Impetuous (Victory Lap Book 1)

by Mercedes Jade

  It had been dangerous... hot.

  Damn it, she should not be thinking like that. Boy troubles were more than she could handle right now on top of everything else. If she kept saying it to herself, she might believe it.

  “The stuff on your mind, is it about why you were visiting the psych?” Kade asked.

  He had probably overheard enough to know she had been there for her mom. It was kind of him not to say it out loud. She didn’t really want it making the gossip rounds at school before people even got to meet her. Then, she’d be that crazy woman’s kid, not Tess.

  “Yeah, kind of. Do you think you can keep it to yourself about where we met? At least, for now?”

  Kade didn’t answer right away, which made her nervous. She bit her lip, tasting peppermint, an old standby. It didn’t soothe her like it normally would.

  “Of course, I’m not going to announce it over the speakers, but...”

  Oh, crap.

  “Who did you tell?” Tess asked, preparing herself for the fallout. She hadn’t come here to make friends. Didn’t need them. Family was all that mattered.

  “I didn’t know I was ever going to see you again,” Kade said, and it sounded like regret and an excuse at the same time. “I’ve got some guys I’ve known for a while and my twin. You can meet them at lunch.”

  Who knew what story Kade had told them? She couldn’t imagine a version that would end without embarrassing her. The hospital outburst hadn’t been her finest moment, nor her scatterbrained need to be rescued.

  “Are they going to let us have lunch, or do we get detention without supper?” she teased, not eager to meet the other guys that were aware of her humiliation.

  “Don’t worry. Nobody threw a punch. We’ll get off with a warning. Henderson likes to talk a lot, but it’s more like a chicken squawking. He doesn’t do anything but peck. Just nod your head and say you will reflect on your wrongs.”

  She thought about it. This was her first Catholic school. “Are we going to have to do penance?”

  “Uh, no,” Kade said, sounding a bit confused.

  Her brother had said that the religion wasn’t crammed down their throats. Just monthly mass and the priest had to come to the school to do it since there were too many students for the church.

  “Good,” Tess said, relieved. She knew very little about Catholicism. Her mom baptized her, but she never took any of the other sacraments and the last time she had gone to church, both of her parents had been together.

  “You sound like it’s your first time,” Kade said.

  For the principal’s office, yep. That could also mean so many things. “I’m not that innocent,” she protested, meaning so many things, too. “I just can’t afford to get into trouble right now.”

  “Come on. Let me do the talking,” Kade said.

  They made the rest of the trip in nervous silence. As they got nearer to the front foyer, where all the administrative offices resided, Tess could feel her heart pounding despite Kade saying he would help handle it.

  Gird your loins.

  The last time Tess had been summoned to a principal’s office, she had walked out with all of her stuff from her locker emptied into a box and handed to her. Her parents hadn’t even waved goodbye.

  The secretary’s voice was a shot fired at Tess as she walked into the front office with Kade behind her.

  “What did you do to that kilt?” she asked as Tess entered the waiting area through the door Kade held open.

  “I lowered it,” Tess muttered, feeling humiliation creep up her cheeks.

  “Kilts are expensive. I told you to take good care of it. We don’t get a lot of kilts in the used clothing donations. Most girls want to keep them as a memento of their time at St. Paul’s and that one was barely worn,” the secretary said. Her name was Sady or something with an S. Maybe Sandy.

  Tess cleared her throat and discreetly looked for a name tag somewhere to jog her memory. “I just let it out. It’s so cold outside and I thought the school rules said hemlines had to be to the knee. This is barely halfway to the regulation length.”

  “I told you they would make an exception since you couldn’t afford-” The secretary cut off before revealing more about Tess’s non-existent fortune and stood up, patting down her own barely knee-length pencil skirt as she came around her desk. “Oh, hello, Kade Saxton. What can I do for you?”

  “I’ve been a bad boy,” Kade said, giving the secretary a wink.

  She was fifty and greying. Tess fought a snort of disbelief. Guess this settled whether the few flirty things Kade had said to her were personal or just his personality.

  Sady-Sandy tittered. “Mr. Henderson knows boys have those wild oat-”

  “Wild hearts can’t be broken,” Tess interrupted. Her brain had spit out the movie title connection immediately and Kade had started to look a little uncomfortable, glancing back at Tess as the secretary practically flirted back.

  Seriously, this was a Catholic high school. Sowing wild oats wasn’t proper office etiquette.

  Sady-Sandy glared down at Tess with annoyance. It was those heels. She wasn’t much taller than Tess and if they were barefoot, the secretary would have more difficulty looking down her nose. That was the exact superior look she had given Tess when she told the secretary she couldn’t afford a new uniform, or books, or the annual supplies fee.

  You would think Tess was robbing the church of valuables to hock for school supplies when she asked if there were any unclaimed uniforms in the lost and found. Ashley had been the one to tell Tess it was a possibility, and then, she had found out about the donations bin. Let’s just say, not everyone washed the clothes they ‘donated’ so generously. Tess had dug through to the bottom to find this kilt and had to accept the only one that wouldn’t fall off her hips was going to bare more of her thighs than she felt comfortable.

  “Did you get Kade into trouble?” Sady-Sandy asked.

  Kade immediately protested. “Nope, I got the new girl into trouble on her first day. You know how seriously I take chemistry class,” he said and the secretary nodded, attention back on him. “Well, Tess takes it just as seriously, and we had finished our pop quiz early when Tess caught Rob Balor cheating, red-handed.”

  “No way!” Sady-Sandy said, emphasizing and drawing it out with way too much shock to sound like anything other than fake.

  “Sandy, who’s out there?” came a masculine voice from the office.

  “Kade Saxton and Theresa Sinclair, Mr. Henderson. They were sent down because of a misunderstanding in Mr. Williams class about cheating,” the secretary answered, her voice all professional, suddenly.

  “Call their parents and send them in,” the principal called out.

  Tess gave Sandy a panicked look, but the secretary pretty much shoved them both into the principal’s office. Who the heck would Sandy call for Tess? It wasn’t as if she could dial up the hospital and ask if Maddy was taking phone calls. Her mother was still zoned out with the antipsychotics as far as Tess knew.

  She had to hope that Kade was a fast talker.

  “Well, Mr. Saxton, why don't you start by telling me how you ended up back in my office for the first time in a month and it's with a girl? I thought you and your friends had sworn off that kind of trouble the rest of the school year. In fact, this semester, I thought you were too busy to get into any further trouble. There is that probation to keep in mind. The third strike and you won't be walked to first base.”

  The principal hadn't even let them walk through the door before he started harping in on Kade. It made Tess feel kind of bad to think that anyone could overhear the lecture that Kade was getting, mostly because of what he had done to help her. The secretary, for sure, had to be listening, and anybody could just walk by, or enter the office. Privacy wasn't holy in this school.

  “Tess, go take a seat,” Kade told her, ignoring the principal for the moment.

  He quickly shut the door on any eavesdroppers. Tess looked behind her, giving Kad
e a quick, questioning glance before she took a seat at one of the two chairs in front of the big white desk. Kade answered her with her a reassuring smile, revealing a glimpse of dimples.

  “Principal Henderson, Kade is not at fault here. I'd like to explain what happened,” Tess said.

  The principal took a seat. His chair must have been new because it squeaked as he sat down, like leather that hadn't been stretched or worn yet.

  Tess didn't say a word, waiting for the principal to give her the okay to explain her side of the story. She had only met him this morning, and he had been rather busy, so all she had gotten was a handshake and her schedule handed to her in the front office and told that Sandy could explain the rest.

  Principal Henderson grabbed a rubber ball on top of his desk and squeezed it into his fist, pliable black squishing out between his fingers. Kade sat down beside her, his closest knee brushing against hers. She looked over to him for just a moment, a tiny glimpse at his face.

  Kade was staring at Principal Henderson with something awful in his expression. It was hard, a tightening of the skin across his high cheekbones, narrowing of his mouth and stiffness that went all the way down to his shoulders, drawing them up slightly.

  Tess felt an internal shiver. She looked back at the principal, watching him work his stress ball in one hand as he stared at Kade. The silence in the room was filled with the tension before two gunslingers drew their Remingtons.

  Of course, she talked. There couldn’t be better torture to get her to confess than utter silence and stillness. Her body was wired differently, all her racing thoughts processed simultaneously by her brain, but if something chocked the engine like the stressful nothingness in front of her, then her body demanded she move around to release all that restless energy.

  Thinking or doing, but never just nothing.

  “All of this started because our coffee perc is broken.”

  Two sets of probing eyes swung to her. She swallowed, deeply. Gawd. Why couldn’t she tell a story in a logical way that others could understand? Principal Henderson didn’t care about her caffeinated habit. Even Kade seemed perplexed as to how coffee could have anything to do with her short skirt.

  “Children shouldn’t be drinking coffee,” the principal said when she stopped talking and fidgeted instead.

  “I’m eighteen,” she reminded him. One of Kade’s brows inched up a little. So, he didn’t know. She supposed most people mistook her for younger, partly because she was short.

  “How does coffee have anything to do with Mr. Balor cheating?” the principal asked.

  He clenched that ball, over and over, drawing Tess’s attention to his dirty fingernails. They were a touch overlong and not filthy, just obvious that he hadn’t washed his hands yet this morning. Maybe, the black marks on his fingertips were from his morning newspaper?

  Her mother’s back flashed in mind.

  A knock on the door startled Tess so bad that she jumped up in her seat, settling when Kade reached out and touched her right knee.

  “Mr. Henderson,” Sandy called through the closed door. “Kade’s father will be here in a few minutes but Tess’s social worker is tied up at a house visit out of town.”

  She didn’t enjoy having that announced in front of Kade. What would he make of her having a social worker called instead of a parent?

  “Fine, Sandy. Let Kade’s father in when he arrives,” the principal said. His eyes never left Tess. “Now, are you going to talk, Miss Sinclair, or should we let Mr. Saxton do the talking for you?”

  Kade had already taken over defending her against Rob’s sexual harassment. If she didn’t want to be dismissed, she needed to take responsibility for herself. It wasn't that difficult. She had been doing it for years. Nobody had been there for her to rely on.

  “I need coffee. It’s not a habit or a preference over tea. It is a necessity for my optimal functioning. I prefer to drink a cup every two to four hours that I need to have focus. Those are standard cups, not grandes, and I drink it with the minimum of sugar and cream to take the bitter edge off of it.”

  “Miss Sinclair, I am not here to take your coffee order,” the principal drolly interrupted.

  “I didn’t get coffee this morning. I haven’t had a cup of coffee since I arrived in Halborne. As I said, the perc is broken at home, and I can’t frivolously splurge on store-bought coffee.”

  The principal cleared his throat, loudly.

  “I can’t focus. When my mind wanders, my body wants to follow. I need to get up and take a walk, but I tried to do that and due to my lack of attention to my surroundings and person, I accidentally flashed one of the boys in my chemistry class and he made an untoward comment about my posterior in comparison to a feline.”

  “Rob grabbed her butt,” Kade piped in.

  “And that,” Tess quickly agreed.

  The principal looked at each of them in turn. “What does this have to do with cheating?”

  “As I said, it started with coffee,” Tess began again.

  Kade made a sound. It sounded suspiciously like a chuckle that was half-smothered.

  Tess gave him a sideways glare. It didn’t do much but make her see double for a moment. Focusing back on the principal, she sighed and decided to try to explain again. He clearly hadn’t understood the correlation of caffeination to her productive function.

  “I wrote the test too fast because I couldn’t focus,” Tess said.

  The principal squeezed the ball. “Usually the opposite occurs,” he commented.

  “True,” agreed Tess. “But the test wasn’t a challenge to me—I already self-studied that unit last month—and I didn’t have the patience to go back over my answers carefully because my mind was on a bunch of other things without the coffee to focus my thoughts. That was why I needed to take a walk, which led to the aforementioned flashing and Kade noticing Rob’s behaviour when I reacted, uh, loudly.”

  Tess didn’t deny that Rob had been cheating, although she doubted it. Both she and Kade had completed and handed in their tests, but she would take the excuse if it would help get Kade out of trouble. He had only been trying to help her and Rob’s comments had crossed an uncomfortable line. She didn’t want to repeat them in front of the principal.

  “She screamed the alarm,” Kade confirmed. He didn’t mention the broken pencils or her stabbing her own pencil through Rob’s test and answer papers. “I can just imagine how my father would react to hearing a female student was practically molested inside the classroom with a male teacher present.”

  Oh, no. Kade was going to alienate her from the principal by making her the dust you tried to sweep under the rug to hide the real dirt.

  “Was there any test cheating?” the principal said, not batting an eyelash at the blatant threat.

  “Well, Mr. Williams could certainly view the situation as a cheat caught in the act since Tess did attack Rob’s test and I disabled some of his test-taking materials. Nobody laid a hand on Rob, though.”

  “Miss Sinclair, do you agree this was an unfortunate case of a boy being caught cheating on a small quiz—for which he will receive a mark of zero and an academic reprimand on his high school record?” the principal asked.

  Tess eyed Mr. Henderson’s hand, noting how hard he had the stress ball squeezed. She wasn’t able to meet his gaze as she accepted that the scenario Kade presented was really the lesser trouble for them all. She could avoid getting a reputation here at the office and around the rest of the school.

  Kade seemed to be experienced at hiding things by slanting perceptions. Who was his father that even the principal seemed unnerved by the thought of his influence?

  “Sure,” Tess quietly agreed.

  “Good,” the principal said.

  It weighed heavily on her. She was an honest person at core and the lie felt like sludge she had to wade through. There wasn’t just herself to think about now. She had Ashley and Jason and her mother depending on her, and that meant keeping her nose clean at scho
ol.

  “Are you going to tell my worker?” Tess asked.

  “That you caught someone cheating?” Kade said. He scoffed.

  She looked over at him. Had there been more behind his lie than she first thought? It was like he came up with the best story to protect her, not only himself. He had walked the principal right into the moral choice as well. Deal with potential sexual harassment or academic misconduct, but still deliver punishment to the biggest offender. It might be more a slap on the wrist for Rob, but it kept her out of the mess that could have resulted from the real situation.

  There was a brief knock on the door. The principal was calling to ‘come in’ when a tall, heavyset older man walked into the office.

  “James, thanks for coming on such short notice,” the principal said. He dropped the abused stress ball to his desk and stood up to greet the man that had to be Kade’s father.

  There wasn’t a real obvious resemblance. For one, this wasn’t the parent that gave Kade his honey-gold skin colour. The blonde hair and cerulean eyes were almost the opposite of his son, although Kade’s dark grey-blue eyes could have been partly from his father. They both were tall, Kade less broad-shouldered, like a football quarterback versus a basketball center. Only when Kade’s father smiled at the principal did Tess see identical dimples that Kade had flashed her earlier.

  There were a lot of lines around that smile, more than you would expect for someone James Saxton’s age, and some of those lines were around his forehead and eyes. She wasn’t quite sure they all fit laugh lines.

  Maybe he got a lot of sun, or he smoked; either could age him early.

  “Kade, I thought we talked about giving Mr. Henderson here a break for a few months. You have plenty to keep you busy, son. And if you don’t, I’ll be sure to find more for you to do.”

  Kade didn’t ignore his father. He stood up, and then, Tess felt like she ought to stand up too in order to be polite.

  “No, sir. I messed up, but I promise this will be the last trip you have to make to Principal Henderson’s office in the middle of your court day,” Kade said.