Chapter 3 The Writing Class #8
“If I knew what the hell that meant, I might know how not to be it,” I whisper, catching her lips for a kiss, then another, and another. She hums contentedly, burying her fingers in my hair as I nuzzle her neck. “I could give you a proprietorial love mark here. That’d do the job, wouldn’t it?”
Tessa squeaks a little laugh and wriggles her neck away from my mouth. “Maybe I’ll give you one instead. That would also ‘do the job.’”
“Even better.” I kiss the tip of her nose. “Let Grayson see what he’s missing out on.”
The next day, we walk into the Trolley Station hand in hand. I make sure we’re hand in hand because I want Grayson to understand the stakes of this “one-on-one” time with Tessa. I’m the only one who can set those stakes.
And no, I don’t think that’s proprietorial of me. (I looked that word up, so I know what it means. And I’m not it.)
Tessa waves with her free hand as soon as she spots Grayson hunched over his laptop at a corner table, two cups of coffee beside him.
One for him, one for Tessa.
He knows her drink order.
For some reason, this knowledge makes me want to hook-punch him in the liver. And we haven’t even been introduced yet.
I’m wearing jeans and Jordans, so we get to skip the Reaction. I have no idea if Tessa told him I’m an amputee, but I assume not since he seems to have no awkward reservations about treating me like your average Joe Blow.
He smiles and gets to his feet, sauntering over to meet us halfway across the café. Yes, sauntering—that’s the right word. A form of walking exclusive to college guys with big vocabularies and even bigger egos.
“Wes, right?”
“Weston,” I correct him, reaching for a handshake. He accepts it, and I deliberately crush his finger bones with a friendly smile on my face. There it is—the flinch in his eyes. Warning taken. I ease off, letting my hand return to Tessa’s. “Good to meet you, Grayson.”
“Yeah, good to meet you too,” he says with some effort, flexing his hand at his side. Pansy-ass. “Uh, Tessa, I got you a cap with oat milk. I didn’t know what Weston likes.”
“I’ll get my own.”
Tessa smiles appreciatively at Grayson. “That was nice of you, Gray. Thanks.”
Gray?
She has a nickname for him, and he knows she likes oat milk in her cappuccino? If this was one of Tessa’s period dramas, I’d be throwing a glove at this guy and calling for a duel.
I decide to walk away before I say something unfriendly, but not before I lean in and kiss Tessa’s cheek—right in front of Grayson. Call it upping the ante. Call it proprietorial. I don’t even care.
I’d want her to do the same to me if there was some girl I had to meet for a study session.
That’s how I decide to look at it as I stand in line for a black coffee, watching Tessa and Grayson at the corner table.
If this were the other way around, and I brought her to meet a girl I worked with who had the hots for me, it would be to make a point.
I’m taken. I’m hers. She’s mine. Get the picture?
Tessa told me to be “nice” to this guy, but I wonder if that’s just her soft, people-pleaser side trying to be a diplomat. Deep down, she wants Grayson to know she’s off-limits. Why else would she have invited me to join this meeting when I have absolutely nothing to add to the conversation?
She’s laughing at something he said as I take a seat in the chair beside her. “What’s funny?”
Tessa shakes her head. “Oh—nothing.”
Apparently, the joke was too intellectual for my ears. Grayson clears his throat and sips his drink, which looks suspiciously like a latte.
Again, I think, Pansy-ass.
“So, Tessa was telling me that this book she’s writing is actually inspired by the way you two met.” Grayson points back and forth between us. “You never finished explaining why that is, Tessa.”
“Oh,” she says, glancing at me. “Um, well… I met Weston a few years ago, right after I was in a car accident and lost my eyesight.”
“Oh wow.” Grayson’s eyebrows arch with surprise. “Seriously?”
“Yeah, it was just temporary. For about three months, I was completely blind. Weston came to help me run my blog and transcribe my poetry for me.” Tessa grins at the memory, threading her fingers through mine under the table. “I wound up falling for him before I ever saw him.”
“Ohhh, okay.” Grayson nods. “So that’s where the idea for Mabel’s blindness came from.” He turns to me with a stupid smirk to add, “And it looks like you have two legs, so I guess the similarities end there.”
Tessa chokes on her cappuccino, but I just shrug and say, “I guess they must.”
He doesn’t need to know. It wouldn’t change anything about this situation, after all. The stakes are the same.
For the next hour, I sit beside Tessa and try not to look bored.
It’s a challenge once she and Grayson start going back and forth over the tops of their computers, playing a volleyball match with words like inciting incident and fatal flaws and alliteration and prose.
Hanging out on the sidelines of this discussion would be a lot easier if I were still in school and had some homework to busy myself with.
But my work these days is all hands-on—instructing at the boxing gym and filling part-time day shifts as an apprentice at the Chronicle.
There’s no take-home work to keep myself busy when I’ve got nothing better to do.
Which is great. Except for times like this, when I have nothing better to do.
So I write out a few training schedule ideas on my phone for a kids’ boxing class I’ve been trying to convince Bruiser to start doing at the gym.
I come up with a week’s worth of drills easy enough for kids to handle without dying.
After that, I watch UFC compilation videos on mute, analyzing the best knockouts—simultaneously listening to Tessa and Grayson debate over some aspect of his stupid book.
Between fighting matches, I steal glances upward. I watch the way Grayson looks at Tessa. To her, it might seem platonic and harmless. But as someone who has a similar weakness, I know exactly what that look means.
And let’s just say the violence on my phone screen perfectly illustrates how I feel about it.
Over an hour later, the topic pivots to Tessa’s book, and she starts debating a timeline issue. I’m zoned out for most of it, watching two Brazilian guys grapple each other bloody, until Tessa turns to me with a question out of the blue.
“Wes, would three weeks be too soon for Barnes’s sutures to heal?”
“Uh, it depends on how many stitches he had. Was it AK or BK?”
“BK.”
“So, not as big an incision,” I conclude. “Yeah, he’d be healed up in three weeks, but he wouldn’t be able to put much pressure on it for a few months.”
When I glance up from my phone, I find Grayson staring with a bewildered expression, clueless as to why I’m a font of amputee wisdom.
It would be the easiest thing in the world to explain. But it’s more fun to skirt around the truth and say, “I’ve got a friend who lost his legs.”
Tessa grunts, going back to her laptop.
Grayson’s eyebrows jump. “Really. Wait, is he… the runner?”
“The runner?”
“Yeah, I’ve seen this guy running sometimes—he has these prosthetic legs; they’re like the ones you see in the Paralympics.”
“Running blades,” I supply, draining what’s left of my now-cold coffee. “Yep, that’s him.”
Tessa cuts me a thorny look, like Why are you lying to him? But I just shrug and give her a smirk, pretending I don’t know what she’s so annoyed about.
The last thing in the world I want Grayson Rhodes to feel for me is pity. Blood-curdling fear and intimidation, maybe. But not pity.
So I let him think I’m buddies with the Paralympic runner whose face he apparently never looked at closely enough to recognize that he’s sitting across from said runner right now.
Hey, it’s not my fault the guy has bad facial recognition.
He and Tessa go back to talking about the highfalutin literary aspects of the story, excluding me from the conversation for a while.
I eventually get up and clear the empty cups from the table, asking Tessa if she wants anything else to drink or eat.
She shakes her head no and encourages me to get something if I want—or, she says, if I’d rather go somewhere else, I can feel free to do so.
Is she encouraging me to leave? Or just trying to be nice because she can tell I’m bored out of my mind?
I insist that I’m fine and sit back down, checking the time on my phone.
Four forty-five. I don’t have to be at Bruiser’s until six.
Will there be any hope of dragging Tessa out of here before then?
I sigh under my breath, rocking my chair onto its back legs. Tessa stops typing, stands, and touches my shoulder. “Wes.”
I glance up, and she jerks her head in the direction of the door. I ignore the burn of Grayson’s gaze tracking me as I follow Tessa over to the entrance.
“Weston, I know you’re bored,” she says in a low voice. “Why don’t you go? You have better things to do with your time.”
“You’re the one who invited me to come.”
“I know, and I shouldn’t have. I didn’t think about how dull it would be for you—I’m sorry.”
I shrug. “I don’t mind. I like being with you, no matter what.”
She crosses her arms over her chest. “Well, don’t you have to get ready for work?”
“Not for another hour.”
She looks disappointed to hear that. Her gaze pivots out the windows to the street.
“What’s that face?” I take a step closer and put a hand on her shoulder. “You want me to leave, Tes, is that it?”
“I think that might be best.”
Something tightens in the pit of my stomach when she says that. My hand lowers, retreating to my side. “You saying you’d rather be… alone with him?”
“That’s not what I’m saying. Don’t twist my words. We just have a lot of work to do, and I don’t want you to—”
“Send me away now, and you know what that says to him.” My voice drops to a gravelly rasp. “You know what he’ll think, right?”