Keeping Score

by Shannon Stults

  “One won’t kill me, and the other is for you. A peace offering after poking a little fun at your fiancé tonight.”

  Logan took the last swig from her bottle, set it aside, and grabbed the new one Cole offered her almost without thinking. “You’re a real asshole, you know that? Spinning that story the way you did. You completely demolished the old woman he’d built up in his head.”

  “Some would say lying to your future spouse isn’t very nice either. Tell me, were you already using the fictional dead aunt story, or did you come up with that one just for him?”

  “I may have used it on a sorority sister or two.” Or anyone else who’d asked about the tattoo. The events surrounding that tattoo weren’t her proudest moments.

  “How do you think he’s going to feel when he finds out you’ve been lying to him? Can’t be a good way to start a marriage, keeping your past a secret.”

  “Some secrets need to be kept,” she said bluntly. “He wouldn’t like the old Logan.”

  Cole’s brow furrowed. “You say that like she’s gone.”

  “She is.” Logan pulled a five-dollar bill out of her pocket and set it on the bar. “And she’s not coming back.”

  She stood to go, leaving the half-empty bottle on the bar. Cole frowned. “Well, don’t go yet. Have one more drink with me, like old times. Or at least let me get you a real drink. We can do a farewell toast to the old Logan if she is really gone.”

  “No thanks,” she said. “I shouldn’t have even had these two. I gave up the stuff when I moved to Texas.”

  He put a hand to his chest. “You’re breaking my heart, Lo. Don’t tell me you’ve gone completely square.”

  She froze, staring him down. “I’m not square. I just don’t need a drink to have a good time.”

  “I guess the old Logan really is gone. And apparently, the new one is a buzzkill.”

  She glared at him. “I am no buzzkill,” she said. “Buzzkills are old people who don’t know how to have fun.”

  Cole took another sip of his beer. “I’m not convinced you do anymore. The old Logan knew how to let go.”

  “I let go plenty,” she bit out. “Trust me.”

  “It’s a shame. I liked the old Lo. The one who didn’t care what people thought or said about her, just looked to make each day more interesting than the last.”

  “Yeah, well, she grew up. And now I’m going home.”

  Cole sighed. “It’s probably for the best. You going to make it home all right, or are you such a lightweight now you need a ride after less than two drinks?”

  “I can still drink your ass under the table!”

  “You sure about that?” he laughed.

  Logan’s jaw clenched. Being called a buzzkill was one thing, but a lightweight? She had too much pride to walk away from that kind of accusation. “Yeah, I’m sure. In fact, if you’re so worried about my life not being interesting enough, why don’t we just make a little wager out of it?”

  “You sure you want to go down this road again?” Cole asked slowly. He grabbed her wrist and turned it over gently, running his thumb over the black letters. “The last time you made a bet with me, it didn’t work out in your favor.”

  She ripped her arm from his grasp. “I’m sure. First one to stop, pass out, or get sick loses.”

  “And what does the winner get? Aside from the pleasure of holding it over the loser’s head forever.”

  “Twenty bucks?”

  He shook his head. “A hundred.” Logan’s eyes went wide; surely she’d heard him wrong. She said nothing, and Cole went on. “You’ve got to make it worth my while, Lo.”

  “Fine. A hundred. Better warn Wilson and Levi their designated driver is about to go AWOL.”

  “I’m sure they’ll understand when I explain the situation.” Cole picked up his beer, chugging down the last of it in one turn before slamming it down on the bar. “Especially when I get to show everyone the infamous Logan Kase has gone soft on us all.”

  Their bartender responded instantly to the sound of the empty bottle hitting the bar and took it from Cole. “Lilly,” Logan said before she could turn to leave, “a shot of whiskey for me and my drinking buddy here and keep them coming. It’s going to be a long night.”

  Chapter Three

  “Seriously, art history? What kind of major is that?”

  They were several shots in and starting to feel it. Logan and Cole sat at the bar facing each other, cheeks flushed and eyes heavy. She’d thrown her jacket off soon after they started, her skin growing warmer by the second.

  “Thank you for sounding exactly like my dad when I told him.” Logan forced down another shot, barely wincing at the flaring heat in her throat. “Any more of my life decisions you want to criticize?”

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean it like that. I just don’t know what kind of jobs you can get with that.”

  “If I’m lucky, something in a museum or an art gallery. I want to find undiscovered talent and help get their art out there in the world.”

  Cole poured himself another shot. “I didn’t know you were still into that stuff. That’s pretty cool.”

  Logan snorted. “Whatever. You think it’s lame.” She took her shot, unable to remember which one they were on.

  “No, really. If that’s really what you want to do, I think it’s awesome.”

  She studied his face. His broad grin, the light in his brown eyes. He was actually sincere. “Thanks. Now I just need to find a job.”

  “Yeah.” Cole grimaced. “I can’t really help you there. I’m not sure there’s going to be much of that stuff around here.”

  She could tell Cole the truth, that her job searches had been geared toward San Francisco, not Willow Creek. It would be easy enough, but the thought of revealing to Cole Tucker that she was moving across the country before she let her own parents know left bile in her throat. Or was that the whiskey?

  “You could ask Ms. Snyder. She might know if there’s anything for you.”

  She hadn’t heard that name in a long time. “Ms. Snyder moved to Maryland. What would she know about jobs here?”

  “She moved back after her dad died.” He took another shot. “She’s been out of town the last few weeks, but she’s in the same house since about a year ago. The art gallery’s still closed down, though.”

  Logan felt a pang for the woman who’d been almost as much a friend to her as Carly was. Louise Snyder had owned the small gallery in town that had come to feel like a second home to Logan in her youth. At least until Ms. Snyder was forced to close up shop and move back home to take care of her sick father.

  Logan picked up her shot glass and made a silent toast to Ms. Snyder’s dad and his family before swallowing it all in one gulp. She shook her head, registering the familiar sloshy feeling she got when she’d long left the boundaries of “tipsy.”

  “Y’know,” she said with a slight slur, “I haven’t been this drunk since the middle o’ my sophomore year in Austin.”

  “I thought you said you quit when you left.” Aside from the heavy eyelids, Cole showed almost no signs of his intoxication.

  Logan shook her head and felt like she was sitting in the middle of a rowboat. “I stopped when I met Jacob, for the most part. I still cheated, getting a buzz here and there. But it was that party my sophomore year that me and Ashley O’Neal got completely hammered. She fell off the porch of a fraternity house and twisted her ankle. We didn’t even know it was messed up ’til early the next morning, and I took her to the ER. That’s where I met Jacob.” Logan smiled. He should be here with her. Then again, if he saw her now, half drunk in a bar at midnight, he probably wouldn’t even recognize her. He’d be so disappointed.

  Cole tilted his head. “So you’re really going to marry him?”

  “That’s the plan.”

  “Without him knowing anything about your past or who you really are?”

  Logan rolled her eyes. “Who I was back then doesn’t matter. All that matters is that he lo
ves who I am now.” She covered her mouth, trying to fight a burp attempting to force its way up. “Not counting tonight.”

  They were quiet for a long time, Logan waiting for Cole to take his next shot and Cole—for whatever reason—not taking it.

  “I’ve got an idea,” he finally said, his eyes lighting up. “How about we take this to the next level?”

  Logan shook her head. “I’m not sleeping with you.”

  “Not what I was going to say. Look, ever since we were in middle school, you and I have been doing one thing.”

  “Making asses of ourselves,” she interrupted, snorting in the process.

  Cole took a deep breath. “Will you shut up for two seconds? Damn, I forgot how much you talk when you’re wasted.”

  “I’m not wasted,” she lied then stopped when she saw his face. “Sorry,” she added. Cole said nothing, and Logan made a show of zipping her lips and locking them.

  He sighed. “Thank you. For years now, we’ve been trying to prove we’re each better than the other. Either with bets or pranks or whatever, the last being the night before you left. And we all know I won that.”

  “Yes, Cole, we are all aware.” She glared at the tattoo on her wrist. The second worst mistake of her life.

  “Yeah, I won fair and square, and that was supposed to be the last of it. But here we are again, doing the exact same thing. And do you know why that is?”

  She blinked her eyes slowly, a subtle haze settling over her mind. “Enlighten me.”

  “Because you can’t finish seven years of rivalry with one drinking game.” He said it like it should be the most obvious thing in the world, but Logan was struggling to keep up. “We need something that’s going to show us who’s the better man—so to speak—once and for all. What we need is a game of H-O-R-S-E.”

  Logan shook her head. “Like basketball?”

  “Not a literal game of H-O-R-S-E, but in that spirit. We have a series of challenges that we take turns picking. The loser of each challenge gets a letter. First one to get a full H-O-R-S-E loses. And then we know who’s better, once and for all. That way we can finally get closure, knowing the best man won.”

  “That sounds exactly like the kind of stuff I swore I wouldn’t get into when I moved back home.”

  Cole laughed. “Exactly, and yet we both ended up drunk at the bar doing the exact same thing we did the last time we saw each other.”

  Not exactly the same thing. But he had a point.

  “That’s why it’s brilliant,” he said. “With this game, we can make it official. Get it out of our systems for good, and then get back to our lives.”

  Under sober conditions, Logan probably would see this as a bad idea. But in her current state, she couldn’t really see a downside. Maybe Cole was right. Maybe all she needed to finally put all this behind her was some sort of closure.

  And then, once it was all out of her system, Logan would have no problem marrying the man of her dreams, moving to California with him, and fully committing to life as a respectable and well-mannered doctor’s wife.

  “So what kind of stakes are we talking here? Five hundred bucks? A thousand?” Both prices were well out of her budget.

  Cole grinned. “Better. If you win, I never bother you or your fiancé ever again. I won’t even talk to him if you don’t want me to.”

  She had to admit, that sounded like a pretty big win. Especially after he pulled that crap with the made-up aunt. Besides, not having Cole around to instigate would make quitting the old Logan that much easier.

  “And if you win?”

  “If I win, you tell your fiancé what happened the night you got that tattoo and what it really means.”

  *

  November—Sophomore Year

  “Go, Raiders, go! Go, Raiders, go!”

  Cole sat on the bleachers, working through a list of geometry problems, waiting so that he could give Cowboy a ride home after practice, when his phone rang in his pocket. He put the math homework aside and stood to stretch his legs as he pulled the phone out.

  “Hello?”

  “Cole Tucker, this is Marshall Kase.”

  Cole’s throat tightened as a wave of panic swept through him. He couldn’t think of any reason the chief of police would be calling him unless there had been some kind of emergency. Or he’d finally been able to pin one of his and Logan’s games on him, only this time Cole had no idea what he’d done to get caught in the first place.

  “Chief. What can I do for you today?”

  There was a heavy sigh on the other end. “I just got a call from Logan. Sounds like she’s gotten herself stuck in one of Old Man Carithers’s fields.”

  “Okay…” Seriously? That was it? “Do you need me to go pick her up or something?”

  “Well, now, that might be a little difficult seeing as she was driving your truck.”

  “My—?” He reached in his front pocket where he kept his keys and fished them out. He chuckled to himself. The key to his Bronco was missing. “Right, of course, she was,” he muttered to himself. How the hell had she done that without him noticing?

  “You don’t sound too surprised by that.”

  He grinned. “No, sir.” He’d learned a while back that nothing she did could surprise him.

  “You at the school?”

  “Yes, sir. At the football field.”

  The chief sighed again. “All right. I’ll pick you up in ten minutes.”

  *

  Cole sat in the passenger seat of the truck pretending not to notice the way the chief kept glancing at him every few seconds. He’d never been alone with the chief before, and he couldn’t remember a time he’d ever been so nervous.

  Logan’s dad looked ordinary enough wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt, jeans, and a Braves baseball cap, and yet the man exuded an authority that made Cole feel like he was five again. Why had he told Cowboy to get another ride home?

  “So,” the chief said after several minutes of silence, “you want to tell me what exactly my girl was doing with your truck?”

  Cole swallowed, his throat suddenly very dry. “Oh, that. Lo said her truck was out of gas, so I let her borrow mine to go pick some up while I waited for Cowboy’s practice to end.” The lie came out easily enough, and he sent out a silent prayer of thanks that he’d had time to come up with it while waiting for the chief.

  “That right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He glanced at Cole from across the cab with narrowed eyes. “And you wouldn’t have had anything to do with the twelve chickens we found in her truck after school two weeks ago either?”

  “Did Logan say I did?” he asked as his shoulders relaxed some.

  “No,” the chief grumbled.

  Cole stared out the side window and smiled. If he knew anything about Lo, it was that she’d never rat him out. It was like they had this unspoken rule ever since he put gum in her hair in the sixth grade and she’d had to chop it all off. To this day they still kept each other’s involvement out of whatever mishaps they got caught in. That didn’t stop their parents from suspecting, though.

  After another few minutes of silence, they finally pulled into a wet field. Parked in the middle was the Bronco, and nearly every inch of black paint from the windows down was covered in thick, red-brown mud.

  Logan rounded the front of the Bronco, her boots and the bottoms of her jeans getting swallowed by the mud with each step. The chief crept the truck forward and parked in a drier patch nearby.

  “Hey, Daddy,” Logan called when he stepped out. “Sorry to call you over here for this, but we didn’t really have anyone else.” She pointed over her shoulder toward the Bronco, and Cole recognized Carly’s blond curls. She waved at the chief.

  “Mm-hmm,” he muttered, eyeing the stuck Bronco currently caked in mud.

  Cole left the truck and strode up to them. Logan did a double take before she glared at her dad. “What is he doing here?”

  “Well, I figured it might be best to give th
e boy a heads-up that his only form of personal transportation was about to get hauled out of the mud on Old Man Carithers’s private property.”

  “I can explain…” she began.

  “No need, Lo,” Cole said as he threw his hands in his pockets. “I already told the chief here the whole story. About how you needed gas and I let you borrow my truck to get it.”

  Her shoulders fell. “Right, exactly. Me and Carly were just running to the Shell station on the other side of town. We tried to cut across the fields to get to the highway over on the other side. Just seemed faster with all the after-school traffic. It was wetter than we thought, and we ended up getting stuck.”

  “Mm-hmm,” the chief said again. He eyed the Bronco over her shoulder. “And how exactly did it get covered in mud if you were just passing through?”

  Logan hesitated. “Uh…”

  “That was me, sir. Me and Cowboy were goofing around yesterday, and I still haven’t gotten a chance to clean her off yet.”

  “You gonna tell me the drawings were you, too?”

  Cole had no idea what the chief was talking about. He studied the Bronco again and noticed for the first time the collection of crude symbols that had been traced into the coat of mud. He frowned at Lo, but she was staring down at her feet, biting her lip with pink-tinged cheeks.

  He sighed, meeting the chief’s stare. “Yes, sir. That, too.”

  The chief rolled his eyes. “All right, let’s just get this thing out of here.” He returned to his truck and cranked it up. He whipped it around easily and started backing it up to the tail end of the Bronco.

  “Thanks,” Logan muttered.

  Cole shrugged. “No problem. Besides,” he said, pointing to the muddy Bronco, “this is amateur at best. I would feel bad getting you in trouble over this.”

  “Whatever. Not only did I steal your key without you noticing, but then I took your truck for a joyride, and you had no idea.”

  Cole nodded. “During which you got it stuck in the mud, so still not impressed. Seriously, the only thing sadder than this attempt is the fact that me and your dad had to come bail you out. It’s a shame this is the best you can do.”