Tatum showed up at the library not too much later, which told me a lot about how fast she had been driving, especially after she mentioned that she had stopped to shop on the way over, and that now her trunk was so full of bottles that the car was dipping down in the back. She looked a little wild, and was talking pretty fast.
“It turns out that I failed that class last semester and I’m in deep shit because they won’t change the grade no matter what I say,” she announced as she used a chair to climb up and perch herself on the circulation desk next to where I was working.
I had to shake my head. “I’m not allowed to have you back here, and if I’m going to let you, you definitely can’t sit there. Try to look like a professional librarian,” I said. “What class—”
“If I were I librarian, my name would be Beatha Dewey and I would get those cat-looking glasses.” Tatum started looking excited as she planned out her character. “And I would definitely do my hair in the braids you did for Fan Day.” Her face fell at the thought of the Woodsmen. “Screw that, I don’t like my hair in a braid crown. No one does.”
“Tatum, were you saying that you failed a class last spring?” I asked. “Which class?”
“Yoga. The one I was doing for credit. My dad is going to hit the roof. Do you think I should cut my hair off?” She eyed the big scissors on the desk.
“No!” I put them in a drawer. “Do you want to talk about that text? About Nico?”
“Not at all. I’m going to the Canteen to get a coffee. I’ll bring something sweet and gross to Domenico in his office. Want one?” She leaped down from the desk and trotted off, and I sighed.
An hour later, I had changed into my bathing suit under my clothes and the pretty bra was relegated to the bottom of my bag because I felt like I probably wouldn’t be putting it back on that day—not because Knox and I would be naked, but because it was going to be a different kind of afternoon from what I had pictured. Tatum and I left the library with her slightly calmer after hanging out with Domenico for a while over their coffees, but she was still riled up. I turned my car into Knox’s bumpy driveway, and saw her fishtail in behind me. I had watched her in my rearview mirror as she texted for much of the drive over—texted, tailgated, and nearly ran off the road several times. My nerves were shot by the time we pulled up to a stop in front of the Xanadu-colored house.
“Woah, this is where he lives? Is it an army house? A barrack?” Tatum jumped out of her car and looked around. “Where is everybody else? I thought he was asking people over!”
“No, it’s just us,” I said, and she gestured to me to help carry the alcohol and bags of chips out of her trunk. “Leave it,” I told her. “Maybe we’ll come back for it later.” She rolled her eyes and stuck two large bottles into her purse.
Knox was definitely not pleased that our time together had turned into a picnic with a friend. He stood stiffly in front of the house, arms crossed over his chest.
“Hi,” I said, just as Tatum called, “Did you really buy this place? Was it a reform school or something? That was where my third grade teacher told me that I was going to end up.”
He made a noise that sounded like a growl. “Tatum, go walk around to the back. It’s so beautiful, you’ll puke,” I said quickly.
She waved and took off, the bottles clinking together in her bag.
“That’s a good thing, puking?” Knox asked. Now that she was gone, he held out his arms.
Oh, thank goodness. I cuddled right in. “It’s what she always says to me. I’m sorry I had to bring her. One of her friends slept with Nico Williams last night and I was sure that she was going to do something stupid to retaliate, against him or against herself.”
“Hm.” But he rubbed my back again. “If she’s going to go off the deep end whenever he sleeps with someone, you’re going to be spending a lot of time with Tatum.”
I picked up my head. “Is he loose?”
Knox laughed. “Yes, he’s loose.” He bent and kissed me and I thought of my bra. Especially when his hands went from my hips to circle my waist, and his thumbs moved to brush the bottom of my breasts, just grazing against them. I shook a little because it felt so good, and he did it again, then again.
There was a shriek, and then Tatum ran around from the side of the house. “Forget what I said before about this being the worst purchase anyone had ever made, even worse than Louisiana.”
“Did you say that?” I asked, glancing up at Knox. “And wasn’t the Louisiana Purchase generally considered—”
“My dad’s a contractor and he can rip this right down for you. Just level it. You could live in a tent, because it would be better than this house, but the location is the best thing ever. You’re a smart man,” she continued.
I could feel Knox’s body stiffen beneath my arms. “She genuinely means that, Knox,” I quickly told him. “She’s not being a jerk, except it was really rude to say that a tent would be better than your house. I still think with a little paint…”
“Paint?” Tatum shook her head. “No way! No paint could cover what’s wrong with this house, unless it was fairy paint that magically made it all invisible. Demo everything, from the ugly roof on down, then start over with exactly what you want.” She whipped her dress over her head, and thank goodness, she was wearing a bikini underneath it. “Let’s swim! We can play chicken. Me and Daisy against you,” she told Knox, and took off back towards the lake again.
“Interesting idea,” he said.
“Oh, I really don’t want to play chicken. How would we, with only three people?”
“I meant the demolition. What kind of house would you build here?” We walked slowly after Tatum, his arm around my shoulders.
“Me?” I thought, then started to suggest some ideas about how it could look: big windows, tons of light, white walls to display a lot of art. Knox had specific ideas about the features that he wanted in a house, like extra-high counters in the kitchens and bathrooms so he didn’t have to bend over all the time, tall doorways, and a big hot tub.
“Where two people, two tall people, could fit,” he explained. His thumb brushed under my breast and I pressed myself into his side. It was hard to hold still when he did that.
Tatum was already in the water, yelling for us to get in. I gave her a look when I saw her watching Knox take off his shirt and she shrugged. “It’s like looking at an eclipse!” she called to me. “You can’t help yourself!”
“Don’t look at that either,” I said to her. I shook my head and carefully removed my t-shirt and shorts, and as I was folding them, I realized that Knox was staring at me in my bikini like Tatum had at him. “What?” I mumbled, finding it a little hard to breathe. He put his arm around me and pulled me against him. It was as naked as I’d ever been with a man, as much skin as I had ever touched. Breathing got even harder.
A spray of water sprinkled my back. “Come in!” Tatum called, and splashed again. We all splashed around for a while. She was a really bad swimmer, which seemed unusual for someone who had spent most of her life living so close to such a large body of water. I watched a lot to make sure her head was above the surface. Then she got tired of staying afloat and settled on the sand to look up the Woodsmen roster on her phone. “Ok, I’ll name them and you guys give me your opinions,” she called to us. “What about Kenny? Darius? Gunnar?”
Knox skipped a rock, and I lost count around 19. The student had surpassed the teacher. “What do you want with these guys?” he asked her.
“What do you mean?” she called.
He walked up on the shore, with water tracing the musculature of his back as it dripped down his skin. It was fascinating, hypnotic, and I followed him like I was transfixed. I realized he was holding out his hand to me and took it.
“I mean, what are you looking for with them?” Knox explained. “To date them, to have a boyfriend? To screw them?” He put a towel around me and rubbed my arms. “Are you cold? You looked like you were getting cold.” I shook my head, but I
stepped closer to him anyway.
Tatum seemed thoughtful and she bit the edge of her phone like it was a pencil. “I don’t know what I want with them. I wasn’t really thinking past the initial stage of forcing them to want me.”
“Maybe you should consider it a little more. If you’re only trying to make one person jealous, I don’t think it will work, Tatum,” I put in. Nico hadn’t noticed or cared when she was there at Fan Day and had headed out with the mascot guy.
“I don’t even know what you’re talking about,” she told me. “I’m not trying to make someone jealous! What about Trey?” she asked Knox. “Jesse? The other Gunnar?”
Knox ignored her. He sighed and sat on the grass a few yards away, where he rested against one of the big boulders at the edge of the yard, and closed his eyes.
Tatum started telling me a story about her dad and his new girlfriend, who was one of the Woodsmen cheerleaders and slightly younger than I was, but older than Tatum. “He always set my age as the bar that he wouldn’t cross, but now that I’m getting so old, he’s going to have to change that. I turn twenty-four next month,” she said, looking bleak. She took a liquor bottle out of her purse and looked at it.
“Don’t open that. Twenty-four isn’t very old,” I said.
“It is when I don’t have a boyfriend, or a degree, or a real job, or a house that I own, or a car that I bought, or anything, really.” She did open the bottle and took a swig.
She had just described my life, too, and it felt pretty crappy to hear it spelled out like that. I reached for the vodka but Tatum pushed away my hand and didn’t share. “You should eat dinner before you drink anything,” she told me, and swigged again.
“I’m thirty-four. The only thing I owned for most of my life is a truck that doesn’t run great when the temperature gets below freezing, which is ninety percent of my time in Michigan. I just got the house and the degree,” Knox said, picking up his head. “I don’t think you need to give up yet.”
Tatum looked at me, and we waited for him to say more, to continue on about how he had just gotten a girlfriend, too. When he didn’t, Tatum reached over to squeeze my shoulder. “Let’s focus on the rest of the roster. Marshall? Tavon? Joe?” she asked. Knox shook his head. “Well, you tell me,” she said, her voice rising a little. “You tell me why none of those guys would like me. Why didn’t Nico like me?”
Knox blew out a breath of air. “I’m not sure. Nico and I don’t giggle over secrets in the bathroom.”
Her eyes narrowed and she sat up straight, knocking over the giant bottle of vodka with her knee. “Giggling in the bathroom, huh? I’m being serious!”
“Serious?” he repeated. “You were trying to give genital exams to the players on Fan Day and I also caught you putting a skull in Nico’s locker.”
“Tatum!” I burst out.
“I couldn’t put it in the end zone because my shovel wouldn’t go through the fake grass!” she explained angrily. Then she turned on Knox, jumped up, and walked over to where he sat. She was barely taller than he was even though he was still reclined on the grass against the rock. “Since you’re not going to help me with finding someone to pump, I have another question for you,” she told him, leaning closer, threatening.
Knox closed his eyes, looking resigned. “I don’t want to argue with you,” he said.
She ignored that. “Maybe this one won’t be too hard for you to answer. Ready?” She waited a beat. “Why didn’t you call Daisy for the whole summer? Why did you leave and ignore her, then come back and think you could pick right back up where you had left off? Right where you had left her?”
“Tatum!”
She turned back to me. “I think you deserve to know. That really pissed me off.”
There was silence and I looked out at the lake. I wanted to know, too, but I was afraid to hear his answer.
Finally, Knox opened his eyes and looked up at Tatum. “Whatever happens between me and Daisy is our business,” he said, very evenly. “I’m not trying to be a jerk, Tatum. I’m telling you that Nico isn’t going to work out for you, and listing a string of football players isn’t the way to find someone, either. I’ll look around the locker room and maybe I can set something up.”
“Really?” she asked suspiciously.
“Really. The kicker seems like a nice guy.”
“Is he married? Real or common-law?” she asked. Her phone rang and she rescued it from the pool of spilled vodka she had created when she knocked over the bottle. “Shit. It’s my dad. He’s super mad about me flunking the yoga class.”
“You really flunked that?” I asked. “How?”
Tatum rolled her eyes. “Something about my downward dog. I have to go calm him down.” She shook off the phone, scattering droplets of alcohol. “Bye, Daisy. Thanks for trying to keep me on the straight and narrow. I appreciate it.” She gave me a quick hug.
I watched her as she scurried up the path, then I put down the bottle of gin that I had taken out of her purse and had been hiding behind my back. Her trunk was still loaded down, but at least she wouldn’t be carrying it on her person.
“Daisy.” Knox inclined his head at me. “Did you say something about braiding my hair?”
“Are you serious?” My fingers practically itched. “Will you really let me?”
“Only on the condition that you never tell anyone. Ever.”
I skipped—literally, I skipped—over to the boulder he was leaning against and settled myself behind him. My knees stretched wide to accommodate the width of his shoulders. “This isn’t going to be my best work, without a brush and with all this wind, but I’m going to do something really cool. A masculine braid, like Leif Erikson.”
“Like who?”
I started to pull back sections of his dark hair as I related some of what I had learned from Domenico about Viking heroes. I got quieter as I went on, because I kept thinking about what Tatum had asked him. Not about the Woodsmen kicker being in a common-law marriage, but about how Knox had left in the spring and not spoken to me until we happened to run into each other on Fan Day. I pulled the elastic out of my own hair and wrapped it around the end of the braid. “There. Turn so I can see you.”
Knox shifted and turned to look me in the eyes. “It looks really good,” I announced. Actually, he was so handsome I almost did want to puke, because I needed to talk to him, and his looks made it even more intimidating. “I like being able to see your whole face,” I explained. “That was really why I wanted to braid it.” And also, because I wanted to be close to him and to touch him. Even now, my hands were on his shoulders.
He ran his hands over my work. “Masculine, like Leif Erikson,” he commented. “You sure about that?”
I nodded. “It’s very Viking.” I tucked back a piece that I had missed. “Your hair is much easier to braid than my mom’s was. Hers was like mine, all slippery.” I messed with what had been my ponytail, combing it out with my fingers. “And you’re easier than Tatum, because she doesn’t like to sit still.”
“While you were braiding, I was thinking about what she said.”
My heart sped up. “What she said about…”
“Did she really fail a yoga class?” he asked disbelievingly.
I swallowed. “I guess so.” My heart pounded harder. Now that Tatum had broached the subject, I had to know because I was always going to wonder. Ask, Daisy! Just get it out. “Knox, why did you want to leave and not see me again last spring?”
“I didn’t want to do that,” he said, very quietly.
“Then, why did you?” I persisted, my voice shaking a little. “If I hadn’t been asleep in the parking lot on Fan Day, would we have ever seen each other again?”
He put his hand on my knee. “I wanted to see you again. I wanted to talk to you over the summer. I read that shifter book and I kept thinking about you being scared of me as a wolf-man.”
“I wasn’t scared,” I protested.
“I know. You were startled,” he corre
cted himself. “I kept thinking, if you were a shape-shifter, you’d be a little rabbit. When I held you in your studio, your heart beat so fast, so hard.”
Like it what it was doing right now. “If you were thinking about me, why didn’t you say hello or something?” I wasn’t going to tell him how sad I had been. How much it had hurt my feelings that he hadn’t bothered to let me know that he was back in Michigan, how I’d found out about his movements through obsessive viewing of Channel 67 Woodsmen coverage.
“I don’t have a good answer. I always had routines that I followed.” He rubbed his eyes. “My grandma used to say I was a creature of habit. Same breakfast every day, shoes put in the same place at the door. It’s comfortable, right? It’s comfortable to know that it won’t change. Everything was always changing when I was a kid, before,” he started to say, but then he looked up at me and shook his head. “I thought I’d go to Arizona and things would be like they always were, every day in the same routine.”
Oh. I picked at a snag in my bikini bottom. I wasn’t part of his usual routine, and he liked the sameness. “Then why did you bother to come talk to me on Fan Day?”
“I came out of the training room and found Tatum at my locker. She was standing up on the bench with a big group of people in front of her, pointing out my goddamn compression shorts to everyone. She interrupted her talk to tell me that you were sitting in the car, upset, and that I was a real asshole if I didn’t go see you. I stopped her from putting the skull in Nico’s locker before I went out to find you.”
Tatum was a good friend. I nodded.
“After I decided that this was going to be my last season. I started looking for a house here, in Michigan. When I’d get the listings, it was in the back of my mind that you could come to the pool that one, or you’d like the kitchen at another. How we could try the pone bread again, with the right ingredients. I thought about you a lot, but I’m not good at this stuff.” There was a huge pause. “That’s an understatement. I’m terrible at it, and I wish I had done this differently. I wish I had been talking to you all summer long. On Fan Day, Tatum stood up on the bench, pointed at my crotch, and told me to grow some to fit the pocket of my compression shorts, and I realized she was right about that.”
The Big Hit Page 17