Walking Wounded

by Lauren Gilley

  ~*~

  Present Day

  “So you were best friends,” Luke says.

  “Not everyone has one,” Will says.

  “No, that’s true, not everyone does.”

  “But I did. And you do.”

  Luke frowns and switches off his audio recorder. “Your point being?”

  “We have that in common. I think maybe that means something.”

  Luke exhales and tries to keep it from sounding like a sigh. “Okay. So.” The clock in the corner, ticking like always, tells him it’s ten o’ clock, and no doubt the heavy bags beneath Will’s eyes signal the post-breakfast fatigue Matt talked about yesterday. “Thanks for the story. Even if it wasn’t real.”

  “Oh, there’s more,” Will says. “A lot more.”

  “I look forward to it.” Though he doesn’t. He’s tired, and still more upset than he’d like to admit about last night, and he would really like a smoke, another coffee, and a nap.

  Scratch that – he would trade all three for a glass of cheap bourbon.

  “Bye for now, Will,” he says, standing.

  “Come back this afternoon, we’ll pick it up again,” the old man offers.

  “Really?”

  “What else have you got to do? Hal’s working ‘til late.”

  He frowns. “Like my days revolve around Hal’s schedule?”

  Will shrugs. “Just saying.”

  Fuck this guy, for real, Luke thinks, leaving the library with a notch between his eyebrows he can feel pushing at the nosepiece of his glasses.

  “Mrs. Maddox,” he says, when he reaches the kitchen, and she holds up the whisk she’s using to halt him. Little globules of beaten eggs run down the tines.

  “What did I say about that?”

  “Sandy,” he corrects, shoulders slumping. “I’m gonna head out, but Mr…Will said to come back this afternoon.”

  She nods and resumes whisking, eyes trained on him rather than what she’s doing, because she’s obviously a kitchen ninja. “He gets his second wind just after dinner, gets all chatty again. You and Hal can stay for dinner and then talk after. We’re having beef stew and cornbread.” She halts her mixing and upends the bowl of batter into a greased cast iron skillet.

  Luke can’t remember the last time he had something as delicious as cornbread, so he says, “Okay.”

  “I look forward to it.” She shoots him a smile. “You two getting anywhere?”

  “Um, well…who knows.” He shrugs and she looks sympathetic. “Thanks. I’ll be back.” He ducks out before he can get roped into further discussion.

  He’s halfway down the front steps when he hears, “Psssstttt!” from somewhere above, and he grinds to a halt.

  Tara Maddox hangs out of a second floor window, dyed hair flapping in the breeze. “Hey,” she calls down in a stage whisper. “Hold up a sec.”

  “What–” he starts, but the window closes and she’s gone.

  First off, who knows what the hell that means. Second off, like hell should he listen to some wannabe-Goth brat senator’s daughter who told him to “wait a sec.”

  But for some stupid reason, he hits the sidewalk and just stands there, waiting, like an idiot. “Fuck,” he says, under his breath, because he doesn’t know how he ever got to be so woefully stupid.

  A moment later, he hears the low squeak of metal hinges and the garage door opens by about a foot. Tara rolls out, stands, and pushes the door back down in a few quick moves, then hustles toward him. She’s wearing all black: jeans, boots, t-shirt, leather jacket; and has a black backpack studded with buttons slung over one shoulder.

  “Go!” she hisses when she reaches him, grabbing his arm and propelling him down the sidewalk with a surprising amount of force.

  “What the hell?” he asks, but he falls into step, because he doesn’t want Sandy looking out the window and seeing them together. Him, being the adult, will be the one blamed, because in his experience, the parents of kids like Tara never believe what their little angels are capable of.

  “I’m skipping school,” she says, as they put distance between themselves and the townhouse. She checks over her shoulder, black-rimmed eyes wild with excitement.

  “Right. Because that’s cool. Nothing like being an uneducated dumbass to prove you’re hot shit.”

  “Oh my God,” she groans.

  “I mean, the public education system’s bad enough, but if you don’t even go at all…”

  She still has hold of his arm and sends him a withering look. “You still think I’m in high school?”

  “Well, what’s the fun in skipping out on college?”

  “I have no interest in poli sci,” she says.

  “Says the girl who could have an incredible career the moment she graduates. I was the first person in my family to go to college. Trust me, I dragged my ass into class when I had the flu and passed out in the hallway.”

  She bites her lip, a fast flash of contrition. “But you’re doing what you want to do with your life.”

  “Wrong. I’m writing a meaningless story about your grandfather for a magazine I don’t care about, living in an apartment the size of a pizza box.”

  “But you’re a writer,” she persists.

  Luke sighs. It’s cold out, and his breath puffs out in a white, vaporous cloud. “Yeah, I’m a writer.”

  She glances away, down the sidewalk, nodding. The wind catches her hair, and he thinks it would look so much better its natural color. She has a lovely profile; classically pretty. The kind of face women pay tens of thousands of dollars to acquire.

  She’s a brat, and trying to look like a punk just to spite her family, but Luke – in his own leather jacket, with holes in his socks – takes pity on her. It’s not much fun to be twenty and hate who you are.

  “What do you want to be?” he asks.

  “A dancer.” She says it immediately, reverently. The word leaves her lips like a prayer. Luke knows that feeling: it isn’t a hobby, or a hope; it’s a prayer, fervent, hopeless, painful, aching deep in the bones.

  He shouldn’t mock her – he shouldn’t – but he has to break the rapture, because it hurts to be close to it. “A pole dancer?”

  She gives him a light backhanded smack against the chest, without thought, like they’re friends. “A ballet dancer.”

  He shrugs, and glances forward in time for them to split apart and go around an older man walking his dog, joining up on the other side of him. “So? It’s expensive, but your parents could afford to send you off somewhere.”

  She sighs and he knows it means he’s missing the point. “Dad doesn’t think it’s useful, dancing. He says all I’ll have to show for it is bruised toes and a lot of debt.”

  “Hmm.”

  “What?” She glances at him sharply.

  “I would say that seems like a real dad thing to say, but I never spent much time with mine, so I dunno.”

  “Huh.”

  “You’re not a real sympathetic person. Ever think that’s why he won’t let you dance?”

  She elbows him. Hard. And he laughs. This feels nice. Like the kind of raw, emotions-unchecked relationship he’s missing so much when it comes to Hal.

  Hal. Jesus. His ribs ache as his lungs contract, and he knows it has nothing to do with the cold.

  “I still dance,” Tara says. “But I want to go to New York. I want to be in the Company.”

  “You could run away.”

  She hesitates.

  “Though, for what it’s worth, I don’t think running away is ever worth it unless you really don’t have a choice.”

  Her head drops and she studies the toes of her boots as they walk.

  “You have a nice family. Don’t hate it too much.”

  “Yeah,” she says, glum.

  “Come on.” He slings his arm across her shoulders. “I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.”

  ~*~

  Georgetown Grind is hopping, but the line moves quickly, and Luke needs the moment in the w
armth, breathing in coffee smells, listening to the low murmur of conversation and the clack of laptop keys. Tara orders a chai latte and Luke orders his with whip and cinnamon. They find a table out on the sidewalk, where Tara bums a smoke and they both light up.

  “Will,” Luke says, when they’re settled. “What’s the deal there?”

  She sips her latte and looks thoughtful, cigarette held between index and middle finger in a pose that strikes him as very Hepburn – Audrey, always his favorite. “He’s always been a little cagey,” she says. “Ever since I was little. Everyone always said, ‘Don’t upset Grandpa.’” She makes a face. “He was good to us, the grandkids, but, I dunno. He was always just so unhappy, it seemed like. Even before Gram died.”

  “Leena?”

  “Yeah. Eileen Maddox.” She takes a drag, exhales, chases it with coffee. “You know the story there, right?”

  “Do you?” he counters.

  “Not all of it, no. But I know something happened during the war that messed him up. And I know before they shipped out, Leena was engaged to his best friend, Finn.”

  Luke rocks forward. “She was?” It shouldn’t, but the information hits him like a shock.

  “Yeah. Childhood sweethearts or something. And then the war happened, and, well…Gramps won’t talk about it. Mom told me, because Gram told her.”

  “Shit,” Luke says, sitting back in his chair. His mind spins, and he can see silvery threads connecting the disjointed intel he’s been given, can start to form patterns, lay these out in his head in tidy notecard form.

  “I’m thinking he’s just a miserable person, you know?”

  “Uh-huh,” he says, but that isn’t what he’s thinking at all.

  We have that in common. I think maybe that means something.

  And just what the hell, Luke wants to know, does Will Maddox think he knows about Luke’s life?

  ~*~

  “You’re really skipping school?” he asks Tara.

  She rolls her eyes. “Today. Yeah. It’s just some history class.”

  “Oh. Just history.”

  She frowns at him. “God, you’re annoying.”

  “One of my more charming qualities, actually.”

  Her eyes narrow, between the dark rings of her eyeliner, and her expression grows speculative. “If you don’t like this job, why don’t you just leave?”

  “What? Like you?”

  “Why not?”

  He ducks down into his jacket collar – the wind nips hard at his ears and nose, and if he didn’t have company, he would have long since given up on smoking and gone inside – and tries to keep his face neutral.

  He doesn’t succeed, because Tara says, “What?”

  “Hal got me this job. I didn’t ask him to, but, yeah…” He feels his face heating from the inside out, and averts his eyes. “I can’t just skip out. Not after he went to the trouble.”

  She takes a long drag and says, “Does he know you’re in love with him?”

  In some ways, Luke’s been waiting for that question for a long time, now. Really, it’s shocking no one in his life has ever asked it, but, then again, he doesn’t see Mom much anymore, and Sadie is…and, well, there’s Linda. And he hasn’t seen Hal in three years. And friends are…friends are problematic for a depressed writer who smokes in the twenty-first century and keeps weird hours.

  And because he’s been waiting, he’s planned a dozen reactions: the shocked gasp, the appalled stare, the good old choking-on-air routine.

  But that isn’t what happens. Instead, a prickling cold numbness moves over him, through him, freezing him; he swears his blood slows to frozen sludge in his veins. He’s felt it, thought it, flirted away from the boldness of the statement in his mind. But when he hears it, in a near-stranger’s voice like that, he knows all over again how irrevocably true it is – and has always been: he’s in love with Hal. Blindly, crazily, relentlessly in love with him. Since that first moment, when they were twelve, when he realized he didn’t just love him as his best friend, but always wanted to run his tongue up the length of his throat for reasons he hadn’t understood. And he also knows, here on the cold sidewalk, that Hal has never, and will never feel that way about him. The Incident was a moment of pity, and kindness, but not of love, nor passion.

  And it just…it closes over him like ice. Facing it all head-on. He wants to die a little bit.

  “Whoa.” Tara drops her cig to the wrought iron tabletop and sits forward. “Are you having a seizure or something?”

  He manages to shake his head. “No, I…no.”

  “Shit.” Her smile breaks in a humorless, sympathetic way. “You really are, aren’t you?”

  His tongue feels like lead in his mouth when he says, “Yes. Forever.”

  “Jeez. That’s rough.”

  He swallows and it hurts. “Yeah.”

  She sits back. “He doesn’t know, does he?”

  Really, he has no idea whether Hal ever believed what he said the night of The Incident. He can’t let himself think about it too much; it only makes the impossibility of it all the sharper.

  “I think,” Tara starts, and for the first time she sounds hesitant. “Maybe you should talk to Gramps about it.”

  He lifts his brows.

  “Trust me. Just…that’s part of the story. Somehow. I think.”

  Tara Maddox, he thinks, isn’t wasted on political science. There’s a sharp girl hidden behind all the getup.

  “Hey,” she says, smiling in a way he hasn’t seen before. She almost looks like she feels sorry for him. Or maybe that’s just his paranoid imagination at work again. “Let’s get outta here. I want to show you something.”

  ~*~

  When a young, attractive woman says, “I want to show you something,” she’s usually talking about her tits – at least that’s Luke’s experience. But he doesn’t think that’s Tara’s game, not after his sidewalk “forever” confession, so he follows her. Walking is at least better than sitting still and letting the cold sink deeper into his bones.

  Georgetown, he thinks, is too nice for him. And not because he’s broke and resents its loveliness; but because he has nothing lovely of his own to offer it.

  Shoulders hunched against the cold, they walk past fashion boutiques with sparsely-dressed mannequins in the windows; lingerie boutiques with curtains in the windows; used bookshops packed with haphazard paperbacks he makes mental notes to revisit another time.

  Tara turns down an alley, and unlike the alleys in New York, it has tidy cobblestone paving and doesn’t smell like piss and rotting garbage. Sensing that wherever they are, they’re at least safe, Luke keeps his curiosity to himself and follows Tara up a short flight of steps to a black-painted door without a sign or a number. She knocks three times, quickly, and then two slow beats. Luke hears the tumblers of a lock slide back, and then the door swings inward.

  “Come on,” Tara says, and ducks inside.

  Luke goes after her, stepping into a narrow, windowless hallway, dark as nighttime once the door thumps shut behind them. There’s someone back there, whoever let them in, but Tara plunges ahead, not giving him a chance to check over his shoulder.

  “Is this a drug buy?” he asks.

  “Shut up. No.”

  The hallway opens up into a huge, high-ceilinged space with scraped hardwood floors and matte black walls. It’s a club of some sort: bar along one wall, DJ stand at the other; no doubt colored lights flash down from above when the main overheads are cut off. He spots a collection of small tables in one corner, and signs to indicate restrooms. The place bears that bleak, sad, washed-out look of all nightclubs in the daytime; the unglamorous behind-the-scenes revelation of extension cords, duct tape, and hasty paint jobs.

  Luke wants to ask the point of this excursion, but then he sees it coming toward them with long strides: a young man whose face reveals that he’s wildly in love with Tara Maddox. Or at least in love with parts of her.

  “Hi!” Tara squeals, her own fa
ce transforming with radiance, as she flings herself at the young man.

  He grabs her and spins her around, her feet lifting up behind her like they’ve done this dozens of times before. The young man presses his face into her shoulder, eyes closing in brief, intimate joy.

  For a second, Luke allows himself to envy them, and their easy freedom of loving each other. He won’t ever have this, and the knowledge sits bitter at the back of his tongue.

  Then Tara’s feet hit the floor and she steers her boyfriend over toward Luke. “This is Dex. Dex, this is Luke. He’s the writer I told you about.” She grins at Luke, hand braced against Dex’s flat stomach. Love becomes her, for sure.

  “You’re talking about me?” Luke asks, shaking Dex’s offered hand. The guy has a firm grip, if a little clammy. His longish hair, deep V-neck tee, and ripped jeans and Docs paint a picture of a young man the Maddox family isn’t going to want to meet.

  In a small way, it warms Luke to think that Tara feels safe enough with him to introduce her inappropriate boyfriend to him.

  “Good things,” Dex assures, drawing back.

  “This is your club?” Luke asks.

  Dex nods, and looks proud. “Yeah. About a year now.”

  “Dex is a dancer,” Tara says. “The best dancer.”

  “Well…” Dex ducks his head, blushing.

  “He is,” Tara insists. “It’s how we met.”

  “And that’s why you want to major in dance?” Luke asks her, smirking.

  “No. It’s called having something in common.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Which is why you should probably start bulking up and get a security job,” she shoots back, smirking in return.

  He rolls his eyes. “Yeah. Sure.”

  “Hey, you want a drink?” Dex offers, sliding away from Tara, but taking hold of her hand as he heads toward the bar.

  Luke could go for half a bottle of vodka right about now. But he says, “Nah. Just had coffee.”

  “Okay.” Dex pulls beers and knocks the tops off on the edge of the bar, hands one to Tara that she takes a healthy pull of straight off.

  Luke chafes at the thought, but he isn’t her family, or even really her friend, so he says nothing.