Whatever Life Throws at You

by Julie Cross

  I guess maybe I do know. Sort of. Dad’s salary change was pretty big, but we went from lower class to middle class. Brody’s gone from lower class to rich. And he’s just one person. Dad is supporting three people. Four if we’re counting Mom now.

  My stomach twists into knots of frustration and anger. Don’t think about that now.

  “I hate putting money in the bank, too,” Brody admits. “I want to keep it all in front of me where I can see it and make sure it doesn’t disappear. I don’t trust banks.”

  “Please tell me you don’t have stacks of hundreds piled inside a briefcase somewhere in this apartment.”

  He leans in close to me, causing a shiver to run down my spine. “Just don’t look under the cushion you’re sitting on.”

  My eyes widen, and my hand immediately fumbles around, reaching under my ass. All I feel is a cold metal bar.

  Brody busts out laughing. “That was too easy. And I said I didn’t like banks, not that I refused to conform.” He removes his wallet from his pocket and spreads it open for me to see inside. “Less than a hundred in cash, plus I’ve got these…”

  I watch as he drops a Visa debit card onto the coffee table, followed by an American Express card and a platinum MasterCard. “Whoa, look at you. You really sold out.”

  “I know, right?” He tucks everything neatly back in but leaves the wallet resting on the table. “Now if I could just get myself to use one of these cards.”

  My gaze sweeps the near-empty room. “Maybe buy some furniture.”

  “Such a big commitment…” He smacks my knee playfully. “Are we studying or what?”

  I raise the book and flip to the page in the social studies section where we’d left off. “Okay, number ten. If a drought severely reduces the amount of corn available to consumers, what would we expect to happen?”

  He takes one of my bare feet in his hands and begins massaging it, completely distracting me from reading the rest of the question.

  “The price of corn goes up,” he says before hearing the answer options.

  I know nothing about corn, so I flip to the back and look up number ten. “Correct. What type of government does the United States have?”

  His eyes are focused on rubbing my feet. “Democracy.”

  “Uh-huh.” His hand creeps up to my calf, and my heart takes off again. “Which government official is appointed and not elected by the U.S. citizens?”

  “Supreme court judge,” he says right away.

  “It’s multiple choice,” I remind him. “Are you going to let me read the choices?”

  “Sure.” He shrugs. “If I don’t know the answer.”

  I rest the book on my stomach again. “I don’t think you can call me a tutor. I keep having to look up answers. I’d probably flunk this test if I had to take it.”

  His fingers drift over my other calf. I close my eyes and enjoy the feeling. “I’m older. I’m supposed to know more than you.”

  “Not really. I’m the one still in high school. No one actually uses this stuff after graduating, so a year out and you’ve forgotten everything. I have no excuse for not acing it.”

  He returns to massaging my feet, his eyes locked on my toes. “My mom’s a teacher’s aid,” he says. I freeze and try not to shake him from this potential sharing session. He’s said so little about his mom. “She went to college for two years, got a scholarship to Eastern Illinois University. She was the first person in her family to even graduate high school, let alone go to college.”

  “So why didn’t she finish?” I ask, but the answer comes to me right away. “She got pregnant?”

  He nods. “But she still got a pretty good job with her associate degree. She helped with a lot of special-needs kids who the school district had integrated into the regular classroom. She devoted every spare minute studying with me, reading to me, making sure my teachers all understood my disability and tested me properly. She knew every benefit the public school system was obligated to offer me and she got it.”

  “Then why did you drop out? Why don’t you talk to her anymore?”

  “Because I’m an unappreciative asshole.” He leans his head against the back of the couch, staring up at the ceiling. “I got sick of being her project. I guess to me, dyslexia has always been embarrassing, something I’d rather not discuss, and it was all my mom wanted to talk about.”

  “How long since you’ve seen her?”

  He shakes his head. “About three years. I was really messed up then, and it freaked her out. I have a younger brother and sister, too, and a stepdad. He told me not to go near my mom unless I cleaned up my act.”

  I set the book on the floor and sit up. “What did you do that was so bad? You said you would tell me everything, remember? The good, the bad, and the ugly…”

  He turns his head and looks at me. “I did say that, didn’t I?” I nod and wait for him to continue. “You name it, Annie, and I did it—drugs, drinking, stealing, breaking and entering.”

  My eyes widen, but I use all my power to hold back any shocked reactions. “Murder? Identity theft? Robbing a bank? Did you do all that, too? Is that why you don’t trust banks?”

  “No.” He lets out a nervous laugh. “Guess I got caught before working my way through the whole list.”

  “How did you get from that to baseball?”

  “Well, first off, juvie sucks. I spent six months there and, after turning eighteen and getting out, I had no desire to see how much worse real prison is.”

  “Wait a minute…” I say. “So Johnson has been totally exaggerating all this time. You’re not an ex-convict. You’re a…a…?”

  “Former juvenile ex-convict?” Brody suggests. “What did you think? That I went to real prison and that somehow didn’t make it into any of the papers or stories about me? Juvenile records aren’t public information, Annie.”

  “Huh,” I say. “I probably should have asked you that a long time ago. Okay, back to your answer…Juvie to baseball, how’d it happen?”

  “I’m glad you didn’t ask me those questions sooner.” Brody flashes me a smile so I know he’s not angry or upset with me for thinking he’s an ex-convict. “It’s cool how your dad and you just took me at face value—no past interfering with your judgment. And I got to play baseball in juvie. That’s where Frank Steadman found me.”

  “They have baseball teams in juvie?” I ask, working hard to keep up. “And Frank trolls juvenile detention centers looking for recruits? Seriously? Does Johnson know this? He’d have a shit fit.”

  He laughs again. “Some have baseball programs, and recruiting kids from juvie isn’t a regular thing for Frank. But he can’t ignore a seventeen-year-old with a ninety-mile-an-hour fastball. Speed overlooks all kinds of indiscretions. Frank never said anything when he came to see me. But after I got out, he sent a bus ticket to a minor league tryout. He put me on the Royals’ farm team last summer, then invited me to spring training this year. And now here I am.”

  “Here you are,” I repeat, my head spinning from this overload of Jason Brody info. “Don’t you think your mom would be proud of you? Look at everything you’ve accomplished. And what about your brother and sister; how old are they?”

  “Twelve and nine,” he says. “And which part would make her proud? Me taking the easy way out and using a God-given ability to avoid education and actual work? And then there’s my secret flings with high school girls. She’d be so proud of that.”

  “Flings?” I shove him in the shoulder. “There better not be flings.”

  His hand slides up my leg, almost reaching the hem of my very short jean shorts. “I’m kidding. It’s just you.” He reaches for my waist, and then tugs me gently until I’m one step away from straddling his lap.

  The newly acquired knowledge and the emotion wrapped around Brody finally telling me about his past causes me to forget my earlier apprehension, and I quickly swing a leg over him, molding us together. I have this strong desire to touch everything—his smoothly shave
d cheeks, the curly hair at the nape of his neck, the muscles on his back that bulge when his arms lift up to wrap around me. My fingers curl around the bottom of his T-shirt, gently raising it up and over his head, tossing it right on top of the GED book.

  And that concludes today’s study session.

  I hold still as he lifts up my hair, piling it on top of my head, and plants kisses from below my ear to my collarbone. I’m doing everything I can to breathe normally, to not let him hear the nerves and desire, to not let him feel the throbbing between my legs because it’s embarrassing and I know I’m not ready to do anything about it. But after his mouth connects with mine, his own desire becomes lodged between us. Before I can stop myself, my entire body stiffens.

  I don’t even know why I freeze up. It’s not like I’m afraid of Jason. Not exactly. It just seems so real all of a sudden. In my head, I imagine guys like Brody kiss a girl, get hard, then get off, and that’s that. Whereas in my world—in my experience—the boys (yes, boys) get boners all the time, and there’s no built-in pretense as to what is done about said boners.

  Why does this relationship feel so complicated at the worst times imaginable?

  Brody must sense my momentary reaction to his…um…reaction because he leans back, his eyebrows pulled together. “Too much?”

  I swing my leg back over him and plant myself on the cushion beside Brody, my eyes zoomed in on the coffee table, my face hot and hands twisting in my lap. “I’m not…I mean…I don’t know,” I say, and that long awkward silence that I’d been so afraid of before when knocking on the door falls between us.

  Brody leans forward, resting his head in his hands, possibly in an attempt to cover up his lap. “I have to meet the trainer in half an hour—”

  I spring up from my seat on the couch and hunt down my shoes. “No problem. I have to help Savannah in an hour.”

  He lifts his head, draws in a deep breath, and reaches for his T-shirt on the floor. “I was going to say, if you had let me finish…” His eyes meet mine. “Maybe we should talk about stuff like this.”

  I wiggle one foot at a time into my shoes, already shaking my head in protest of his plan. “I think talking about it is a bad idea.”

  He tugs his head through the hole in his shirt. “Communicating is a bad idea? Since when?”

  I fold my arms across my chest, turning to face him, attempting confidence. “I see this going one of two ways. Option one—we both spill our past experiences and conclude what I already know, that high school is a very different world than after high school. Or option two—you give me some dignified, noble speech about how you’re afraid of stealing my innocence and you’re willing to walk around with blue balls until, like, forever if that’s what I need.”

  He mimics my crossed-arm position and returns my stare. “Or option three—I tell you how I’m very aware of the fact that you suddenly got super uncomfortable, and even though I’m not at all willing to walk around forever with blue balls, I’m also not going to enjoy something that you’re clearly not enjoying.”

  I let out a defeated sigh. “This is impossible, right? I’m me and you’re…well, you—”

  Brody strides across the room, reaches for my hand, and pulls me against him. “It’s not impossible. I really wish you’d stop saying that. You know me, not the baseball player from the tabloids and newspapers. That’s more than any other girl can say right now, and it’s really going to piss me off if you decide to start seeing me as the public me, okay?”

  “Okay,” I whisper.

  He releases a breath. “Ride with me to the stadium? We can talk in the car.”

  Brody hoists his own gym bag onto his shoulder, picks up my bag, and slips on his flip-flops, then holds the door open for me, giving me no other option but to follow him into the hall.

  He’s very careful to take the residents-only elevator into the parking garage, making sure no one spots us together before we’re in the confines of his black SUV with the conveniently tinted windows.

  “So here’s the truth, Annie Lucas,” he says, flashing me a sideways grin. “Sometimes, when a dude has his tongue in an attractive girl’s mouth, blood travels from his brain to his—”

  I snort back a laugh and smack his shoulder. “I know how it works.”

  His dark eyebrows pop up. “Then you know that this reaction can occur at virtually any moment and honestly, nothing is expected from the girl who’s allowed the dude access to her mouth.”

  I peel my gaze from his. “I guess I know it works like that for me in my world, but it’s different for you, right?”

  The sarcasm and teasing drops from his voice. “Hypothetically, if I were to take a fangirl or any random girl from a club or bar home with me for the night, that’s exactly what would be expected for the most part—and I’m not going to lie and say that I’ve never done something like that before. I’ve already told you about the one incident. But last year, I had a girlfriend for a significant amount of time—at least it was for me—and we did things the normal way, kissing on the first date and nothing more, so I went home with a pair of blue balls.”

  I glance down at my lap. “Significant amount of time?”

  “About three months,” he says.

  “So what happened?” I spilled all about my gay ex, like, forever ago, so he totally owes me this answer.

  “Jessie’s in college, and she waits tables part-time,” he says. “Dating her was something brand new for me. Before that, I had flings and nothing more.”

  “So what happened?”

  He shrugs. “I’m not sure it was one specific thing. She had a high school boyfriend who I think she was still hung up on. She didn’t understand the athlete’s life. The fact that I couldn’t blow off practice or stay out all night and expect to be able to pitch the next day. To her, it was a game and not a real job. Which would basically be true had I not moved up—it’s pretty hard to live off the minor league salary without any other work on top of playing ball. It wasn’t a big dramatic breakup or anything. We’re still friends.”

  “You didn’t love her?”

  Brody pulls out of the garage and stops at a traffic light, allowing him to glance my way. “I don’t think so. We didn’t really toss that word around.”

  “Really? After three months?”

  “Is that bad?” he asks. “Did you tell your ex you loved him? And when? After getting off the phone or in text messages?”

  “Yes to all of those,” I say. “Probably two months, though I don’t really think we were in love like you should be, but at the time it was the most in love I was aware of.”

  “Is it cliché to say that I have trouble with that word?” He rests a hand on my knee and hits the gas when the light turns green. “I’ve heard both you and your dad on the phone, and it seems so easy for you to tell him you love him and the other way around. That’s all really weird to me.”

  I laugh and throw a couple sideways glances his way to see if he’s being serious. Judging by the color creeping into his cheeks, I assume he is. “It’s not so hard once you get used to using the word. Maybe if you practice a little. Find an excuse to use the dreaded L-word.”

  “What, like now?” he asks.

  I shrug. “Why not? Say something you love, but it can’t be food related. That’s too easy.”

  It takes Brody nearly the rest of the three-block drive to the stadium to reply, “Okay, I love…”

  “What?” I prompt. “The smell of new shoes? The feeling you get after running ten miles and then taking a shower and putting on clean clothes? Fireworks? Summer holidays? Sleeping babies in those little front pouch things?” I suggest.

  “I love…” he continues, shooting a sideways glance in my direction. “The sound of your voice when you read math and social studies facts.”

  My breath catches in my throat, but I try to sound cool when I say, “Really?”

  “I got addicted to it after listening to sixteen hours of the recordings you made me,” he admits
. “I’m starting to wonder if that was your plan all along.”

  I look away quickly. “Yeah, right.” My gaze drifts back to his. “What else do you love?”

  “Hmm…” We’ve reached the stadium now, and Brody pulls into his assigned parking space in the exclusive player lot. He hops out of the car and grabs both our bags from the back. When I get out of the car and follow him to the door, he pauses in front of it, not yet swiping his access badge. He moves close enough for me to feel the heat radiating off his body. “I love how you smell like sunscreen all the time, and I love how your eyes can change from bright blue to gray-blue depending on what you’re wearing.” He pauses to look me square in the eyes, one eyebrow raised. “And I love how you hate to lose, but you threw your two-mile race at state to let Jackie win—”

  “I didn’t—” I protest, but Brody lifts his index finger to my lips, causing that whole blood-shifting-from-the-brain-down-lower reaction he so expertly described earlier to happen.

  “Yes, you did,” he says. “But it’s our secret. I’ll take it to the grave. I love how you worry about your dad and Grams and even me. And I love your legs in those short running shorts. Makes me want to hold you in place and run my fingers up and down them.”

  Oh my God.

  And yeah, I have virtually nothing to say, because I started this game and clearly I’ve lost.

  He flashes me his best arrogant smirk. “And I love how flustered you are right now. It’s adorable, and even more so because you absolutely refuse to admit that you’re off your game and trying so hard to prove how mature you are.” He leans in, and my stomach flip-flops. Goose bumps crawl up my arms. “Despite the fact that I’ve never told you I thought otherwise.”

  His lips touch mine at the same moment his hand lands on my cheek. This kiss is better than all the other ones combined, and even though I hate to admit it, it’s obvious Brody was right about us needing to have this chat.

  He pulls away after only a short time, probably due to the fact that we’re technically inside the stadium and not doing such a good job of keeping this thing between us a secret. He rests his forehead against mine. “This is where I’m drawing the line for now, and when you want that to change, all you have to do is tell me. Sound good?”