3. The Storm
THREE
The Storm
SHANNON
Shannon woke to the tickle of his fingertips on her neck.
“Hey,” he whispered as her lashes fluttered. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“What time is it?”
“Not time to go.”
“I need to call my roommate. She’ll be worried.”
She rubbed her eyes and prayed she hadn’t left raccoon-like smudges of mascara beneath them, then blinked him into focus and gulped. The cool, white light of the street lamp through an unshaded corner of the window lit him like a high-contrast portrait, the curve and cut of every muscle in his arms and chest in stark relief. Athlete or not, he was obviously a gym rat, and enticingly not inclined to talk about it. She wouldn’t call it luck, but she’d survived one star athlete who never shut up about the grind, and thought fate might have finally dealt her the best of both worlds with the shy Mystery Boy who put in the work without bragging.
Her heart pounded just looking at him. Breathing in the smell of his skin and wrapped in the heat of his body, desire rushed over her again.
Reclined on a stranger’s bed, one sculpted arm outstretched and one finger still tracing lazily over her breasts, he offered a boyish smile before pulling her close for a kiss. “Text your roommate,” he said. “Don’t leave.”
“My phone is in my coat pocket. In the living room, or the kitchen.”
“We’ll get it in a minute.” He lowered his mouth to her neck, teasing and licking his way down while his hands found her hips and scooted her closer.
“Oh, will we?”
“Mmhm.” The warm cloud of his breath and his lips on her breasts and stomach heated her core and sent a cozy tingle through her limbs as she wrapped around him.
“Oh, that feels—wait, I really could just run out there and?—”
“One more time. Please.”
Hours before dawn, they sat in the parking lot behind her dorm in his green Jeep, the engine running to keep the heater on as they traded more facts about themselves between kisses. She had a sister in medical school. He nearly went to the naval academy. She learned to snowboard at three. He and his brothers liked to surprise their mother in matching clothes since she used to dress them all alike. She collected vintage Jadeite and thrilled for a rare piece in an online auction or at a flea market. He could patch drywall and plaster without a mark .
“I need to go in,” Shannon said, deflating as she read a message on her phone. “My roommate is glad I am alive, but suspicious of a stranger I met at a party.”
“I’ve never been a stranger to you,” he said, and leaned in for another kiss. “I never will be.”
“I’ll tell her all about you.” She squeezed his hand. “Almost all about you. She’ll think I’ve lost my mind.”
“And I’ll call you. I’ll see you later today, all right?”
Shannon nodded and tapped her screen. “It’s time to give up the name game, then. How are you going in my phone, Mystery Boy?”
“Caleb Fields.”
Her phone clattered to the floor, and the warmth in her cheeks from kisses and shared laughter drained down her neck and out her icy fingertips. Next to her, his voice echoed, asking if she was all right.
No. On several levels, no, absolutely not, nothing could be all right. She couldn’t look at him as the memory of her cousin’s words assaulted her ears. Missy would scream. Or cry, or try to kill her, maybe all three, but in what order, Shannon couldn’t guess.
And then—the lectures.
“Your little nowhere town is Sauganac, Michigan. You grew up in a white house right on the lake.” She stared out the windshield, trembling and afraid to meet his gaze.
“What? I didn’t tell you that. Did I?”
“Missy did. My cousin.”
Her cousin had been her best friend growing up, and throughout their childhood, Missy’s home in little Sauganac was her home as well on nearly every vacation and long weekend. In high school, they talked and texted often but had less time to visit, so Shannon never met Missy’s first boyfriend in person. Missy told her the summer before how annoyed she was they’d picked the same school, but she thought that among fifty thousand undergraduates, she wouldn’t bump into him. She’d even refused to meet Hayden that fall when Shannon started dating him, just to avoid his crowd, which meant?—
“You’re on the football team,” she said flatly. “She said you were.”
“What does that…” He gulped. “Your cousin is Missy Van Pelt. Oh, no.”
“Yeah,” she said, finally turning back to him. “I’m Shannon Van Pelt. I probably saw you around town every summer when we were kids.”
Not at the Sauganac beach, though, watching for storms. Caleb’s family had their own beach, the one where he made out with Missy when they were in high school, and he watched the lake from his back porch like the spoiled rich boy he was.
The panic and confusion in his eyes unnerved her, and she didn’t wait for him to make excuses. “Why didn’t you tell me you play football?” It was the only thing she could think to say.
“Why does that matter?”
“We were telling each other all this stuff,” she said, pressing her hands to her cheeks. “You didn’t think that was a big… I don’t know, a big thing you do?”
“You didn’t tell me you went out with Hayden Hamilton all last season. So what?”
“Well, I’m not going out with him anymore. Forgive me if I don’t enjoy the reductionist title of football ex,” she snapped.
“You’re also not a swimmer or a clarinet player or a snowboarder anymore, but you told me all of that. Do you still collect green glass?”
Shannon glared. “I bet you don’t even play chess anymore. So what if I dated him, and so what if I dumped him?”
“It’s what you did to him after you dumped him, that’s what.” He furrowed his brow, angry and disappointed in every glance. “I can’t believe you would do something like that.”
So Hayden had told them. He must have worn her betrayal around the locker room like a badge of disgrace, stooping to embarrass himself just to embarrass her, and maybe gain a few pity points with his stupid brotherhood. What his teammates thought never mattered. She’d done it for the right reasons, and Hayden could not know those reasons. Neither could Caleb. Not yet.
“If Missy talked to you about me, I think you should understand why I think faking a pregnancy hits pretty low,” he said.
Her eyes blazed. “You said that you never slept with anyone before.”
“And I hadn’t until last night. Ask her why. Go ahead.” He held his hands over a heater and didn’t look up. “I have nothing to be ashamed of.”
“Don’t you?”
Caleb turned as if in slow motion, lips slack, all bravado vanished from hazel eyes wide with worry .
“I know why you and Missy broke up. I know what you and your brothers did.”
The flush in his cheeks disappeared, and she thought that with one sharp intake of breath, he sucked all the air from the tiny space and left them both gasping. Pounding his chest, he regained his voice. “Missy runs her stupid mouth. She doesn’t know anything about it.”
“Maybe Hayden runs his stupid mouth, too.”
Hayden called him the Freshman Freak and bitched about the scouts who watched the four-star recruit more than they watched him. He joked about him being married to the game, uptight and full of himself, and too good to hang out or even talk to more than a handful of his teammates. A drag in the locker room, when they were supposed to be a team.
Shannon knew not to believe much of what he said. But just like Missy, Hayden had no reason to lie to her about someone she didn’t even know at the time.
“I think you should go,” he said through gritted teeth.
“I’m going.” She scooped up her phone.
“Someone who fakes a pregnancy scare just to mess with a guy is just sick.”
“I said I’m going. You can shut up now.”
“You made him think his entire future was shot to hell because the girl who broke up with him ended up pregnant, and you did it just to torment him.”
Yes , she wanted to scream. That was the point!
“I said I’m going,” she said instead. The color returned to her cheeks. “And you’ve got some nerve looking down on me if you’re the kind of guy who will stand by someone who hit his girlfriend. You want to talk about sick? Look at yourself.”
She cranked the rearview mirror hard to the left and felt it wobble in her hand, and fought the impulse to snap it off the windshield.
“Shannon.”
He gripped the steering wheel, white-knuckled, as his voice came out with a hoarse rasp. But if he said anything else, she didn’t hear it. The slam of the door shook her body like thunder, and she didn’t look back.