Chapter Eleven
Responsible Adults (Instructions Not Included)
Jordan
‘Seriously, Jake? Do y’all buy a new jar of peanut butter every other day?’
Jake grins up at me. There is peanut butter all over this kid’s mouth, cheeks, nose, forehead – how do you manage to get peanut butter on your forehead? I don’t know, but he’s evidently cracked it. This is the fourth exploding peanut-butter sandwich in four days of camp.
‘Come on. Come … Rod! Take him to the bathroom, will you?’ I yell over my shoulder.
Rod startles immediately. Friday had me in shambles all weekend, and clearly, he’s not much better off, considering he’s as skittish as a mouse.
Whether it’s because of me or something else, I have yet to know, though I’m willing to bet the fact that I had to haul ass to escape his sister factored into it.
Not exactly at the top of your ‘WatchMojo’s Top Ten Moments of Chivalry’.
Beside me, Jake reaches for his lacrosse stick with peanut-butter-covered fingers. ‘NO!’ I yelp, sticking a hand out. ‘Absolutely not. Please go wash your hands with Coach Rod, Jake.’
He gives me another devious snicker before clambering to his feet and plodding along behind Rod to the bathrooms just outside the field fence. I glare at the peanut-butter globs all stuck in the grass with malice. ‘How on earth do you do it, Lyla?’
Hands on her hips, she shakes her head disapprovingly. ‘I don’t. I’ve given up on him.’
‘Fair enough.’ I take one last bite of my own salad, before packing the container in my lunch bag and clapping my hands. ‘Let’s go! Back at it!’
As the kids scramble to pack up, chatter still abounding in the bleachers, Benny hustles up to me. ‘And here – ’ he holds out a clear cup filled with my usual wonderful, delectable chai latte – ‘is a chai for you.’
‘Benny.’ I raise an eyebrow at the guy. ‘You’re supposed to be my boss. You ask me to get you chai. Not the other way around. What’s goin’ on?’
‘Just a token of our appreciation!’ he protests, but his left eye is twitching suspiciously. This shit’s no token. Benny is hiding something.
‘Tell me,’ I demand, although I accept the chai happily.
‘Wait …’ He pauses, lips pursed. Then, ‘Did Rod tell you? He told you, right?’
‘Told me what?’
‘Oh …’ Benny sucks in a breath. ‘Maybe this is my problem to tell you about, actually. About Declan.’
‘Who?’ Declan? Who is this dude? Also, what a name, but irrelevant. ‘Who’s Declan, now?’
‘Our camp nemesis.’ Benny pauses again. Poor thing literally has regret in his eyes. ‘Are you sure Rod didn’t tell you?’
‘Yep. Start me at square one.’
‘Every year,’ he sighs, ‘we play a cross-camp match at the end of the summer, on the Fourth. It’s kind of big.
Huge barbecue. Fireworks. Town lore. It’s us …
versus Boston. Very well-funded. Led by some …
’ He clears his throat. ‘Awful person. Named Declan. We do not like Declan. And Rod really doesn’t like Declan.
However, we have lost to Declan four years running.
And although it isn’t explicitly stated anywhere …
loser usually takes a funding cut. Winner, well … you get it.’
It doesn’t take a sip of chai to pique my attention with that one. An enemy? Stakes are high? I lean in conspiratorially. ‘A rival, you say?’
‘Basically.’ Benny gulps. ‘We’ve been waiting for the right moment to tell you because it’s kind of a rough time of year the closer we get to the match.
The kids start to go wild right when we need them in line.
Rod gets all tense thinking about losing to Declan. It’s not good. We just didn’t want to—’
‘Run me out of town? Because of a kids’ camp championship?
’ A smile spreads across my face, and I take a swig of chai.
‘Benny, you couldn’t if you tried. In fact, you got yourself a promise.
We’re beating Declan this year. You just wait.
And actually,’ I raise my cup to him, ‘if this comes with chai, I’m not complaining. ’
He exhales a sigh of relief. ‘Well, that was a soften-the-blow chai, so I’m not sure I need to grab you any more.’
‘Blasphemy!’ I recoil with a dramatic hand to my chest before setting my cup on the bleachers. ‘Help me grab this tub. I hope Rod’s not drowning in peanut butter back there. This thing’s heavy.’
It takes two of us to manoeuvre a massive tub full of water balloons, which we filled up well before the day’s camp, over to the left corner of the field. I stand up and blow my whistle twice. ‘CAMPERS! We’re going to be doing a fun little drill I like to call Cradle the Baby. Y’all familiar?’
They shake their heads. They’re definitely not familiar because this is not, in fact, a drill.
It’s completely something we made up back in Prosperity to pass time on especially hot days out on the field.
With today’s scorching eighty degrees, more like ninety, I figure it’s called for. Rod and Benny didn’t fight me.
‘You will get one water balloon. Just the one.’ I raise a balloon, all air-hostess.
‘Your job is to cradle this balloon very carefully before absolutely whipping it at the goal. Mind you, this is the only situation in which I will allow whipping of your stick during a drill. If you make your goal, you will get another balloon. If your balloon pops before you shoot, that’s an out. Winner is the last camper standing.’
A colourful assortment of pre-teen exclamations emerges from our campers.
‘Whip respectfully, please,’ I shout over them, hands raised. ‘Deal?’
‘Deal,’ they chant at varied paces.
‘I refuse to miss this.’ Rod and Jake rejoin us with perfect timing, just as I crouch down with the water balloon tub to arm everyone one by one. Jake runs off to meet his friends in line, and Rod reaches down to grab a balloon. ‘Where’d you get this idea, again?’
‘OKC.’ I drop a balloon in a kid’s stick, turning to shoot Rod a smile. ‘Tried and true.’
‘Oh, yeah, for sure,’ he says with that fake, strangled voice people use when they’re clearly struggling to address you normally.
I raise an eyebrow. ‘Now, you’re the one who wanted me out Saturday morning, and I did that, but suddenly I’m scarin’ you away?’
Rod’s eyes go wide, and by the time I’ve popped a balloon in yet another stick with a warning to handle carefully, he’s still taken aback. ‘It’s nothing like that—’
‘It’s something like that, I’m afraid.’
He takes a knee next to me and starts to help with balloons as if stirred out of his stupor. ‘Okay, a little. It’s not you, though.’
‘Fair. I like to know it’s not me.’
We pass off balloons until every camper has one in the head of their stick, and Benny’s got them all lined up at the goal. Up on my feet, I give my whistle one good toot. ‘GO!’
It’s a frenzy of balloons flying either into the net, as far away from it as possible or, my favourite, popping before they even leave the stick head.
The kids have good fun, and by the end of it, the last one standing is all giddy with excitement, we’ve all been blasted with cold water at least once, and everybody is happy and maintaining normal body temperature.
We send them all to drop-off with their parents with no shortage of relief all over our faces.
‘About before,’ Rod says as we’re unlacing our cleats at the bleachers after picking up way too many water balloon shreds, ‘I think that came out wrong. It’s definitely not you. Whatever it is, it’s fully me.’
I nod, and I don’t expect it, but a ball of nerves starts to tie itself into knots in my throat. I mean, it’s so simple. We had a moment. A fling, fuelled by lots of burgeoning tension. That tends to happen when you eye each other for a couple of days straight. Why am I nervous?
‘It’s been a while … you know, with Tali and everything.’ He slides on his street shoes and sits back on the bench with a sigh. ‘A lot of people in my life have been telling me what they think’s best, but I need to figure it out. Step by step.’
‘Yeah. Makes sense,’ I say, but the knots aren’t loosening, even as I sit down beside him and will myself to calm down. ‘Listen, it’s really not … it doesn’t have to be that deep.’ I finally find my words, hands practically pressed into my knees. ‘We’re grown-ups. We had a moment.’
My fingers twitch. Not so sure about him, but I know that Friday definitely wasn’t just a ‘moment’.
That was the kind of sex you have once in a blue moon.
That was actually the kind of sex I’ve never had in my life.
Maybe that says more about my questionable college taste in men than anything else, and yet I know that’s not the case.
It was different. I felt it in the way my body knew.
Recognized him like I’ve known him all my life.
I watch him calculate his next sentence. ‘Jordan, for the record … I don’t totally know what’s what. But, like … maybe we let the cards fall where they may. You know? It’s the summer.’
‘Sure.’ That tangle of weird feelings undoes itself – finally – but something still hangs on.
Sometimes it manifests itself as jealousy: a tightness in my chest when I see the way May and Colt are, the way that people are so committed, so easily.
Sometimes it’s a yearning, a nagging tear at the corner of my eye during a tacky romance movie.
But I’ve accepted that’s not for me. Let the cards fall where they may.
Playing a game. No matter how far I run from work and lacrosse and every obligation, it always comes back to playing the game.
It’s the only way to guarantee a safe outcome. A sure outcome.
The silence between us is deafening after the last word out of my mouth. I finally slide my feet into my Birkenstocks and shoot Rod a smile. Forced? Not necessarily. I’ve just got good at pushing smiles over the past twenty-three years.
And yet, something hooks around my feet and stops me when I go to get up. I open my mouth, close it again. Then, ‘Honestly?’
‘Honestly?’ echoes Rod with a raised eyebrow, dare I say, nervous.
‘Friday was really nice.’ I grab my bag and clamber to my feet. ‘But, hey. Shit happens. Like I said, no use in making it deep.’
‘Yeah. Totally.’ Rod nods way too enthusiastically as he gets up, slinging his backpack over his shoulder.
‘I’m sure it was just a, like, one-off,’ I add, and suddenly, I’m the nervous one, yapping just to fill silence. I really do hate silence.
‘Oh, definitely. Sometimes that happens when you work with people, right?’ says Rod, even though his eye is doing this infuriating twitch that tells me he’s just shooting shit to fill silence, same as me.
I don’t know what kind of experiences he’s had, but I can tell you I don’t usually sleep with my co-workers.
He opens the chain-link fence at the field’s exit so I can head through before he follows.
We both pause almost instinctively once we’re outside.
Our eyes lock right on the other’s, tentative, nervous, a hint of the need from Friday night.
As cliché as it sounds, I’ve had a taste of this man, and stopping now will be agonizing.
I look at him, and I can practically feel his hands on my hips, his lips against my neck.
I sweep a hair from my face and tuck it behind my ear in hope that the motion will centre my mind on the present, instead of the wild clusterfuck of attraction that Rod Wilson has ignited in me.
‘One-off,’ I say again.
‘One-off,’ agrees Rod with a firm exhale.