Walk a Mile

by Sarah Madison

  “No.” Tom’s word was almost a bark. “You nailed her. The job, the humanitarian work, everything. She’s been prepping to be the success story for this reunion for the last three months. Believe me, I know. You should see the date she’s bringing along later tonight. Some doctor from the hospital. Half her age. Just to make me look bad.” He slumped over his beer. “The thing is, she doesn’t need to do that. She doesn’t have anything to prove. She really is a brain surgeon, and she’s good at what she does. I don’t get it. I never have.”

  “You don’t really miss her, though.” Flynn was unexpectedly gentle. “The constant sniping, and the deliberate use of personal knowledge to skewer you in front of your friends.”

  Tom blinked myopically behind his heavy glasses. “Wow, you really are a regular Sherlock Holmes, aren’t you?” He laughed softly. “No, I don’t. Sometimes I wonder why I put up with her as long as I did. You don’t know what she was like, though, how she used to be. When it was just the two of us, she was a lot of fun. It was only when we went out together that she had to turn on me. I finally realized part of the reason she was attracted to me was because I made her look good.”

  A heavy silence fell. Jerry glared at Flynn, who had the grace to look slightly embarrassed.

  “Just the same, maybe I should go after her and apologize.” Flynn started to push back his chair.

  “I wouldn’t.” Becky didn’t sound particularly sympathetic. “You called it as you saw it, and besides, she was the one who challenged you. If you go after her, you’ll just be making a bigger deal out of it than it really is. Let her come back to the table and pretend nothing happened. She will, you know.”

  “I thought she left you, Tom. That’s what she told me, at any rate.” Nancy frowned, her hands wrapped around her half-empty beer mug.

  “Well, she would tell you that, dear.” Becky’s eyebrow arched delicately. “Don’t you know how these things go? At the reunion, the thinnest woman wins. Hands down. Nothing else counts.”

  “Becky!” Nancy protested. “You don’t really feel that way, do you?”

  Becky grinned and scooped up another potato skin. “Hell, no! I’m just saying that’s how it works for most people. You look smashing. I’m sure your work is interesting, and you have a nice home. However, you could live in a cardboard box and work at a fast-food place, and it wouldn’t matter. The only thing that counts is how everyone’s head turns when you walk across the room.”

  Nancy made a noise of protest again, but stopped when Flynn spoke up.

  “You’re right about the power of looking good. And Nancy is lovely.”

  Flynn had everyone’s attention again. He slouched back in his chair, one hand resting on the table. Jerry wanted to tell him to sit up straight, that he never sat in such a debauched manner. He’d settle for Flynn not being such a jerk, however.

  “But at the end of the day, people want to be remembered for more than looking great.”

  “That’s true,” Becky, ever the peacemaker, chimed in. “I tend to remember acts of kindness more than what someone looks like.”

  Flynn nodded slowly. “Yeah. Kindness. Bravery. Compassion. The people I remember aren’t necessarily the ones that look like runway models.” Flynn locked glances with Jerry.

  That could be taken so many ways. Feeling the need to release the tension gathering around them, Jerry quipped, “Are you saying I don’t look like a runway model?” He cupped one hand behind his head and thrust out his chest.

  Everyone laughed.

  “A runway model, no. You’re too ruggedly handsome for that.” Becky popped a chunk of melted cheese in her mouth.

  “What? Like the guy on that cop show? The one where the writer goes around solving crimes with the police?” Jerry pretended to be affronted.

  “No, that would be Jerry over there.” Becky smiled over the top of her beer mug at Flynn. She turned a speculative glance in Jerry’s direction. When she spoke, it was to the table. “John’s more like a detective in a trench coat, don’t you think? Or, I know, Indiana Jones.”

  Jerry blinked for a moment, trying to follow her “Jerrys” and “Johns” and pair his response with the right statement. Pretending to be Flynn while sitting with his friends was making his headache come back with a vengeance.

  He felt the need to take control of the conversation. “Yeah, well, if it’s any consolation, she’s paying the intern to escort her to the reunion. Oh, and by the way, he’s gay as well.”

  Tom looked up hopefully. “Really? How do you know that?”

  Oops. If Flynn could have kicked him under the table, he probably would have.

  “Trust me, we have ways,” Jerry said, twirling an imaginary mustache.

  “So, John.” Nancy seemed interested in changing the subject to a safer one. “I know this is a working trip for you guys, but have you had a chance to see your mother? How’s she doing these days?”

  Ouch.

  Conscious of Flynn’s sudden glower, Jerry took a deep breath and smiled. “As a matter of fact, I saw her yesterday. She’s doing really well. She’s selling her house and getting married again.”

  Flynn sprayed beer across the table. Coughing, he set his mug down with a clatter. It slopped over the brim. Becky patted him on the back and pushed all the spare napkins toward him, shifting items on the table to mop up the spilled beer.

  “You didn’t tell me that!” Flynn glared at him.

  Jerry raised both eyebrows with what he hoped was a polite smirk. “You didn’t ask.”

  “Oh, hey, Paul’s here with Rick!” Becky was practically bouncing in her chair as she waved them over. Jerry turned to watch them approach, and caught Nancy looking at him thoughtfully. He let his glance continue to slide past her so he could greet the newcomers without acknowledging the fact she was giving him an odd stare.

  Well, shit, Flynn looks pretty damn good after all these years. Jerry couldn’t tell where the thought came from; it was there and gone before he could localize it. He smiled tightly as he tried to figure out which man was Paul and which was Rick. What had Flynn said about them? Paul had been the former football player, right? That had to be the big beefy man with the beginnings of a beer gut, then. He had arms like a lumberjack, the corded muscle bulging out of his short shirtsleeves. He wore no coat despite the cool evening. The man with him, by contrast, was on the weedy side, his hair overly long and straggling over the collar of his checked flannel shirt. The T-shirt beneath heralded a band that had been popular in the ’90s, and Jerry felt a pang of sympathy for him. Unlike everyone else, Rick didn’t look as though he was headed to a reunion of any sort. In fact, he looked as though he might still be in college as one of those never-finishing-that-degree grad students. Belatedly, Jerry remembered Rick was supposed to work here at the bar or something. He was the one who’d given up college to come home and take his dad’s place at Killian’s.

  His memory was as holey as a sieve. How did normal people function?

  That odd sense of recognition stirred near him again, and he turned his head quickly to try and pinpoint it. Shaking his head like a dog who’d heard a whistle pitched too high for human ears, he returned his focus to the table.

  “Tom!” The man that had to be Paul clapped Tom on the shoulder hard enough to make him tip forward in his seat, and Jerry noticed Flynn watching him with narrowed eyes. “Where’s Carlene?” Paul didn’t wait for an answer. His glance continued around the table as he greeted everyone. “Becky, good to see you. Nancy, damn, you look good enough to eat.”

  There was a bit of a leer in his voice when he spoke to her, and it was accompanied by a rather pointed once-over. He had the high color of someone who’d started drinking well before his arrival at the bar. Rawr. I could get me some of that action.

  Compared to Becky’s cheerful appreciation of Jerry and Flynn earlier in the evening, Paul’s greeting of Nancy seemed almost obscene. Recognizing the slow smolder of Flynn’s temper on the other side of the table, he wonder
ed how he might possibly draw Flynn away to put a word in his ear about who he was supposed to be tonight.

  This was a bad idea. I shouldn’t have come.

  The thought echoed Jerry’s so closely that for a moment, he thought it had come from Flynn, but he realized he didn’t know where it had originated. For some reason, that made him uneasy.

  “John Flynn. Look at you. Pretty boy all grown up.” There was something unpleasantly suggestive about Paul’s smile. Obviously, Paul still believed he was the big man on campus. That he still held sway over the table because he’d been a high school quarterback at one time. He reached across the table to offer a hand. Jerry took it, wearing the Mask of Flynn when Paul tried the hand-crusher grip on him. Jerry shifted his fingers slightly and applied pressure to Paul’s thumb, pressing on the nerve there. Paul abruptly let go.

  “Pretty boy!” Flynn blurted, and Paul turned his gaze on him.

  “Who’s this guy? I don’t remember him from school.” Paul spoke with hearty nastiness disguised as hearty niceness. Jerry resisted the urge to wipe his palm on his pants when no one was looking.

  “Oh, yes,” Becky smiled, diffusing the tension so naturally, it had to be her primary role at any gathering. “Did anyone bring a yearbook? Jerry, if you’d seen John back in high school, you’d know what Paul meant. He was a dreamboat.” Becky folded her hands over her heart and tipped her head sideways as she batted her eyes at Flynn. Everyone laughed.

  Everyone except Paul.

  Paul opened his mouth to say something, but Carlene returned to the table, and everyone shifted to make room for the new arrivals. Becky introduced Flynn (as Jerry) to Paul and Rick, while Tom snagged extra chairs from the next table. The look Paul fixed on Flynn was unnerving. Even though Jerry was shielding everyone in the room, Paul’s assessment of Flynn came through loud and clear.

  “Partner?” Paul’s smile was more of a sneer.

  There’s another one. One of those pansy-assed faggots.

  “They work together. FBI.” Becky’s response was a little shorter than usual. What an ass.

  “Ah, none for me,” Rick said as Tom pulled over a second chair. “I’m afraid I’m working tonight.”

  “What’s the point of owning this fine establishment if you can’t take a few minutes to hang out with old friends?” Becky said, hands on hips in mock outrage. “Come on, Rick, take a load off. I’m sure your boss won’t mind.”

  Rick hesitated a moment, then smiled at Becky, giving in with grace. “Okay, but just for a little while. Since I am the boss, I guess you’re right.”

  “FBI agents, eh? I hope we’re not under investigation or anything.” Paul had a way of making everything sound slightly offensive. Jerry bet he was the one in the crowd who always told the off-color joke, and the one who made women uncomfortable.

  “That depends,” Jerry drawled in a fair approximation of Flynn’s sarcastic tone. “What have you been up to?”

  That triggered another round of laughter, but there was that same uneasy feel to it that made Jerry wonder what he was missing here. The temptation to drop his walls and see what everyone was thinking was strong, but he resisted. He couldn’t shake the feeling he was hiding in a barn, hoping the zombie hordes outside were incapable of pushing their way through the barred door. He caught himself breathing faster, muscles coiled to launch him into a fight, and he forced himself to relax.

  Paul laughed a little too loudly for a little too long. When he finally trailed off, the conversation turned to what everyone was doing in their lives now. Paul helped himself to a glass of beer, drinking deeply as he stared at Jerry over the brim. Jerry noted that Flynn was silent, toying with his frosted beer mug as he listened to the others. Carlene had just come back from Haiti, where she’d conducted a teaching course in “spinal intradural hydatid cyst disease.” Jerry hid a smile at the accuracy of Flynn’s assessment. It turned out she did indeed divide her time between her practice and Doctors Without Borders. Her recitation of her achievements was a bit flat, however, as though she was expecting Flynn to comment on them.

  He had a sort of blank look on his face, and Jerry could almost see him turning over thousands of bits of data in his mind before he said, “Oh, right. Pretty rare, but the prognosis is good if you get to it in time, right? Perform a laminectomy, and then a course of anthelmintics, yes?”

  “What are anthel—whatchamajiggers?” Rick asked, giving up on the word halfway through.

  “Dewormers.” Everyone seemed slightly surprised Jerry knew the answer, which irritated the snot out of him. “What?” He raised his hands, palms up. “I have pets. So sue me.”

  The conversation segued briefly into pets, with almost everyone taking out their cell phones to share a picture of the family dog or cat. Pictures of children followed, with Paul sharing an image of an impossibly buxom young woman, who inevitably was named Candy.

  Flynn withdrew from the conversation, continuing to stare into the bottom of his mug without really making much progress on the beer, either. Tom summed up the last seventeen years of his life in a few sentences, obviously subdued in the presence of both Carlene and Paul. Rick was quiet as well, even when Becky tried to draw him out on the success of the bar.

  “It’s a living.” He shrugged. “Certainly not as exciting or as productive as the rest of you guys.” He nodded in Carlene’s general direction.

  It’s no more than I deserve.

  Jerry caught the edge of his resigned despair, and sympathy bubbled up again. He couldn’t help but think Rick’s sacrifice to come home from college to run the family business felt like a George Bailey thing to do. He hoped Rick had found some measure of happiness over the years, but the miasma of defeat that hung about him made that unlikely.

  “Damn fine living, I’d say. There are worse things than to sleep late every day and go to a bar every night.” Paul’s statement seemed to boom out over a lull in the conversation around them. “You aren’t looking for a partner, are you? With my name and connections, it could be a good deal for both of us.”

  Jerry suspected he was the only one who noticed Rick’s wince, and only because he could hear Rick’s mental hell, no. Rick smiled enigmatically over his frothy mug.

  Paul, it would seem, was a high school football coach of a champion team. Jerry’s eyes glazed over as Paul regaled them with stories of his winning team, his best players, and stats from the latest games. Each story was punctuated with a deep pull from his mug. The man could certainly put away the beer. He started on his second glass when most were still on their first. Just when Paul’s stories were bordering on the obnoxious, Nancy interrupted him.

  “Speaking of investigations,” she said, shooting Jerry a sly smile, “we had a break-in at the museum the other night.” Might as well change the conversation to something intriguing. Too bad if John doesn’t like it.

  The change in subject was embraced gratefully, with everyone showing a greater degree of interest than the story otherwise warranted. Knife-sharp, Flynn’s anxiety about the topic pushed to the forefront of the emotions Jerry could sense, but almost as quickly, Flynn smothered his reaction. Not for the first time since the switch, Jerry wished he could send Flynn a telepathic message telling him not to worry.

  Even as he was attempting to send Flynn silent communications with his eyebrows, Jerry felt again that unexpected frisson of recognition. This time it carried with it mingled parts of glee with some undefined anxiety. He couldn’t tell if it was coming from more than one person or not. It bumped up against his consciousness in a way that refused to be ignored, and he scanned the room to see if he could spot anyone looking at him.

  The problem was, there were a lot of people who seemed to be looking his way: their server for the evening, threading through the customers to bring another pitcher of beer for their table; some college-aged girls giggling in a corner booth when he caught them glancing in his direction; a random guy at the bar who happened to look up at the same time he did. He got the impres
sion the person or persons thinking about him might not even be looking at him just now, and he frowned. This could be important.

  When he turned his attention back to the table, Becky was giving him an uncertain smile.

  “I’m sorry, what?” Everyone at the table was looking at Jerry expectantly. Obviously he’d missed something.

  “Carlene asked why anyone would be interested in the artifact.” Thank God, Flynn covered for him. “To be honest, we have no idea. On the face of it, it certainly doesn’t seem to be worth stealing.”

  “Oh, right.” Jerry nodded noncommittally. He started to add some platitude when the sense that someone was either excited or nervous about his presence rolled over him again. He felt overwhelmed by the strength of it, and this time, he lowered the shields in order to identify the source.

  At once, it was as though sluices had been opened and cold muddy water now rushed over him, knocking him off his feet and battering him again as he tried to regain his footing.

  I can’t believe I slept with that gorilla. Well, I slept with all of them, all except John. I bet stick-thin Nancy can’t say that, nor can Becky with her oh-so-perfect family. Look at how much weight she’s gained. What a cow. It was me they wanted then. Me.

  Jerry looked across the table at Carlene, his eyebrows shooting up. Her mouth fell open unpleasantly.

  Christ. Anyone would think he could read my thoughts.

  Hastily, he looked away.

  I was so stupid to let him go. I’d take him back in a heartbeat, only I think it’s too late.

  Jerry caught Nancy’s focus on him. He wasn’t sure what she saw in his expression, but she suddenly became interested in picking cat hair off her clothing again.

  Wonder if he’s wearing a gun. Where would he keep it? Shoulder holster, I bet. Can’t tell if he has it on him or not. An FBI agent. Who’d have thought? Well, there was that thing with his sister.