FORCE: A Bad Boy Sports Romance (60 page)

Lexi

I woke up to the bright sunlight reflecting off of the two feet of glittering snow that blanketed the world.  One look at our unplowed street confirmed it; I wasn't going anywhere today.

After logging on to the CCP website to confirm that classes were indeed cancelled, I wandered reluctantly from my room.  I could already hear the blare of the television.  It would be on all day, tuned to the frantic news reports at ear-splitting volume, interjected periodically with my father's even louder cries of indignation over the idiocy he was seeing.  He liked to call us in right at the tail end of a story and demand to know if we could believe what was being said.  Since I had learned a long time ago to tune out the television set, I rarely knew what he was talking about and only succeeded in agitating him further.

I walked downstairs in time to catch the press conference with the mayor.  He was only reading a prepared statement
, all unnecessary traffic should stay out of the roads so the plows could do their job, all city offices were closed until further notice.
The usual solemn warnings to go to shelters if it got too cold. All normal and inoffensive.

"Do you believe this idiot?"

I blinked at my father as he gesticulated wildly at the TV.  He was still in his pajama pants, his bathrobe loosely tied so that it fell open at his chest, revealing the once rock hard muscles that had now gone soft and flabby with disuse.  He blamed his weight gain on my mother's cooking, and frequently went on rigid diet and exercise sprees, only to be caught, late at night spooning some of my mother's meatballs directly into a bowl and eating them in front of CNN. Without the rigidity of the police force's fitness demands, my father was left to depend on his own willpower, something he lacked just like a child.

"I can't believe the nerve of this guy."  My father had turned back to the TV, pushing the volume even higher.  "If he was at all a competent leader, he would have anticipated this and not have to shut everything down.  I think his lazy ass just doesn't want to work.  This isn't that bad, I've seen worse, Christ, back in '94 we had a storm close to...."

When I realized he wasn't actually talking to me anymore, I slipped quietly into the kitchen.  He talked a good talk, but I knew he would be following the Mayor's guidelines strictly.  The instinct to obey authority was too deeply ingrained in him. 

I yawned as I headed to the coffee maker.  Both Sarah and Mary were still asleep, so the pot hadn't been completely drained yet.  Sarah was notorious for taking the last cup and not refilling.  My whole family was demon coffee drinkers; my mother was seldom seen without a mug in her hand.  I wondered if a group of people as anxious and agitated as we were really needed the caffeine.  Then I told myself to shut up and poured a blessed cup of that heavenly nectar.

It felt strange to have a day off.   It made me nervous, like I was missing something.  I couldn't help but wonder if I had read the announcement wrong, that classes really weren't cancelled and I was skipping the last class before finals.  That would be devastating.  My grades were good, but they hung by a thread.  I couldn't miss a review.

I stood by the back window of the kitchen and stared into the snow.  Our house backed into the park, a real perk when I was a kid, but the once magical fairyland I had constructed back there was now choked and overgrown with vines and bramble.  The snow weighed it down, making it look like the drifts were seven feet tall.  It looked like a wall ready to tumble down and bury me beneath it.  I felt the clawing of claustrophobia at my throat and turned quickly away. 

The creak of a floorboard overhead told me my mother was awake, and my panic rose further.  Without my sisters around to deflect her, all of her focus would zero in on me with laser-like precision.  Unless I found something to do quickly, she would corner me and start grilling me, offering unwanted advice and insight, tearing back my defenses until she had me second guessing every decision I had made. Right down to the amount of coffee I poured into my mug. 

It was how she showed her love.

When I heard her footfall on the carpeted stairs, I looked around quickly.  Grabbing one of my textbooks from where it lay facedown in a heap by the computer desk in the corner of the dining room, I slid quickly into a dining room chair and opened it randomly.  It was the text for my American History class, barely used, barely needed but still wildly expensive.  My professor taught almost exclusively from the packet he had also made us buy, and the textbook had gathered dust since the third week of the semester.

Looking at it now, I could see why.  The text was barely comprehensible.  But it gave me something to focus on as my mother entered the kitchen and spied me through the opening between the two rooms.  It paid to always look busy in front of my mom.  Her nervous energy never let her see the value in just sitting alone with your thoughts.

"Only boring people are bored," she would say, stuffing a rag into our hands and sending us off to do chores if we ever so much as looked like we might not be being productive. 

Sarah, Mary and I had all quickly learned that the only way to avoid being drowned in a river of menial tasks was to always have something that we could plead away and do.  So I bent my head to the textbook, poking my tongue out of the corner of my mouth in faux contemplation.  I could feel her smile at me fondly.  She ambled over to ruffle my wild hair and I relaxed slightly when her fingernails scratched lightly over my scalp and up the back of my neck.  I'm a sucker for headrubs.

"Hey Mom," I whispered distractedly.

"Right back at it without any breaks, huh?"

I quickly remembered that I had run away from dinner with excuses about having to study.  "Ugh, yes," I sighed dramatically.  "Finals," I elaborated. 

"That's my girl."  She headed over to the back window and cupped her coffee mug in her hands.  Her normal whirl of nervous energy always dissipated when she looked back there.  I wondered where she went when she stood there dreaming.

I spent the morning reading a textbook I didn't need to, just to keep up the charade.  My sisters finally roused themselves close to noon and suddenly everything was as it always was in this house.  People in every room.   My mother in the kitchen, sitting in a chair, reading through the mail pile that always teetered on the edge of drowning us all.   Sarah in her room, blasting music, punishing us for some unknown crime.  My father in his place in the living room, the couch cushions molded into a perfect outline of his body. 

And Mary.  I clenched and released my hand, and as always she spied it.  "Stressed?" she asked in that same singsongy voice she's used since we were kids.  "I don't know what you're worried about.  It's just community college."

"Shut up," I warned, unwilling to be dragged into our usual argument.  Mary was too close to me in age and too like me in temperament.  She was everything about me, magnified tenfold.  My competent intelligence in her was a whip-smart intellect that she used to mercilessly beat down friend and foe alike.  My stubbornness in her was a bulldog intensity and a complete unwillingness to back down.  My comfort as a leader was in her a desire for world domination. 

"You shut up," she shot back.

"Well said," I snarked.  I was getting drawn into it.  I couldn't help it.  Mary pushes every one of my buttons.  It's a wonder I didn't strangle her long ago.

"Perfect score on the verbal SAT," she intoned.  "I just didn't want to waste it on you."

"Why are you
such
an almighty bitch?" I breathed.

"Girls!" My mom looked up sharply.  "Alexandra, watch your language."

"Just goes to prove my point," Mary muttered.

I tried so hard not to rise to the bait, but I failed. "What point is that?"

She smiled smugly. "That I don't have to resort to cheap jargon and profanity to tell you what I think of you."  She tapped her temple.  "Perfect score."

"Mary, will you go away?"

"Why?  This is my dining room too.  You have a room if you need to go study."

"Mary!

"Girls!" My father roared over the din of the television.  "Keep it down, I can barely hear the TV!"

"Stop this awful bickering," my mother added, piling on.  "You are sisters and should love each other."  When she was sure she had our attention, she shifted in her chair and took on the martyred tone that we both knew and dreaded.  "When I am dead and gone, I want to look down from heaven to see you two supporting each other."

Mary looked at me and rolled her eyes.  I cast mine downward before I started to laugh.  "What about Sarah, Mom?" Mary asked, voice heavy with sarcasm.  "Why doesn't she have to support us too?"

"Oh you know what I mean, Mary," my mother snapped.  I grinned at my sister, and she nodded slightly before getting up from the dining room table.  We may fight like cats and dogs, but at least we had the silent agreement that comes with being sisters exasperated with our parents. 

I snapped the book shut.  "I'm going to my room," I announced to no one in particular. 

"Bring that coffee cup down when you're done with it," my mother reminded me.

"I know, I know." But she was right.  I had a collection up there.  It's a bad habit I couldn't seem to break.  Unlike coffee cups, of which I had broken three already.  I needed to stop shoving them onto my cluttered little nightstand when I was done with them.

Flopping onto my bed, I made a half-hearted attempt to open my notebooks.  But I was too caught up in everything around me. Suddenly burning hot, I pulled off my pajama top and slipped into a tank top.  The heat felt like it was on too high.  My whole body was prickly and crawly with sweat.

Just as I was working up my nerve to ask about the thermostat, I heard a knock on my door.  Four aggressive taps.  It was Sarah.

Her hair was hanging in her face today, the million different dye jobs leaving it the murkiest of blacks.  Her ever-present eyeliner was already in place, though I guessed she hadn't been awake for more than fifteen minutes.  Maybe she slept with it.  I wouldn't know.  She was hardly ever here.

"Can I borrow your black boots?" she asked in a dull monotone, as if the prospect of even saying six words to me drained her of her energy.

"Where are you going?" 

"Out."

I hear the sound of a motor outside, revving and grinding its gears. She tossed her hair and snatched the black boots from my hand and tore down the stairs.

I braced myself.

My father's roar was deafening. "Where do you think you're going?"

"Out!" Sarah shouted back with far more energy than she could muster for me.

"Like hell you are! It's a fucking state of emergency!"

"Kevin! Language!" my mom shouted over them both from back in the kitchen.

I heard a pause.  And then a loud snort from Sarah.  "This is a free country," she announced, playing her trump card early.  "I can do what I want."

"Don't you dare, young lady!"

My mother's voice entered living room and I could see her in my mind's eye, looking out front window and crossing her arms.  "I don't recognize that car, Sarah Rose.  Who are you going with?  Why does it need to be today?" She was practically whining.

"You're not the boss of me!" Sarah shouted and then the whole house vibrated with the sonic boom of her door slam.

This must have finally roused my father from the couch, because I heard him at the front door.  "I will report this!" he roared out the door.  "I will have you busted for underaged drinking, so help me god I will!  Don't test me young lady, don't you dare try to test me..."

But the revving of a motor and the spinning sound of tires on ice drowned out his threats.  The car found purchase and drove slowly away.

There was a moment of blessed, shocked silence.

Mary poked her head out from her bedroom and called to me from across the hallway.  "She got away with it.  Can you believe it?  That little brat!"

"Wait, listen." I held up my hand and we both heard the noise of my mother crying dramatically, the muffled sound of it telling me that she was clutching at my father's robe. She would stay like that until his whole front was wet with her tears.

"She only gets away with it because she's the baby," Mary remarked.  "You and me, if we tried that...?"

"Ooof," I agreed.  At thirteen I was still a little mommy.  Rebelling like that was inconceivable then.  It was inconceivable now.

I looked back into my tiny room, frustrated with myself.  Why was it inconceivable?  Sarah had just gone about it the wrong way.  Why should I, a grown woman of nineteen, not be allowed to leave the house when I chose?

If I didn't get out, I might go insane.  The walls were already threatening to close in on me.  I gathered my books and shoved them into my bag, then quickly dressed and pulled my hair back in a headband.  I hadn't showered and I stank like coffee, but I was willing to overlook this lapse in personal hygiene for a chance at escape.

My parents were still clutching each other as I came down the stairway and froze.  Shit, bad timing.

"Where do you think you're going?"  My father's voice was low and dangerous.