Keep You (26 page)

             
“What the
hell
?” Jessica hissed through her teeth.

             
Beth made a sound like a startled cat.

             
“No,” Jordan whispered as he left his chair, like he was wishing this wasn’t happening.

             
Ryan got a knee into one of Tam’s soft spots and sent him rolling off. But Tam had a hold of the guy’s shirt and used his own weight against him; he kept rolling them, until he was back on top. His fingers were white on the collar of Ryan’s shirt as he slammed his head down against the floorboards so hard it sounded like it would go through them.

             
Then bodies were surging forward and Jo couldn’t see much anymore. A tangle of voices thick and indeterminate with varying levels of outrage boiled up toward the rafters. One of the locals was shouting above the rest, his words so heavily draped with brogue she couldn’t make them out.

             
Jo put a hand on Mitch’s arm in front of her and wriggled between him and Johnson to get a better look. Mike had Tam from behind by both arms and struggled to hold him, face black with anger. Tam wasn’t even there. The total lack of expression in his eyes, the glassy, lifeless doll-like quality of them would haunt Jo for weeks. His lips were skinned back off his teeth and the cords stood out in his neck as he lunged against Mike, his mind still far, far detached and fighting. Ryan was on his hands and knees, getting noisily sick all over the floor. Walt stood over him, bent at the waist, a hand at the back of his neck.

             
Everyone was talking at once, asking a hundred questions. Beth was flapping her hands and asking if an ambulance needed to be called. Randy was bellowing for an explanation as to their ruined evening at the top of his lungs.

             
Jo felt tears stinging the backs of her eyes and couldn’t understand the tableau in front of her. “Tam,” she said just above a whisper, in a strangled voice she thought no one had been able to hear.

             
But Tam’s eyes swung over to her and just like that, the life flooded back into them, a radiant blue current that was full of
oh shit
. And Walt heard it too, because he straightened and shot her a frown she hadn’t seen since she was a little girl nicking cookies out of the pantry before dinner.

             
“I told you,” he said to Mike, stepping over Ryan – who had gotten his retching under control – and leaning into Tam’s face. “I told you this shithead was gonna get somebody hurt!” There was venom in his voice, his cheeks splotchy with angry red.

             
Tam made a valiant attempt at getting loose from Mike, and when he failed, he kicked Walt, the sole of his black and white sneaker landing just above Walt’s belt.

             
Jo was shoved to the side as the madness started all over again. This time, Randy emerged from the tangle of bodies, Tam held by the scruff of his jacket collar, his toes dragging across the ground. Someone, likely her father, had caught him across the jaw and the spot was going red, blooming like a fist-sized rose across his fair skin. Randy marched him toward the door and in his wake, she saw that the barkeep had a baseball bat in his thick hands. One of the regulars was giving Mike an earful and the others were tending to Ryan. Jordan was trying to smooth things over with Babe Ruth, his wallet in hand, puppy dog eyes on full blast.

             
Jo saw all this, couldn’t digest it, and headed after Tam and her dad.

             
“Jo, don’t.” Jess made a grab for her sleeve but she ducked away and slipped between the tables. The door was damp against her hands as she found the handle and pulled it open, slick with condensation. Outside, the rain was thick and deep as the Atlantic, overflowing the gutters and pouring over their edges in a solid curtain that started at the roof’s overhang and ended in the mud of the road’s shoulder. She took a deep breath full of rain-soaked air and looked for them.

             
Their shadows were to her left, down along the side of the building. Tam, the shorter of the two, had his back to the plastered brick, his face in his hands. Randy had a hand on Tam’s shoulder and was leaning forward, oblivious to the rain pouring down his back, the silhouette of his mouth moving. It was the unmistakable pose of a worried, frightened parent delivering a lecture that was more about
are you okay?
than
I’m gonna beat your ass
.

             
There was a rush of stale-smelling air as the door opened beside her. A slight, slim-fingered hand that wasn’t much larger than her own laced its fingers with hers.

             
“What was that?” Jo asked helplessly, still stunned.

             
“You made him jealous.” Jess’s voice held nothing of a lecture. It sounded sad. “It’s wrecking him.”

             
She watched, the moisture in her eyes not related to the driving storm, as Randy steered Tam out to one of the waiting shuttle vans and they climbed on board. A moment later the engine turned over with a growl and the lights flared to life.
This is my fault
, she thought as the van pulled out onto the road, headed back for the castle. And then softer, as if in her subconscious:
He didn’t deserve this.

**

              It was just after one in the morning when the knocking started; heavy, loud, irregular thumps against their room door. She guessed, as the lamp switched on and Jordan rolled out of bed to answer it, that she should have expected this. Seen it coming.

             
When they had turned in that night, Jordan had said one line to her: “I hope you’re proud of yourself,” and he’d flopped into bed, extinguished the lights sans his usual TV ritual, and rolled away from her. Now, as she sat up, blinking and pushing her hair out of her eyes, she wasn’t proud, but, ashamedly, frightened.

             
Tam was propped in the doorway with one hand against the jamb, his other curled around the neck of a bottle. His hair was in his face, his features haggard, the bruise turning shades of burgundy along his jaw. He looked like the night had added twenty years to him.

             
“Hi, Jordie,” he said in a flat voice. He wasn’t slurring, and he wasn’t weaving, which were both good signs. “Kindly get the hell out while I chat with your sister.”

             
Jo didn’t know if it was a good thing or a bad thing when her brother slipped out, Tam slipped in, and the door shut with a soft click.

             
For a moment, the room held its breath, the light bulb humming in its prissy lamp, the rain pattering against the window, both of them staring at one another and trying to feel each other out. Jo could sense a flickering anger in him that had nothing to do with the Jameson’s in his hand. Finally, she threw her covers all the way back and curled her knees beneath her on the bed. He was dressed, the jeans and sneakers and blue Bazooka bubble gum shirt he’d been wearing at the pub before. He still looked damp, like he’d been taking a nap in his clothes, under the covers where he couldn’t dry. Jo wished she wasn’t in the cotton shorts and tank top she’d been sleeping in. She folded her arms over her breasts.

             
“What did you want to - ”

             
“Don’t get cute with me,” he said, again with the flat, expressionless voice. He took a long pull off his whiskey and set it beside the TV in the open armoire. His steps were slow, like he was having to think about where to put his feet as he crossed to the end of her bed and sat down hard, the mattress dipping. “I think,” he paused, seemingly for no reason, staring at the carpet, “that it’s time to do some of that unpacking we talked about.”

             
How many times had she prayed for an opportunity like this to talk to him? But it was wrong. “You’re drunk. We should put this off before you say something you wish you hadn’t.”

             
He snorted, a humorless breath of air through his nose. “Too late for that, sweetheart. Lots of shit I wish I hadn’t said.”

             
“Now who’s getting cute?” she challenged. She knew he was way over his limit, and that as such, he wasn’t exactly rational, but the moment he’d first let his fist fall against the door he’d started picking at scabs, pulling at sutures. Having a truce over breakfast, out in the open, was one thing. Coming to her in her room, while she sat vulnerable in her pajamas, was touching on a more intimate insult. Hurting her on purpose.

             
Tam turned a nasty, glittery-eyed sneer toward her. “Always gotta be feisty, don’t you? I’m trying to
talk
to you, Joanna.”

             
She was exhausted and her patience refused to take the plate. Anger bubbled at the thought of him sitting here, shitfaced, playing the martyr. The nice guy who just wanted to “talk” to her. “Yeah, for the first time in four years, you deign to speak to me. Pardon me while I don’t find that flattering.”

             
“I’ve talked to you.” His face screwed up with indignation. “At that party last year - ”

             
“Two years ago.”

             
“And the other night at Mike’s.” The grooves deepened between his black brows as his frown went dangerous. “I never stopped talking to you.”

             
A warning bell chimed in the back of her head, but she ignored it, bristling under his stare. “You
dumped
me!” her voice rose, wavering around the edges. “You dropped me like I meant nothing to you! And then you wanna make small talk at a barbecue like nothing freaking happened?! Can you be that insensitive? Or are you just stupid?”

             
Like it had back at the bar, a flat, cold sheet of ice came down over his eyes. His face screwed up and for a moment, she wondered if he was even still here, if he was seeing her. It was the first time in all her memory she’d been remotely afraid of Tam Wales, and as his muscles bunched and he moved toward her, she threw herself back against the headboard and out of reach, a yelp escaping her.

             
His outstretched hand hovered in the air between them, quivering from alcohol or emotion, or both. Jo was breathing in quick rushes, eyes fixed on his face, and she saw the ice melt in his gaze. He blinked, and it was nothing but water, a thick sheen, and the grooves left his forehead as his expression went slack.

             
He swallowed, and his eyes moved up and down her, shining in the incandescent light of the lamp. “Joey…” he said, and retracted his hand, wiping it down his face as he turned away from her. He groaned. “I wasn’t…I would never…”

             
He surged to his feet, wobbling, but steadied himself and headed for the door.

             
It was that afternoon four years ago all over again; Tam galloping into her life, twisting her insides up, and then leaving again before he had to deal with any of the messy fallout.

             
“Wait!” she was on her feet too, her hip slamming against the pointed edge of the nightstand so hard she almost bit her tongue. Tears pricked in her eyes. “You cannot”- her throat was closing up, her voice shaking, as he came to a halt at the foot of Jordan’s bed - “just walk away from me. You did it once and you don’t get to do it again!”

             
“You don’t need me.” His voice was a hoarse croak. “You’ve got Atkins and all those others like him to keep you warm at night.”

             
“Are – are you serious?” she stuttered. Her eyes were beginning to swim with unshed tears. “Do you think…Tam,
look at me
.” He’d been shaking his head and he twisted it over his shoulder, his face etched with each and every ragged sore she felt thumping in the soft spots of her heart. “Is that what you think?” She felt stretched thin, like a thread unraveling from a sweater, her voice threatening to crack. “That I’m just in need of a cock and a warm body?”

             
“You tell me,” he bit out. “How many Atkins have there been? Five? Ten? Twenty?”

             
“You don’t get it, do you? You don’t have a fucking clue.”

             
“
How many
?”

             
All the carefully constructed self-control she’d maintained the past four years snapped. Her friend Megan in high school, who wasn’t her friend anymore, had passed along some of her mother’s wisdom:
never let a man know your weaknesses
. Don’t tell him how much you’re hurting, because he’ll use it against you. Jo was beyond the point of caring.

             
She took two bold steps toward him and watched him turn to fully face her. “None!” her voice was a not-so-controlled shout. “I went on exactly five dates in college, each one more ridiculous than the last, and I didn’t sleep with any of them!”

             
All the aggression had bled out of him. She saw him swallow again. “Why not?”