Chapter 8
8
Kit
I sat down on the bus that would take me up to Liam’s house and a newspaper crinkled under my thigh. I pulled it out from under me and turned it over to the front page. Where there was a full color picture of Liam Locke pushing a little girl in a swing at some park.
Both of them were wearing matching scowls.
The headline wasn’t subtle.
Daddy Liam?
Apparently, yesterday Liam went to a park with a little girl and the whole town lost its mind.
“I knew one of these days he’d end up being some woman’s baby daddy,” said the woman next to me with her shopping bags gathered around her feet. “That boy is too pretty for his own good.” She shot a significant look at the paper in my hands.
In the picture he wore a baseball cap and sunglasses, but a man that size would stand out anywhere. Also a guy who wore two carat diamonds in his ears and custom blue and gray Jordan’s on his feet didn’t look like any other dad in the park.
“Sure is a looker though,” the woman next to me said. “Wouldn’t mind making a baby with him.”
I folded up that paper and handed it to her.
“Don’t be so sure. He’s not as nice as he seems,” I said, without any real heat.
“Liam Locke! I heard he donated money so the township could re-open the public pool in this neighborhood. Now the kids have somewhere to swim in the summer. That man is a saint!”
Of course he did that.
I jumped out at my stop and started the long slog uphill to Liam’s house.
I hadn’t seen Liam in person since the End Zone party two weeks ago.
But even trying to avoid him, I couldn’t.
For the parade last week, Portland had been packed to the rafters. Everyone on the Eastern Seaboard was there, losing their minds as the buses went by. It went down the center of town, right in front of the bar where I worked and I saw him, standing in the open top with his arm around Mike Harrison. Their faces now freshly shaved. Their playoff hair trimmed up. Their smiles so joyful it could bring a tear to a cynic’s eye.
Me. I was the cynic.
But I couldn’t avoid him forever.
“Hey Mike,” I said, approaching the stoic bodyguard sitting on Liam’s front porch. Did Liam ever let this poor guy inside the house?
“Hey,” he replied. Then breaking protocol, he said, “Not sure if you want to be here today.”
“Let me guess, his date still here from last night?” I asked.
“Nope,” Mike laughed.
“Another party?”
“Far from it. But I guess you’ll see for yourself,” Mike said ominously. I opened the door to an incredibly quiet house. No music. No laughter. No video games. It was…eerie. Usually, this house was full of people and noise and ruckus. Even if it was just Liam here, he lived his life very loudly. Without apology.
But today his house was a tomb.
I walked down Liam’s vanity hallway towards the living room where the silence gained a kind of horror quality. I was suddenly terrified of what I would see when I turned the corner. Was it a murder scene? Mike would warn me about that, wouldn’t he? If there was an actual dead body situation inside?
Cautiously, I poked my head around the corner to find a living room that looked like… well, a toy store. Or like a whole toy store had exploded. There were Lego kits. Stuffed animals. A dozen different games, set up and discarded. The pieces tossed around the coffee table like there’d been a tantrum.
On one end of the low, wide gray couch was Liam.
On the other end was a little girl with bright pink glasses and long brown hair in a crooked braid down her back.
And they were staring at each other.
No. Not quite staring. They were shooting daggers with their eyes.
“Um,” I said, and Liam looked at me with such sudden and wild hope that I sucked in a breath. Startled by all the emotion he was revealing. But, just as quickly as he saw me, it was gone. Like it never was.
The mean golden retriever was back.
“It’s you,” he said.
“It’s Sunday. Of course it’s me. What’s going on here?” I asked. The little girl, since Liam wasn’t staring at her anymore, had picked up a book, flopped over on her back and was reading.
“Tess and I are… Tess!” Liam cried. “What did I say about reading?” Liam looked at me. “This can’t be good for her.”
I laughed, but then realized he was serious. “Are you joking? Reading is great for her.”
“I don’t know what I am,” he whispered and hung his head in his hands.
I looked over at the little girl who was sucking on the end of her ponytail. She looked about five. She was reading a Junie B. Jones book.
Interesting.
“Well, I have your money,” I said. “I’ll just drop it and leave you-”
His phone rang and Liam grabbed it and stood up. Unapologetically, taking the save.
“I need to take this. Can you…watch her?” he said and walked away from the room towards the kitchen.
Leaving me with the little girl, who, when he left, sighed and rolled over on her side, putting her back to me. I didn’t know what was going on here, but I couldn’t just leave. She was a bored, unhappy kid. It went against my grain to leave her like that.
“Hey,” I said.
She was silent.
“I love that book,” I said.
She looked over her shoulder at me like she didn’t believe me.
“Shut up your face,” I said, quoting the one about the fruit cake.
She smiled, just a little, and turned back to her book and the couch cushions.
“So…where’s your mom?”
“Carson City, Nevada,” she said.
I hummed in my throat like that made sense. “Is…ah…is Liam looking after you?”
She shrugged as if to say, sort of ? But also, who can tell? And maybe a little of, if you can call it that.
The laughter burst out of me so hard it hurt my throat. The little girl scowled over her shoulder at me like I wasn’t funny at all.
This was my favorite kind of kid. If I was being honest, the gregarious kids, the precocious ones. The ones who never met a stranger and made all kinds of eye contact when talking to adults – they made me nervous.
Give me a shy kid. A reticent kid. Give me a kid I needed to draw out of their shell and I would put my back into it.
Kids like the girl on the edge of the couch reminded me of me at that age. Following my dad around with a book in my hand. Sitting in corners. Surrounded all the time by adults talking over my head.
I knew how hard that could be.
“Are you having fun?” I asked her.
She shrugged again, same shrug. But this shrug said very clearly - No. No, I am not having fun.
I couldn’t stand seeing all the game pieces laying scattered around. Things would get lost. Put in the wrong box. All these games would be ruined because someone didn’t care enough to put them away right.
I stacked up the checkers and put them in the box. One of the other games was chess. The black pieces were all cats and the white pieces were all different kinds of dogs.
It was cute.
“Did you play chess?” I asked the little girl, holding up the white poodle.
“He forgot the rules,” she said, sounding about as glum as a kid could sound.
I used to play with my father. I hadn’t played since that night in Nashville. After I got the frantic text from my father and left Liam’s hotel room without even saying goodbye.
“ Help me, honey. I’m in trouble. It’s an emergency.”
That one text had changed everything.
“Do you play?” Tess asked, looking over her shoulder at me again. This time with all the hope in the world.
I knew I should say no. I wasn’t an idiot. The right thing to do here was to tuck the cash I’d brought with me under the board game and get the hell out of there. Except saying no to a kid with those big blue eyes behind pink glasses was beyond me.
To a kid who just wanted to play a game. A girl who couldn’t quite hide how lonely she was. Missing her mom. Maybe a little scared. And a whole lot bored.
I didn’t know what the hell was going on here, but I wasn’t about to say no to her.
“Yes, I do.” I said. “Set up the board and I’ll be right back.”
I walked down the hallway to the kitchen, which didn’t look any better than the living room. Instead of games, though, it was boxes of take-out food scattered around the place.
Pizza. Burgers. Bowls of what looked and smelled like clam chowder.
Come on, Liam, I thought. No kid likes clam chowder.
His back was to me as he talked on his phone. He wore a pair of gray sweatpants and a black t-shirt that clung for dear life to the muscles of his back and shoulders.
I shamelessly looked my fill and eavesdropped.
I never claimed I was a saint.
“You guys doing okay?” Liam asked whoever was on the other end of the phone, his voice in that sincere place that always made a mess of me. “No, I know you can handle your shit.”
I picked a piece of pepperoni off a piece of pizza and popped it in my mouth. My mouth immediately watered, and my stomach roared for more.
Had I eaten today? No, I realized. I hadn’t. I picked up the slice and leaned against the counter to eat it. Even cold it was really good pizza. And free.
“Yeah,” Liam said. “No. Who am I going to tell?” He blew out a breath that was half laughter, half frustration. “That was when we were in high school, man. And you’re the one who made it weird. I won’t say a word to anyone. Oh, except Dad. I told Dad. I know… but…yes…Fine. Yeah. Fuck you too.”
Liam hung up the phone.
“Did your brother really get married in Vegas?” I asked and he jumped, spinning around.
“Stop sneaking around,” he snapped.
“Hardly sneaking,” I said and helped myself to the carrot sticks that were sitting next to some chicken wings. “So? You want to tell me something? Like maybe you’re someone’s baby daddy?”
“I’m not Tess’s dad,” he snapped, real fast. Real quiet. He walked across the kitchen to me and pulled me away from the open doorway.
“I don’t think she’s listening,” I whispered, yanking my arm free once we were on the other side of the island. Oh, he had cookies over here. I grabbed one. “How do you know you’re not the daddy?” I asked. Because their scowls in the picture in the paper had been nearly identical. “Did you sleep with her mom?”
He frowned like he was going to deny it, but then remembered it was true. “Years ago.”
“Like six years?”
“Will you…” he scowled at me and I thought, yep, he definitely slept with her six years ago. “I’m not the father, okay? Janice would have told me. She knows how I feel about that shit. Yes, we used to hook up back when she was my manicurist. Then she left to be a nurse. She moved back a couple of months ago with her daughter. Said she doesn’t like to talk about the dad.”
“Let me guess, you gave her a side job to help her make ends meet as a single mother.”
He blinked. “She’s a really good manicurist and foot care is no joke.”
“Okay, so where is she now?”
“She took this temp nurse gig.”
“You mean a traveling nurse?” I nodded. “Smart. They get paid bank. I bet I could pay you back a lot faster, if I’d been a nurse.”
“Did you want to be a nurse?”
I shook my head. “Too much blood.”
I took a bite of the cookie. Oh wow, there was salt in there. Salted chocolate chip. I struggled to swallow my moan of pleasure. I really was hungry.
“So the single travel nurse-slash-ex-slash-manicurist hit you up with a favor to watch her kid. How long?”
“Two weeks.”
I laughed, spraying cookie crumbs all over his chest. “I’m sorry,” I laughed, reaching out to brush the crumbs off his shirt. I refused to register the heat of his skin, the curve of his chest.
“What is it with you always spitting on me?” he asked.
“Calm down,” I said, flushing at the reference to the wine I spit on him in Nashville. I never liked to go back to that night. “I’ve spit on you twice. It’s hardly a habit. But did you say two weeks?” A night I could understand. A weekend, maybe. But two weeks?
“Yes. Two weeks.” He swatted my hands away and stepped back, brushing the crumbs off himself.
I shook my head, a dozen questions launching themselves into my mouth. How desperate did a woman have to be to trust Liam Locke, a barely grown child himself, to look after a five-year-old girl?
“I know,” he said, like I’d said all of that out loud. “It’s insane. A total mistake. Did you see the picture in the paper?”
“ Daddy Liam . It was exciting stuff.”
He blew out a long breath. “I can’t risk any more pictures, or stories, especially not after what happened to me before. So we’ve been trapped in this house and all she wants to do is read,” he said.
“You say that like all she wants to do is tear off the legs of frogs.”
“That I would understand!” He cried.
“What kind of disgusting stuff did you and your brother do growing up?”
“Vermont stuff,” he said. “Her mom said I couldn’t let her read all the time and to make sure she ate food that wasn’t graham crackers. I’m 0 for two so far.”
“Sounds like you’ve got a rough two weeks locked inside your house,” I said, and grabbed another cookie.
“The kid needs sunshine and dirt and exercise and fresh air.”
“I think you need that. She seems pretty happy with her books.”
“What’s worse,” he said and stepped closer. Closer so I could smell him. Laundry soap and pizza. He didn’t smell like a millionaire playboy athlete. He smelled like a dad on a weekend.
That smell shouldn’t do anything to me. Not one thing.
I had to lock my knees anyway. I’d have a stern talking to them later.
His hair, now that the mullet was gone, was clipped high and tight along the sides and a little floppy on top. With no product in it, it swooped into his eyes, begging for someone to push it back. I kept waiting for him to do it, to sweep his fingers through it, but he didn’t.
My fingers itched to do it. I would be talking to them later, too.
“She’s stopped talking,” he whispered. “We had to leave the park with people chasing us with cameras, she…stopped talking. It’s nothing but one-word answers, if that. We’ve always been cool. She’s normally a total chatterbox. Non-stop about all kinds of things. Books she’s read. A dog she met at the park. Some kid in her class who hid her shoes.”
“Hid her shoes?”
“I know, I’ll be finding out more about that kid later. But now…nothing. I’d say she was giving me the cold shoulder, but I don’t think she’s doing it on purpose. I think she’s just that unhappy.”
If the world could see this version of Liam, they wouldn’t believe it. Worried and out of his depth. That cocky smile flattened into a hard line of frustration. There was no reason to like this side of him, but of course I did. It was so honest.
“Poor kid,” I said, turning away. “Her own mini-paparazzi event. Must have been traumatizing.”
“I know,” he said, and thank God, he finally pushed that hair off his face. “What the hell do I do?”
Oh, the poor guy. I mean, there were solutions, the guy had more money than sense. But he obviously felt some responsibility for this little girl. Which meant the stakes were high and he knew it. Except if there was one thing I knew about Liam, it was that he only did casual.
The little girl in question came tearing into the kitchen. She wore a purple t-shirt and a pair of purple leggings with spiders on them. She looked at us and we looked at her.
“I don’t know your name,” the little girl said after a long second.
“Sorry,” Liam said. “Tess, this is Kit. Kit, this is Tess.”
“Baby foxes are called kits,” Tess said.
“So are skunks,” I said, which for some reason seemed to delight her. “Kit, I set up the board if you’re ready to play.” The girl had extremely good manners.
“What are you playing?” Liam asked, looking so upset that she was going to play a game with me and not with him. It had obviously been a very long afternoon for both of them.
“Chess,” she said. “Maybe Kit can teach you.”
Oh, it was a fantastic burn and the kid didn’t even know it. How fun.
“Yeah,” I said with a grin. “Maybe I can teach you something.”
He growled in his throat and the little girl took my hand, which kind of shocked both of us. I looked up at him and he shook his head. Like he wasn’t sure what was going on either.
I was used to kids liking me. Before everything had crashed and burned with my dad it had been my dream to be a teacher. Now I was the daughter of a convicted felon.
“I have your money,” I said to Liam in a low voice. “I can pay you and-”
“Stay,” he said. “Play chess. I need to get a few things taken care of.”
I nodded and let myself be tugged into the other room.
We sat down on the floor beside the coffee table. I saw on the couch behind her, plates full of abandoned food. “You’re not hungry?” I asked, moving my pawn.
“I don’t like that food.”
“What food?” I asked. I saw pizza and those wings.
“That food,” she jerked her thumb back at all the plates.
She moved her pawn.
“What food do you like?”
“Graham crackers,” she looked up at me hopefully. Like I might have some in my bag.
“I like those too.”
“The kinds with cinnamon.”
“So good.”
Within a couple moves I realized I was in trouble. If I didn’t get my head in this game she was going to take my queen. I moved my queen out of harm’s way. “So, what do you like doing, Tess?”
“Reading.”
“What else?”
“Swimming.”
“Yeah? You like swimming in the ocean?”
“I’m scared of the waves,” she said, shaking her head.
“Strictly a pool kid?” I asked her with a sage nod.
“I went to a lake when I was little, but Mom always takes me to the pool in the summer.”
“Well, Liam should take you to the pool one of these days,” I said. But if taking her to a park was going to be a problem, a pool would be worse. The second he took off his shirt, every phone would turn his way. Surely, he belonged to some private rich guy club that had a pool.
“Check,” Tess said as I stared, flabbergasted, at the board. She had me. I moved my king one space, but I couldn’t run forever and in two moves she had me beat.
“Rematch?” I asked her, and she lit up with excitement as she set up the board again.
Well, Kit, I thought. You’re in it now.