Waking Olivia (8 page)

W
hen Will walks
onto the track a little later, I avoid his gaze. He seems to be avoiding mine as well. He's in a shitty mood and barking at almost everyone as we warm up. Everyone but me. "Higher kick, Olivia," is all he says and even that is lackluster and unwilling.

"You can't do that," I tell him quietly.

"Can't do what?"

"Don't start treating me differently. Don't act like I'm fragile."

"I'm not."

"Bullshit, Will. You're in a crappy mood today and God knows when you're in a crappy mood I'm the first person you bust on, but you aren't saying a word to me. I'm not fragile. Nothing that you've seen is new for me."

"You're normally crying about how hard I am on you,” he sighs. “I can't win, can I?"

“A, I don't cry, and B, I like Asshole Will. He's a known commodity."

"If I'm such a known commodity,” he says, his mouth lifting on one side, “you'd know not to refer to me as 'Asshole Will.’”

I walk away, wanting to laugh and yet feeling unsettled. I know how to be angry at him, but I don’t know how to feel
this.
Or even what, exactly,
this
is.

A
fter the warm-ups
, Peter comes down to the track with the men’s team following him. They’ll do their time trial first. I wish it were us. My stomach plummeted the moment he walked down here, and it’s going to remain swimming and nervous until this is done.

"You're pale," says Erin. "You can't be nervous, you’re the fastest girl here. You're the only one who shouldn't be nervous."

"Things go wrong." My voice is tense, and for some reason even talking seems to rock the uneasy thing in my stomach and make it feel less stable.

"I can't believe I'm saying this, because you sure don't seem to think a lot of things through, but you need to think less."

I scowl at her.

"I'm serious. Let your mind go blank. Say it with me.” She crosses her legs and puts her hands in the lotus position. "Ommmm."

"Please shut up, Erin."

"That's super un-Buddhist of you."

"You know what else is un-Buddhist?" I warn. "Punching someone in the face. So stop talking." Erin doesn't tend to get scared off by me the way she should, and I doubt I've scared her now, but she does, for once, stop yammering.

Will motions us down from the bleachers, looking oddly anxious given that he just has to stand there looking pretty. It’s not until we’re lined up and I catch his quick glance that I realize he's anxious for
me
. I hate that. I don't want anyone hoping things for me. It's bad enough when I only disappoint myself.

The gun goes off and I stop thinking. My mind stops running and my body takes over, pulling me through as if directed by some outside entity. This is my meditation. This is how I let my mind go blank.

My legs pump and I feel that rasp in my chest that warns me I've gone out too fast and I don't care. I ignore it because I want this. I want this more than I've ever wanted anything. I want to show Will that I am worth his effort. In five weeks’ time, in his own abrasive way, he's done more for me than anyone I've ever known.

I see him standing by the bleachers, watching, and I don't look around me. I don't even look at the finish line. I pass it, and I am first, and the whole time he is the only thing I see.

S
he was brilliant
.

She was absolutely fucking brilliant today.

And the truth is I’m not surprised. I need to get out to my mom's, but seeing Olivia's performance today has given me tunnel vision. I want to solve this for her. I want her to become the person she's capable of being. I realize it's naïve. Her family has probably spent the last decade trying to fix it, so there's no reason to think I'll be any more successful, but I have to at least try.

I pull up her student records again. Will she be pissed that I've called her parents? Undoubtedly. Do I give a shit? Not really. The nightmares have to stop. I think about her in that neighborhood in the middle of the night, not even awake, and I feel sick. It's just a matter of time until she gets hurt.

But there are no parents listed anywhere in the file, no home address, and the only contact I can find is a grandmother somewhere in Florida. Why are her parents not listed? No aunts, no uncles, no siblings? The more I try to solve the mystery of Olivia Finnegan, the more mysterious she becomes.

Resignedly, I dial her grandmother's number. The chipper voice on the other end informs me that I've reached Sunset Springs Assisted Living. For a moment, I think I’ve dialed wrong.

I ask for her grandmother by name.

"Are you a family member?" the woman asks.

“No, I'm calling about her granddaughter."

"I'm sorry, sir, but we have instructions to only pass calls through to Miss Anya from family.”

I grip the phone tight, trying hard to rein in my impatience. “Look, this is kind of important. I need to get in touch with someone and she’s the only contact number we have.”

“I doubt she’d be much help anyway,” she says.

“Excuse me?”

“Alzheimer's,” she whispers. “I’m not supposed to tell you that, but hers is pretty advanced. She doesn’t remember anybody these days.”

“How long has she been with you?" Somehow I know before I’ve even asked the question that the answer will only make things worse.

"Well, I'm not supposed to release that kind of information either," she says, and then her voice drops to a whisper again. "But it's been a little over four years."

Olivia wasn't even out of high school yet. So who was raising her all those years? And where are her parents?

I
’m distracted
through dinner at Jessica’s that night. The minute I think I’m beginning to grasp what Olivia’s been through, it just gets worse.

"What kind of work did you have to do last night anyway?" Jessica asks, pulling my attention back to her.

My intentions were completely innocent with Olivia. And had it all stayed that way I'd probably tell Jessica the truth.

Except that it hadn’t.

Because something changed in me when I caught her last night. And then it changed again, in a far more dangerous way, this morning. When I saw her asleep in my bed, her back bare, her breathing even, her hair spread over the pillow…

I’ve tried a hundred times to block the image. And the one that followed, when she sat up and the sheet slid to her waist.

I can’t.

It’s pretty much all I’ve thought about all day, despite my best efforts. It’s left me feeling as if a small crack has formed, a fault line, one that could grow into something unmanageable.

It’s the first time in the year we’ve dated that I tell Jessica a lie.

I
run
hard for him the next day.

I follow his every command to the letter. In the end, when he has not a single criticism to offer, I feign shock.

“Wow. Nothing shitty to say? Does that mean you were actually
pleased
?”

“You know you did well,” he says. “Don’t fish for compliments.”

“I’m pretty sure it’s the only way to get them out of you,” I gripe.

“Try running like that in the meet and the compliments will flow freely.”

My mouth goes into a hard line. "Awesome. So basically, as soon as I’m able to stop doing something in my sleep I don’t even know I’m doing,
that’s
when you’ll be pleased.”

He sighs, pinching his nose between thumb and forefinger. I know his moods now, his tells. He does this when he's frustrated, and when he's about to face something he doesn't want to face.

"Go shower and come to my office."

I can't imagine what he thinks a talk in his office will accomplish. He's probably going to send me back to that idiotic counselor, who will send me off with some stupid fucking homework. Last time, I was supposed to list things that make me happy. "Like bubble baths," she’d said. "Doesn't a nice bubble bath make you happy?" I told her a bubble bath would make me feel like I was wasting valuable time, which still makes me laugh although she didn’t seem to appreciate that much.

He's waiting for me, sitting behind his desk and looking grim.

"I'm not going back to the counselor if that's what this is about."

He runs a hand through his hair and almost smiles. "Yes, you've made your feelings about her known."

"So what do you want me to do? The only thing that ever works is keeping myself up, which usually fails, or running the night before the meet. Sometimes if I do six just before bed, I'm tired enough—”

“No, I want you fresh, and that'll just give me some version of the half-assed running you give me when you've had a nightmare."

I frown at him. "So what's your magic solution then?"

"You're going to stay with my mom."

"With your mom?" I scoff. "Are you crazy? I punched you! What would I do to her? And how could she possibly stop me?"

"I'll be there too.” His shoulders sag a little. "It still looks bad, but no one needs to know I was there. I'll sleep on the couch so you can't get by without me hearing."

The effort he is making causes something to tighten and twist in my chest, a small pain that radiates outward and makes me long to walk away from this whole conversation. "You shouldn't have to do all that," I mumble.

"I want to.”

When I reluctantly meet his gaze, I see how badly he wants me to succeed—not for him,
but for me
. The pain in my chest gets worse, and I look away. "Okay," I mumble, a single word that doesn't begin to express what I am feeling. No one has ever made an effort for me.

Until now.

H
e picks
me up on Friday at 6 p.m.

"This is embarrassing," I mutter as I put on my seatbelt.

"What's embarrassing?"

"Your mom is going to think I'm some kind of freak."

"And she'd be wrong to think that because ...?" he asks with a grin.

I give him my most menacing look, which he seems to now be impervious to, annoyingly enough.

"She's not going to think you're a freak,” he continues. “My brother used to sleepwalk when he was little. It’s not that different.”

It’s actually really fucking different, but okay.

"Have you eaten?" he asks.

"Yes."

"What did you have?"

"Oatmeal."

"It's the night before a meet," he grumbles. "You can't possibly think that's enough food, not after what happened last time."

I shrug. "Last time was sort of an anomaly."

"You
are
aware that 'anomaly' means 'an unusual occurrence,’ right?"

"That's why I said 'sort of' an anomaly," I argue.

"And that's why you're 'sort of' going to eat dinner at my mom's house."

I
t's surprising
how quickly the town becomes rural once you move away from campus. It reminds me of where my grandmother lived, the endless roads with nothing but farmland and forest on either side. He pulls onto a bumpy gravel road littered with potholes that send me bouncing toward the ceiling of his truck, and in the distance I see a small house and a substantial barn.

"This is where you grew up?" I ask.

“Yes, I suppose you have some smart-ass comment about it?"

I did, but now that he's called me on it I'm inclined to keep it to myself. "No," I say huffily. "I was going to say it looks nice."

“Right." He jumps out of the truck, leaving me to follow.

The house seems substantially larger on the inside, like some kind of "Alice in Wonderland" trick of perception. There's a big living room with a kitchen on the right, bedrooms to the left.

His mom comes out of the kitchen. "You must be Olivia," she says. “I’m Dorothy.” She hugs me with so much enthusiasm I feel certain Will has kept a number of details about me to himself. She tells us it’s a while until dinner and suggests we go out for a quick horseback ride, which he greets with a look of disgust.

I huff in exasperation. "Am I really that awful, Will?" I demand. "You're acting like she just asked you to give me both kidneys."

“It’s the night before a meet. You might get sore.”

“I spent the whole summer riding horses. I’ll be fine.”

"Okay, Olivia," he says with just a touch of acid to his voice. "Would you care to go horseback riding?"

I walk out the front door without bothering to reply.

"Do you even know how to saddle a horse?" he asks, coming out behind me.

"Are you seriously asking me this question? Did you think I was just going to jump on bareback and take off?"

“Right, how silly of me, when you have such a reputation for restraint and good judgment."

I march toward the stables, trying to ignore him. The smell hits me first. It is, without a doubt, an unpleasant smell, hay and manure and grass baked in sunshine, the faint smell of leather beneath it. But the memories it brings back are good ones. I spent summers as a girl cleaning out the stables down the road from my grandmother's house. I got to ride in the afternoons when I was done, worth far more to me than the crappy pay I got for doing it.

H
e puts me on Trixie
, who looks so docile I’m not sure she’ll even wake up long enough to be ridden.

"Don't even think about going faster than a trot," he warns.

I roll my eyes. "I doubt this horse is
able
to trot,” I retort.

I can tell he’s assessing my seat, and the only sign of approval I get is his eventual decision to ride ahead.

I’d like to ignore the fact that he looks good riding a horse, really good, but cannot. He wears the hell out of a pair of jeans on his worst day, and even 20 feet behind him I can see the definition of his arms. I have a sudden desire to sneak up behind him and press my nose just to the nape of his neck, just below where his hair is shaved close. A small shiver brushes over my arms at the thought.

I don’t want him.

I don’t.

I don’t want his bossiness and his bad temper and the way his upper lip curls when he’s mad at me. Half the time I’d just as soon kick him in the balls as fuck him. I need to focus on the part of me that wants to watch him writhe in pain because right now, at this precise moment, the other part is winning easily.

W
e get
to the crest of the hill and a lake comes into view. "Wow," I breathe. "It's amazing. I just assumed it was all woods down here."

"My dad built it for my brother and me."

I cast a suspicious glance at him. It’s not a pond. It's a lake the size of a football field. "He
built
it? How the hell do you build a lake?"

Will shrugs. "Engineering background and a lot of persistence, I guess."

"Did you guys swim in it?"

"Pretty much all year long. It’s built over a hot spring, so it stays warm for the most part.”

"Why?" My voice is quiet and uncertain, and I'm embarrassed by the question.

"Why does it stay warm?”

"No. Why would he build it for you?"

Will cocks his head, looking at me as if he's trying to understand something. "Because he loved us. Why else would he do it?"

I don’t answer, but the truth is that I can't imagine someone caring about his children that much. I can't imagine anyone caring about anyone that much.

By the time we finish riding, the sun has gone down and the breeze has picked up. The air feels crisp, a hint of fall on the heels of summer.

“So what was the deal with you and Mark Bell?”
he asks as we ride back to the stables.

I’m immediately wary. “What do you mean?”

“It takes a whole lot of rage to take a baseball bat to another human being. I figured he must have cheated on you or something.”

A small, choked laugh escapes my throat. “No, we weren’t dating. I don’t date.”

“What do you mean you don’t date?” he asks, aghast. His tone suggests that I just told him I don’t breathe. “
Ever?
”

I shrug. "If I want to sleep with someone, I don’t need him texting me all the time and pretending he actually likes me as a person in order to do it.”

He looks more dumbfounded than when I told him about the sleep running. "I don’t even know what to say. You can’t mean that.”

“Why not?”

“Because you should be waiting for someone who actually
does
like you as a person. And how do you know they’re pretending?”

I roll my eyes. “I know my strengths, Will. Likeability isn’t high on the list. You’d be the first to attest to it.”

“I never said you were unlikeable,” he protests.

“You don’t have to. It’s written all over your face every time you look at me.” I sigh, tiring of this whole conversation and glad we’re almost done riding so I can escape it. “Don’t worry. I’m used to it.”

“Olivia, there are guys out there who would actually like you.”

“No, there aren’t. There may be guys who convince themselves they like the whole package when they actually just like the box it comes in, but they’d figure it out soon enough.”

“So you just stick with douchebags,” he huffs, “instead of waiting for a decent guy to come along who actually means well?”

“When I’m looking for someone to hook up with,” I reply, “the last thing I want is someone who
means well
. Nothing’s less exciting than a guy who’s too nice.” Because in that one area of my life, I want a guy who isn’t scared to take charge. Who’s a little bossy and knows exactly what he wants. Someone like …
no, I’m not even going to think it
.

W
e dismount
and I unsaddle Trixie while he handles the significantly better horse he chose for himself. We finish up at the same time and turn back toward the house.

"Race you?" I challenge, expecting him to refuse.

"Your funeral," he says, taking off. I'm so shocked that it takes me a second to register the fact that he's running at all.

"No fair!" I shout from behind. He slows just enough to let me catch up and then we are flying.

It’s my favorite kind of run. The kind where the breeze is warm and blowing at your back and you feel so light and so strong it seems possible you'll take flight. At the very last minute he pulls ahead to win and we both crash into the front porch, laughing.

"You cheated!" I protest.

"How was that cheating?" he demands.

"Because I didn't know you were that fast!" I laugh. "I'd never have challenged you if I thought I might lose.”

Dorothy is watching us from the door. "Will, did you never mention to this poor girl that you ran track at ECU too?”

"
You
?" I gasp, following him inside. "
You
ran track?"

He shrugs. "You don't have to sound so shocked."

"It's just that you're big," I protest. "I mean, you're not just tall but you know, you're broad shouldered ..." I begin stammering because all of a sudden it sounds like I'm describing him to a teen magazine. "I just meant you're muscular,”
dammit I'm just making it worse,
"and so you carry a lot of weight." It's a relief to finally conclude on a note that doesn't sound like I'm writing porn.

I follow them into the dining room reluctantly. Will points to a chair for me to take, and his mother objects. "I raised you better than that," she chides. "Pull her chair out."

"Mom," he growls, “this isn't a date. I'm not pulling her chair out."

"She is a lady," his mother says, "and you always pull out a lady's chair."

He smirks. "I think even Olivia would agree that calling her a lady is a stretch."

I take a minuscule portion of the dinner Dorothy has made. It smells unbelievable, but it will sit in my stomach like a 20-pound dumbbell when I race tomorrow.

"More, Olivia," says Will, glaring at my plate.

"I'm going to get sick," I argue.

"Not as sick as you will if you don't eat enough. No more fainting episodes."

Under his watchful eye, I consume everything on my plate. The joke will be on him when I can’t run tomorrow because I’m carrying an extra pound of pasta in my stomach.

After dinner, Will and I clear the table. He tells me to go sit and I ignore him, silently grabbing a dish towel. I stand on tiptoes to put a bowl away on the top shelf of a cabinet.

“I got it,” he says, coming up behind me and taking it from my hands. I turn just as his arms come down and find myself facing him, our chests touching, his arm brushing against mine as it descends.

It’s not just that he’s close—it’s that I feel
enveloped
by him. The sheer size of him, the power that lies in his muscles, coiled tight even at rest, makes me feel like I can’t breathe.

It’s as if the part of my brain that has any common sense has shut down. The only part still functioning is the part that notices the smell of his skin, the way his breathing has gone shallow, the tiny scar on the bridge of his nose and the look in his eye, vanquished as quickly as it appears, that is different from anything I’ve ever seen from him before.