Chapter 43 – Waylon
chapter
forty-three
Waylon
Thanks to practice, I’d only pulled the four-hour shift while Josie was stuck on a six-hour shift.
My body had been buzzing the whole time anyway, the way it always did when she was in the same building, but we’d been slammed all afternoon, and there hadn’t been a single window to talk to her, let alone anything else.
God, what I would have done for a proper date night.
Something stupid and ordinary, like a couch and a movie.
She had this unhinged love of bad action movies, the worse the better, and anything with Seagal in it went straight to the top of her must-watch queue.
I kept a running list of the titles she rattled off.
Even texting was dangerous now because Marcus had started checking her phone. So I opened a new voice note instead and started talking, except autocorrect kept trying to turn Coulter into Cutter, and I’d rather say a thing out loud than explain to my phone who my best friend was.
“Hey, Flash.” I kept walking across the lot, the phone tucked up near my jaw.
My breath came out in clouds in front of me and looked amber under the lot lights.
“Just got out of practice. Patton had us on box drills for forty minutes, which is, respectfully, about thirty-nine minutes more box drills than any man needs in a single lifetime.”
I found the truck and dug out my keys.
“It is freezing out here. You know what I would honestly kill for right now? You, in a bed, and a hot chocolate, and I’d even share. But only if you promise not to steal every single marshmallow off the top like you did last time, you absolute menace.”
I almost stopped the recording there. I stood with my hand on the door handle instead. The metal was so cold, it went straight through my glove.
“You’re probably still over at Kimmy’s,” I said, “which means you’ve probably been drafted into the great paint swatch debate for longer than any reasonable human being should have to survive.
Trace says if anyone makes him pick a color, he’s going to gouge his own eyes out, so you’ve got that to look forward to. ”
That was when I heard the footsteps coming up behind me, too heavy to be anybody just heading home, and when I turned around, Marcus stood there. I shoved the phone into my jacket pocket without thinking and crossed my arms over my chest.
“What do you want, Kane?”
“Johnson.”
“Sup.”
“I’ve seen you watching her.” He stopped a few feet off, close enough that I could see the steam coming off him. “At the games. Around campus. Walking her to the track building that one Tuesday. You think I don’t clock that? I’m not blind.”
“You want to say something, then say it.”
He smiled at me with all his teeth. “Stay away from my girlfriend.”
“That’s the whole speech? I’ve already been clear with you, man. I’m not poaching anything.”
He shoved me with both hands flat to my chest, hard enough to rock me back on my heels.
I came back up straight, and I didn’t swing.
It would have been the easiest thing in the world.
My weight had already dropped into my right foot, and I forced myself to roll back onto my heels and clamped my jaw until my molars ached.
That was the version of myself I’d promised I would never be, the one who looked too much like the man I’d spent my whole childhood stepping in front of.
“Is that all you’ve got?” I kept my voice flat. “No amount of following me around or trying to goad me is going to make me lose my shit on you. But touch me again if you think you can. No refs out here, Kane. Put your hands on me one more time and see how it goes.”
“I will destroy her before I let you have her.” He looked me dead in the eye, and his voice never climbed once.
“I will burn every single thing she has. Her mother’s job.
Her scholarship. Whatever she thinks she’s built here.
I will take it apart piece by piece, and I will make sure she knows down to the last detail that it happened because of you. ”
“You actually have that kind of power,” I said, “or are you renting it from Daddy?”
He took a swing at me, but I read it a half second before it came and stepped off the line, and his fist sailed through the space where my head had just been.
“Fuck you. Stay away from her. She’s mine.” He dropped his voice low. “I don’t need to lay a hand on you, Johnson. I just need to lay a hand on her.”
“You saying all that because the swing missed?” I let myself laugh, and his face went a shade of red the cold hadn’t put there.
“I’ll wreck you for fun. For the sport of it.”
I grinned at him. “As lovely as that offer is, I’m going to have to pass. You’re really not my type.”
He held eye contact for two more seconds. “Fuck you. You stay away from my girlfriend.”
“It’s a little sad, you know,” I said. “Insisting on holding on to somebody who doesn’t want you. It’s pathetic, honestly.”
“She’s mine.”
“She’s a person, Kane. You don’t get to own her. And one of these days, real soon, she’s going to be free of you.”
“Keep talking, asshole. I’m going to make sure she loses everything she’s got, and that it’s got your name on it.”
“Maybe the thing to ask yourself,” I said, “is why you think you get to own a person in the first place.”
“Because I’ve been with her for years, and I control her.” His mouth twisted. “You think her scholarship review came out of nowhere? You think that just happened? That’s the kind of power I’m talking about. That’s what I can do with one phone call.”
Holy shit. I kept my face empty and gave him nothing back. Underneath, I was memorizing every bit of it, the scholarship, the one phone call, the exact order the threats came in.
“Again,” I said, “was that you, or was that Daddy?”
He lunged for me one more time, and one more time I wasn’t where he aimed. He didn’t get a third try because the weight room door banged open, and three of the guys spilled out into the cold. Their gym bags were slung over their shoulders, and Marcus’s whole posture changed.
“Stay the fuck away,” he said.
“Sure thing. You’re a broken record, but sure.”
He shouldered past me and stalked off toward the rec building. I stood there with my hand still flat on the cold side panel of the truck and watched him until he disappeared, and then I pulled my phone back out of my pocket.
The voice note was still running. I hit stop and watched the file save. It was three minutes and forty-one seconds long.
I pulled it up and dragged the playback back to the start. There were thirty seconds of ambient lot noise, the scrape of my boots across the salted asphalt, and my own dumb voice going on about marshmallows. Then came the footsteps that weren’t mine, and then his voice, clear as anything:
Johnson.
I’ve seen you watching her.
I scrubbed forward through the file, and it was all there. Every word he’d said, recorded clean and time-stamped.
I pulled up Aaron’s contact and hesitated a second. My agent was the one person in my life who could actually do something with three minutes and forty-one seconds of Marcus Kane running his mouth, and do it without it blowing back on her.
Me: Hey. I have something you need to hear. Call me when you’re free.
I hit Send, and the whoosh of it sounded loud in the quiet of the cab.
He’d just handed me the whole thing himself, standing in an empty lot running his mouth because he couldn’t help it. Now I had to put it in the right hands and keep it pointed away from Josie.