“I don’t think I’m up for yoga,” he told her. I studied his face, and although he did look more comfortable in the new, cooler temperature of the attic, he still looked very tired after the day’s work.
“Yoga might be good for both of us,” I said, but he waved us out and said he’d see me on Monday.
I had looked at all the pictures I could of the yoga studio, which seemed very airy with lots of windows, and of course, I thought yoga was supposed to be about calming yourself down, so my anxiety about this class was at a low hum as we got out of our cars in the parking lot. Then Tatum corrected my idea of what “power yoga” meant. “This class is really hard, and it’s going to kick your ass,” she informed me. “Yoga isn’t for weak bitches.”
“I’m not a weak bitch!” I said, offended. “I’m not any kind of bitch.”
“It’s just an expression! Haven’t you heard that said before about yoga?” She looked at me. “Damn it. I’m not going to be able to wear those clothes again, you look so cute in them.” She sighed. “Sometimes it’s hard on my ego to be friends with you.”
“Tatum, you’re nuts.”
“Come on, I have my extra mat. I’ll introduce you to the yoga ladies. Don’t be nervous, or anxious, or whatever!” She took my hand and smiled up at me. “Let’s go flow!”
I always had anxiety with new things, but I was still keeping everything together pretty well. The studio was all calming music and cool, restful colors, so that helped. Maybe yoga would be my jam. I looked around the room for the beautiful, sexy, uninhibited women from the text chain I’d been reading for the past few months, but everyone there looked really normal. Thin and pretty, mostly, but no one wearing anything totally, outrageously naked, and no one was crowing about her latest sexual adventures.
“Hi, Tates!”
Tatum spun around, and from the immediate snarl that appeared on her face, I knew who this woman wearing the cropped sweatshirt and floral leggings was: Cinderella, AKA Amelia, AKA the woman who had pumped Nico, Tatum’s Nico. Oh, crap. She was definitely pretty, and definitely curved, and taller than Tatum. She was the kind of woman whose ponytail swung back and forth when she walked, and her cute leggings and swinging hair were on their way over to us.
“Amelia!” Tatum said, narrowing her eyes, and before she could add to that, I put out my hand to stop her from attacking. The woman didn’t understand the danger she was in, and instead took my hand and shook it.
“I’m Amelia!” she told me. “Welcome to the studio!”
I had to admit that I had been expecting the women from that text to be something other than who they were. I met Barbie, really Stella, whose parents owned the awesome vacation house. She talked about it within the first two minutes of Tatum introducing us. I identified Eeyore because she was frowning as we stood chatting before the teacher arrived, and she said that this class was probably going to be just as bad as the last one. Pretty unfortunately and ironically, her real name was Hope.
But she was fine, as were all the other yoga girls. I completely understood how Tatum had come to be friends with them, even though now she looked like she was going to strangle Cinderella/Amelia with one of the black cloth belts that hung from hooks on the wall. I placed myself between her body and the belts, just in case.
“Ok, everyone, find your spots on the floor and come to your mats!” the teacher said as she breezed in. “Sorry, my babysitter was late!”
These women seemed totally normal. Some of them were friendly, some not so much, some had dirty hair and the person I thought was probably Caffeine (she kept trying to convince the other women to train for a half-marathon with her) had a hole in the seam of her cute yoga tank top. I sat on my mat at the very back of the room, surprised by this discovery. I had imagined them all in stiletto heels and tight black leather, walking together as a squad in the middle of a deserted street, with men falling dead to the right and left (and maybe lightning in the dark sky, because I always pictured them at night).
“See?” Tatum hissed next to me. “Didn’t I tell you that Amelia was a heifer?”
“No, and she isn’t. Tatum, did she know that you liked you-know-who? You can’t blame her for doing you-know-what with him if she didn’t.”
“I don’t know who or what you mean,” she said, and flopped herself down onto her face, precluding more conversation.
Which was fine, because I had always thought of yoga as a kind of extended breathing exercise with some stretches thrown in, but this was the hardest workout I’d had in a long time, and I didn’t have any breath left to talk to Tatum. There was unfortunately no clock in the room, and we’d had to leave our phones up at the front, so I was unclear about how much longer it was going to last. One of my hardest jobs in therapy had been to learn to stay present and not worry about what was coming next or had happened in the past, but I was quite concerned about when the teacher was going to tell us that class was over, because if I had to do one more of their stinking yoga pushups, my arms were going to give up the ghost.
“Wasn’t that awesome?” Tatum asked when we were finally lying in a pose that was supposed to be us being dead. It really felt like I might be.
“Are we supposed to me talking?” I whispered. Dead people didn’t.
“I feel a lot better after all that mind-opening stuff,” she continued, unperturbed. “You’re right. Amelia didn’t know that Nico and I had a relationship, so I can’t blame her for fucking him. What?” she asked the three women who picked up their heads off their mats to stare at her.
“Talk after,” I muttered, playing dead, but after the class she was running off to meet with a life coach her dad had insisted that she talk to in order to fix her priorities and get herself in gear. As I waved goodbye to Tatum and the women I had met, I saw that I had a bunch of messages from Knox on my phone. I called him back once I had collapsed in the seat of my car.
“Yoga is hard,” I answered in response to his question about what I was up to. “It’s not just looking cute in leggings, as I had suspected. But I did it! I went to the class and stayed the whole time.” I smiled to myself then caught a glimpse of my face in the rearview mirror. Oh, God, I looked like a strawberry.
“Come over to the condo,” Knox was urging me. “I’ll order dinner.”
“Or I could cook,” I suggested. “I really like to and I used to all the time for my brother.” I took another look at the mirror. “Let me just run home…no, there’s no time. I’m disgusting, Knox. Truly gross.”
“You can clean up here,” he said casually, as if it wasn’t a big deal to take a shower in his bathroom. To be naked with him in the next room. I thought of the lace bra, still in my bag. “Tell me what food you want and I’ll go shopping,” he said. “But come now, ok? It feels like it’s been a while.”
I felt the same way, and I let myself drive pretty fast over to see him. The hallway was full of groceries when he opened the front door for me, so much so that I couldn’t get past into the apartment. “Hi,” I said, glad for the distance the bags created due to my yoga grossness, but Knox reached for me anyway.
“Hi.” He lifted me over the mass of food and kissed me. “I got a lot. Maybe we’ll be doing a lot of cooking.” He looked into the kitchen. “So I should probably get some pots, too.”
My eyebrows went up. “That would help. Maybe I’ll go get dressed.” Tatum’s sweatshirt was not at all long enough to cover my butt.
Knox was looking at me in the yoga outfit. “You look pretty cute like that. Very cute.” He kissed me again, his hand sliding down over my tights in a way that made me briefly forget my sweatiness and lean into him. “I’ll show you,” he said, breaking away.
He led me into his bedroom. His bedroom! The mattresses took up almost the entire space so that I had to edge along the side to reach the bathroom, and he barely squeezed past. “It’s a tight fit,” he agreed, when he saw me looking. “Here.” He reached into a drawer in his bureau and pulled out some clothes. “You can w
ear this if you want.”
I had my own clothes from the day with me, but when I got out of his shower, I did put on his giant Woodsmen t-shirt. And the black bra underneath it. I pulled up my hair, staring at myself in the mirror. Here I was, in Knox’s bathroom. I had just been nude in the same place he was also nude, every day. Soon, we could be nude together, in the big bed just outside the bathroom door. I watched the color rise on my face as my anxiety notched up. One step at a time, I told myself. First, dinner. I leaned on the bathroom counter and breathed. This was Knox, and it was going to be fine.
We tried to cook together at first, but there was really no room in his tiny kitchen and he stepped out, into the dining area. “There will be a big kitchen in the new house. With a huge refrigerator,” he noted, because his current one was bursting with everything he had just bought.
It was a lot easier to cook when I was able to move, but the shortage of pots and pans was a bit of a challenge. “And you can have lots of utensils and cookware,” I added. “Are you really thinking of tearing down the house like Tatum said? Tell me.”
He talked for a while about some ideas, but he had been too busy to get things started any more than that. So I asked about the upcoming game, and what he thought about the Cottonmouths’ players. He was very thoughtful and almost scientific-sounding in how he talked about the opposition, and I learned a lot more about football than I had from the What-Ho, the Gridiron! book from the library basement. I told him about meeting the yoga girls, and how they surprised me with their normalcy, and about Domenico’s new approach to looking for the portrait. Then I remembered what Knox had done for the attic, so I stirred my sauce in his singular pot one more time and came around to where he was sitting to hug him. “Thank you, thank you so much for the air conditioning.”
Knox tugged me onto his lap. “It helps?”
“It’s wonderful.” I played with his hair a little. “It’s hard to believe that you did that for us.”
“I’m an art lover,” he explained. I looked around at the blank walls of his apartment and he shrugged.
“Why didn’t you tell me yesterday what was happening?” I asked him.
“I wanted it to be a surprise. Was it?”
“Yes! You can’t even imagine walking into the attic and feeling the cool breeze blow. It was like a dream, especially since Domenico was singing and dancing. Thank you for that wonderful present.” Knox was smiling hugely. “The professor sent you a note. I had to type it out because he kept getting stuff on the paper when he wrote it himself. Even the final copy didn’t get out of the attic unscathed.” I made myself leave his lap to find it in my purse. “Please ignore the coffee ring on the bottom.”
Knox watched me as I meandered back to him, my legs stiff. “Why are you walking so slowly, limping?” he asked. He held out his arms, not for the letter, but for me, and I settled on his lap again.
“The yoga killed me,” I confessed. “When the Woodsmen season is over, I’m going to make you come with me and try it.” Maybe we could tape two mats together for him, I thought.
“I’ll go with you.” He leaned and kissed my neck. “Your biceps hurt, too? You weren’t able to pick up the gallon of milk.”
I felt kind of languorous and lazy, curled up against him. “Biceps, triceps, back, pecs. Will you give me a rubdown?” I asked, and stiffened in shock. What had just come out of my mouth? Had I invited him to rub my breasts?
“Happy to help,” Knox said. He tilted up my chin and kissed me like he meant it. “Read the note to me.”
“Dear Mr. Lynch,” I started, but halfway through Knox stopped me and sniffed the air. That was dinner getting overdone. I hobbled into the kitchen to rescue it.
“Much better than the pone bread,” he pronounced as we ate. He didn’t talk too much at dinner, because so much fuel was going into his mouth. Fortunately, I had cooked many times before for my brother and had calculated the volume of food just right. In other words, I made enough for at least five normally-sized people, plus more for myself.
“You’re fun to cook with,” I told him as he finished what was left on my plate. “I can make dinner for you to load up before the game, what I used to make for my brother the night before his meets when he was still in high school. He won every time, every race.”
“Was it the food, or was he the best swimmer in the nation?” Knox asked.
“I tend to think it was the food. Dylan used to throw up sometimes before he swam, so I guess a lot of my cooking got wasted, anyway. Do you get that way before your games?”
“No.” He shook his head, but then conceded, “Not anymore.”
“You didn’t look nervous before you played the Dukes the other night. They showed you on the sideline and you just glared at the camera,” I remembered.
“I don’t like being on TV. When they put the lens in my face, I want to break it.”
“That’s pretty much how you looked,” I agreed. “So why…”
Knox pushed back his chair and patted his lap for me to come over. “Why what?”
“Why did you go on the Marcus Tagarela show last spring?” I finished, putting myself carefully on his thighs. My muscles were getting progressively more difficult to manipulate.
He rubbed my back and I moaned, then bit my lip. That had echoed a sound I had made when he was touching me the other afternoon at the beach, if my hazy recollection of my reactions then were accurate. Mostly, I remembered the feeling of pleasure, pleasure so intense that thinking of it made me feel excited all over again. I leaned against his shoulder and hid a little.
“I was in the middle of renegotiating my contract last spring,” Knox explained. “My agent kept saying that football wasn’t enough. I had to be ‘out there’ and getting attention. I hate that bullshit, the celebrity bullshit. They booked me on the show and I knew it was going to be a disaster. But the team heard about it and they wanted me to do it too, as publicity for the Woodsmen, and I just said fine. I’ve regretted it ever since.” He massaged and I bit down another moan. “I got a lot of crap, right? I scared the shit out of that little guy. I didn’t mean to.”
“The little guy, meaning the host? Yeah, I think he got a lot of crap about it, too.”
“I apologized to him,” Knox said.
I picked up my head and he rubbed my neck. “Ahh. Yes, right there. You did? You apologized?”
“He was good about it, started laughing. He wants me to come back on his show so we can straighten it out on the air.” He pressed my head back down into his neck and I found myself kissing around his jaw, the stubble that had grown in since he had shaved in the morning. Knox shifted in the chair. “That feels good.” Now he made a little noise, too. He did like what I was doing.
“Are you going to do it? Go back on the show?” I asked.
“No, there’s no reason to put myself through that again. I didn’t care too much about looking like an idiot, but all the attention afterwards was distracting. Dumb as a box of rocks. Dumb as a box of Knox, right?”
My head snapped up. “Don’t say that! That’s not right!”
“Daisy, it’s ok. I don’t care if people think that about me. It doesn’t bother me anymore.”
“It’s not right!” I repeated angrily, but he shook his head.
“I’ve always had problems with school, learning.” He shrugged a little. “It’s ok, that doesn’t bother me anymore either. It takes me forever to read and write, numbers kill me. I spent the whole summer reading that wolf and alien book. The time it took to make the grocery list for all this food was ridiculous, and look at it.” He pulled a crumpled paper from his pocket, covered in straggling column of block letters. “It looks like a kid did it. It’s just the way I am.”
“You’re very smart,” I told him, my voice shaking. “I can tell by the way you talk and how you think about things. How many other people would be able to tell me how long it would take to walk down to the parking lot from the attics at the college based on my pace and
the distance? Or when you explained how the Cottonmouths’ quarterback moves, his angles and his reaction time? That’s all science and math.” I warmed to the topic. “You couldn’t play your position without being smart and reading the offense! So what if it takes you longer to read some book? Or if your handwriting is bad?” I thought of the list of dinner conversation topics he had written last spring, the piece of paper that I still kept tucked into a pocket of my wallet. It had been pretty hard to decipher, but who cared when the meaning was so sweet? I also thought about the “intelligence” test he’d had to take for the professional football draft and the newspaper article that had reported his score as in the single digits. If it took him a long time to read the test questions, of course he wouldn’t have scored well! “You’re not dumb at all and I hate that you think that about yourself.”
“Bunny, don’t get upset.” He wiped his fingers under my eyes. “Don’t cry about this. The worst part was school, and that’s all done now. I graduated, remember?”
“How did you get through? Did your grandma help you when you were younger?”
He sighed. “She tried. Things were pretty messed up, back then.” I waited and eventually he started talking again. “My grandma and grandpa, the ones I told you about, they weren’t really blood relations. They lived near me and when I was a kid, they used to help me out with a lot of stuff.”
“How?”
“They fed me,” he said bluntly. “They made sure I took baths, had clothes. They called the authorities and tried to get them involved. I definitely had a thick case file and I did a few stints in foster care. My mom didn’t give a shit, except that she wanted me with her to get the benefits. The extra money from the state,” he explained. “But I was living full-time with my grandparents when she finally died.”
“Finally died?” I asked.
“The things she did to her body, she had been slowly going for years. Drinking. Drugs. She’d screw anyone who walked by to get them.”
The Big Hit Page 19