Chapter 8 – Trace
chapter
eight
Trace
The second Lena walked away from me at the Commons, her hips swaying with that don’t-follow-me energy, I was already fucked. I pulled out my phone anyway.
You’re really going to do this.
Yeah, I was really going to do this.
Early October had stripped most of the green from campus, leaving the oaks along the quad in shades of rust and gold that caught the low afternoon light. I zipped my jacket higher, the phone already warm against my palm, and scrolled to Dad’s contact.
He picked up on the second ring. “There he is! My favorite youngest son.”
“I’m your only youngest son.” I dropped onto one of the stone benches near the library and the cold seeped straight through my jeans.
“Which makes you my favorite by default. See how that works? Your old man’s still sharp.” I could hear the grin in his voice, and there was music in the background—Marvin Gaye, which meant Mom was nearby because Dad only played Marvin when he was trying to be smooth around her.
“Is Mom with you?”
“When is your mother not with me? I’m a kept man, Trace. Happily imprisoned. Hold on—Sash, it’s our baby.”
A shuffle, then the music got louder before it muffled like someone pressed the phone against fabric. Then Mom. “My baby! Are you eating?”
“He just got on the phone, woman. Let the boy breathe.”
“Don’t you ‘woman’ me. I can ask my son if he’s eating.”
Twenty-five years married and still bickering like it was foreplay.
“I’m eating, Mom.”
“He’s lying,” Dad stage-whispered. “He’s got that lying voice.”
“You can’t hear a lying voice,” I muttered.
“Baby boy, I spent twenty years in locker rooms. I can hear a lie through a concrete wall. What’s going on? You sound like you need something. Or you’re in trouble. Please tell me it’s not trouble. Your mother will blame me and I just got back in her good graces after the golf cart incident.”
“We do not speak of the golf cart incident,” Mom said.
I didn’t even want to know.
“I’m not in trouble, but I need a favor. A big one.”
Dad dialed back the jokes—not all the way, just enough and both of them locked in.
“Talk to us.”
“There’s a doctor, a hematologist named Okafor. Best in the country for blood disorders and his wait list is a year long. I need to get someone moved up.” I rubbed the back of my neck and my fingers caught on the chain I always wore, Grandpa’s ring bumping against my collarbone.
“Who’s sick?”
“Lena’s mom.”
Neither of them said anything for a long beat.
“Our Lena?” Dad said, and the way he said it.
Our Lena. Made my gut twist, because that’s what she’d been.
She’d been at our house every other weekend in high school, curled up on the couch watching game tape with Dad and helping Mom prep Sunday dinners and laughing at Uncle Dax’s terrible jokes at barbecues.
Not just Trevor’s girlfriend, but part of the family in a way that went deeper than that.
When she disappeared after the breakup, nobody talked about the hole she left, but it was there.
“Yeah. Our Lena.”
“What’s wrong with Gloria?”
“Blood disorder, about a year now. She’s been trying to get in with this specialist but the wait list is brutal and insurance is fighting her on half the treatments. And Lena’s—” I stood up, paced three steps, and sat back down. “She’s handling everything solo. Her dad’s gone.”
“What do you mean gone?” Dad’s voice dropped low.
“I guess he took off. From what Lena said, he had another family on the side. When he got caught, he bounced.”
“You’re shitting me.” A thud on the other end—his hand hitting a table or counter. “That girl worshipped her father.”
“Fox,” Mom said, and the single word carried enough weight to stop him.
“No, Sash, I’m serious. Remember when he came to that doubles match? Lena played the best tennis I’ve ever seen from a high schooler that day because her dad was in the stands. And he just—what? Walked away?” He exhaled hard. “Some men don’t deserve the families they get.”
And hearing Dad get pissed on Lena’s behalf loosened something in my chest.
“So Gloria’s sick, that deadbeat is gone, and Lena’s carrying the whole thing alone.” Mom’s voice had gone quiet in that way it did right before she organized an entire benefit in forty-eight hours. “Trace, why am I just hearing about this now?”
“I just found out the details myself.” But I understood what she was saying. Because how had we stopped checking on her?
“I should have kept in touch with her after the breakup. I almost did, picked up the phone a dozen times.” She paused, and I heard the soft click of her nails against a hard surface—granite, probably, if they were in the kitchen of the lake house.
“But I didn’t want to make things awkward when she was already hurting.
I thought reaching out from Trevor’s family would just salt the wound. ”
She wasn’t the only one who’d picked up the phone and put it back down.
“You did talk to her though, right?” I said. “Before the breakup. Tried to tell her Trevor needed to grow up.”
Silence stretched long enough that I checked the screen to make sure the call hadn’t dropped.
“I sat that girl down in my kitchen and told her she deserved better than what my son was giving her. Told her Trevor had a good heart but he was immature and selfish and that she shouldn’t waste her best years waiting for a boy to become a man.
” Mom’s voice thinned. “She looked at me with those big brown eyes and said she loved him, and I knew right then she was going to get her heart broken because my son wasn’t ready to love anyone but himself. ”
Mom had tried, and Lena had stayed anyway, because that’s what she did—loved hard, even when people didn’t deserve it.
Dad cleared his throat. “All right. Okafor. I’m on it. Ransom just did a charity event with Mass General’s board last month, so I’ll call him tonight.”
“And I’ll work my contacts,” Mom added. “Trace, I need specifics—the exact diagnosis, insurance details, current treatments. And Okafor—I’m almost positive Tammy played in a charity tournament with his wife last spring, so I’ll reach out.”
The Coulter network. Six degrees of separation? Try two.
“I’ll get you everything I can.”
“Baby, you get me Gloria’s number.” Mom’s voice had that clipped efficiency she used when she was already building a mental to-do list. “I’m calling her directly. She shouldn’t be navigating this alone.”
“Sash is going to adopt this woman,” Dad murmured. “I’m going to come home one day and Gloria is living in the guest room doing puzzles.”
“Would that be so terrible?”
“Not even a little bit. I’ll set up the guest room myself.”
These two.
“Thanks, guys. Seriously.”
“Trace.” Dad’s voice went warm enough that I had to swallow hard. “You’re a good kid. Always have been. Heart the size of a hockey rink.”
Don’t. Not when the reason I’m helping Lena is tangled up with wanting her so badly I can’t think straight.
“I don’t know about all that.”
“I do,” Mom said. “Now. Lena. She something to you? And don’t give me that face—I can hear it through the phone.”
Everything.
“She’s a friend. Just like always”
The silence that followed was the kind where I could practically hear my parents exchanging a look across whatever room they were standing in, doing the telepathic married-couple thing where they both agreed I was full of shit.
“Right,” Dad said, the grin creeping back into his voice. “A friend. Sure. Just like your mother was my ‘friend’ when I became her roommate.”
“That’s different.”
“It really isn’t, son.”
“Okay, we’re done here.”
Mom laughed. “We’ll start making calls this afternoon and get Gloria in to see Okafor. And Trace? Whatever this is with Lena—be careful with her. That girl has been through enough.”
“Your mother’s right.” And the lightness left his voice completely. “The Coulter boys have already done enough damage there. If you’re going to be in her life, be in it right.”
No pressure.
“I will.”
“Good,” Mom said. “Now tell me you’re eating actual food.”
“I’m eating.”
“He’s lying again,” Dad said.
“I’m sending a care package. Don’t argue.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Dad and I said at the same time.
They hung up together, and I sat there for a minute with the phone resting on my thigh. One call, and the full weight of the Coulter machine was already in motion.
Two hours later, after my final class, I made it back to the house, dodged two guys playing beer pong on the front porch in the middle of the afternoon, and took the stairs two at a time to my room.
I locked the door behind me and the soundproofing swallowed the bass thumping from someone’s speaker downstairs.
I tossed my bag onto the leather desk chair and kicked off my shoes, then dropped onto the bed—the one upgrade I’d insisted on, because nobody over six feet should sleep on a dorm mattress.
My room smelled like the cedar diffuser Mom had sent in her last care package.
But fuck me, I could still smell her. Something of her clung to me still.
Coconut shampoo, still clung to the sleeve of my jacket. My body responded to the memory on its own goddamn schedule, heat pooling low in my stomach and I forced my mind off of her.
You’re going to have to get your shit together. You are going to be stuck with her. There will be no hiding anything you’re feeling.
That much was true. I was going to have to figure it out. Because once we started putting on the show, my fucking heart wouldn’t know the damn difference. The thing about Lena was once she was under my skin, there would be no excavating her.
My parents were already working the doctor angle, and Aaron still needed to know about the fake girlfriend, and somehow I needed to figure out how to be around Lena every day without her catching on that the fake part of this arrangement was the only thing keeping me from losing my goddamn mind.
You’re not doing this for her. You’re doing this so you can matter to her. So she’ll look at you the way she used to look at your brother.
Maybe, but Lena’s mom was still going to get the help she needed, and I was going to be the one who made that happen.
And when she finds out the fake boyfriend has real feelings?
I’d have to just worry about that when it came up. But until then, I had to suck it up. I picked up my phone and texted Aaron.
Me: Got the girl. We’re on. Fill you in tomorrow.
His response was immediate.
Money Man: About damn time. Don’t screw this up.
As if screwing up wasn’t the only thing guaranteed when it came to Lena.
But I was going to try, even if she’d rather set me on fire than admit I was capable of it. I rolled over and my eyes caught the nightstand drawer, slightly ajar, the worn spine of Kindred with her handwriting in the margins just visible inside, and I told myself this was going to work.
I just had to make sure I didn’t break the only promise I’d ever actually wanted to keep.
I typed.
Me: You free tonight?
Her reply came fast.
Lena: Why?
I stared at the screen, pulse kicking hard against my throat, because once we stepped into the light together, there was no fucking going back.
Me: Because our deal starts now.