Keep You (14 page)

             
Tam spotted a knot of teenagers standing in the shade of a cluster of newly-leafed pear trees at the edge of the practice field. One waved at him as he drew closer and he recognized Jordan’s curly mop of dark blonde hair.

             
Good job, Jordie
.

             
He parked nose-out at the curb in case one of the little shits called the cops and he had to leave in a hurry. He made a slow, relaxed show of climbing out of the car and checking the phantom stash in the pockets of his leather jacket. That was the story Jordan had pitched to the others: he knew a guy who had some good “stuff.” He hadn’t even specified what kind of “stuff” that was, but the idiots had been anxious for it, obviously.

             
There were four of them besides Jordan, one a girl as big around as a toothpick dressed in Hollister everything and a fake-and-bake tan. Two of the guys were brunette, and he moved only a cursory glance over them, enough to notice that they too were dressed like preps. His eyes landed on the stocky blonde with the pug nose who had to be Nick and anger clouded his vision with swirling red fumes. If he’d been feeling protective of Jo before this weekend, now he was emphatically, rabidly so.

             
The kids formed a semi-circle around him. The girl was chewing at her nails, nervous. He made brief eye contact with Jordan who gave him a tight non-smile in return.

             
“Which one of you is Nick?” Tam said. Casual. Calm.

             
The blonde pig-face gave him an up-nod. “That’s me.”

             
Tam gave himself one last chance to back out, curled his hand into a fist instead, and launched himself at Nick Schaffer.

             
Nick may have been good at forcing himself on tiny girls, but he didn’t have much in the way of defenses when it came to a fair fight. Tam caught him in the ear with a jab and the knuckles of his right cracked against the kid’s eye socket. Nick collapsed to the grass with a wail and Tam was on top of him.

             
The girl started screaming. The boys were yelling. Nick made a feeble attempt to come back at him and Tam put a hand around his meaty throat to hold him still, drawing his right arm back for another blow and then another. Nick swung his arms drunkenly, but the hits were ineffectual. Like flies against Tam’s shoulders and arms.

             
Nick’s squashed little nose become more squashed, purple and spurting blood. His mouth was twisted up in a pained howl. His face was that of the shithead who’d tried his best to force Jo against her will. It was the face of the doctor who thought he was a terrible son. It was the face of his father, sneering, feral, as he brutalized Melinda.

             
Tam only meant to hit him once, to threaten him, to send a message. But adrenaline was surging through him, his rage drowning out all thought, all logic, all restraint. He drew his fist back again and again and again –

             
And then it caught in the air, frozen.

             
“
Tam
!” Jordan’s voice pierced the haze in his brain and suddenly, he went zooming backward from the situation, his mind turning loose of the here and now and reeling a safe distance away so it could observe.

             
He was pinning a seventeen-year-old to the grass, the kid’s face swollen and bloody. He turned his head and saw Jordan holding his arm, staying his hand. His eyes were saucer-wide. Blue-green. Jo’s eyes.

             
“Dude, you gotta get up,” Jordan said, tugging at him. “You’re gonna kill him! Come on!”

             
“Oh, God.” He looked down at Nick again. Red bubbles of snot and saliva were streaming down his cheeks. His eyes were swelling shut, just watery slits in his dough face. He was making a high-pitched whining sound, his breath wheezing in and out of split lips. “Oh, God,” he said again.

             
For a moment, he’d lost control. He’d gotten locked in a place inside his own body that didn’t feel sympathy and didn’t know right from wrong.

             
Just like his father.

             
Tam leapt to his feet, shaking, breathing in huge, rattling inhalations.

             
The girl was sobbing hysterically. The other two boys were nowhere in sight.

             
What had he done? He pushed both hands back through his hair, feeling the wet stickiness of blood against his scalp. What the hell had he just done?

             
“Go,” Jordan said. “Tam.” He spoke slowly, firmly, like he was speaking to a child. “Get outta here, man. I’ll take care of this.”

             
He wanted to argue, to get his shit together and come up with a solution to this horrible thing he’d done, but instead, he climbed back in his car and left.

13

Then

             
“Jess! Oh, shit, Jess! Wait!”

             
Jo tripped over the sheet she’d wrapped around herself like a toga and was forced to pause and gather the tail of it up in the hand that didn’t secure the rest of the thing to her shoulder. “Jessica!” she called as she heard her sister’s flats thumping down the stairs. “Wait!” She was starting to get desperate. “Where are you going?” she asked as she hit the top of the stairs and started down, fearing Jess was rushing to the phone to dial Mom. She was a lot of things as a big sister, but the cool, understanding friend who didn’t rat to Mom and Dad wasn’t one of them. Jo liked to think that if the situation were reversed, she wouldn’t tattle.

             
She thundered gracelessly down to the first landing and around the switchback to the foyer, the AC-cooled, sun-faded planks of hardwood as smooth as marble beneath her bare feet. She clutched the sheet tighter and broke into a jog. Jess was already in the kitchen…where the phone was.

             
“Jess,
please
!” Jo said, voice becoming shrill, “just stop and talk to me a sec.”

             
When she stumbled into the kitchen, she found her sister standing at the end of the breakfast bar, short, clear-coated nails rapping against the laminate countertop, expression pinched into one of severe disapproval. For such a beautiful woman, she could look about as charming as a disgruntled librarian. The tight bun she’d slicked her hair into wasn’t helping either. “What in the hell” – her tone was short, clipped, and dispassionate, that of someone with complete authority and not an ounce of doubt about the judgment she was about to dole out – “are you thinking, Jo?”

             
Jo fiddled with the powder blue sheet, adjusting it on her shoulder. The sound of footsteps signaled Tam’s descent of the stairs. She chewed at her lower lip, watched her sister’s drumming nails, and knew there was no lie that could cover what Jess had walked in on.
I tripped and fell
wasn’t gonna cut it.

             
“Well.” Tam’s bare feet were coming down the hall behind her. “I was thinking,” Jo said as he pulled up behind her. From the corner of her eye, she could see him brace a hand against the doorjamb. She met her sister’s censorious gaze without flinching. “I was thinking that Mom and Dad wouldn’t be home for another hour, so there was still time to finish and take a shower.”

             
Tam laughed.

             
Jessica glared. “Clothes. Here.” She pointed to the table. “Sit.”

**

              Tam very much wanted to tell Jessica Walker – now Beaumont – to piss off. She was nobody’s mother. Hell, she was only two years older than him.

             
But instead he went back upstairs, retrieved his shirt and shoes, and took a seat at the kitchen table, as neutral an expression as he could muster pasted to his face. All for Jo.

             
She was back in the cutoffs and blue tank top she’d changed into after work and before his arrival. She’d scraped her tousled hair back into some semblance of a ponytail. Her peppermint Chapstick was gone, a little bit of eyeliner smudged. And it was kind of cute that she actually looked fretful as she faced off from her sister.

             
He draped his arm across the back of her chair, felt Jess’s cold, unhappy glare land on him, and waited for the lecture to begin.

             
“How long’s this been going on?” Jess asked, narrowing her eyes and lifting her chin in a very dictatorial fashion.

             
Tam could have calculated the time in a matter of seconds, but Jo knew it by heart. “Seven weeks,” she said. Her shoulders squared and she did her best to mirror Jess’s posture.

             
“Seven weeks? You know that exactly?”

             
“Since prom.”

             
“You went to prom with Nick Schaffer.”

             
“Nick’s an asshole,” Jo said vehemently, brows snapping together.

             
Tam felt his hands twitch at the mention of the guy’s name. Jo had never let on that she knew what he’d done to Nick, she’d never brought him up or even hinted at anything prom-related. But the next time he’d seen her, when Mike had left the room to take a call – his stupid smile suggesting the caller was female – Jo had crossed the basement in a rush, slipped her arms around his neck, and stood up on her tiptoes so she could press a sweet, lingering kiss against his cheek. The look in her eyes before he’d kissed her for real had left him thinking that she knew all about Nick, and the way she’d smoothed her hands down his shirt, her smile something akin to sympathetic, he’d been overcome by the sensation that she was trying to comfort him about it. Like she’d known that it had left him twisted up. Now, her expression fierce, it was clear she didn’t hold any such sympathy for Nick Schaffer.

             
Jess switched her focus to Tam. “Did you push her into this?”

             
“No!” Jo said. “
I
pushed
him
!”

             
Tam tried to fight a grin and failed.

             
“But you’re a child,” Jess told her sister. “And he knows better.”

             
“Excuse me?!” Jo’s voice was rapidly becoming a controlled shout. “A child?!”

             
“You’re twenty-one,” Jess told Tam, “you’re out of high school, you have a job. You know better than to - ”

             
“We’re three years apart!” Jo interrupted, and Jess sighed. “Three years is nothing! This isn’t some one time mistake. I lo - ”

             
“Don’t even say it,” Jess said. “You’re seventeen, anyone you were having sex with right now would be the love of your life. You - ”

             
“Hey.” Tam didn’t raise his voice, but he snapped the word and it bounced off Jess with enough force to bring her teeth clicking together and her wide green eyes over to meet his. “Stop insulting her. It pisses me off.”

             
Jo leaned back and her hair brushed his arm. He rubbed his thumb across her shoulder in a soothing gesture.

             
“Do you know that Nick kid who took her out?” he asked. “Huh?” He took her silence as denial. “Trust me, that little date-raper isn’t who you want taking your sister out.”

             
He’d expected no reaction and was surprised to see Jessica’s spine stiffen, her eyes getting even larger. “Did he - ”

             
“No. I took care of it.”

             
Jessica glanced at her sister and the muscles in her throat worked as she swallowed. “You didn’t say anything.”

             
Tam felt an invisible tremor course through Jo’s body. “You would have been too preoccupied telling me I’m a child to listen.” Jo sounded more hurt than angry.

             
“That’s a separate issue - ”

             
“No it’s not.” Jo shook her head and groaned. “Jess, you’re my sister, not my mom. Did you really deserve to wear white on your wedding day?” Jessica blinked. “I’m not doing anything wrong.
We
.
We’re
not doing anything wrong.”

             
Tam suspected Jess was worried things would end badly, and when it did, Tam’s friendship with Mike, and the family even, would make things difficult and awkward. That, and it was hard to look in Jo’s huge eyes and not see her as a girl, as someone who, ferocious or not, was very fragile on the inside, and who didn’t deserve to be hurt.

             
“Oh my God.” Jess put her face in her hands and exhaled. “Why could I have just not stopped by? I didn’t want to know any of this. Please tell me you’re being safe.” She gapped her fingers and peered at Tam between them.

             
They had been since that first time they weren’t. “Always.”

             
Her eyes narrowed. “She’s my little sister,” she said like Jo wasn’t in the room. A half dozen unspoken accusations sparked in her gaze.
Why’d you have to come after her of all people? Your friend’s sister. A high school kid. Someone so in love with you she can’t see any of the truth about you
. He wasn’t sure how many of those were Jess’s and how many were of his own making. “Don’t you dare break her heart.”

             
Tam leaned forward and put his left hand on the table. Jess’s hands fell away from her face. “You’re not gonna scare me off.”

**

              “Every seventeen-year-old in America is sexually active, Mom,” Jessica said before she popped another forkful of salad into her mouth. “And you should have seen Jo; she is
very
Tam-focused. She’s not sleeping around.”

             
It wasn’t comforting news for Beth. She was not a mother who’d hauled her kids to church every Sunday, who preached things she herself had never had the patience to practice. She didn’t expect perfection. But Jo was always going to be the baby, the youngest, the most innocent and easiest to hurt. She wasn’t quite ready to be a “cool mom” on the sexually-active-Jo front.

             
“Lord,” she sighed, setting her fork down, her chicken and brown rice untouched. Jess had met her at a favorite little steakhouse tucked in the bottom floor of an office building two blocks down from Coca-Cola headquarters. The dark wood and green-and-burgundy upholstery of the tall, private booths lent themselves to a cool, reserved mood. The lighting was low, the carpet dark, the waiters soft-spoken. But Beth’s pulse was thumping in her ears so hard she might as well have been at Chuck-E-Cheese for all the good the ambiance was doing her. “I’m just having a hard time taking hold of all this.”

             
“Tam and Jo have always been tight,” Jess said logically, spearing a hunk of tomato and bouncing it on the end of her fork as she made her point. “He’s her friend and they have everything in common.”

             
“It makes sense she’d experiment close to home, somewhere safe,” Beth said, nodding, throat feeling tight.

             
Jessica twitched a small frown. “I don’t think ‘experiment’ is the right word.”

             
“You don’t?”

             
“She’s head-over-heels, Mom. This isn’t teenage curiosity on her part; this is pointed, targeted attraction. She tried to throw the L-word out there - ”

             
Beth groaned.

             
“ – and I kinda think she means it.”

             
“Jo doesn’t do anything half-assed.”

             
“No,” Jess agreed. Her eyes took on a strange, green twinkle. “You should have seen Tam. There was fierceness coming off that boy in waves.”

             
“Just not enough fierceness for them to be upfront about it all.”

             
Jess shrugged. “They’ll be upfront when they feel like it. Right now, they’re hooked on each other.”

**

              The side of her raft dipped dramatically and water rushed over the inflatable side, cold as it splashed over her hip and lower back, flooded the pocket between her stomach and the top of the raft. She opened her eyes, was nearly blinded by the reflection of the sun on the pool’s surface, and saw Tam propped up with his forearms on the edge of her raft, his hair black and slicked-back with water, the shimmering movements of water refracted up onto his face, rippling and white on his wet skin.

             
“You’re hot,” he said, resting his chin on his crossed wrists. All the overlapping layers of light and reflection plucked at his tongue ring when he spoke; it was a bright shiny spot in his mouth.

             
She’d been in the water up until a half hour ago, enjoying a stolen afternoon with Tam at the neighborhood pool. They were down in the deep end away from the swarms of screaming, splashing children, and she’d crawled belly-down onto a raft to catch a little sun while he’d continued to do laps around and beneath her like a restless shark. “Thanks.” She smiled.
              “You’re sweating,” he corrected. “You should get back in.”

             
She stuck her tongue out at him and he grinned evilly, slipping back into the water, his dark hair swirling up as he went under. Jo knew it was coming and was ready when he tipped her raft and sent her rolling off the other side, her sun-warmed skin shocked as the much-cooler water enveloped her.

             
Jo let herself sink a moment, breath held, her body weightless, hair pluming above her. The sensation mirrored the way she felt on the inside: weightless, floating, happy in a way that was a new, magical cross between childhood exuberance and an understanding of something bigger than herself as an individual.