn’t afford to be late two mornings in a row on her first week of junior year.

              Sam gathered her bags and headed down the hall. “Erin?” She rapped on her sister’s door. “Erin, sweetie, it’s time to get up.”

              No response.

              “Erin, come on.” She turned the knob, surprised to find it unlocked, and let herself into the room. “You know you can’t…” The words faded in her mouth as her eyes roved across the room.

              The bed was made, or as close to it as Erin ever approximated, the quilts tugged up hastily, pillows stacked against the headboard. The closet stood open and hangers jabbed out of it like plastic bird wings. Clothes littered the floor, tops, cheerleading shorts, bras and panties. Makeup bottles cluttered the dresser. The sharp citrus note of spilled perfume shot up Sam’s nose and punched her in the back of the throat.

              Erin wasn’t there.

~*~

A sound woke him. An awful clanging sound, like Christmas bells and someone beating on a copper pot with a spoon. Low and high notes, clinking and resonant, together. It tolled through his head, pushed at the sides of his skull, hit the back of his tongue again and again, gagging him.

              He became aware of things slowly. The heaviness and pain in his body. The press of a hard surface beneath his cheek. He lay on his stomach, his head twisted to the side, his neck pinched. His skin prickled into gooseflesh and he thought he must be naked beneath whatever scratchy linen covered him.

              He worked his eyes open like old shutters, and that was when he realized the source of the noise. A coffee mug sat in front of his face, and someone was stirring its contents with a spoon, the silver clipping against the porcelain as it moved, the sound magnified by his epic hangover.

              “What?” he croaked, and didn’t know why he’d said it.

              Tango’s voice: “Hot tea, with honey and peppermint. Walsh swears by it.”

              “Yeah, I bet he does. Fucker.” With a grimace and a groan, Aidan pushed up on his arms and sat back. The pounding in his head intensified. The light, weak though it was, stabbed through the high frosted window above the bed and shot needles through his eyes.

              Wincing, he glanced down at himself, confirming that he was indeed naked, and that someone had thrown a blanket over him, one that now trailed off his shoulders. He wrapped it tightly across his front and reached for the tea. It actually smelled good, so that was something, at least.

              Tango sat on the side of the bed, long hair on the top of his head carefully gelled and styled, so a few pieces fell across his forehead. He wore soft colors, a white t-shirt with the Lean Dogs logo and rockers. His face seemed sharp and too-thin, his eyes a little haunted around the edges.

              Or maybe that was just the hangover. Whatever.

              The first sip of tea flowed soothingly across his tongue, proving that his English brother knew everything about everything, as if he’d ever doubted him. He took another sip and glanced over the mug at his best friend.

              “What did I do last night?”

              “Tried to choke Jasmine to death.”

              “Shit.” More tea. “Did I dream it, or were you and Jockstrap and she…”

              “Yeah.”

              “Huh. How’d that go?”

              “Pretty good up until that whole strangling thing.”

              “Right.”

              “She wanted it to be you.”

              “Come again?”

              Tango sighed, stared at the toes of his boots. “A while back, she asked if I’d ask you if…”

              Aidan started to grin, and it turned into a gasp of pain as the movement plucked at his headache. “Shit. Yeah, okay, that woulda been fun.” Some faint memory from last night grabbed at him, tried to take a firmer hold. “Wait…did you…did you kiss me?”

              “And you enjoyed it,” Tango deadpanned. “I’m a very good kisser.”

              They held one another’s gazes a moment, Aidan’s watery with exhaustion and pain.

              Then they both smiled together, sad, regretful smiles.

              “I didn’t hurt her, did I?” Aidan asked quietly. “If I’d been in my right mind, I swear, bro, I never–”

              “She’s a little shookup, but physically she’s fine.”

              “Thank God.”

              “Yeah.” Tango gave him a level stare. “I haven’t ever seen you like that. Violent with one of the girls. That was Mercy’s old game, not yours.”

              Aidan swallowed more tea, kicking himself mentally.

              “Tell me about Tonya.”

              “She’s trying to trap me.”

              Tango’s mouth tugged in a sideways frown. “No offense, but what the hell would she want to do that for?”

              “She–” His mind went blank.

              “She’s rich, she’s gorgeous, her dad has connections. She’s got everything she wants. What would she be trying to get out of you?”

              Wasn’t that a giant slap across the face?

              “Nothing,” Aidan muttered. “She wouldn’t want anything from me.”

~*~

“No, no, I’m not calling in sick.” Sam cranked hard on the wheel with one hand, her other occupied with the cellphone she held clamped to her ear. The battleship that was her ’83 Caprice dipped hard into the turn, brakes squealing. “I’m just going to be late is all. Can one of the TAs slap a sign on my room door or something?”

              Her colleague, and new head of the English department, Conrad Pitts, sighed deeply. She could envision him taking his glasses off, rubbing at his eyes. “I can’t spare any of them. Look, Samantha, if you can’t make it in today–”

              “But I
can
make it,” she insisted, panic ratcheting another notch in her chest. “As soon as I find my sister–”

              “Listen, I don’t need the whole sad melodrama spelled out. I’ll notify your students they have the day off.”

              She fumed silently, wanting to unload on him over the phone. But where would that get her? Fired? And since her mother worked at a fabric shop and her sister was a degenerate runaway, she couldn’t afford to lose the income all three of them depended upon.

              So she said, “That’s fine. I’m so sorry.” And hung up with an inward snarl.

              So far, the search was going nowhere. Erin’s cell went straight to voicemail, and none of the usual haunts had turned up any leads. At this point, Sam was half-convinced her little sister was passed out on the floor of Hamilton House, a needle stuck in her arm.

              She hit the brakes and turned into the driveway of the modest two-story colonial where Erin’s best friend Julia lived. She was halfway up the front walk when the door opened and Julia’s mother, Heidi, stood in the threshold drying a casserole dish with a checkered towel.

              “Samantha.” Her voice registered surprise. “Good morning. Were the girls supposed to carpool? I just put Julia on the bus.”

              Sam shook her head, and knew her smile was tight. “No. I’m actually…” It stung to have to say these words to this kind of woman. Someone who was on top of every aspect of her household, who would never have lost a teenage girl out from under her roof. “I’m looking for Erin,” she said in a rush. “She hasn’t been by, has she?”

              Heidi’s eyes widened. “Looking for her?”

              “Yes.” Sam grimaced inwardly. “Have you seen her?”

              “You mean she…” Heidi lowered her voice, as if she were saying something truly scandalous. “
Ran away
?”

              “Gonna take that as a ‘no’ on the seeing her front,” Sam said.

              “Oh no. She hasn’t been by here.”

              “Thanks.” She turned to go, knowing there was no sense dragging out this oh-my-how-could-you-lose-your-sister conversation.

              “You want me to call if she turns up here?” Heidi called at her back.

              “Yeah.” Sam fought to keep the sarcasm from her voice. “That’d be great.”

~*~

Tea, and then coffee, and then a cold shower only went so far toward burning off the hangover haze. The slap of early autumn wind against his face as he rode in toward Main Street went a little further. But nothing sobered Aidan up like sliding into a booth at Stella’s across from Tonya.

              What did he call her now? His baby-mama?

              As with last night, she lacked her shiny veneer of outward beauty, and instead looked severe, bitter, and WASPish. Dark hair slicked back, lips pale, harsh cheekbones casting dark shadows across her jaw. She wore a loose sweater that was too warm for this time of year. Her hands were wrapped around a coffee mug, and her eyes flicked momentarily to him before dropping back to the table.

              The sight of her was a double-shot espresso gut punch. He was instantly awake, all foggy remains of his hangover vaporizing.

              “Should you be drinking that?” he asked as he got settled.

              “It’s decaf,” she snapped, voice brittle enough to crack.

              “Right. Helps you keep up the charade that way.”

              Her eyes flashed, a cold, seething shade of blue he suddenly found repulsive. “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

              “It means I was the one who broke up with you, and it pissed you off, ‘cause you’re a goddamn princess. So I’m gonna need more than your word for it.” He gave her a tight, false smile. “No offense.”

              One of the usual waitresses breezed past and patted him on the shoulder. “Hi, hon, the usual?”

              “Yeah, that’d be great, Mona.”

              When the woman was gone, Tonya pinned him with an icy glare and reached into her purse, withdrawing several folded sheets of paper. “Here.” She shoved them across the table toward him. “Is that proof enough, asshole?”

              It took him a moment to figure out what he was looking at: paperwork from Knoxville OBGYN. Test orders. Results. An old-fashioned stick test and a blood test, and both had come back positive. The next one was a grainy black-and-white abstract he couldn’t make any sense of.

              “Sonogram,” Tonya explained. “That’s my uterus.” One of her manicured nails touched the picture, a pale speck. “That’s the fetus. So,” she said, withdrawing. “Proof.”

             
The fetus
.

              All the air left his lungs in an explosive exhale, and then he couldn’t take another breath. Eyes fixed to the little blip on the picture, the tiny dot that was a life…that he’d created…the café and everyone in it faded. He could have sworn he felt the wind on his face, because his skin was being scraped all over, even beneath his clothes.

              He knew how the whole make-a-baby thing worked. Not just the physical aspect; he understood that for parents, there was something wonderful about contemplating bits of themselves in new humans, growing in bellies. He’d overheard Mercy giving Michael some sort of father-to-father pep talk once: “It’s you, and it’s her, and it’s perfect, ain’t it?” He hadn’t known, not really. Hadn’t felt that deep kick in his gut, heard that little voice that said,
“That’s a part of you right there, boy. That’s your blood, your flesh.”

              He heard it now. Loud and clear. Something cosmic was happening to him in this café booth, and he hadn’t been prepared for it. Couldn’t seem to breathe properly.

              “Is it a boy or a girl?” he asked, dazed, clenching the sonogram tight between his fingers as he lifted his gaze to Tonya.

              Her mouth pinched up tight. “They won’t be able to tell that for a while.”