Quarterback Bait (7 page)

Meanwhile, Anya was nodding her head like the matter was
decided. She stood and stretched elaborately, before holding out a hand to the
Pastor, who took it. She leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek, engulfing
me for an instant in a hot cloud of patchouli. I watched Ash bending down to
gather the dinner dishes, over her mother's shoulder.

“Happy birthday again, sweetheart!” Anya murmured at her
daughter—but she spoke into my ear. It somehow sounded seductive. I was aware
of the moisture popping off her lips as she spoke. “We love you! Take good care
of your
step-brother-to-be
.” Ash didn't so much as shrug, she just
continued stacking plates. I realized there had been no presents, no cards, no
heralding of this eighteenth birthday at all. I wondered then if she really had
turned eighteen that night. I wondered if she really had asked her mother not
to celebrate it, or if that was just bunk for our benefit.

Anya repeated herself, as she pulled away from me. “Take
good care of him, baby.” And I thought I spied a wink.

Chapter Nine

Ash

The walls were too thin. The walls were
disastrously
thin, in fact. It took about ten seconds (and some of my newly minted
woman's
intuition) for me to jam my headphones into my ears and blast The Clash, so as
to overwhelm any sounds of Anya and the Pastor...going at it. This wasn't
exactly a new tactic—Lord knew I'd overheard my mother doing just about
everything a person could do, despite even the biggest speakers—but The Clash
was working better than most bands. Mr. Dempsey had suggested them to me. He'd
brought me a mix CD on the last day of school.

I watched the light flickering under my closed door,
indicating that he-who-must-not-be-named was watching TV in the living room. In
spite of myself, I wondered what he could be watching. Probably sports.
Meathead guys don't throw a lot of cultural curveballs.

Though it had been a relatively short evening, I was shocked
by how quickly my tune had changed about Landon. For the past few weeks, I'd
been bobbing around on a mysterious Cloud Nine. I'd been kinder to my mother
than usual. I'd suffered my bullies with patience. I'd gotten a little
distracted in my AP comp class at the community college, but had gleefully
taken on extra work to ensure I'd graduate with an A. The day before, I'd
received my early enrollment materials from UT, as well as a personal note of
congratulations from my advisor. In the note, a one Mrs. Kepling had called my
application materials “stunningly precocious” and “self-possessed.” I was
looking forward to college, all while living out a daydream fantasy in my head.
But in one pizza party, everything now seemed ruined.

I stared up at the Day-Glo stars smattered across my ceiling
(left by a previous tenant) and tried to prioritize the problems at hand. So, okay—I'd
very nearly got it on with my step-brother. That was maybe a 7 on the 1-10
disaster scale. More pressing was the fact that my crazy ma seems to have
fallen head-over-heels for an old, crusty charlatan. As much as I wanted Anya
to be happy and cared for after I flew the coop for school, wasn't leaving her
in the clutches of Pastor Sterling a poor move on a daughter's part? The guy
could barely walk, and the first words out of his mouth to me had been
disciplinary. I didn't trust him. Their whole, whirlwind romance seemed...off.

And then there was the fact of the step-brother himself. It
had been one thing to see him standing there, looking especially smug and tan
in the kitchen doorway, and have to contend with the possibility that he was
more of a jock dirt bag than I'd let myself believe on the roof. But the way
he'd acted outside the bathroom? Trying to come onto me, and shit? I couldn't
believe how quickly it was possible to go from lust to repulsion. I also
couldn't believe how warped my own judgment of people could be, especially
given all the lunatic step-fathers and druggies my mother had introduced me to.
The whole thing was nauseating. As if to augment my fury, Joe Strummer now
screeched into my ears about being lost in a supermarket.

The instant I threw my headphones aside in frustration, the
overhead lights in my room snapped on. Blinking, I sat up to see jock
boy—looking confused (and extremely naked, from the waist up). For a
split-second, we just regarded one another.

Another source of extreme fury was the fact that—yeah, okay,
sure, whatever, he was
kind of
good looking. I saw in the full light
that his football camp tan ended at t-shirt level, while his pecs and chest
remained a lighter color. There was something cute about the farmer look. There
was something cuter about the coils of dark hair on his chest. The hair was
darker than I would have imagined, and it grew thick at a spot just below his
navel. When he inhaled, his core expanded in a way that suggested every fiber
of his body was made of muscle. His form was tapered like a swimmer's. Either
I'd forgotten the whole Adonis body thing while in the dark of his Saab, or
he'd really outdone himself on the free weights in Galveston.

But it wasn't like any of this mattered, or made him less of
a creep. It was like Carson said: “You can admire the house without signing the
deed.”

“I got turned around. Thought this was the bathroom,” Landon
grumbled, scratching at the side of his face. Even in the hours since dinner,
it seemed as if stubble had begun to erupt on his jawline. Or maybe this was a
trick of the light. Unbidden, I recalled his proclamation on the rooftop:
I'm
a man. I will fuck you senseless.

“It's not, genius,” I managed to huff, hopefully concealing
some of my gawkery. But Landon didn't turn around right away. Instead, I got
the sense that he was staring me down. Seconds too late, I remembered the
loose-fitting nightshirt I'd elected to wear—the one I treated like a second
skin. It was a gauzy, practically see-through t-shirt that just barely covered
my ass—one of mom's old faves from the seventies. A lot of faux-Spanish
embroidery framed the plummeting V-neck. I never had to think about how
suggestive my sleeping clothes were when I lived in a house with no men.
Blinking with fury, I shifted a pillow in front of my chest.

“Is that all?”

Landon nodded, but I watched his eyes pull themselves from
my body and lurch around my room. I'd inherited a decorating gene from Carson.
No matter how often Anya and I skipped town, making a space my own was always a
first instinct. As his eyes peered around my room, I tried to see my little
cubby space from Landon's POV. The long, glittery tapestries procured from
Austin street fairs. An original sketch of Tex's, affixed to the far wall with
multi-colored pushpins. A gumbo of band posters for Led Zeppelin, Miles Davis,
The Strokes and Metric. A tall vintage lamp, draped with scarves. Did all of my
objects immediately betray the fact that I was a kid, and still “kind of an
idiot”? In one way, this was my greatest fear. That people—even stupid jerk
people, like my future step-brother—wouldn't take me seriously, for whatever
reason.

Landon looked like he was about to say something, but at
that moment some ambiguous groan moved through the wall. I watched him hear it,
and frown. If things had been different, we might have made eye contact and
grimaced together. That was the kind of thing siblings did, wasn't it? Laugh at
the dumb (and disgusting) shit their parents did?

But we would never have that kind of relationship. I shifted
my gaze to the braided rug on the floor, and pursed my lips. Landy took the
cue, and pulled himself from the threshold of my door. I popped my earbuds back
in, but snuck a peek at his lumbering frame as he moseyed off down the hallway.
A few paces away, he returned and ran back.

“What?” I cried, pulling my earbuds out again. I half-hoped
my voice was loud enough to let Pastor Sterling and Anya know that I was having
none of their coitus. Landon just pulled a face at me, before snapping out the
light and shutting the door. Which I guess was nice. Whatever.

When I blinked, I saw light again. You know how that happens
sometimes? And for a long time after, though I stared at the ceiling and tried
to pour my shifting feelings into the vessel of
London Calling
, I saw
his torso in my doorway. His chiseled body, with its elegant, smooth-looking
planes of tan and white.

Chapter Ten

Landon

July 28
^th

Zora's hand reminded me of a hawk's talon, the way it
clamped around my wrist. She was plowing toward the Hyatt like a steamship. She
had no looks to spare me, so I tried to make eye contact with our chauffeur.
But the poor guy—pretty righteously—didn't seem interested in exchanging a
fraternal face with the dude whose girlfriend had been yelling at him for the
past twenty minutes, as if he alone were responsible for Austin's gridlocked
Friday night traffic.

“Smile for the cameras,” I heard my girlfriend murmur at me,
from over her left shoulder. “And with your
teeth
.” As if taking her
cue, bright lights started to wink at us from both sides.

“Did I miss something? Is your sister a celebrity?” The
circle around my wrist tightened. I felt uncomfortable enough in the rented tux
(cummerbund added at Z's “suggestion”), and this red carpet shit was just too
much. I swallowed. Something about all those bright lights was making me
thirsty, too.

“It's part of the
theme.
” Zora whispered back,
smiling madly all the while. “
You're
the one who said it was a lame
tradition. This is me, trying to spice things up.”

There was nothing I could say to that, so I tried to keep my
eyes fixed on Z's tanned shoulder-blades as she maneuvered us toward the hotel
entrance. She is very graceful, I’ll give her that. With seemingly no effort,
she'd steered us to the front of a long line of other women in ball gowns,
trailed by other bewildered-looking dudes in suits.

Only once we were inside the hotel lobby did Z release her
skeleton grip. She looked me up and down, as she had several times that day
already—eyes withering, hunting for a flaw. She looked fantastic in a
peach-colored dress that complimented her honey skin. It was a light, gauzy
fabric that drifted through the air behind her as she walked. And her dark hair
was piled high on her head, sculpted into this fountain shape. She was
beautiful.

“It's too bad your Dad can't swing the Hyatt for his wedding
ceremony,” she was saying now, apparently satisfied with the picture I took.
(Or not: she reached a manicured hand up and smoothed a lock of hair back from
my scalp, not a second later.)

“His whole thing is pretty anti-flash, remember?” This
change in conversation made me even grouchier. I would rather have talked about
the long road to finding the perfect florist for Betsy's deb ball than spend a
second admitting that Pop seemed about to go through with his hare-brained
matrimony, despite my very logical protests.

“I know you think he's being crazy,” Z said, eyes roving the
lobby. Periodically, she'd raise her hand and wave at some other couple or
group. “But IMHO, it's romantic. He's a man of the cloth, he's getting up
there...why shouldn't he have someone to spend the rest of his life with? I
mean, when you get drafted next year it's not like you'll have a bunch of extra
time to spend at home.”

I bit my tongue. Even during our best times, I'd never
exactly felt the need to confide in Z about the real quality of my relationship
with Pop. From the outside, I knew it looked like something out of a sad fairy
tale or bad movie:
Wounded Veteran Raises Only Son, Finds God On The Way
...but
the truth was, we were more complicated than that. Of course I wanted Pop to
find someone to take care of him. Of course I did. But I'd never have gone so
far as to call his storefront operation “of the cloth,” nor would I ever deign
to call his shacking up with Anya “romantic.” I'd also never entertained any
plans of coming back to live with the old coot, draft or no. Sticking around
Pop for my last college summer was turning out to be a huge ordeal. If not for
all the oddly scheduled football training, I would have been able to at least
fly the coop every so often to a job—but alas. No dice.

And as much as I hated to admit it, there'd been a grain or
two of truth in Ash's bitchy rant at our first dinner. I didn't think Pop was
scamming Anya, exactly. Nor did I think she was scamming him. But I'd decided that
there was something unseemly about their union, and could only hope it was
mutually beneficial. After all, Pop had never exactly been a good husband to my
Mom. I worried a little about his ability to be...decent. Or perhaps it was
just that I didn't like to bandy the word 'love' around so lightly. My idea of
love looked a whole lot different than what had become our tri-weekly pizza
parties, those evenings spent in mostly silence.

But this wasn't the kind of thing you could say to
girlfriends. Especially not family-oriented, marriage-crazy Christian ones,
like Z.

“I want him to be happy,” I said curtly, hoping this would
seal the matter. And Zora did seem temporarily satisfied. She leaned over and
kissed me on the cheek. I grinned at her impulsiveness, but in another second
registered the camera waving in our face.
Aha.

“I'm sorry you're getting a little twat of a stepsister in
the deal, though,” Z murmured, as the camera-lady sauntered away. “That girl
has the most sour face I've ever seen, except for maybe that
Twilight
chick.
Like, what's her deal? And does she go outside? I haven't seen anyone that pale
in Texas,
ever.
”

I didn't have the energy to rebut most of this, and luckily,
I didn't need to. For there was Betsy, appearing at the top of the lobby
staircase like Scarlet friggin O'Hara. Everyone in the vicinity clapped. Zora's
little sister was first in a short line of trembling sixteen and seventeen year
old girls, their faces spanning the spectrum of from giddy to nonplussed. But
Betsy, in her short and comparably boring white dress, was definitely not
feeling her big day.

“I am going to
murder
that girl,” Z said in the
direction of the staircase, though she clapped and smiled as she whispered the
threat. “She's going to regret that face in her pictures. She's not going to
want to hang that puss on the dorm room walls.”

For something to say, I cast about the room of beaming
faces.

“What's her date like?”

“Oh, don't even get me STARTED.” Zora barely gestured in the
direction of a tall, sallow-looking redhead who immediately struck me as gay.
But then again, what did I know?

Zora spent most of the rest of the ball hunting for people
to yell at. During Betsy's short—but surprisingly funny—remarks about her
future plans, Z was in the kitchen, harassing some caterer about a fruit plate
that wasn't up to snuff. I couldn't help feeling bad for poor Betsy, who spent
much of the evening looking miserable in her frilly gown. At one point, she and
Sallow Red made a break for the lobby, looking like Bonnie and Clyde after a
successful heist. Even though I knew Zora would pitch a fit when she realized
her sister had escaped her own deb ball, I watched them go without raising my
head. Kids were supposed to have fun, right?

Left to my lonesome, I spent a lot of the party looking at
the array of high-school kids on display. Most of the guests, like Betsy, were
fixing to finish high school in the fall—a few were headed to college. They all
seemed bright-eyed and full of themselves. They had no idea about the future,
the little posers. Most of the girls were like Zora minions—perfectly made up,
flawless as Beyoncé. And I couldn't help thinking of what Ash might have made
of this set-up. Try as I might, I couldn't picture her fitting in with these
kinds of kids. These happy, breezy kids who seemed so certain about their place
in the world.

Over the past two weeks, Pop had been spending almost every
night at Anya's. I'd been finding elaborate reasons to keep guard at our house,
or crash at Denny's, or sneak into Zora's room once her parents fell asleep.
(Even though we were twenty-two and consenting, Mr. Hall was not a fan of mine
when it came to his daughter.) I wasn't willing to risk another night of
accidentally wandering into Doll's bedroom and finding her half-naked, like
some kind of Lolita. I hadn't slept a wink that night, pinned as I was between
fury (the little twerp...) and frustration (...her giant tits). It was like
Denny said: you could crush a problem with your mind vice. And Doll was a
problem.

Two more weeks, I told myself, letting the ice cubes clink
in my tumbler. In Z's absence, I'd had to find comfort in Jim Beam. The Hyatt
was beginning to blur around the edges, in echo of that rooftop night. Why was
it that I couldn't stop thinking about her? I gripped my glass till it stopped
feeling cold in my palm.
Why?

“There you are,” Z murmured, the touch of her lips on my ear
surprising me so much I dropped my whiskey. The cup shattered loudly along the
parquet floor, causing the band's lead singer to stutter. I couldn't help but
smile. Event bands were so cheesy anyways.

“Leave it,” Z was saying, her chest flush against my back. I
could feel the round, warm bulges of her breasts as she breathed in and out.
“The help will get it.” Then her hands appeared around my waist, revealing a
crisp, laminated card in her outstretched palms.

“I got us a room,” she whispered, pressing her lips lightly
against the divot where my shoulder and neck met. She breathed lightly on the
place where I imagined she'd left a lipstick mark. I felt the slightest
stiffening in my rented pants.

Crush it. Crush it with your mind vice, Landon.