“Of course,” Marsha said.
“And I’d be happy to testify about the altercation in the alley at Pockets,” Kristen offered.
Was she closer? Or was Law imagining that a moment ago he wouldn’t have been able to reach out and cup her cheek with his palm, and now he could? He could smell the same citrus scent he had yesterday at Pockets, when he’d been tugging Kristen’s hand to inch her closer.
If she didn’t step back, there’d be no way he could do the rest of what he’d come to school to do.
“Dan’s taking care of recording what went on outside,” Law roughed out. He cleared his throat, hoping he didn’t sound as desperate as he felt. “I don’t think there will be a shortage of people who could account for what happened at the party. I’m pretty sure Walter Davis will give a statement if I ask him to. It’s probably better for me if you just stay out of it.”
“Oh…” Kristen looked toward the Dixons again—a sideways, mortified glance. “I see.”
She really didn’t.
“I didn’t mean—” he started to say, when he’d meant every word, and he needed to stick by them.
She placed her hand on his arm, her skin warming his below the sleeve of his T-shirt, her gaze soft and anger-free.
“I do understand.” She lifted the file. “We both have a job to do here. I’ll make sure this goes into Chloe’s records, and that the carpool staff is briefed on who’s approved to pick her up and drop her off from now on, if she doesn’t ride the bus.” Kristen smiled at the Dixons next. “And I’ll keep you in the loop on Fin’s progress here at school.” She stepped back, miles away it seemed, though she’d barely moved an inch. “Thank you for working with Fin,” she said to Law. “You’re going to make an amazing difference in his life. I just know it. You already have. Now if you’ll all excuse me...”
She disappeared into her office, closing her door with quiet dignity.
Joe shook his head and slapped Law on the back. “Damn, son. You sure know how to sweet-talk a woman.”
“Joseph Dixon!” Marsha swatted her husband’s chest with her purse, pointedly looking over her shoulder at their audience. The school secretaries were working still, but not with much enthusiasm. It was so quiet, Law heard someone walking by outside the hallway door.
“Excuse me.” He stepped toward Kristen’s office. But then he remembered Fin and the promise he’d made to the boy. “Chloe and I will be at the park around five,” he reminded the Dixons.
He opened Kristen’s door without knocking and walked inside. She was standing before the window instead of sitting at her desk, staring through the blinds. She had the file he’d given her clutched in her hand.
She folded her arms over her chest and turned toward him.
He shut the door behind him, not knowing what to say. But he wasn’t leaving until this was done, and done right.
“This is a really bad idea,” she said—using his words from last night. “Open my door, Mr. Beaumont, or my staff will get the wrong impression.”
“I wasn’t brushing you off out there. I wanted to talk to you in private. And my name is Law.” He sighed, willing the frustration out of his voice. “Whatever else we are now, I think we at least owe it to each other to use our first names.”
“Okay.” Her eyebrow rose. “What are we, Law?”
“I don’t know. But I know I’m not in a place to figure us out. Libby’s going to be on the warpath. I have to deal with her, and I can’t do that and worry about how any of this is affecting you, or what you’re thinking, or what I’m going to do if you decide you can’t handle another minute of my crazy life being mixed up with yours. I’m digging myself out of a deep hole. Deeper than I’d realized. I can’t afford to be distracted, the way I’ve tuned too many things out for too long.”
“I’m not trying to distract you.” Some of the rigidness eased from her posture. “What if I were to decide that being mixed up with your crazy life suited me just fine?”
Well, Law admitted to himself, that would be even worse, wouldn’t it?
“I don’t think that’s likely to happen.” There, he’d said it, because she wouldn’t. “You’ve been great to me, Kristen. But I need to be free of this before we end badly, too.”
She tilted her head to the side, as if she’d only now realized that he was nuts. “You barge in here, shut yourself in my office, and stay when I ask you to go, because you want to tell me we’re over, before we’ve even done anything to be over, so you can be free of me before we end badly?”
“That didn’t come out right.”
“I would hope not.”
This wasn’t what he wanted: her confrontational and hurting; him trying to do the right thing, but being an ass to her all over again. None of this was what he wanted.
God, she was sexy, giving him hell in that teacher’s tone of hers, in her prim little suit with a skirt that dared a man to run his hands all over and under and up her mile-high, toned legs.
“I never meant for this to happen,” he said, suddenly needing to adjust the fit of his jeans. But he’d be damned if he was going to draw attention to his predicament. “I never meant to upset you or your life.”
“I’m not upset.”
He was close enough now—three steps closer to the window, by his count—to know differently. Her pulse was beating away at the base of her throat.
“Law…” She said his name breathy and half-formed, while his finger traced the soft skin beneath her chin. “What do you want from me?”
“I want you to be okay with me keeping my distance while I sort things out with Libby.” He let his finger slide just a little lower, torturing himself, before dropping his hand to the waist of his jeans. To make sure it stayed there, he snagged his fingers in his belt. “But I want you to know that the last forty-eight hours between us is making it nearly impossible for me to let go.”
“Yeah,” she whispered. “I know exactly how you feel. But you are letting go, right? And here I was, thinking you’d trust me enough to let me help you sort things out.”
“Kristen…” He didn’t trust her. He didn’t know how to trust anyone.
Her hand tangled in his shirt, tugging him closer.
He brushed her lips with his, softly, sweetly. It was a chaste first kiss. It was a gentle good-bye.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” he whispered, his hands still at his sides. Hers were on his arms now, running up the muscles that felt like they might never unclench from the strain of maintaining space between them.
“Then don’t,” she whispered back.
She held his gaze for a second, and then she closed her eyes and kissed him. Harder, out of control, her mouth open to his, her lips soft to his tongue, her body pressed to his as they lost themselves in each other. No groping. No desperate need. Just touching and being touched and needing stronger than anything he’d let himself feel in a long time.
She stepped back, leaving him grasping for the emotional restraint he’d kept up all morning. He was in the midst of the most destructive mess of his life since the accident with Libby that had all but destroyed him. His daughter needed all of him now, to get her through this. And yet…
He needed Kristen, too, and the way she was making him feel broken open and stitched up and full to brimming and empty, all at the same time. He stared at her answering confusion.
“What are you going to do next?” she asked.
He shook his head. He had absolutely no idea. “We’ll be fine.”
Kristen nodded, disappointed. He could feel her letting go. It was already undoing him.
“Fight for your daughter,” she said, arrowing straight to the heart of the matter with her customary fearlessness. Yet there was sadness in her eyes. Desire, and loss. She gulped. She reached for him again, this time laying her hand over his racing heart. “I’ll be watching, Law, an
d cheering you on—for the good I know you’ll be doing for Chloe and Fin. I’d like to help. If you ever decide you really want me, and trust me not to bail on you the way you’re so convinced everyone will when you need them the most, you know how to reach me.”
Now
“It sounds like you got to know Chloe and her dad, by first playing soccer with them,” Mrs. Sewel says after I finish telling her about how I met the Beaumonts. “And it almost sounds as if you were glad to see them in the office when you and the Dixons were talking with Ms. Hemmings. Was that when you and Chloe started to be friends?”
I look around Mrs. Sewel’s run-down office that feels like my world has always felt—leftover and unwanted, because that’s why kids like me come to places like this. When you’re a kid and everyone else gives up on you, there’s nowhere else to go.
Mrs. Sewel wants the Dixons to work. I believe her, even though she’s not happy with everything I’ve told her. But that doesn’t change what’s happened. So why keep talking about it?
So what if, after I saw the Beaumonts at school that day, I started playing soccer with Chloe and her dad. I started trying harder at school. I stopped being such a pain to the Dixons, because they were kinda cool. And I started liking Chloe a little, because she’d decided to like me first, no matter how mean I’d been to her. But that doesn’t change last night.
“You and Chloe must have felt like you had a lot in common,” Mrs. Sewel says. “You must have heard what was going on with her parents, especially her mom. You’d seen her friends treat her badly, and she was feeling like she didn’t fit in. But her dad was helping you, and she got you to go to class that morning. I hear you two are great on the soccer field together. You must have felt like you owed the Beaumonts a lot. Was that it?”
I shake my head.
“You knew that if my office heard you’d tried to run away again,” she says, writing more into her notes, “you weren’t going to be able to stay with the Dixons. So why, Fin? Why run away with Chloe from last night’s Valentine’s party, after working so hard at your soccer and your foster family and school and making Chandlerville work?”
I shake my head again. I’m not going to cry anymore. And I’m not going to rat on Chloe.
I heard what Chloe’s parents said to each other last night. What no one else knows. That’s why we ran, after she listened to them fighting outside the party at Pockets. Chloe couldn’t stay after that, and I couldn’t let her go alone. Just like I can’t tell Mrs. Sewel why now—because I promised Chloe I wouldn’t. Chloe hates that everyone in town is going to know how messed up her family really is. I don’t want her to hate me because I’m the one who tells.
“You said she was a mean girl at first, like her friends,” Mrs. Sewel says. “But she wasn’t that way at all, was she?”
I shake my head. “She’s cool. She and her dad were cool to me.”
“And because of them, you started to think the Dixons and school and other things here might be cool, too?”
I nod, feeling stupid. Feeling sorry. “Chloe’s family was messed up, but she and her dad helped me. A lot of people helped me.”
“Then why, Fin?” Mrs. Sewel pushes her notebook and pen away. She’s still in her chair on the other side of her desk. “You learned to like your new family and your new friends and being in Chandlerville. I need you to tell me why you threw all that away last night.”
I shrug. The Dixons’ house is loud and noisy and full of kids, but it’s my house now. And I don’t want to lose them, or Chloe, or even school. I don’t want to lose any of it. I’m sick, just thinking about it.
Mrs. Sewel is suddenly beside me, on my side of her desk and sitting in the chair next to mine.
“I know you’ve been happy in Chandlerville,” she says. “I can tell how much this is hurting you. Your permanent placement with the Dixons was green-lighted. It’s what they want. It’s what I thought you wanted. Except I can’t make that happen for you if I can’t tell my supervisors and the judge that you won’t run again. Help me figure out what’s the right thing for you. Talk to me about what happened last night.”
I shake my head.
I can’t. I’ve never had a friend before, not like Chloe and Mr. Beaumont. And if I tell, it would mean Chloe never should have trusted me at all. And I’ve already messed up enough.
“Come on, Fin,” Mrs. Sewell says. “Certainly you can tell me more. Let’s talk about what happened the day before your first practice with the soccer team…”
Before
“You doing okay?” Walter asked Law, just before noon on the first Wednesday in February.
Law grunted.
Lunchtime at McC’s was, as usual, a slow start. That had become the appeal for Walter over the last couple of months—getting away from Pockets before his and Julia’s afternoon picked up. And Law usually liked having the man around at the start of the late-morning shift that was all he worked now most weekdays. But today wasn’t the day for Walter to ask what Law had sensed him wanting to, several times before.
Is Mom better? Chloe had asked before school that morning. Is she better enough for me to go back and live with her, and you to go back to your apartment, and for everything to go back to normal again?
Law sighed instead of answering his friend. He thought of the warped version of normal his life had been last year, before he’d realized his ex-wife had relapsed. And the nothing-close-to-normal that he had to look forward to now, if Libby kept herself sober and he could trust her with Chloe again.
It was almost unbearable, thinking about coming out of the last two months only to watch Libby bottom out again. What would another relapse do to Chloe? To all of them?
He hadn’t known what to tell his daughter this morning. They’d been living in limbo with Dan since November. Law still wasn’t ready to commit to something more permanent. Right now it took all he had just to get them through each day.
His lawyer had secured him temporary sole custody. If Rick needed Law to work nights in a pinch, Charlotte was always at the Mimosa Lane house to supervise the girls, or she gladly took Chloe with her and Sally when they went places. But Chloe needed him around as much as possible, even when she spent most of her time at home in her room, pretending he didn’t exist. She alternated between clinging to him and refusing to talk. She was confused and angry still, and not liking the way they were living. He could relate.
The holidays had been impossible. Libby had made certain of it.
She’d refused to take her sobriety seriously at first, demanding more time with Chloe than the supervised visits the court had granted her, while she spiraled deeper into her addiction. She’d found rock bottom on Christmas morning, which she’d spent drunk and entirely alone. By New Year’s, she’d finally sobered up and promised to do whatever she had to, to make amends. And so it had started again: Law trying to believe her enough to get them all back to something resembling the stable family Chloe deserved. For their child’s sake, he and Libby had to learn how to co-parent without being at each other’s throats.
Which would mean more change, more limbo, more of him doing whatever he had to, to show Chloe that things would somehow work out.
Dan was helping out financially with more than just legal expenses. Law had broken his lease on his apartment. Most of his personal things were boxed up and banished to a storage locker on the outskirts of town. His brother was covering the fee for that unit, as well as helping with the alimony and child support Law was still legally required to pay his ex-wife—even though Chloe was with him full-time, and that meant he was clocking fewer hours at the bar.
Thanks to the skill of Dan’s lawyer buddy, Libby’s drinking had been formally documented for the court. She hadn’t been able to talk herself out of the irresponsible behavior so many people had now witnessed. Since the new year, she’d worked hard to rehab her image, if not actually going to
rehab. She was sober, she insisted. She was more attentive to Chloe. She was back volunteering at the school and mending fences with the friends who’d shunned her after her alcoholism had become public knowledge.
But was it a real change this time? Was she committed to making this last? Law wished like hell he knew. And he wished he really knew what his daughter thought about any of it.
Chloe seemed to be enjoying the several afternoons a week she and Law spent playing soccer with Fin. All she’d wanted, she’d told him that night after they’d left the Dixons, was for their family, their lives, to feel good again. Now that things were calming down, she was dealing with school better, according to the e-mails Law received each week from Daphne Glover. She was more like her old self than the wannabe mean girl she’d tried to become for Libby’s sake at the beginning of the school year.
But Chloe was still too quiet with him. She was missing her mom. She was waiting, bracing for whatever happened next. His daughter sometimes seemed to feel as lost, still, as Law did.
He looked up from drying a load of glasses he’d just pulled from the bar’s dishwasher, his gaze connecting with Walter’s. How was he doing? On top of everything, he was missing Kristen like hell, so badly his chest physically hurt each time he thought of how sweet and understanding she’d been to him.
He braced himself against the memory of her the morning he’d broken things off. Angry and confused and resigned to him pulling away, she’d kissed him breathless and told him she hoped everything would work out. A haunting song poured through his mind, about capturing time in a bottle forever, along with dreams he had no chance of making come true.
Walter nodded at Law’s silence, as if he’d heard the litany of regrets tumbling through Law’s mind. He took a bite of his cheeseburger. He popped a fry into his mouth.
“You give any thought,” he said, “to getting out a bit more, like you did that night at mine and Julia’s opening?”
Love on Mimosa Lane (A Seasons of the Heart Novel) Page 17