Chapter Twenty-Eight
Susie
I’m almost desperate enough to talk to Liz about what’s going on with Bryan. But I can’t make myself ask.
She’s at her desk with the phone to her ear while she puts the finishing touches on her scrapbook of the football season. It may as well be a scrapbook for Bryan alone. We won the last game, and he ran for eighty-something yards, though he didn’t get a touchdown in spite of trying twice. Dane came through with a pass to Chuck for the win.
She rises and hangs up the phone. I want to ask her who she was talking to, but I don’t because she’s frowning.
“What’s wrong?”
“When I called Bryan over Thanksgiving to let him know that he got the waiter job, his mom said she would give him the message and was very tight-lipped about where he was. She’s usually more friendly. I just found out he went to Eldy’s house for the long weekend.”
“That’s… odd,”
I say, not sure if it is odd. I know he has issues with his dad.
She shrugs. “It’ll be good to see him tonight. I haven’t talked to him since right after the last game.”
Me neither.
Bryan didn’t show up to Fletcher’s party two weeks ago, and Liz called him to ask why, but he only said he had homework to do. That didn’t make sense to either of us because he missed our tutoring sessions after that, and then we barely saw him after the last game except for a quick chance to congratulate him. I was at Liz’s side, so it felt stilted.
“He had a lot of press and other people wanting to talk to him after that last game,”
I say. “Maybe there were NFL people there too.”
She chuckles. “You mean scouts? I’m sure he did. Eldy said there’s at least one team interested, but Bryan won’t talk about it.”
My heart blips like a champagne bottle popping. “That’s so exciting.”
No matter what else is going on—or not going on—between us, all three of us, I genuinely hope he gets to play in the NFL.
“I think he might actually get drafted to the pros.”
Her entire demeanor shows pure, thrilled excitement as if it were her dream come true and not his. Maybe it is her dream. Maybe they talked about their dreams together all these years so that they feel like when the other person’s dream comes true it’s the same as their own.
The idea fills me with too many wistful emotions, bordering on jealousy, I’m ashamed to acknowledge. I push my feelings aside.
“I bet he’ll make it,”
I say. “Then we can say we knew him when.”
She laughs. “We’ll still know him. He won’t forget about us. He’s not like that.”
“He’ll still know you.”
I force a smile, but it doesn’t match hers.
“Maybe he’ll have news about his NFL prospects tonight,”
Liz says. “But I can’t ask him or he’ll accuse me of bugging him. You ask him.”
I laugh. “He’ll just ignore me. He’s good at ignoring questions he doesn’t want to answer.”
“You’ve really gotten to know him, haven’t you?”
Liz asks. I squirm, turning away with a shrug, going back to the book in front of me as if I’m reading it.
The time we spent together in his room that night pops into my head like it’s a dream or something that happened long ago instead of a few weeks ago. After he missed Fletcher’s party, I had to admit to myself I’d been counting on another few hours alone with him. I’d been hoping for more of the intimacy, to unlock the feelings I have for him for years, in spite of the overwhelming guilt I get alongside these feelings.
When he didn’t show up for tutoring and gave me no reason when I asked him about it in class, I wasn’t surprised that he wasn’t anywhere to be seen after the last game.
Then we were all off for Thanksgiving, which felt like going home to a different world. The world where Dad’s still waiting on a job offer and we worked hard at not talking about the elephant in the room. It was a relief to return to school yesterday.
Getting nowhere and tired of my useless obsessing, I shut my book and give voice to my fear, albeit in a veiled way. “We’re supposed to have a tutoring session tonight, and I wonder if he’s going to show.”
Liz laughs, clearly pleased with the prospect of seeing him tonight. “You can ask him when he gets here.”
She looks at her Timex. “Any minute now. Let’s go down and meet him when he comes in. I told the cook I’d show him the ropes.”
“You should go down by yourself then,”
I say, cringing at the idea of her dragging me along like a third wheel, and I can’t do it anymore.
“Don’t be silly. He’ll be glad to see you, too. He likes you. He told me how helpful you’ve been and how grateful he is for your tutoring. I told him he should get you a gift at the end of the semester.”
Her words press down heavily on the sore spot of my guilty conscience. “Go without me. I’ll be down for dinner.”
She gets my message and leaves.
Dread and anticipation fight for control and unsettle me as I take my time to go downstairs to dinner. My legs feel shaky as I walk, hearing the escalating voices coming from the dining room, competing with each other to be heard, everyone excited after being away all weekend.
At the doorway, I look around for an empty seat anywhere but next to Liz, where she saved one for me. Shit. Taking a deep breath of the aroma of spaghetti sauce and garlic bread, I slide into my seat at the end of the table. Next to Liz.
“You missed the big news,”
Liz says. “Bryan has an agent to negotiate for him with any teams interested in him.”
She clutches my arm, digging in with her excitement.
I glance up and see Bryan standing there with a basket of garlic bread. He places it on the table and leans in between Liz and me and says close to her ear, “I can hear you talking about me.”
His voice is accusatory.
He barely looks at me, but I need to bail Liz out and change the subject. I blurt, “Are you staying for your tutoring session tonight?”
He turns to me as he straightens, his expression unreadable. Liz is watching us, her eyes bouncing between us, and I know she can see and feel the tension. Was I trying to deflect his attention to help her, or help myself? I look away.
He says, “Yes.”
But there’s no inflection of any kind in his voice. He’s all business.
Shit. Maybe he doesn’t care at all about English comp class anymore, now that the season is over. He only cares about football. And Liz.
Then what was that night about? We shared so much, so many private things.
I hardly eat a thing and don’t say much at dinner. When it’s over and Bryan comes by to clear dishes, I say, “I’ll go get my notebook and be back down in a minute.”
He doesn’t nod or say anything. Instead, taking a wet cloth, he bends and starts wiping the table down, dismissing me whether he means to or not.
When I come back downstairs—after convincing Liz she needs to stay in the room and finish her accounting homework so she can concentrate—I find Bryan seated at a table, bent over his papers with his brows furrowed.
“Let me see,”
I say as I join him. He hands the draft of his essay to me, and I read it.
“Pretty good.”
I smile at him. Then I point out a couple of places where he might want to change the order of his words or phrases and a paragraph to move down.
He sighs as he draws arrows in the places where I suggested changes and circles the words and phrases. “I’ll need to rewrite this. It’s a fucking mess.”
“You have great penmanship,”
I say. And then I blush when he looks at me in surprise because my comment borders on a non sequitur, not exactly following his comment about rewriting.
“Thanks.”
He turns to a fresh page in his notebook and starts writing.
I watch for a few seconds, feeling like he doesn’t need any more help tonight. Or maybe for the rest of the semester.
Liz pops her head in the open dining room door, with Pemberly standing close behind her.
“Do you want anything at Irma’s? Pemberly and I are going for a French fry run.”
“Irma’s? The food truck all the way over near the Frats? We just had dinner,”
I say, though I didn’t eat much.
She shrugs and waits for Bryan’s answer.
“I’ll have a meatball sub.”
I laugh.
“Writing essays is hard work,” he says.
“We’ll be back in a jiffy,” Liz says.
Bryan pulls out his wallet, handing over a bill, and they take off.
“Now that football season is over, you probably don’t care about your grade in English comp anymore,”
I say, realizing I’m making a bold assumption. I hope it’s bold enough to provoke him into giving me some answers to the mystery of what’s going on with him.
“I don’t care about getting a B minus, or even a C plus, but I do want to pass. Mom expects me to graduate next semester, so I can’t afford to take this class again.”
“So you care about what your mother thinks.”
I’m thinking out loud, speaking before I consider my words, always a dangerous thing. Something about this guy makes me want to act dangerously.
He stops writing and looks hard at me, trying to intimidate me, but I stare right back, and after a few beats, I quirk a brow as if to say, Well? What are you going to do about it?
Then his mouth quirks up on one side, and I see his dimple, and triumph shoots through me. On the heels of that elation, a low-level hum settles in my lower belly, with unbearable excitement stirring there, more dangerous than whatever I’ve experienced before in my life. Or at least that’s how it feels. Unsettled, wanting the forbidden, and vulnerable to all manner of undoing and destruction.
“You get it. You get me.”
His voice is low and raspy, and I’m not sure what he means because I’m too captured by my needy, wanton longing for him.
“That you don’t care about much? Or that you only pretend you don’t?”
He chuckles, and the smirk that breaks his hard, beautiful face makes him look like the wolf he is. The very dangerous big bad wolf. No one’s idea of a pet. Nothing cuddly about him.
“I care. Deeply and absolutely.”
“About…”
“My family. Their well-being.”
“And football.”
He laughs. “Football is a means to an end. Like farming, only more… fruitful.”
“I see. And do you care about your well-being?”
He gives me a look that says, What do you think? I’m afraid I think the answer is no.
“And your friends?”
“The friends I care about come under the heading of family,”
he says without hesitation, as if he’s had this all worked out in his head. Or maybe it’s all self-evident to him, or taught, drilled into him from a young age. By his father?
“Like Liz.”
He nods. And stares like he’s waiting for me to ask.
But I have no intention of asking him whether he cares about me, whether he considers me a friend to the point of family. The idea confuses me.
The possibility that the answer is no scares me.
“You’re an unusual man,” I say.
He nods. “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“Recognizing me, that I’m a man, that I am who I am.”
I have nothing to say to that. So I reach for something flip to say, to diffuse the uncomfortable intensity, and to distract me from my cowardice for being unable to hear what he thinks of me.
“But you’re still a horny college boy underneath it all.”
He laughs. A real, normal laugh with no edge, no caution, just for the hell of it, because he thinks I’m funny. The things that sound does to me are indescribable, more than watching 4th of July fireworks over the breaking surf, or getting kissed for the first time.
“Touche, princess.”
I let out an exaggerated sigh. I don’t want him to know how he affects me, or that the princess nickname is growing on me—at least when he says it. But I’m afraid he can see through me, see everything.
God, I’m in trouble. I need to deflect.
“So are you going to play football in the NFL or not?”
“Million-dollar question,”
he says, closing his notebook and closing his mouth on the subject of the NFL.
After Liz and Penderly bring the food back from Irma’s, Liz insists that Penderly stay, and they sit with Bryan and me.
“Let’s raid the kitchen for drinks,”
she says, taking my arm in invitation to join her, the kind of invitation I can’t say no to without making a fuss.
In the kitchen, she rushes to the refrigerator in the back, towing me with her. I expect her to open the fridge door, but she turns to me, flushed and excited.
“This is it. I’m going to flirt shamelessly with Penderly and make Bryan so jealous that we might need to break up a fight.”
“That’s so bloodthirsty.”
I say this while I try and make sense of her plan and whether she’s crazy or I am. The only thing that’s clear to me is that she’s still as attached to the idea of Bryan as her boyfriend as ever.
“You don’t really think that’ll work, do you? This isn’t an episode of Three’s Company where that kind of crazy hijynx ends up working.”
She laughs. “Don’t worry. I’ve been watching him and biding my time, trying not to be too pushy, and now I think he’s ready for a shock to his system—not to mention a blow to his ego. Once he thinks someone else is interested, he’ll step up. He’ll be shocked into realizing what he’s missing.”
I shake my head, alternatively wondering when she turned into an I Love Lucy screwball comedy character and wondering whether she’s right and I’m the one out of touch.
“Besides,”
she adds, “those kind of scheming scenes in sitcoms always go wrong because it’s funnier that way. In real life, jealousy isn’t funny at all.”
“That’s right. It’s not. It’s serious, and I hope you know what you’re doing.”
“You never doubted me before.”
The disappointment flashes and disappears from her face like it was a mirage, and a smile crashes through. “Don’t worry so much.”
She grabs a few cokes from the fridge, and we return to the dining room.
When I catch Bryan’s eye, I try to communicate some kind of warning. I end up feeling like the character in a sitcom as he gives me a squinty, puzzled look in return.
Liz starts right in as she sits, pulling her chair right up against Penderly’s like she’s creating a love seat. She leans in and whispers something in his ear to make him laugh and hands him a coke with a shockingly suggestive look on her face, as if she’s handing him the keys to her room. Then she pulls a nip from her purse, and after they take a few sips from the cokes, she splits the vodka nip between their drinks.
“Sorry I only have the one nip,”
she says, gazing into his eyes. “I drank the other two earlier to get through my accounting homework.”
I’m sitting on her other side, and Bryan is across from me. I want to leap over the table to join him, to put my hand over his eyes. Not that I want to desert Liz. Even if I think her plan is nuts and she’s acting like a cartoon character, I’m on her team all the way.
She was my friend first. Before my crush on Bryan took over, taking me by surprise and seems to have a stranglehold on me now.
Except how I feel is more than a crush. Too much more. I need to crush my bigger-than-a-crush crush. If I only knew how.
As Bryan bites into his sub, ignoring my side of the table, my tension grows because Liz and Penderly are doing an excellent job of acting the role of hot new couple, all into each other and all over each other. I need to diffuse the atmosphere and search for something to say.
“How’s your animal husbandry class going?”
I ask Bryan out of nowhere. The ridiculous question has the effect of getting everyone’s attention and making Penderly crack up.
“It’s coming along,”
Bryan says with a straight face.
Penderly’s laughter doubles up, and Liz snickers, reaching across the table to slap Bryan’s hand. The gesture is part sisterly scolding and partly intimate and knowing. But after a quick smoldering flicker of her eyes, she turns her attention back to Penderly.
I’m surprised when she kicks me under the table, and I have no idea what she wants me to do, but for once, I don’t care. I make up my mind to protect Bryan from whatever fall-out her manipulation may bring, in case he really does have feelings for her that he’s not acknowledging.
“I suppose you get straight A’s in your Ag classes,”
I say, absently picking at my food.
Bryan has no problem eating his sub. Right up until Liz throws herself onto Penderly’s lap as he tickles her, and she giggles, holding onto him, as they morph into a couple tangled in a sexy pose not meant for others to watch.
I move my chair back and stand. When I look back at Bryan, he’s already out of his chair, eyes averted, wrapping the uneaten half of his sub and shoving it in the bag.
“I’m outta here.”
Liz snaps her attention to him. “I can give you a ride.”
Pemberly looks disoriented as she slides from his lap back onto her own chair.
“No. I’d rather walk.”
I flinch on Liz’s behalf at the harshness of Bryan’s words. But Liz absorbed the sting because she’s an eternal optimist and maybe partly because she’s past buzzed and on her way to drunk.
I manage to catch up with Bryan as he pushes through the back door, and I grab his arm, surprising myself with the aggressive move.