by Serena Bell
He’d been a boxer-briefs guy, as a teenager. Was that one of those things that stayed consistent throughout life?
Why was she thinking about his underwear?
Any minute, she’d start thinking about what was under his underwear. And damn, now she was. Well-formed, smooth, soft as velvet under her hand, but steel to the core. And he’d felt so good inside her, the one time she’d gotten to experience it.
Gah!
It took her a minute, because of the distraction, to understand what he was doing. He was hanging a new sign. It was made of wood and said MEEPLES in big, burned-in letters. On either side of the shop’s name, there were game pieces—a chess queen, a checkers piece, a simple pawn, and one of the meeple people she’d showed him.
It was fantastic. He’d taken her vision and made it even better.
They’d been like that, in high school. When she’d drawn and he’d leaned over her shoulder and dreamed up the story with her. She sometimes felt like he was inside her head, following the story as the film played out on the screen in her mind.
He must have sensed her eyes on his work—or his ass—because he looked down and smiled at her. “You like it?”
“I love it.”
That made his smile even bigger. And Jax, full-on smiling, was something to see. He had smile wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, an almost-dimple in one cheek, and very white, slightly crooked teeth, every one of which was familiar to her: the canted front tooth, one vampirish canine, and the just-a-little-bit crowded bottom teeth that made him look impish.
Damn him, his illegal ass, and his impish teeth. Also, his perfect sign.
He came down the ladder and stood next to her. “I did it last night.”
She wanted to hug him, but resisted the urge. That way lay…madness. “It’s really, really great,” she said. “It looks just like I would have imagined. But better.”
His face got very serious all of a sudden, and he was looking at her in a way that made her feel like she needed to get out of there immediately.
“Gotta get to work,” she said, sliding under the ladder and into the shop.
A few minutes later he came in. “I finished the plan for the checkout counter, too.”
“Did you sleep?”
“Not much.”
Funny. She hadn’t slept much either. Partly because she’d also had a game-store fire lit under her. She’d spent hours strategizing events for the store, for Labor Day weekend, for this fall. She’d made a plan to publicize them with social media and the North Coast Gazette—Willa, her reunion committee friend, was the newspaper’s editor and would help.
But even after she’d gone to bed, she’d tossed and turned, unable to get herself the right temperature. Finally, after midnight, she’d given in and employed the single best, tried-and-true method, Mr. Buzz.
It was possible, although she wouldn’t admit it even if you tortured her, that she had fantasized about Jax.
“Where’d Terraforming Mars go?” she asked.
“I put it away.”
She tried, she really tried, but she couldn’t stop herself from crossing the room to the bookshelf that was serving as a demo shelf.
“Really,” he said. It wasn’t a question. “You’re going to check to make sure I put it away right.”
“It’s not you,” she said. “I would check if anyone had put it away right.”
“Evan?”
“Not Evan. But he’s a gamer.”
She took the box out and set it on the table. “There are extra plastic bags,” she said. “That’s usually a sign that you didn’t separate out everything I would separate out.”
He was shaking his head, but also smiling. “Seriously, Campbell, you know you have a problem, right?”
She glared at him and sorted the resource cubes into three piles—gold, silver, and copper—and put each in its own plastic bag. Then she separated the oceans from the greenery and the cities. She put the flat stuff in the box first, then the cards, then the plastic bags full of pieces.
“Feel better?” he asked, smirking.
“I’ll have you know,” she said, mock-primly, “that in the scheme of gamers, I don’t even register on the neurotic game-piece management front.”
He raised his eyebrows. “I’m finding that hard to believe.”
“No, seriously. There are gamers who build insert trays out of cardboard or balsa wood—hand built, custom-built—for each of their games.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Swear to God. And there’s a whole cottage industry for 3D printing—and sometimes even machining—better game pieces. Like upgrades.” She got out her phone and showed him, on Etsy. “Look at these. Aren’t they adorable?” She’d been coveting the Terraforming Mars pieces for a long time—plastic hexes to replace her cardboard ones, with teeny-tiny trees and teeny-tiny buildings.
“Adorable,” he said dryly, but when she looked up, his eyes were on her. He had an expression on his face that made her shove her phone in her pocket and put a couple of feet between them.
Her heart was beating too fast. She hurried behind the counter and began setting up for the day, jiggling the mouse to bring the computer to life and initializing the card reader.
“Can I show you my plan for the counter?”
Whatever she thought she’d seen on his face was gone. “Sure,” she said.
“It’s in my truck. I’ll run and get it.”
“Yeah. Perfect.”
As soon as the door shut behind him, she let out a breath.
It felt like she’d been holding it for hours.
13
He took his time getting the counter plan from the truck, giving his body time to recover. His systems had gone into overdrive when she’d said she loved his sign—and meant it. And fuck, he shouldn’t give a shit. He hadn’t made the sign for her, he’d made it for Evan.
Or so he’d told himself, but if that was true, why had it meant so much to him that she’d loved it? That she’d looked at him like he’d done something worthwhile?
Then he’d teased her about the game pieces and she hadn’t shut down. She’d teased back. It was like the old days, like they were friends. And then she’d come close with her phone in her hand, and her arm had brushed his. Her apple-cinnamon scent had filled his brain, and every single nerve in his body had blazed to life.
He remembered once telling a girlfriend—one of his longer-term relationships, lasting a whopping two or three months—that getting an erection wasn’t like flipping a switch but more like pouring a good glass of beer. (Except for in high school. Because in high school, Chiara had been a reliable source of insta-hard.)
Apparently, insta-hard was still a thing. So apparently it was Chiara, not high school, that was the key.
And then he’d made her uncomfortable, damn it, which was the last thing he wanted to do now that maybe, just maybe, they were sort of kind of a little bit friends. She’d run away from him so fast that she’d set some kind of land-speed record on banged-up subflooring.
He grabbed the plan and headed back inside. She looked up at him and smiled, so that was good. He hadn’t blown everything.
Although—what the fuck did he think was going on here? He couldn’t really be friends with her. You couldn’t be friends with someone when you knew something big you were never, ever going to tell them.
Could you? If your motives were good, then could you?
“This is great,” she said, spreading the plan out on the counter.
He kept his distance this time. He didn’t need another hard-on that fierce. Those kinds of erections made you do stupid shit you would regret later, like all the blood in your head really had run right into your dick.
“Oh, wow. I love this.” She pointed at the drawers and shelves below the counter.
He’d known she’d be excited about that. He had a few other surprises up his sleeve, too—
For Evan. Surprises for Evan.
When he’d v
isited Evan yesterday and updated him on what was going on with the store, Evan was thrilled that he and Chiara were working together. So much so that Jax had felt like he had to say, “It’s not a big deal, Ev. It was ten years ago and as far as I can tell she doesn’t actually give a shit anymore.”
Evan had said, shrugging, “Okay. But I’m glad anyway.” And then, brow wrinkling, “You should tell her why we left.”
“Pretty sure she doesn’t care,” Jax said.
“Well. You can tell her if you want to.”
“I’ll bear that in mind.”
He’d go back to the hospital again today, as he had every day since he’d been here, sometimes more than once, and show Evan photos of what he’d done, the plan for the counter. He probably should have shown Evan the plan first, but he’d wanted to get here early and get the sign up so it was the first thing Chiara saw when she showed up.
“What’s this?” she asked, pointing to the lines in Jax’s sketch that represented the wall behind the front counter. In the shop, that spot was hung with an unmatched montage of framed maps, old photographs, book covers, and book leaves. In Jax’s plan, he’d drawn only a big, blank rectangle.
“Your mural,” he said.
“What mural?”
“Whatever you want it to be.”
She squinted at him. “What are you talking about?”
“Something fun. Family-friendly. Bright colored. Something to do with games and comics.”
She was shaking her head. “I wouldn’t know how to do something like that.”
“Sure you would. It’s just like the stuff you used to draw in high school, but bigger.”
She looked at him like he was stark raving mad. “I haven’t drawn since high school. And I wouldn’t know how to scale it up, anyway.”
“You draw it, I’ll scale it up,” Jax said. “We can do that thing where we transfer it square by square.”
“I wouldn’t know what to draw.”
“Superheroes playing board games.” Then he was sorry, because her face closed down in a big hurry. Like a door slamming.
She pushed the plans across the counter to him. “These look good. We can hang some fun posters behind the register. We’ll find something.”
He didn’t push. He wasn’t willing to scare her off. He’d come close enough as it was. “I’ll work on this,” he said. “And I’ll let you know when I need to be in the store for built-in installation and carpet and paint and all.”
“Sounds good.” Her tone was businesslike. He half expected her to stick out her hand to shake, but she didn’t. She just went back to messing with the computer.
On the walk back to the truck, he chastised himself. What had made him suggest superheroes for a mural? Of all things?
Back in high school, a couple of weeks after Jax had seen Chiara drawing at Cape House, she left a stack of notebooks behind when she went home with Levi and her dad. He told himself he was only opening the top notebook—which looked like a sketchbook—so he could confirm they belonged to her before he returned them.
But once he had it open, he couldn’t put it down. Many of Chiara’s drawings were one-frame cartoons—funny scenes, captioned. A woman at the grocery store, laying her items on the belt—donuts, donut holes, and a tube of superglue. The caption read, When the grocery checker calls her manager. He laughed out loud.
There was one recurring character—that superhero she’d drawn, with the slammin’ bod and the “K” swerving across her chest. She was everywhere. In one drawing, she was singing into a mic. In another, she was at the top of the Eiffel tower, looking out over Paris. In yet another, she seemed to have shoved a skinny blond chick to the ground and was standing with one foot on the skinny girl’s chest.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
He had looked up to find Chiara staring at him over the notebook.
“You—left this.”
She grabbed it out of his hands. “You shouldn’t have looked in it.”
“It’s really good,” he’d said. Maybe he should have shut up, tried to pretend he hadn’t seen a whole lot of her drawings, but he couldn’t.
“It’s really not. I can’t draw so it looks like real life.” She flipped it shut and turned to walk away.
“Who’s the girl?”
“Which girl?”
“The one with the ‘K’ on her shirt.”
“None of your business.”
He stayed quiet, and then realized he was holding still, too. Praying, or what passed for it in his world.
She turned back. Her face was bright pink. “SuperKee,” she said.
“Super—Kee?”
“Kee. For Chiara.”
“She’s you?”
She looked like she was either going to hit him or run. He wanted to take it back—the shock in his voice. Then she said, “Yeah.”
“Why’s she—?” At a loss for how to ask it diplomatically, he fell back on: “She doesn’t look like you. Why’d you draw her like that?” He didn’t mean to do it, but his hands unconsciously traced a woman’s curves in the air.
She got even pinker. “She’s how I wish I looked.”
“I like the way you look.”
Sometimes words jumped out of Jax’s mouth without his permission. He wanted to reel them back in, hand over hand, but it was definitely too late for that.
“Um, thanks,” she said. And she smiled. A small, very shy, but definitely very pleased smile.
Something shifted seismically in Jax’s chest.
“I’d, uh, better go,” she’d said, gesturing behind her. “They’re waiting for me in the car.”
“Yeah, you better go.”
He remembered that she’d looked back once, right before she reached the door. And given him another one of those smiles.
It occurred to him that he would do just about anything for those smiles. And that scared him. Because there was no space, anywhere in his life, to feel that way.
14
At the hardware store Friday morning, Jax worked his way methodically through the items on his list. Straight metal attachment plates, toggle bolts, swivel casters with locks—he wanted Chiara to be able to move the tables around.
Correction: He wanted Evan to be able to move the tables around. Chiara would be in Seattle. Technically, she didn’t have the job, but he knew that she’d get it. She’d always gotten what she went after. Valedictorian, the college of her choice, a top business school.
Except you, a voice told him.
She wasn’t really after me, he argued back. She thought she was, but I wasn’t right for her.
In that regard, Chiara’s dad had done them both a favor. Jax hated to admit it, but the man had seen the truth of it, even if his delivery of the message had sucked.
His phone rang, jangling him out of the past. He pulled it out of his pocket and saw that it was his mother. Well, shit. With Evan in the hospital, he couldn’t ignore her calls.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hello, Jax.”
“I just have a few minutes.”
She sighed, which he knew was because he only ever had a few minutes. He loved his mother. He was devoted to helping her out any way he could. But at the same time, he wouldn’t say that he exactly enjoyed spending time with her.
“I had a long talk with Evan,” she said.
That, too, was code: Evan talks to me.
He didn’t rise to the bait. “I’m glad you guys got a chance to talk.”
“I told him all about the craft fair.”
Right, the craft fair. “How did it go?” he asked.
“It was great. I made more money there, with these skirts, than I have at any other single event. I think I’m finally onto something.”
His mother had gotten sober shortly after their move to California. Jax wasn’t sure what had finally made sobriety stick. Maybe she’d understood, however incompletely, how much she’d taken away from him. Or how her misjudgments had grossly affected Ev
an. Or maybe she’d finally seen that it was only a matter of time before she did something that couldn’t be undone.
He’d asked her once, but she’d given him a typically vague answer, something about energies aligning or it being the right season.
Even sober, his mother had trouble staying anchored in the world. And often Jax had felt like he was still the parent, and she was more like Evan’s sister than a mother. She took an intermittent interest in Evan’s well-being, but didn’t stay focused for long, abandoning him for projects that snared her full attention. She moved from project to project and scheme to scheme and was only ever barely solvent. He was constantly rescuing her from herself. Bailing her out “just this once” or for “just a few hundred.”
I’m onto something was probably also code for, I need a hundred bucks.
“That’s great, Mom.”
“I was wondering if it would help Evan if I sent him a little bit of this money.”
He nearly dropped his phone.
“Hang on, Mom, give me a sec.” He switched his phone to the other hand. Maybe some people were ambidextrous, but he definitely wasn’t one of them. Wait, hang on—he suddenly zeroed in on his task. Not straight metal attachment plate; he needed the angled one. Had he already checked all the drawers on this row?
He gave up on doing both things at the same time and wandered into a corner of the hardware store to give his mother his undivided attention. “How much money are we talking, Mom?”
“Twenty-five, fifty bucks?”
Oh. Right. He let the foolish hope that had bubbled up in him settle back down again. Not the kind of money that would help pay for an expensive experimental treatment. And she’d be asking him for a hundred two weeks from now when she realized that she hadn’t set aside money for supplies to make the next batch of skirts.
He suppressed a sigh. “Hang onto it, Mom. You’ll need it for something. I’ve got Evan.”