So True

by Serena Bell

“There’s a great Italian place a block over.”

  After thanking Jessie for her time and help, Chiara headed that way, got seated, ordered a plate of spaghetti and meatballs, and pulled out her phone to text Jax.

  Can you cover the shop tomorrow morning, too? Stranded in Aberdeen—car troubles.

  The text came back right away. What???

  Blew a head gasket. The car did, that is.

  LOL. That sucks. Where are you?

  In an Italian restaurant. I have a hotel room.

  I’ll come get you.

  What? No!

  Sure. It’s not that far.

  It’s two hours!

  Whatever, I like driving. Evan’s good—I just saw him. Give me your address and stay put.

  She didn’t reply right away. She was struggling with herself. It would be so nice to sleep in her own bed tonight. She wouldn’t have to drag one of her siblings all the way up here to get her. And she’d be able to open the shop herself tomorrow morning.

  But she’d have to spend two hours in the car with Jax.

  Disturbingly, that didn’t feel like a “con.” It felt like a “pro.” Which was the best reason of all for her to spend the night in a hotel.

  I’m fine. Don’t come.

  It took five minutes for him to reply.

  I’m already on the road. You can text me the address whenever you get a chance.

  She wasn’t going to tell him to turn around. That would be—

  Prudent, said the practical side of her brain.

  Ungrateful, said the other half.

  She didn’t tell him to turn around. She texted him her address. And, Don’t text and drive.

  I won’t.

  She rolled her eyes, laughed, and called the hotel to cancel her reservation.

  Two hours later, almost to the minute, he texted her from the front of the restaurant. She dashed out and climbed up.

  “Hey,” he said. He was wearing a tight black t-shirt that featured a picture of a hammer, with the caption underneath, “This is not a drill.”

  She was tired and frustrated and cold—she’d never really gotten warm again after her long wait on the side of 101. The restaurant had been chilly, and she was bare-legged under her pencil skirt. The truck was warm and he was—beautiful. His hair looked like he’d been running his fingers through it all day. It was speckled with sawdust, and his strong jaw sported two-day’s scruff.

  And of course he was such a good guy. How many guys would make a four-hour round trip to pick up a stranded friend—if he even thought of her that way? In her experience, not many.

  She wondered if there were people in his life now who took care of him the way he took care of other people. There hadn’t been in high school—or not, anyway, until her father had semi-adopted him.

  He had soaked up every ounce of care and love that Rich and Maggie had bestowed on him. And when he’d finally let Chiara love him—

  Loving him had been the most gratifying thing she’d ever done. No one had ever made her feel like her love was such a gift.

  She shoved down the wave of longing that washed in with those memories.

  “How’d it go?” he asked.

  She hesitated. “You really want to hear the whole story?”

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “Other people’s job interview stories are maybe a little bit like other people’s dream stories.”

  “We have two hours,” he pointed out. “No shortage of time for stories.”

  So she told him. About Greg Pepper, the executive suite members, directors, and managers she’d met, including the CTO who’d mumbled his way through the interview until she’d stumbled on the magic question, about local brew pubs, and then he’d come to life and given her an in-depth guide to Seattle’s beer scene. She told Jax about the conversations she’d had, and that she thought she’d made a good impression. She didn’t tell Jax about the moment with the COO, when she’d lost her focus. That had been a fluke, and she’d gotten back on track. “I’m, like, ninety percent sure they’re going to call me for a third interview.”

  “And you want that.”

  He sounded so damn doubtful. “Yeah. I do. Why do you keep doing that?”

  “Doing what?”

  “Making it sound like you think I’m making a mistake.”

  He took his eyes off the road long enough for her to see the flash of green. “Because the way you talk about this job isn’t—”

  He stopped.

  She should let it go. He didn’t want to finish the sentence, and probably, she didn’t want him to finish it. But something wouldn’t let her drop it. “Isn’t what?”

  “I’ve seen you. When you’re excited about something.”

  Her body reacted to that as if it were a come-on, but she knew—could tell from his tone of voice—that he hadn’t meant it that way. He meant something else. Something more.

  “In the shop, even. Getting excited about the plans. You were all lit up. You were so into it. Doubly so when you have a pencil in your hand.”

  She didn’t want to talk about how she was with a pencil in her hand. It was too close to the heart of what mattered.

  “Do you remember SuperKee?”

  Of course she did. But why the hell was he doing this? He was the one who’d walked—no, run—away from what they’d had, so how dare he bring it up?

  But yes, she remembered.

  He glanced her way again and saw it on her face.

  “You were so sure you wanted to study math or accounting or business, but then you’d draw SuperKee and you let her be whoever you really wanted to be. And that made you more you.”

  Her heart was pounding.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I think you do. No. I know you do.”

  The night that came back to her was in late winter senior year. It was one of the nights that Jax and Evan had come to dinner at her parents’ house, and then stayed afterwards for the bullshit math tutoring he’d engineered. Which she hadn’t called him out on, because she’d wanted it, too. She’d wanted to sit next to him in the kitchen while her mom and dad washed and dried the dishes—the homey memory of the two of them brought tears to her eyes, but that was nothing new, and she brushed the tears away.

  So there they’d been, in the Campbell kitchen, side by side at the table. His body had given off heat like a furnace. She’d figured maybe it was because he was all muscle and it chewed through calories every minute of every day. Certainly he ate like several grown men and still had zero body fat.

  She’d been able to feel the heat even when he was six inches away. She could smell laundry soap and deodorant and something musky and personal that was Jax.

  Her parents had dispensed with the dishes and gone into the living room. Shortly after that, she and Jax had finished up his math homework, and he’d pushed back his chair, ready to round up Evan and go home.

  And then he turned back.

  “Who was the girl that SuperKee was standing on?”

  “What?”

  “In that picture in your notebook, she knocked someone down and was standing on her chest.”

  “No one. Just a girl I hate.”

  “What did she do?”

  “She said something shitty about Mason.”

  Jax nodded, like that required no further explanation, which—she liked that. There was no more unforgivable sin, in Chiara’s book, than going after her younger brother, who would not speak to defend himself. “So, like, she does stuff for you that you wouldn’t do yourself.”

  She hadn’t really put it into words, but that was exactly it. “Yeah.”

  “She’s brave you.”

  “Yeah, I guess.” She blushed. It was true, but it also felt like too much, him knowing that. So she said, “And SuperJax is brave you, right?”

  For a second, she thought he was going to deny it, but then he said, “Yeah. So what?”

  “What would he do that you can’t do f
or yourself?”

  She met his eyes. His eyelashes were ridiculously long. His bottom lip was soft and full. His eyes were green, but with streaks of gold and amber. And he was tired. There were big circles under his eyes and a gray slackness that she associated with her parents when they’d been working too hard to keep the hotel afloat.

  “Maybe not things I can’t do,” Jax said. He sounded as tired as he looked. “Things I don’t want to do. Vacuum. Mow the lawn. Empty ashtrays. Clean up around the toilet when someone throws up and misses.”

  Her chest hurt.

  “Carry my mom to bed when she passes out.”

  Her chest hurt bad. Like really bad.

  He kept looking at her, which was how she understood that he was telling her this. He was telling her through SuperJax, just like she’d told him about Mason and the girl who’d called him something cruel.

  Jax was ticking things off on his fingers now. “Take Evan to the doctor. Do my homework when I’m too tired.”

  She couldn’t help herself. She reached out a hand and touched his arm. As she’d known it would be, it was a million degrees, even through his flannel shirt. She felt the heat travel all the way up her arm. It filled her whole body.

  She wanted more of it.

  But instead she took her hand away and opened her notebook to a fresh page.

  “What happens next?” she asked. “In their adventure?”

  Because it felt far, far easier—and safer—to imagine that than to ask herself what was going to happen next in the Campbell kitchen.

  Or, now, in the present, in the truck, hurtling along 101. There were a lot more than six inches between them, but she thought she could feel the heat of his body anyway.

  “You were different when you drew,” he said. “You were so happy.”

  “We were just kids,” she said. “We were just fooling around.”

  He shook his head. “No.”

  He was quiet for a long time, and she almost thought that was it. That he’d said what he was going to say, and they’d moved on. But then he took a deep breath, and she saw his hand grip the wheel, tight enough that his knuckles flared white.

  “Maybe we were just kids, but we weren’t just fooling around.”

  He looked at her, long enough that the car wavered, briefly, on the road, before he fixed his eyes forward and said:

  “We knew exactly what mattered.”

  23

  After he dropped Chiara off at her house, he went back to the shop. He thought he could finish up in another three or four hours of work. He even made himself place a call to Chief Rains. “I’m going to be in the shop until three a.m. again,” he said. “Mostly painting, so I don’t think noise will be an issue, but just in case someone sees the light on—”

  “Thanks for letting me know,” the police chief had said, no muss, no fuss.

  Jax hung up the phone and poured paint into his roller tray, started working the big wall behind the front counter, the one that he’d hoped Chiara would turn into a mural. He should just fucking leave her alone already.

  Except he couldn’t.

  Despite what he’d more or less promised Levi, the past wasn’t just the past. He’d made sure of it. As long as he was in Tierney Bay, what he’d done was going to creep around him like a ghost and make it impossible for him to forget.

  One night, during the spring of senior year, Jax and Chiara were sitting at the Campbell kitchen table. Evan was playing with Hannah, and Maggie and Auburn and Mason were in the living room watching the first season of West Wing on Blu-Ray. Rich had gone back to Cape House to grab some paperwork he needed.

  They were supposed to be working on Jax’s pre-calc homework, but Jax’s brain felt sluggish. He’d erased and rewritten the same problem three times already, and the paper was starting to wear thin in that spot.

  It didn’t help that the day had been unseasonably warm for March and Chiara was wearing shorts and a tank top. Most of her was bare, soft and pale—the white flesh of her inner thighs and the lightly freckled curves of her shoulders and upper arms.

  He wanted to know if the skin was as soft as it looked.

  “I’ve been thinking,” Chiara said. She’d opened the sketchbook when he wasn’t paying attention, and she was doodling something.

  He leaned over to look.

  “What if something bad happens to SuperKee and SuperJax has to rescue her? Like, she figures out that it’s Mr. Barker, the chem teacher, who offed Mr. Mueller, and she has proof. Fingerprints, or whatever.”

  “DNA,” Jax offered.

  “DNA’s good. She has his hair, or whatever.”

  “And he knows she has it.”

  “Yeah. And he gets her to stay after school for something, and then he has a syringe with some evil concoction in it and he’s got her trapped in the chem lab—”

  She started drawing. The chem lab took shape, with SuperKee tied up against the gas hood.

  SuperKee’s proportions had changed since he’d first seen her. The new SuperKee looked an awful lot like Chiara herself—lean and athletic, with perfectly proportioned curves that would feel just right under Jax’s hands. There were ropes around her ankles and around her wrists, and Jax wondered exactly how messed up it was that he liked them there.

  “SuperJax knows something’s wrong. She said she was going to meet him for coffee, and she’s never late. Plus he has a sixth sense with her. So he shows up at the school. Everything’s locked up, so he breaks a window.”

  Chiara drew it: SuperJax, his shirt wrapped around his fist, going after one of the windows in the science wing. “He knows it has to be Barker.”

  Under Chiara’s pencil, SuperJax overpowered Barker and knocked him unconscious.

  “He runs over to where she is. He’s breathing hard, he’s bruised and bloody and his hair is all messed up,” Chiara said.

  He waited for her drawing to catch up. She took a long time over SuperJax, and sometimes she looked at him while she was drawing. He liked that best, when she stared at him for a long time and then drew SuperJax, looking too perfect to be human. Because then, just for a second, he could believe that was what she saw.

  She was looking at him now, her eyes moving over his face in a way that made his breath freeze.

  “When he sees her like that, he realizes how worried he was for her. And he realizes that if anything ever happened to SuperKee, he—”

  “He wouldn’t be able to stand it,” Jax said. He just knew that was how the sentence ended. Because they were both there, inside the story. That was how it worked.

  He could hear Chiara breathing. “And he realized, right then,” she said, “that he was in love with her.”

  Jax froze. Or, his outsides froze. Inside, everything was super-heated and rushing, and he couldn’t catch his breath.

  “So he didn’t even wait to get her untied. He just stepped in, and—”

  Jax finally recovered the ability to move. He reached over and took the pencil out of her hand. “Kee,” he said.

  She slowly turned her head. Her pupils were huge. She bit her lip. It was like watching someone bite into a peach; his mouth watered. Her gaze fell to his mouth. He set the pencil down and leaned toward her.

  “Chiara,” a voice said. “That doesn’t look like homework.”

  It was Rich, standing two or three feet away. Jax couldn’t make out his expression. Concern, and—anger? He’d never seen his boss angry.

  Chiara closed the notebook and pushed it away. “Sorry,” she said. “I got off track there for a bit.”

  She didn’t look at Jax when she said it.

  “‘Distraction wastes our energy, concentration restores it,’” Rich said. “Sharon Salzberg.” His eyes moved from Chiara’s face to Jax’s, his frown intensifying. There was something in his eyes, some message that Jax couldn’t read—but he was pretty sure it wasn’t anything good.

  “Sorry, Daddy. I was—we were—”

  “It’s my fault,” Jax said quickly. �
�She was working, and I distracted her.”

  A small twitch moved through Rich’s mouth, but it wasn’t laughter. Jax felt a chill. “Well,” Rich said. “Back to work with both of you.”

  His voice was cheerful, and he’d turned and walked away.

  The whole interaction was almost nothing, but Jax felt, somewhere in his gut, that it wasn’t.

  Just because nothing had happened—nothing that you could point to or record or photograph—didn’t mean the world hadn’t changed.

  24

  He wanted the timing to be perfect. So he got to the shop before Chiara the next morning and intercepted her outside the front door.

  She looked so damn good, her hair around her shoulders like a cape, smiling all the way up to her eyes at him. And in her hands, she held something that he was pretty sure was food.

  “Is that—?”

  “Lily’s French toast.”

  “I would have gone with you to get it fresh there.”

  “Another day,” she said, shrugging. “I couldn’t get myself up early enough.”

  He let himself imagine them waking up together in the morning—then squashed the thought as flat as a pancake. That was not ever going to happen. He’d made sure of it.

  She tried to get past him to the door, but he blocked her.

  “I have something to show you,” he said.

  “Am I finally going to get to see what you were working on?” Her face lit up, eyes bright, cheeks pink.

  God, she was going to kill him.

  “Yup.”

  There was still work to be done. He hadn’t been able to get all the painting done. There were a few areas where the carpet wasn’t down. There was no art or signage on the walls … But you could see the bones now of the new shop, the shape of it. He’d set the games in their shelves and the comics in their racks. You could see the finished product like a photographic image rising on an old Polaroid.

  And really, it was the tables that he wanted her to see most. The rest had been her design, her vision; he’d only executed it. But the tables …

  He finally opened the door and let her in.

  Her mouth opened as she looked around. Her eyes got huge.