Stay: Vignettes & Outtakes (2 page)

BOOK: Stay: Vignettes & Outtakes
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This was his first purchase with it and he felt guilty about it. He’d already determined to be as frugal as possible, but buying a nice girl lunch didn’t seem like such a stretch.

“Thanks,” she said, and led the way to a table out of the way. He carried their shared tray and sat across from her. “So...how did a guy like you get here?”

Strangely, he wasn’t eager to share anything about his life east of here, didn’t want to bring it here and taint his environment with it. It was bad enough his roommate knew, but he’d keep his mouth shut. However annoying Dirk got, Eric trusted him implicitly. With Dirk he could sound off without explaining crap he didn’t want to explain. Dirk knew the history and understood the nuances.

“Um... Well, the, uh, prosecutor in my county. Back home,” he said, wondering how much he wanted to tell her so she’d have some frame of reference for his foreignness. “He made me a deal. Said he’d put me through school if I went here.”

“Why?”

Why? Well, he didn’t know, really. Hilliard had no sexual interest in him, but Dirk said Knox had paid for half his mission.

“My roommate says he collects people,” Eric said. “Like projects. I don’t...get it.”

“Oh! Like Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle.”

“I have no idea who that is.”


My Fair Lady
?”

He stared at her.

“Never mind. That’s awfully nice of him. The, uh, prosecutor?”

“Yeah, I got a record,” he muttered, bending down to dig into his enormous salad. Salad bars. That’s what he’d really love about being here. Every day in his dorm cafeteria, a salad bar. “Possession. Intent to sell. Larceny. I’ve boosted everything from cigarettes to cars. You name it, I’ve probably done it.”

He stared at his food, awaiting her condemnation, but instead, she picked up his tightly clenched fist in both of her hands and began to unclench it, finger by finger.

“If the prosecutor sent you here and is paying your way,” she said softly, “then he must believe in you.”

Don’t let what that girl did for you be in vain.

“Um... ” Shit. What was
this
in his throat? Little Vanessa Whittaker’s hurt-filled turquoise eyes flashed across his mind. “Yeah,” he whispered. “I guess he does.”

“And you got in, so you must have done something right. Do you know how hard it is to get into BYU?”

“Knox— Uh, the prosecutor— Knox said it was because I’m Osage.”

She tsked. “You have to have really good grades to get in here and if you didn’t, it wouldn’t matter.”

He looked up at her. “Really?”

“Didn’t he tell you that part?”

“Yeah,” Eric said slowly. “I guess he did. I just kind of forgot.”

“Did it offend you?”

Well, yeah. It had, but he was grateful enough that he’d kept his mouth shut, especially since Knox hadn’t mentioned it again and had instead stressed his grades. He’d even taken the time out to tutor him in his suddenly vastly accelerated curriculum when and where he could—usually at the feed store after hours.

He shrugged. “Kind of.”

“So what do you have next?”

“Political science,” he answered immediately, so glad to get out of that conversational quagmire.

“Really? Me too.”

They sat and chatted amiably for the next hour while they ate and for the first time, Eric felt relaxed in a girl’s presence. He wasn’t sure why, but at the moment, he didn’t care. He was enjoying himself.

“Okay. Time to go,” Heather said after looking at her watch. She led him through the “the Wilk,” the basement of which housed a bowling alley, a billiards room, and—the most foreign thing of all here—a ski shop.

Yo, Knox, what the fuck is that on top of all the cars?

Ski racks.

What?

My advice? Take a PE class or two and learn how to ski. Almost as fun as surfing. Go up the canyon to Sundance after the first good powder falls.

All the opportunities, the horizon that had suddenly opened up to him and poured down life’s possibilities on him—it was overwhelming and frightening and thrilling, all at the same time.

Across the street to the Clark building... “The law school,” Heather said.

Law school, where Knox had said he’d spent most of three years, and Dirk intended to spend three of his years.

A tiny grain of a hope took shape as he held the door open for Heather, but Eric shook it off.

No way.

Not possible, not for a loser like him.

But he sat in a lecture hall as staid as the courtroom in which Hilliard had arraigned, tried, and dismissed the charges against him and listened to the lecture.

“...theory,
anybody
can be the president of the United States, natural-born US citizen over the age of thirty-five...”

Eric looked down at the open book in front of him, the syllabus, and the tidy collection of highlighters nesting in the crease, wondering just how theoretical that was.

Here he wasn’t a loser.

He was a blank slate.

He could have told Heather any lie he wanted about who he was and she would’ve believed him; he’d told her the truth simply because she’d caught him off guard and he never thought about fabricating a new identity.

She laid a gentle hand on his arm and he looked sharply to his right to find her staring at him intently. “You can be anything you want,” she whispered intently, as if trying to impart some great wisdom.

As if she’d read his mind.

Eric gulped, stared at her, not really wanting to believe it.

“I’ll help you.”

At this point, he could do nothing but go along for the ride and trust this girl knew what she was letting herself in for, because he sure as shit didn’t. “Okay.” He paused. “Thank you.”

FREIGHT TRAIN

May 2002

Vanessa preceded Knox and Leah into the very odd-looking house and she stopped, looking around with some trepidation. She knew who Sebastian Taight was; he was all anybody could talk about in her finance classes at school. She had never dared volunteer that she had any connection to him whatsoever, no matter how remote, particularly as she’d never met him.

“Get a move on, Vanessa,” Knox drawled. Leah chuckled and nudged her a bit when she still couldn’t seem to move.

“C’mon, sweetie,” she murmured. “Sebastian doesn’t bite.”

Vanessa moved then and found the four steps that led up to a platform where stood an immense conference room table. To her left was a smallish kitchen and directly in front of her, beyond the table, was a massive living room. There was a man and a woman with their backs to her, sitting on a couch playing very primitive video games on an enormous television, yelling at and pushing each other.

“Oh so mature,” Knox muttered as he nudged her along and into the living room. “Hey. Giselle. Sebastian. Could you please attempt to act a little more refined when we have company? There are impressionable twenty-year-olds present.”

Vanessa snorted and looked around. This place was beautiful. Eclectic. Interesting. Textured in style, design, color, and time periods.

“Vanessa!”

Giselle jumped up and over the back of the couch to grab her in a bear hug, and she returned it wholeheartedly. She hadn’t seen her mentor since she’d sent her off to Notre Dame with a wardrobe to die for. She hadn’t realized how much she missed Giselle, who had been the one to take her to the doctor when she was sick, for Pap smears, for her dentist and orthodontist appointments; who had taught her about reproduction, sex, taking care of the details of managing a period; who had taken her to Young Women’s and enlisted the church’s help in taking care of her when Giselle or Knox couldn’t.

Giselle had guided her into womanhood, something Knox could never have done even if he’d been inclined to try—and he’d grown decidedly squeamish as Vanessa’s needs turned more and more “girly.”

Vanessa pushed her away from her a moment and looked her up and down. Where before had been a pudgy-cum-fat woman now stood one with the faintest hint of a six-pack partially hidden by her denim shorts, below which was an old, large gash in her thigh, and above, perky C-cup breasts barely covered by a sunny yellow bikini top—which was not a push-up model.

“What
happened
to you?”

Giselle grinned. “Dr. Atkins and Gold’s Gym.”

“Oh, my God,” she whispered, awed at the change in Giselle’s body. “You’re
hot
.”

“Thank Leah for that,” Giselle replied dryly. “She gave me the book and kicked my ass.”

So happy to see Giselle, so shocked over the transformation, Vanessa didn’t pay attention to Mr. Taight until—

Knox was speaking. “...Sebastian. Sebastian, Vanessa Whittaker.”

She looked up. Stared. Sebastian Taight, the man she’d heard about from Knox and Giselle for years, whose genius was dissected and studied in every business class she’d ever taken, was the most gorgeous man she’d ever seen. She hoped no one else noticed her reaction to him, and she managed to shake his hand as if nothing had happened, as if she hadn’t just laid eyes on a
Playgirl
centerfold.

He
had apparently noticed her reaction, though, and suddenly, she wished she had enough experience with men to know what it meant when he raised his eyebrow like that.

The five of them spent the evening together at the conference table eating and chatting. Vanessa didn’t have a whole lot to say except that she was leaving for New York in the fall to attend culinary school. Knox bragged on her grades at Notre Dame. Leah pulled the pictures of her graduation out of her purse and passed them around. After dinner, Knox, Leah, and Giselle wandered off to the library in Sebastian’s living room once they all got involved in a heated discussion over some Shakespearean concept that Sebastian had asked about—

—and once they were thoroughly distracted, Sebastian looked across the table at Vanessa and murmured, “Come downstairs with me.”

Well. She would no more say no to that than she’d say no to a full-ride scholarship and it wasn’t because he was Sebastian Taight, financier.

“Hey, you three!” he called out over his shoulder. “Vanessa wants to see the house.”

So involved in their discussion, Knox waved a hand absently and Sebastian rose, expecting her to follow him. And she did. Down the stairs and into a room that looked like a painter’s studio.

“Take off your clothes,” he said gruffly.

That shocked her. “What?”

“Take off your clothes. I want to see what’s under the leather.”

“Why?”

He gestured to the room they were standing in. “I’m an artist. I paint. I think I want to paint you.”

“Nobody at school said anything about you being an artist. Neither did Knox.”

“Sebastian Taight
isn’t
an artist. Ford is.” Her eyes widened and her mouth dropped open. A wicked grin stretched his face. “Surprise. Now take off your clothes.”

She did, though shyly. Ford. Her breath caught in her throat. Her artist roommate had taken her to a Ford exhibit and Vanessa had been bowled over. “It’s said,” her roommate had murmured to her in the darkness on a night neither of them could sleep and just talked, the way girls do, “that Ford seduces all his models. Oh, what I wouldn’t give to be painted by him. I don’t care if he’s a fat, balding old man. He’s got something good going on down there.”

Sebastian Taight. God of the business department at Notre Dame.

Ford. God of the art department at Notre Dame.

And beautiful, to boot.

One and the same, and here, with her, demanding that she strip for him. How could she not?

Once she was out of her clothes, she stood and watched him inspect her, his gaze running up and down her body. He walked around and around her, looking at her as if she were already a work of art. He didn’t touch her, except to lift her hair away from her body, which made her shiver with...something. She felt more than a little deprived when he took his hand away.

Finally, he spoke. “What’s your schedule like?”

“I’m here all summer,” she whispered, watching him warily. “I’m working as a short-order cook at Nichols for the breakfast crowd. Monday through Friday three to noon.”

“Where are you staying?”

“In an apartment in Valentine, with a friend. It’s a dump, but it’s cheap and we split the bills.”

“Most of Valentine’s a dump,” he muttered absently. He still studied her naked body, and the way he looked at her made her insides all gooey. Suddenly, he took a deep breath through his nose and he grinned crookedly, chuckling. “Tomorrow’s Saturday. Whatever you have planned, cancel it and be on my doorstep at nine.”

“But—”

“No buts. I’m about to make you famous.”


Vanessa showed up on Sebastian’s doorstep at nine; he hadn’t told her not to tell anyone, but it was a warm and cozy thing to have an actual secret worth keeping—and from Knox, no less. Her roommate had been disappointed that she was canceling on going to a Ford exhibit at the Nelson, but Vanessa didn’t dare tell her she was going to become a Ford exhibit.

That was frighteningly arousing.

What was even more arousing was how he was dressed when she arrived. His big body was mostly bare except for a short pair of cutoff jeans, the fly of which he hadn’t bothered to button. Oh, and was he built. Muscular, cut, six-pack, rock-hard quads—an undiscovered male model. The myriad criss-crossings of thin scars all over his body only enhanced his beauty. Not a fat, balding old man to be found in this house. And she couldn’t catch her breath.

He painted for hours. She loved that he loved looking at her nude body, but she wasn’t thrilled about the rest of the world seeing it. He ordered Chinese and once it had been delivered and eaten, he hustled her back down the stairs, stopping on the way to do something to the security system.

“Knox can come and go as he pleases,” he explained once they got back downstairs, “except when I’m about to seduce his twenty-year-old ward.”

She gasped, her mouth open, and he took the opportunity to pin her against his big, hard body and kiss her, long, deep, with...a something...that had never been present in any other kiss she’d ever shared with boy or man.

BOOK: Stay: Vignettes & Outtakes
5.9Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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