A Straw Man (The Clay Lion Series Book 3)

by Amalie Jahn

  “But Charlie and Brooke and your mom…”

  “Are perfect,” I interrupted. “But it’s taken so much work to become the family we are now. It hasn’t always been this way. For a long time it was…” I stopped. I didn’t know how to describe how life had been before my dad died. It hadn’t been horrible. It just wasn’t good.

  I took a deep breath and tried to explain. “Charlie’s so much older than me, you know? So by the time I started kindergarten, he was already in middle school. He tried really hard to include me in stuff, but he could only drag his little sister along to so much. I think his way of dealing with the pressure at home was to avoid being here as much as possible. He was involved in every sport and club and spent a lot of time with his friends at their houses. So that meant most of the time, it was just me and mom here in this big, giant house by ourselves. And she did her thing and I did mine. And we both tried to stay out of my father’s way when he showed up.” I laughed. “I think your family would have probably enjoyed this house a lot more than we did.”

  “I think we would have destroyed this house,” he said, tapping my nose with the tip of his finger. “Can I see the rest?” he asked, hopping off the bed.

  “Of course,” I replied, following him to the door. “I’ll give you the grand tour.”

  We inspected each floor of the house as if I was a curator of a fine museum. I pointed out what little architecture and history I knew about the three-story Georgian I called home. We crept into attic spaces and peeked into rooms I hadn’t explored in years.

  “There’s not even furniture in here,” he commented as we opened the door of a long-forgotten guest room.

  “I know. My mom gave up trying to please my dad about decorating the house when I was about ten or eleven. I remember them having this huge fight about some estate auction she wanted to go to. She liked the charm of antique furniture which he considered ‘garbage’ so Mom told him she was never buying another piece of furniture ever again. And true to her word, she never has. I think there are probably still two or three rooms with nothing in them.”

  He whistled between his teeth. “My family would have filled them in a heartbeat. With people mostly, not necessarily stuff. But my mom does her best decorating with furnishings off the side of the road.”

  He grinned at me, waiting for a reaction.

  “Stop,” I said. “You’re not serious.”

  “Hand to God. The dresser in my bedroom came out of a dumpster. My mom’s a ‘one man’s trash is another man’s treasure’ kinda woman. And let’s just say we have a lot of other people’s trash in our house.”

  “I think I’d like your mom,” I told him as I led him out of the room. “She seems practical.”

  “Insanely practical,” he replied, closing the door behind him as we continued down the hall. “I don’t know how she raised us all in that tiny house, but she did. I shared a room with two of my brothers, and the day Will left for college was the first night I ever slept in a room by myself. I was fifteen.” He ran his fingers along the mahogany wainscoting which ran the length of the hall. “Now that I think about it, it’s a wonder we didn’t all kill each other off.”

  “Trust me,” I said, “the size of your house doesn’t say anything about the quality of the people living inside.” I stopped at the door to my bedroom and couldn’t decide if it was appropriate to take him inside. I elected to err on the side of prudence and turned on my heel back in the direction of Charlie’s room. “Anyway, that’s the end of the tour,” I called over my shoulder.

  I took three steps before I realized he wasn’t following me.

  “What about your room?” he asked.

  “It’s right behind you,” I replied.

  He held out his arms as if to lead the way. “Will you show me?” he asked.

  Against my better judgment, I slipped past him and stepped into my bedroom, fumbling with the light switch behind the door. The crystals dangling from the lamp on my nightstand threw glimmers of light off the walls, and I was keenly aware of how feminine and juvenile the room appeared. My Victorian doll house still sat in the far corner, its inhabitants waiting patiently to be brought to life by the imagination of a child who no longer existed. I hadn’t thought about the house in ages and was embarrassed by its presence. The piles of stuffed animals and my old unicorn mural spoke of a little girl and not the woman I’d become.

  “Purple, huh?” Nate remarked as he gave the room a once over.

  “It’s actually lavender,” I replied, immediately regretting my decision to invite him in. I felt the overwhelming urge to explain why I was still sleeping in a room decorated for an elementary schooler. “My mom and I picked out the color together for my eighth birthday. I was big into purple then, I guess. I don’t know why I never thought to repaint it.”

  He flopped onto the white wicker papasan chair beside my bookshelf and started flipping through my well-worn copy of To Kill a Mockingbird. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t mind the purple. It brings out the color of your eyes, just like when you wear that purple sweater with the little flowers.”

  His remark caught me off guard and I replayed it in my head several times before responding. Did he really pay attention to my clothes?

  “Okay, smooth talker,” I said, aware of just how self-conscious it made me to talk about myself. “What color are my eyes?”

  “They’re green,” he replied without the slightest hesitation.

  The tone of his voice disarmed me. He was hurt. Offended by the notion that I didn’t believe he thought I was important enough to be memorable. Until that moment I was still under the delusion that our being together was an impossibility. That we were too different to ever really amount to anything other than a college fling. And then it hit me.

  He knew the color of my eyes.

  He chose leftover turkey with me over the end-of-the-season blow-out with the team.

  I took a step closer to where he sat reading the back cover of the book.

  “I think I read this in ninth grade. Did you read it for class?”

  “No,” I replied, taking another step closer. “I read it for fun.”

  “That sounds about right,” he laughed, tossing the book onto the carpet. “It’s the one about the girl whose dad’s a lawyer, right?”

  “Her name is Scout.”

  “Yeah. I remember. It was a good book.”

  “I thought so too,” I said, as my final step placed me squarely between his knees. I knelt down in front of him, resting my hands on his thighs. I wanted to tell him how I was feeling. I needed to tell him.

  “I’ve been trying to figure out what in the world this is…”

  “The book?”

  I chewed nervously at a hangnail. “No. Not the book.” I started again. I needed him to understand. “I’m trying to figure out what it is that you and I are doing?”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “We’re having fun.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “You’re not having fun?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Yes of course I’m having fun. But that’s not all this is.”

  “It’s not?”

  “No.” I took a deep breath and gathered my courage. I wasn’t typically very direct with people because I never like to show my hand. But in a very uncharacteristic move, I was about to lay all my cards on the table. “You like me,” I said finally.

  He was smiling now, leaning forward in the chair so that I could feel the warmth of his breath on my face. “I do?”

  “You do. I didn’t realize it at first either because you’re so how you are, and I’m so how I am, but you’re here, at my house, and you could be anywhere. You’re not at those places though. You chose to be here with me.”

  “Maybe I couldn’t stomach the thought of eating in one of the dining halls tonight,” he countered. “Or maybe I just didn’t want to listen to McNaulty mouthing off about his spectacular defensive maneuvers for the rest of the weekend.”

>   “Liar,” I said, picking idly at a pull in the sleeve of my sweater because I was no longer able to look him in the eye. “You’re here because you like me.”

  Without responding to my accusation and before I could protest, he lifted me from the floor and sat me on his lap. The wicker papasan creaked beneath our weight and although I worried briefly about breaking it, I quickly decided I didn’t care about the fate of the chair. Nate cradled my face gently in his hands.

  “I don’t like you, Melody Johnson.”

  His declaration shook my confidence and made me question my judgment. I bowed my head, humiliated. “You don’t?”

  “No,” he said as he lifted my chin. “I love you. And what’s more than that, I think I need you. All semester I’ve been caring about all this stuff I’ve never cared about before. I’m doing extra homework. I’m finishing assignments on time. I’m eating healthier. I’m washing laundry. I’ve been trying to figure out what the heck is going on with me. And then today, when I made that touchdown, the first thing that came into my head was ‘I hope Melody saw.’ It’s like I didn’t really care about what anyone else thought. Suddenly, you’re the only one I want to impress. And when I saw you in the stands, it all made sense.”

  I was confused. He didn’t like me because he loved me?

  “What made sense?” I whispered.

  “The way I’ve been feeling. These last few months I’ve been so busy trying to fill your life with fun that I didn’t realize what you’ve been doing to me.”

  “What have I been doing?”

  “You’ve been giving me a reason to be a better person. A better student. A better player. A better friend. I want you to keep me around because I like being around you, Mel. I want you to like me as much as I like you.” He kissed me gently on the lips. “I want you to love me as much as I love you.”

  His words seemed ridiculous coming out of his mouth. He wasn’t being the big, dumb jock I had him pegged for on that very first day. The one I assumed was incapable of feeling anything other than pride and self-ambition. He was absolutely nothing like the person I kept expecting him to be.

  He was better. So much better.

  What I wanted to do in that moment was melt into a puddle on the floor. What I did instead was punch him in the shoulder as hard as I could. “That’s for giving me a heart attack,” I said just before he silenced me with his lips once again.

  The next hour of my life involved a lot of touching, kissing, and the removal of clothing. I had never felt so cherished or so completely sure of anything in my entire life. We talked in hushed whispers like conspirators in a crime about what loving each other would look like now that we’d both confessed how we felt. And then my mom, who I hoped had forgotten we existed, poked her head in to announce she was going to bed and that we should do the same.

  Separately.

  In our own rooms.

  The night Nate stayed at my house for the first time was the night I fell hopelessly and shamelessly in love with him. Before that night, I was on the brink. I liked him. A lot. And he’d become a welcome fixture in my day to day life. But the night he spent under the roof of my childhood home was the night I accepted there was no turning back. I handed over my heart to Nate Johansen.

  The weekend flew by in a whirlwind of introductions and family gatherings. On Saturday we met Brooke’s parents at our favorite outdoor ice rink, and it wasn’t until I saw Nate struggling with his laces that I realized he’d never been ice skating before.

  “At least the season’s already over if I break my leg,” he joked as I helped him onto the ice.

  After pulling me down with him half a dozen times, he finally started to get the hang of it and before long was racing Charlie around the rink. The two of them hit it off immediately and Brooke and I sat together at dinner lamenting our abandonment.

  “He’s adorable,” she said. “If someone that size can still qualify as being adorable.”

  “I think he can,” I agreed. “Only don’t tell him I said that.”

  “It’s too bad he and Charlie don’t seem to have anything in common,” she joked as we watched the men, heads together, embroiled in a serious conversation about which sports were the most difficult to play based on endurance versus skill. They’d been debating it for half an hour and had barely come up for air when their burgers arrived.

  When dinner was over they interrogated us in the parking lot, coming at us like two members of the CIA.

  “Charlie said we can go to his house tomorrow to watch the Redskins. It’s the 1:00 game. Do we have time to go or do you want to head back to school early?” He cocked his head to the side and grinned.

  How could I say no?

  “Yes, we can stay for the game,” I relented willingly, “but then you’ll have to drive us back so I can study in the car.”

  “It’s a deal,” he replied, throwing his arm around my shoulder as we approached the car.

  “I would say I’ve never seen anything more hilarious,” Brooke said to Charlie, taking him under the arm, “but he reminds me a lot of you at that age. You practically camped out at my house, remember?”

  “I do remember,” Charlie smiled. Then he turned to me. “Thanks for letting him come.”

  C HAPTER SEVENTEEN

  SUMMER BREAK - SECOND to THIRD YEAR

  Vicki started crying about 20 minutes north of the police station. There was no warning whimper, just silence and then screaming. I ventured a glance into the rearview mirror and could see her reflection in the baby mirror I’d ingeniously rigged to the headrest above her. She looked like a possessed raisin, all scrunched and crimson. She was awake and she was hungry.

  “It’s gonna be okay, bug-a-boo. We’re almost there and then I’ll feed you. I promise. I’m so sorry about the long drive, but sometimes we have to do stuff we don’t want to do. That’s just the way it goes.”

  She continued to wail, ignoring my uncensored reflections on life. I didn’t feel the need to sugar coat it for her. That’s the sort of aunt I was going to be.

  As we pulled into the parking lot of the county police headquarters, my head was throbbing. After slipping into the closest space I could find, I grabbed a bottle from the diaper bag, grateful I had the forethought to prepare one before we left. Because she wasn’t able to hold the bottle for herself, I slid into the back seat of the car to feed her, slipping the nipple of the bottle between her eager lips to make amends and silence her hysteria.

  Once pacified, I turned my attention to the precinct and the daunting task before me. After disconnecting Vicki’s seat from its base and hoisting it out of the car, we approached the run-down building, maintained by tax dollars which had long since been appropriated to other causes. Paint peeled from the windowsills and I nearly tripped on a large crack in the sidewalk. As I struggled with Vicki through the heavy double doors and security clearance, I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the glass and realized how pathetic I must have appeared to the officers; an unwed teen mom come to rescue her stoner baby-daddy from jail. Poor thing. Another statistic. I felt like a character from a late-night reality TV show.

  Vicki, for her part, began attracting unsolicited attention as we approached the front desk. The dainty looking receptionist, who was surely someone’s maw-maw, craned her neck around the corner of the counter to get a better view.

  “Well my goodness, isn’t she just the sweetest thing? How old is she?”

  My response rushed out, all in one breath, in an attempt to legitimize my situation. “She’s a little over three months but she was born premature, so she’s small. But she’s not mine. I mean, I didn’t steal her or anything because she’s my brother’s baby.” I sounded like a maniac and I knew it. “She’s my niece,” I said at last.

  Perhaps she thought I was lying to cover something up because all at once Vicki’s allure faded and the maw-maw ‘mmm-hmmed’ condescendingly through her pursed lips.

  “I see. And what can we do here for you today?”
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  My hasty departure and concern for Vicki initially overshadowed the potential humiliation associated with bailing Nate out of jail, but faced with the reality of the woman’s bitter disapproval, I was forced to acknowledge my own embarrassment. I was petrified she would think I was a bad person, and for a second, I considered walking away. In the end, however, my loyalty to Nate would not allow me to leave. He needed me and I loved him. There was nothing more to it than that.

  “I’m here about Nate Johansen,” I began, wording my reason carefully so as not to implicate myself. “I received a phone call earlier today about coming to pick him up.”

  “Mmm hmm,” Maw-maw said again, scanning her computer screen. “Oh yes, here he is.” She clicked her tongue, alerting me to just how offended she was by Nate’s transgressions. “I see he’s being detained just down the hall. Got picked up for buying drugs right outside the station last night. Not too bright, that one. I can call for someone to take you back to fill out the necessary paperwork.” She nodded to a row of chairs against the wall. “You can take a seat over there while you wait.”

  I dragged both Vicki and the diaper bag over to the waiting area where I finally unlatched her harness, releasing her from her constraints. I cuddled her against my cheek and whispered heartfelt apologies for our dismal state. Satisfied with her meal and happy to be out of the seat, she rewarded me with another of her goofy smiles. She was my ray of light in an otherwise gloomy afternoon.

  Not long after the paperwork was complete and his bail was paid, a remorseful Nate appeared in the hallway just beyond a locked gate. The same weather-beaten officer who executed the bail led him in my direction. He wouldn’t look me in the eyes. His shame was far too great.

  Released to his own recognizance, he held the exit door for me as the heat of the late afternoon sun overpowered us.

  “It’s hot today,” he commented nonchalantly as we shuffled along the weed-infested gravel lot.