by Ruthie Knox
She’s a nice girl. Probably looking for a husband.
Not for you.
Tony rubbed his palms together. “So how’d you get this job?”
“I just applied for it. After college. I mean, I worked at the desk for a while, and then I applied for this job.”
“Did you want to be a … whatever you are?”
“Program director.”
“You in charge of everything—who uses the gym when and what time the pool is open and that big Halloween party and all that?”
“More or less. I did my degree in sports management, and this was kind of what there was, if I didn’t want to move. It was either this or be, like, a high school coach, and I’d have to be a teacher for that.”
“You didn’t want to be a teacher?”
“No.”
“See, I’d have guessed that was right up your alley. Bet you got straight A’s in school.”
Her expression soured.
“You did, didn’t you?” he asked. “Honor roll and everything.”
A nod.
“And you went to college. Where’d you go, OSU?”
“No, to the Naz.”
“You’re a Nazzie?”
The Nazarene college in Mount Pleasant was for serious Christians. The students weren’t even allowed to dance, much less kiss.
She was even more of a bunny than he’d thought.
She shrugged. “It’s close by, and they gave me a good scholarship. I’m not really … I’m a Catholic. Or I used to be.”
“Me, too.”
“I guessed, with a name like Tony Mazzara.”
And then she looked down at the floor, and he replayed the conversation, trying to figure out what he’d said to spook her this time.
No idea.
“So you used to be Catholic, and you’re only sort of a Nazzie. What does that make you now?”
“A great disappointment to my mother?”
“Ah, you’re nothing but trouble these days, huh?”
She snorted, still inspecting her toes. “Hardly. But I don’t go to mass twice a week, and I’m not married yet, so she’s not sure what to do with me anymore.”
“That does sound disreputable—working seven to five, driving that little yellow car around, doing lines of cocaine in the bathroom.”
Her head snapped up.
“What, no cocaine?” he asked.
“I don’t even drink.”
“Bet you bring a different man around the apartment every weekend.”
There came that blush. “Not so much.”
“You got a boyfriend?”
“Not exactly.”
“Not exactly? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I don’t.”
Leaning back, he braced his arms behind his head. He stretched his legs out in front of him, propping one boot on top of the other, because he wanted her to look at him. Patrick gave him flak about the way she stared, but Tony liked how she looked at him. She made him feel big.
He needed to stop playing with her, but by the time her wide brown eyes finished meandering their way up his legs, past his crotch, and over his chest, he was feeling so bulletproof, he couldn’t resist. “Honey, somebody’s got to teach you how to misbehave. You’re doing it all wrong.”
Tony was thoroughly enjoying her dismayed expression when the lights went out.
Chapter Three
Blackness fell, sudden and complete. It took a second for Amber to get her mental bearings.
The power had gone out.
Fantastic.
Now she was alone in the dark with an unreasonably sexy man who thought she was Mother Teresa.
Somebody’s got to teach you how to misbehave.
She’d wanted to ask, How about you?
But of course she’d said nothing. She didn’t know how to say stuff like that.
It was a trap, being good. You trapped yourself, and then even when you unlocked the door and walked out of the cage, you still felt trapped.
She sighed.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Why wouldn’t I be okay?”
“Some people don’t like the dark.”
His voice didn’t sound right. It sounded as if it was pushing back against the weight of something, but that didn’t make any sense. Tony moved around the construction site like he owned all of Mount Pleasant and half the village of Camelot. He was never this … strained.
“You wouldn’t be one of those people, would you?”
She tried to give the question a teasing lilt, but it didn’t quite fly, and then it didn’t matter, because he said, “I might be.”
Tony Mazzara, the Italian Stallion, was afraid of the dark.
She let it sink in for a moment, because it had such a long way to sink.
Part of her wanted to smile at the irony, but it was really bad news for him. The basement wasn’t just dim, it was pitch-black. An ocean of dark. There were no windows, and a heavy door at the top of the stairs blocked any light that might have filtered down. Poor Tony.
“Is there a flashlight down here, you think?” he asked.
“Not that I know of. How much of a problem is this for you, exactly? Like, you’re not a big fan of the dark, or worse than that?”
“I’m not going to flip out and start smashing things.”
“Okay. Good.”
But he didn’t sound good, now that she was listening. She could hear him breathing, fast and shallow, as if he might be flipping out. Plus, would he even have admitted being afraid of the dark if he had only a minor aversion to it? Probably not. He was a man. Her younger brother, Caleb, would never admit to being afraid of worms, even though he’d passed out when he had to dissect one in high school.
She needed to help Tony get his mind off the situation, but she wasn’t sure what to say. They were stuck in a basement together in the dark, in a tornado, and he was possibly having a panic attack. What next, zombies?
She said the first nonsense that popped into her head. “You think this is what Y2K is going to be like?” January 1, 2000, was still months off, but she’d seen a “personal survival guide” at the bookstore last week. “Everybody huddled in the dark, fretting about the end of the world?”
“Nah. I think Y2K is a bunch of crap.”
“My mother is obsessed with it. She reads every article in the newspaper, and when it comes on the news, she’s always like, ‘Turn it up! This is important!’ ”
“Your mother sounds like a trip.”
Her mother was controlling, difficult, and uptight. But really lovely, if you could get past all that. “She’s unique.”
“You live with her?”
“No, I have an apartment.”
“Oh, right. You said that.”
“But she lives nearby,” Amber confessed. “My parents own the complex, so they have a big apartment above the office.”
If he interpreted this to mean she was a loser who’d never properly left home, he was kind enough not to say so.
“My mom’s having her New Year’s party like she always does,” he said. “All my family, plus the aunts and uncles and cousins. She figures if the lights go out and airplanes start crashing, at least there’ll be champagne.”
“Maybe we won’t even survive that long. Maybe this is actually the apocalypse, getting a jump on us. By the time New Year’s rolls around, the world will be empty, anyway.”
“If this is the apocalypse, where are the horsemen? They’re supposed to have fiery swords. Then it wouldn’t be so fucking dark.”
“You could ask to borrow a fiery sword to use for a flashlight,” she suggested.
“Yeah. ‘Excuse me, sir? I know you’re probably going to lop my head off with that thing in a minute, but in the meantime, could I hold it, you think?’ ”
She smiled. “Maybe he wouldn’t let you have the sword, but there’d probably be a flaming T-shirt or something he could spare.”
“You’re making out like the horsem
en of the apocalypse are going to be nice guys. I’m not sure that’s the way it works.”
“Good point,” she said. “You’ll have to find an angel.”
“Those won’t be hard to track down. They’ll be here for you.”
“I doubt it. I never go to mass anymore.”
“They’re going to bring you a fancy chair to ride up to heaven in. A what-do-you-call-it, like in Vietnam movies? Where somebody pulls you through the streets?”
“A palanquin?”
Another huff of laughter. “I’ve never even heard of that. Whatever it’s called, you’re getting one.”
He snapped his fingers. “A rickshaw. You’re getting a rickshaw.”
“I’m not sure I want a rickshaw.”
“Doesn’t matter. Rickshaws aren’t optional. But look, if you haven’t left in your rickshaw yet when the Devil shows up and starts listing all my sins, you might consider sticking around to defend me.”
She smiled. He sounded better again. Relaxed. He was funny, which was a surprise.
She liked him.
Of course, she’d already liked him, but in a faraway, movie-star-idolizing sort of way. When she’d imagined talking to him in her head, he hadn’t ever been funny.
Actually, did he even talk, in her head? Or did he just sort of … attractively smolder while chopping wood, or smashing things with a sledgehammer, shirtless?
Her imagination—so rich in some ways, so impoverished in others.
“Do you deserve to be defended?” she asked. “I thought you were trouble.”
“Who said I was trouble?”
The teasing had drained from his tone. Oops. “The same person who told me your name was Patrick.”
“You were asking about me.”
“It’s possible.”
“Well, if you did ask about me, and you found somebody who knew my family well enough to tell me and Patrick apart, they’d probably tell you I was all right. Not bad news like Patrick, but not as smart as Joe or as ambitious as Peter. They’d probably also tell you none of us boys has a lick of sense compared to Andrea and Cathy.”
“That’s a lot of nots. You’re not the bad one, the smart one, the ambitious one, or one of the girls. Which one does that make you?”
“The one who’s never going to amount to anything.”
He was trying to sound light and breezy again, but it wasn’t quite working. She heard the discomfort behind his words, and it surprised her.
Tony ran a big construction company, or at least part of it. Directed trucks. Told workers what to do. He walked around pointing at girders and directing electricians as though he had an encyclopedia of construction inside his head. Surely he’d already amounted to something?
“Why would anybody say that about you?”
A few seconds’ pause. “Actually, I take it back. It’s been awhile since anybody said that. I’m trying to be the responsible one these days.”
“Trying?”
Three or four mornings out of five, his blue truck was waiting in the parking lot when she drove up, and he kept her late after work. He seemed about as responsible as they came.
“Yeah, well, it doesn’t come real natural. My brother, Patrick? He and I …” Tony paused, then exhaled explosively. “Let’s just say he did something he couldn’t undo, and I had a part in it. It changed the way I think about … pretty much everything. And then my dad died a few years ago, and my mom took over the company, but she doesn’t know jack shit about building things. I’ve been helping her keep it afloat.”
“You don’t sound like trouble at all.”
“I used to be.”
An uncomfortable pause. They’d strayed too far from where they started. In an attempt to steer them back, she said, “That’s a relief. If you were a saint, who would teach me how to misbehave?”
Silence.
She’d walked off a conversational cliff.
In the dark, silence had a completely different quality. She felt exposed, her heart beating over a loudspeaker, her words echoing in the space between them.
She smelled concrete and pool chlorine and damp. She shifted away from the hard plastic of the chair digging into her upper back, and she heard it all coming. Everything he was about to say.
“Amber, look.”
She crossed her arms.
“You’re a nice girl.”
That. Exactly that. Now he would tell her he hadn’t meant what he’d said earlier.
“I didn’t mean to give you the wrong impression. The thing is …”
“I get it,” she said. Anything to stop him before he could tell her she was too nice for him, or too young, or too something else that she didn’t know the words for.
“I’m pushing thirty,” he said. “And you’re, what, twenty-one? Twenty-two?”
“Twenty-four.”
Metal scraped over concrete as he shifted in his chair. “You’re a pretty girl.”
He said it like an apology.
“Thank you.”
Silence again. Pitch-black silence, into which no machines rumbled and no lights intruded, no shapes emerged to make the darkness feel familiar. She could hear the rain, a faraway white noise that only seemed to deepen the quiet of the basement.
She could hear her watch, too, ticking off the seconds. She’d had no idea it was making so much noise down there on her wrist.
And beneath that, inaudible but present, she could hear the anger and frustration she’d been finding increasingly difficult to ignore over the past few years.
This was what came of trying so hard for so long to be good. Twenty-four years old, and her inexperience was written all over her face, so obvious that it meant a man like Tony didn’t even find her attractive.
When she was little, she’d believed that God was watching her, and she’d wanted to please Him, just as she’d wanted to please her mother. In those first years after they moved to Ohio from Michigan, away from her aunts and uncles and her grandparents, her mother had become so bitter and unhappy she was almost unrecognizable.
Amber did what she could to make it better. She played with her younger brother, Caleb, and helped take care of baby Katie. She never made a peep at school, helped clean the house, brought home exemplary report cards.
After a while, Mom got used to Camelot, Ohio, and Amber got used to being good. For years and years, she was as good as she could possibly be, thinking it was going to get her somewhere. Win her a blue ribbon, or true love, or fulfillment.
It didn’t.
Even before college, her faith in God and goodness had started to fray, and the summer break she spent in the slums outside Cape Town doing charity work with a group of Nazarene students left it in tatters.
God wasn’t watching. There might be a God, or there might not—she hadn’t made up her mind about that. But she’d seen enough dire poverty and need in South Africa to shake her out of her complacence.
Life could be short, and it could be brutal. She was lucky enough to have been born in a good place to good people in the midst of plenty. Yes, she needed to use the advantages she had to try to make the world better, but she also had to live.
It wasn’t that she wanted to misbehave. She just wanted to locate some other set of standards, some way to be and feel without worrying so much about doing the right thing all the time. She wanted to follow the occasional crazy impulse without getting smacked down for it.
She’d just begun to think that maybe she could, with Tony. That she could flirt. Be a bit reckless.
Then, smack.
“Say something.”
Tony’s voice, strung tight again.
“What do you want me to say?”
“Anything. I get … I get antsy, being in my head this much.”
She didn’t know what to tell him. She couldn’t go back to what they’d been doing before—teasing conversation that had misled her.
Irritation nudged at her. Be who you are. Say what you mean. What difference does it ma
ke, anyway? Who’s really paying attention?
He might end up thinking she was a fool, but he was just a stranger. A guy who worked construction at her job. When the new wing of the community center was finished, she’d stop seeing him three or four days a week and start seeing him every three or four years. Or never.
Why should she care what Tony Mazzara thought of her? He certainly didn’t care what she thought of him.
For once in her life, she was going to say whatever she wanted, and damn the consequences.
Chapter Four
“I’ll talk to you,” Amber said, “but only if you promise not to feed me any bull.”
Tony sounded cautious when he replied. “I’m not feeding you bull.”
“Just … just be honest, okay? You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to, and the same goes for me, but don’t say what you think I want to hear. And don’t tell me how nice I am. You don’t know me.”
“All right.”
A few more seconds ticked by. She hadn’t expected his easy acquiescence. This was uncharted territory, and stepping into it unsettled her as much as it exhilarated her.
“So you gonna talk to me or not?” he asked.
“I’m thinking.”
“Anybody ever tell you that you think too much?”
“Yes.”
She couldn’t see him, but she thought he might have smiled.
“Okay, here’s what I want to know,” she said. “Do you feel like the inside of your head matches the outside of you? I mean, do you think people see who you are when they look at you, or somebody entirely different?”
It was something she wondered about a lot.
“Deep thoughts, bunny.”
“Don’t call me ‘bunny.’ I’m not an infant.”
Amber did a mental stutter step. She never would have said that to him in the light. She never would have said it to anyone.
But Tony didn’t seem to recognize the audacity of her remark. He just said, “Sorry.” Then he exhaled, considering her question. “No. Not really.”
“So who are you, really?”
“Who do you think I am?”
She felt her face heating, but she ignored it. “You’re strong. I mean, your body, of course, but that’s not the main thing. You walk around like you know where you’re going, and like that’s all you’re thinking about. You don’t care who sees you or what they think about you. You’re … centered in yourself, I guess. And everyone else is irrelevant.”