Friction (Red Hot Private Eye, Novella, Vol. 2) (10 page)

That was the summer that Sophie Hunter (aka Sophiebell) had moved into the house next door to Aunt Wendy. And right away—literally, starting immediately on moving day—Sophie had become Katie's shadow. Not that she’d minded! Katie had loved finally having someone, anyone other than a doll, to dress up and play tea party with.

Sophie’s dad, Mike, was a
fireman and her mom, Grace, was a nurse. Katie had babysat Sophie when Mike’s and Grace's shifts overlapped. Katie’s house felt a lot less lonely with a bouncing, laughing, full-of-life four-year-old in it. But Sophiebell wasn’t the only distraction the Hunters had brought with them when they moved to Harper's Crossing. They also brought Nick, Sophie’s older brother and Katie’s first love.

Nicholas Hunter was three months older than
Katie and he had never let her forget it. He had sandy blond hair and the most beautiful green eyes Katie had ever seen.

The day before school started in seventh grade, two weeks after the Hunters had moved in, Nick came to Katie’s door to get Sophie for dinner.
She'd never forget that day. Before he left the porch, he looked over his shoulder, his green eyes sparkling in the sun. They were even extra green due to the fact that he was wearing his favorite Fighting Irish t-shirt.
Swoon
!

He asked, “Hey, do you think you would want to be my girlfriend? It’s a lot easier to start a new school when you already have a girlfriend.”

He then proceeded to shoot her a smile she would later come to know had gotten him anything he’d wanted since he was an infant. And with good reason—it was one helluva doozy of a smile!

As much as Katie had wanted to act
like the smile didn’t affect her, she knew the heat she felt in her cheeks meant they were bright red. No way could she hide the evidence.

Still, that
didn't mean she had to acknowledge it. So she did what any super-cool eleven-year-old girl would have done when faced with Nick Hunter’s dreamy proposal.

She shrug
ged and said, “Yeah, whatever.”

“Sweet,” he smiled
.” I'll be here at 7:45 so we can walk to school together tomorrow.”

He then jumped off her porch before she could say another word. She slowly closed her front door and, once it shut, started to scream and run around in circles until she fell on her couch in utter exhaustion. Katie always did lean towards the dramatic.

Katie had no way of knowing then that the relationship she had just entered would last for the next six years of her life and end in tragedy.

As she drove past
the sign marking Harper’s Crossing city limits, Katie’s chest constricted tightly and tears stung her eyes at the thought of the senseless tragedy. The summer after Nick and Katie's senior year of high school, Nick had been out late one night joyriding and had tragically driven his truck off Spencer Point.

Hours later, when the police pulled the truck out of the steep embankment, they found a nearly lifeless body inside. Nick
lay in a hospital bed in a deep coma for three weeks following the accident. Katie and his family were by his side every moment the hospital staff would allow them to be.

Finally
, his parents, Mike and Grace, made the most horrific decision any parent could ever have to make. They took Nick off life support.

His funeral
was held three days later, and Katie left that very same night to go stay with her grandmother in Chicago. She’d needed to escape. That was the last time she had set foot in Harper's Crossing.

Until today.

Driving through the town a
s she took in her surroundings, Katie barely recognized it. The last time she had been in Harper's Crossing, it contained two traffic lights and one four-way stop. Today there seemed to be a traffic light or four-way stop at every intersection!

Katie’s eyes scanned the area where Pickler
s' field had been. She was shocked to see that the field she had learned to ride her bike in when she was five, played tag in, attempted and failed to smoke a cigarette in when she was thirteen, and spent almost every Friday and Saturday night parking in with Nick after he turned sixteen and got his black Chevy truck was now a strip mall.

Coming up to yet another stop light
, Katie did a double take. The quaint, one-story hospital she had been admitted to when she had suffered from chicken pox and had a temperature of 104 at age six, had her tonsils removed when she was eight, and spent three weeks practically living in when she was eighteen, keeping her vigil beside Nick’s motionless body as he lay in a coma was now a four-story hospital that looked to be straight out of the pages of Architectural Digest. And if the exterior was any indication, it was now state-of-the-art.

As she continued on
, she mentally counted four McDonalds’, three Burger Kings, and two Taco Bells since she had entered the city limits. This was quite a contrast to her days in Harper’s Crossing, when there had only been one fast food restaurant in town—a Dairy Queen. It had been the local hang out for all the pre-teens and teens. Katie noted sadly that the Dairy Queen, which was another place that held so many of her teenage memories, had also been obliterated at some point in the past decade. It was replaced by an Office Depot.

Then a
s she made the left turn onto her childhood street, she audibly exhaled in relief.

From what she could see
, nothing had changed on Harper Lane. Certainly not the houses, which were still all painted in one of three color combinations – blue and yellow, green and white, or blue and white.

And
judging by the few neighbors she saw out on their lawns, the people hadn’t changed either. Mrs. Belmont stood watering her yard in that same pink and green moo moo she had worn since Katie could remember. Mr. Peters still mowed his lawn in white shorts that were two sizes too small and black socks that he pulled all the way up to his knees, a cigarette precariously dangling out of his mouth.

As she pulled into the driveway of her aunt’s two-story home (
painted in the white with blue trim option, for that Mediterranean flair,
Katie thought with a small smile), she felt a confusing combination of relief, nostalgia, sadness, and anxiety. This was it. Katie was home.

She opened the door to her rented blue Honda Accord
, took in a deep breath, and let out a cleansing sigh. The air smelled of a familiar combination: sweet from Mrs. Greyson’s beautiful flower bed and fresh from the trees that lined the street. She let her head fall back, soaking in the warming rays of sunlight. The sun in the sky may very well be the same one that shone in California, but somehow, standing in her Aunt’s driveway, it felt different. It felt comforting.

With a renewed sense of calm, she moved to the back of the car, popped the trunk, and reached in for her suitcases.
As she pulled them from the car, she was stopped cold in her tracks by a familiar voice.

“Need a hand
, Kit Kat?” the deep voice sounded from behind her.

A shudder rippled through her body and the hairs on the back of her neck stood up. Her carry-on slipped from her shoulder and dropped
with a thud on the cement driveway.

“Jason?” she said, her voice a whisper of disbelief.

Katie had known she would have to face Jason at some point on her trip home. He was, after all, the best man in Sophie’s wedding—which made perfect sense, seeing as how Sophie was marrying Jason’s little brother, Bobby. She didn’t need to possess psychic powers to foresee that their paths would cross. She’d just thought she would have had a little more time to prepare herself before she came face to face with him.

She had also been
banking on the theory that when the inevitable face-to-face occurred, she would have the buffering (protective?) shield of a room full of people surrounding them. However, that did not seem to be the case.

Nope.
Here they were. Alone.

She stood
, frozen, with her back to him, staring down at her pink and black suitcase, wishing with all her might that she could just climb into the trunk and hide. Logically she knew that plan was probably not the most mature response to this encounter—and also, shall we say, not the most subtle. Still, it was tempting. Because as the realization sank in that the extra time and buffer-people she so desperately needed to get through this encounter with Jason
were not flipping forthcoming
, Katie felt as though the air was literally being sucked from her lungs.

Great.
Panic attack number two. Here we go. And right in front of Jason.
The hiding-in-the-trunk move was sounding better by the second.

--- ~ ---

Jason Andrew Sloan had chestnut brown hair, whiskey-colored, soulful brown eyes, and a smile that could, as her Aunt Wendy always said, “melt butter in a freezer.” He was also the first person Katie had met in her kindergarten class at Harper's Crossing Elementary.

23 Years Ago

It was the first day of Kindergarten and Katie was paired up with a boy as a table buddy.

A BOY!
Could this day get any worse? The class’s first official assignment as kindergartners was to write their names on the white paper sitting on the desk in front of them and then tape it to the back of their seats.

Katie wrote her name in all capital letters and rainbow colors and taped it on the back of her seat, just as she
had been instructed to do. She was proud of finishing her assignment in time to go out for recess. She noticed her table buddy (The Boy!) had not.

After the first recess, when the kids came back into the classroom, she saw a few of them standing around her chair
and laughing. As she walked up behind them to sit in her seat, she saw that the 'ie' at the end of 'Katie' on the nameplate she had been so proud of had been crossed out, and the word 'Kit' had been written in front of the 'Kat' that remained of her original creation.

She was so embarrassed. Why would anybody ruin her name paper? She looked over to see her table buddy Jason (The Boy!) smiling a toothless grin from ear to
ear as he patted her chair “I think this is your seat, Kit Kat,” he said.

All the kids started laughing and Katie just slumped down in her chair, furious at her table
buddy aka The Boy aka Jason Sloan.

Jason never admitted to being the one who had defaced her beautiful rainbow
-colored name paper but she knew deep down in her heart he was the culprit. And she would never forget it, just like no one ever forgot the nickname. From that day on, Katie Lawson was Kit Kat.

Well, to all the kids in Harper’s Crossing Elementary anyway.

Present Day

His deep voice interrupted her thoughts now.

“Wow, all this time and you know it’s me without even having to turn around. I guess that means I still got it,” he said with his trademark cocky tone. A tone that had always amused Katie, not that she would ever let him know that. His ego was big enough.

Jason had had girls swooning over him for as long as she had known him. In fact, Katie maintained to this day that their sixth grade math teacher
, Mrs. Carson, had had a crush on him. Whenever Jason would turn on the charm, usually to get out of detention for not completing his homework or being tardy, Mrs. Carson would just smile as her cheeks turned a light shade of red and say, “Oh, Jason, if you were just ten years older…”

Mrs. Carson never finished the sentence but Katie always knew what she meant, and Jason never got detention
—at least in that class.

I
t’s not like his charm only worked on older women either. Jason had always had girls eating out of his hand and he knew it. There wasn’t a single girl in Harper's Crossing who wouldn’t do just about anything to get Jason’s attention.

Well, there was one girl.
Katie.

“Oh yeah, you still got it, Mr. Sloan,” Katie said
, forcing herself to speak, trying to buy herself even a few more seconds before she would have to face him. “If by 'it' you mean the maturity of a five-year-old, then yes, you definitely still have it.”

Her words sounded strained between her shallow breaths.
Not only was she having trouble keeping the oxygen from escaping her lungs, it also seemed as though all of the oxygen had somehow disappeared around her. Deliberately and methodically, she slowly breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth, trying desperately to remain as calm as possible.

She reminded herself firmly that she
had
to be calm in hopes of staving off panic attack #2. She absolutely couldn't think about how humiliating it would be to fall to pieces in front of Jason or fear would take over—her heart would start to race, her breathing would quicken, and it would all be downhill from there. Reaching up with heavy arms, Katie shut the trunk of the car so that she could lean on it for strength.

“Come on Kit Kat
, you know you always loved that nickname,” Katie heard Jason say playfully, but his voice sounded as if it were coming from a long distance, across a great expanse. She felt his hand grasp her arm, and then she felt her body being turned in his direction.