6. At the Farm
SIX
Avery rappedher knuckles on the open door of her advisor’s office and stepped inside. “I have an update,” she announced. “There’s a display of student drawings upstairs, and I made myself fall in love with one showing a waterfront.”
When classes started two weeks before, Melinda Scheer found it difficult to disguise her shock when the tall, bright-eyed girl from Connecticut spilled half her life story and asked her opinion on how to handle classes where she might be asked to study or create artwork that reminded her of her brother’s death. She admired Avery’s stated goal to improve her own coping skills and not ask for accommodations, and encouraged her to celebrate the incremental steps.
“How did you do that?”
Avery thumped her chest. “Sheer force of will. And I’m going to keep doing it. My brother loved the water. I refuse to let this hold me back.”
“I’m really proud of you. You should be proud of yourself.”
“I’m all in for a fresh start. Something about being in the place where everything was sad was keeping me down, I think.”
“I’m excited to see what you do with a fresh canvas.” Melinda squeezed her shoulder. “Where’s your picture? I don’t think anyone’s put up new work since my spring classes.”
Avery checked her watch. The boy in the orange hat would be in the lounge if they were sticking to the awkward schedule they’d developed. She led her professor down the hall, and her shoulders drooped when she saw the lounge was empty.
She pointed to the drawing over her couch. “It reminds me of the waterfront in Charleston, South Carolina,” she said. “At the risk of over-simplifying, I see it like a coloring exercise. Every time I come here, I paint the houses with different colors in my mind. I paint the water, too.”
“What colors are they today?”
“Peach and blush and lemon.” She pointed house by house. “The skinny one with the bay windows is baby blue. This one with the porches is almost always mint.”
“Mint?”
“If I had gold paint, I’d dab it in the corners and make it like the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. The Winter Palace is Charleston times a million, and both of them stealing from the same French styles, including the color schemes.”
Melinda laughed. “I hear wheels turning.” She unclipped the paper from its display wire and held it out. “Take it with you. Call it a trophy and pick a new one to conquer.”
“Are you serious?”
“These have been up all summer, so I’m sure the artist won’t mind. When I bring the first round from fall classes, these will probably end up in slurry in the print shop. It’s yours.”
“I want to come with you,” Natasha said, whirling around in her desk chair. She pouted at her roommate. “Why can’t your brother invite whoever he wants to a party at his own house?”
“Weird-ass team traditions.” Avery plucked a stray blonde hair from her black sundress and bent to check her roots in the mirror. Natasha hadn’t stopped asking about meeting football players since the day she met Justin. “He lives at this place they call The Farm, and it’s a few sets of duplexes that have been rented to football guys as long as anyone can remember. Justin says a former player owns them. The deal is always that they don’t have wild parties there. It’s supposed to be chill and relaxed, without a ton of strangers. One guest per teammate, and no one is supposed to be on phones. No cameras.”
“That actually sounds pretty nice. Does your brother have another single friend I could borrow to chill and relax with?”
Avery patted concealer on an ominous pink bump on her jawline. “I’ll be on the lookout. This Isaac guy is apparently sent straight from heaven, but I’m already one hundred percent certain I’m not dating him.”
“Why not?”
“Justin says he’s a lot like me. Who wants a relationship with someone like themselves? Other than a similar sense of humor, which you need or there might be bloodshed, I’d like someone to balance me a little.”
“Like the broody boy in the orange hat.” Natasha spun in her chair again.
“Unlikely.” She reached for her sandals. “It was funny and maybe a little mysterious for the first week, but honestly, now he’s just straight-up rude. Tash, I sat there and read aloud in French for five minutes the other day just to be a pain in his ass, and he didn’t move. I didn’t even annoy him enough to make him leave.”
“You’re fluent in French. Try Japanese if you want to piss him off with pronunciation.”
“Maybe I will. He’s got something going on. Something is eating at that guy, and I guess I’m low-key obsessed with figuring him out.”
Low-key obsessed? Drawn to him like a magnet was more like it. Every day, she offered a greeting to the silence. And every day, she thought maybe the next day would be the one he spoke to her with more than brown eyes laden with hurt and lips that never curled into a smile.
“And you said he’s cute.”
Her palms tingled. “He’s sexy as hell, he always smells good, and I want to eat him. That’s not the point.”
“Eat him. I’d like to meet this Isaac guy if you’re not interested.”
She spotted him pacing outside the residence hall near the benches where they agreed to meet, and sized him up before he spotted her. He was built like her brother, another linebacker—tall and broad-shouldered, bulky enough to pass-rush and lean enough to beat a running back. His dark hair gleamed chestnut in the waning sun, and as he tugged at the starched collar of his shirt while he paced, Avery thought that the much-vaunted new best friend—Justin’s poorly disguised setup—looked downright nervous.
“Isaac?”
He stopped mid-stride and pivoted on his heel. “Avery. Isaac Fields. It’s so nice to finally meet you, and I hate parties.”
She shook his hand and didn’t miss a beat. “It’s nice to meet you, too. I hate oceans and boats. Do you want to get a taco?”
“A taco?”
“It’s not a party, an ocean, or a boat.”
“There are lots of things that are none of those,” he countered, relaxing his furrowed brows when he smiled. “Why didn’t you ask me if I wanted to get a cat? Or a popsicle?”
“Oooh, a popsicle sounds about right after a hot day.” She pulled her phone from the pocket of her dress. “Want me to find some? We’d be so badass, showing up at a party with bomb pops since we can’t BYOB like the big kids.”
“We can’t just enjoy our popsicles in peace while we deconstruct everything Justin ever told each of us about the other?”
She dropped the teasing facade. “Hey, new friend. He said you wanted to go to this thing tonight. It’s football people. Those are your people.”
He shrugged, forcing an awkward smile she saw straight through.
“I’m sorry if he made you feel like you have to take me. We don’t have to go.”
“It’s not that. Or you. I said I wanted to go, and I do, but I’m not great with new environments and people I don’t know,” he said, pacing again and taking measured breaths. “I’ll know people there from the team, but it’s different outside of football where we’re all sorted into who goes where and with whom, and it’s…” He faltered. “It’s a lot. For me.”
She put her hand on his elbow. Freshman anxiety in Avery wriggled with excitement, and in Isaac, in just a touch, she felt it vibrate with fear. “Let Justin have his stupid date, and we’ll go hang somewhere and make ourselves best friends without an intermediary or any pressure. You pick where to go.”
“I appreciate the offer. But half the team has been listening to him brag about you for the better part of two years, so your presence is expected.”
“Wait. I’ve got a receiving line of his making, and that bastard put it on you to walk me through it so he can go on a date with some random girl he met Tuesday? Oh, he’s asking for trouble. Let’s get him.”
Isaac ducked his head and his smile turned genuine. “What do you have in mind?”
Taking his arm, she steered them down the sidewalk to the student parking lots. “We’ll get to that. Before we plot my brother’s payback for abandoning us, I’m going to say something while we’re more or less strangers, and you can forgive me for a huge overstep by saying I’m just ignorant.”
“Okay, but we’re only strangers for about three more minutes.”
“I’m working on my fear of boats and the ocean with a little amateur exposure therapy. For the last two weeks, I’ve been forcing myself to look at a picture of a waterfront. That’s the kind of thing that might have given me nightmares last year. I’m sure you know why.”
“Justin told me a little about your brother. How’s it going with the picture?”
“Really well. It’s hanging over my desk in my room now, and I’m going to get another picture soon.”
“I know where you’re going with this.”
“My parents didn’t get me and Justin any counseling after our brother died. We had to fend for ourselves in that arena—school therapists and self-help. It’s been kind of haphazard. But I’m tired of being afraid, so I decided to try this, one picture at a time, and see what I can do.”
“Quarterback sneak. You’re throwing all your weight behind a short gain for a big benefit.”
Avery laughed. “God, you are a football wonk.”
“Loud and proud. Football is life.”
“I propose we give you some limited exposure to something non-football. Something that makes you anxious.”
“If we’re going to be besties, you can’t propose to me. This isn’t that kind of movie.”
She flicked his shoulder. “If we have to go tonight, let’s make our own rules. We’ll set a time to leave so you don’t worry that the torture will never end, and we’ll have a safe word for emergency extractions.”
“Okay. You sold me with the safe word idea.” He wrangled his keys from his pocket. “If it’s a game, I like it. I like playbooks and play clocks. And popsicles. I am all about the popsicles.”
She checked the time. “Let’s go there, run the clock for sixty minutes, and then get popsicles to celebrate.”
“Sixty minutes, or the safe word. Which is what, exactly?”
“Yours is ‘peach’ and mine is ‘eggplant.’”
He faked a gasp. “Your brother told me you were a good girl.”
“Oh, I’m a delightful girl. Our safe word is ‘bubblegum.’”
He offered a pinky, and she hooked hers around his.
Justin greeted them at the door, casting a watchful eye over Isaac’s shoulder. “Mindy will be here in about fifteen minutes,” he said. “Bonfire and keg are out back, and water and soda are in the fridge, since you are both law-abiding children.” He tapped the side of Avery’s head. “I’ll find you guys when she gets here.”
“You’ll have to hunt us down,” Isaac said. “We’re mapping the place for laser tag.”
Avery tugged his elbow. “We’re totally playing laser tag. Can we? We have to. No one ever wants to go.”
“Oh, I’ll go.” He reached for his phone, and stopped. “I guess I can’t look anything up right now.”
“You’re not supposed to. Justin said if your phone’s out, you’re out, more or less.”
“That’s the weirdest party rule ever, but it’s pretty nice to know that if you have one too many and start acting stupid, you won’t be on everyone’s social media in the morning.”
“That’s precisely the point.” She led him by the hand to a loveseat in the living room. “Here’s a decent view,” she said, plopping down on the orange plaid cushion. “You point to teammates and tell me what I should know, and I’ll receive them here like a princess if they wish to meet me.”
“I don’t have a sister, Avery.”
“Huh?”
“I’m the oldest of four, and my brothers and I are so close. We always wondered if one of us had been a girl, how the dynamic would have changed. You sort of feel like one of them. That’s probably pretty weird to say right now since we just met.”
“It’s definitely more comfortable than Justin preaching your virtues to me while he swears up and down it’s not a marketing pitch, just my new bestie.”
“Whoa.” He tapped his hands together for a time-out. “Was he marketing me?”
“You’re a business major from a small town in Michigan where you were also a wrestler and homecoming king. Your twin brothers are high school seniors who will probably come here to play next year, and your best locker room singing is usually something in the big-band era. He says ‘Take the A Train’ is especially good. Shall I go on?”
Isaac stared at his hands and fought back a laugh. “Well, I’m flattered, because he obviously cherishes you. Can we leverage this to get him back for ditching us for the invisible woman?”
“Mindy.”
“The enemy.”
“Let’s leverage. It would serve him right if we sent him a wedding invitation and then we didn’t show up. I’m going to grab a water before we get too far into the plot. Do you want one?”
“Please.”
She scanned the rapidly filling room. “Save my seat.”
Someone called Isaac’s name as she wove between people on her way to the kitchen, and she stopped short when she rounded the corner.
The boy in the orange hat sat on the counter with a cup of beer lifted halfway to his lips for a drink. He froze when he saw her.
He wasn’t dressed for a party, and may as well have just come from the art building lounge in chino shorts and white sneakers. She watched him steady his breathing as his black T-shirt stretched across his toned chest. The hat was backward over a mess of brown curls, and Avery read the tension gathering in his arms and in the muscles of his neck.
“Hi,” she said.
He nodded and cleared his throat.
She tried again. “Nice to see you outside the lounge.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Just looking for another way to hang out with you and talk to myself. What are you doing here?”
His brows shot up. “Really?”
Avery sighed and opened the refrigerator, then bent low to wrestle two bottles of water from a case. Really? was just short of Don’t you know who I am? “I don’t know who you are, and I don’t care,” she muttered, cutting back across the living room as her heart sank. The unlikely connection she imagined crossing their couches was nothing under the harsh fluorescent light in the kitchen. He was a vessel for daydreams, and the mysterious hurt and frustration that drew her to him was nothing more than an artist’s will to make something out of nothing.
A sudden panic broke her stride.
He was a football player. The only men at the limited-access party would be her brother’s teammates, the ones who knew all about her.
Isaac practically leapt from the loveseat when he saw her, abandoning the girl who claimed Avery’s seat only seconds after she got up. “I missed you,” he declared, grabbing her hand in the middle of the room. “Stranger danger over there. Someone’s single friend.”
“In the kitchen, too.” She handed him a bottle and drank from her own.
“Let’s try the bonfire.”
“Tell me something funny first. Justin said you told dad jokes.”
“Hold on.” He cupped her chin and turned her face to his. “Avery, are you okay?”
His hazel eyes were pools of calm in the turbulence around them.
“Of course I am. I won’t leave you unattended anymore.”
“We’re sticking together.” He snuck an arm around her waist and pulled her to his side when he recognized someone. “Cam. What’s up, buddy?”
Avery turned and followed his gaze, and her breath caught in her throat.
“Fields. It’s about time you got out a little bit. Who’s this?”
Isaac nudged her forward. “Avery, Cameron Porter. Cam, this is Avery Whitman.”
The embarrassed flush in her cheeks from their brief encounter in the kitchen heated again, and she clutched Isaac’s elbow instead of putting out a hand in greeting.
He scanned her from head to toe and stunned her with a shy smile. Cameron Porter. Justin’s friend, the reluctant rising star who retreated into a shell of himself and only came alive on the field, was the boy in the orange hat.
Isaac leaned toward Cam as if to continue a conversation, and Avery tugged his shirt. “We should go find Justin.” She whispered, keeping her lips close to his ear to hide the wobble in her voice. “The mystery lady should be here by now. And I need a… a…”
She couldn’t remember the word, and she had to get away from Cam before he smiled again and unwound her spine.
“I need a bubblegum popsicle,” she said, louder than intended.
Isaac nodded gravely and tightened his arm around her waist. “We are all about the popsicles.” He punched Cam’s shoulder and pulled Avery into the hall. “See you, buddy.”