by Rachel Rust
“Am I under arrest for something?” I asked.
“No, but—”
I stood up.
“Nathan, I haven’t dismissed you,” Jackson said.
“Well, I have.” I stepped around Donnelly’s chair and flung the door open. The bell had already rung and the halls were empty. I headed for the front doors.
Chapter Twenty-Three
She’s a Light Pink Lady
By lunchtime, a thick buzz of commotion filled the air. It had a sinister tone to it. A heaviness hung in the hallways. Rumors flew about who had vandalized the Shadville School. Consensus was that it was a Thorn Creek student. Most likely, someone with a thirty-three on his jersey. The same someone who—rumor had it—had nearly beat up Lance in the hallway that morning.
I grabbed my afternoon textbooks while ignoring the waves of insinuation in the air around me. As I shut my locker, hands flew around my waist causing me to jump.
Nathan’s lips brushed my ear. “Meet me by the gym doors in ten minutes.”
“What?”
“Gym doors. Ten minutes.”
I turned to face him. “You want me to cut class? My parents would kill me.”
“They’re not gonna find out,” he said. “Just tell your teacher you don’t feel good and that you wanna go to the nurse, then meet me at the gym doors.”
Other students roamed the hallway all around me. They were all goody-two-shoes, and I was being asked to do something that, in my mind, was the epitome of what bad school girls did. I wasn’t a bad school girl. I was boring. The whole Pink Lady thing didn’t fit me. Pink clashed with my hair—not to mention my GPA.
“No,” I said. “If I’m caught, it’ll—”
Nathan held up a small ring of keys, the same ones from the footlocker in his bedroom. “We’ve got full access to the school.”
My eyes widened. “Those are school keys? Why do you have those?”
“In ninth grade I stole keys from the janitor’s closet, made some copies.”
“My God, Nathan, that’s the kind of stuff people get suspended for—or worse. What the hell were you thinking?”
His face fell. “It was a long time ago.”
“Well, I’m not skipping class. Are you trying to get me in trouble with you?”
He rolled his eyes. “You know it’s not like that. I just need to see you.”
“Why do you need to see me?”
He paused. “Is this a trick question?”
“Does it have anything to do with your jersey being found in Shadville?” I asked. “Or maybe what happened between you and Lance this morning? Everyone’s talking about it.”
Nathan leaned on the wall, looking to the ceiling.
I tugged at his t-shirt. “Talk to me.”
He hesitated, but his wrinkled brow told me words were coming. “Lance pissed me off,” he finally said. “God, I wanted to punch his damn lights out.” His fingernails picked at one of the keys. “And then this jersey thing in Shadville. I get really sick of people labeling me a bad person. I know I did a lot of stupid stuff, but it’s like the fact that my parents ditched me has always given people the green light to judge me based on that alone. They assume I must be no good if my parents couldn’t handle me. Or they assume that I’m all messed up because of it.” He paused, taking a deep breath. “I don’t know, maybe they’re right. Maybe I am messed up.”
“No,” I said. “Don’t believe that. You are who you say you are.”
“Yeah, I’m the asshole who stole the school keys.”
Placing my hands to the sides of his face, I stared him down. “Nathan, you didn’t deserve the things that were heaped on you growing up. Maybe you did some stupid stuff, but you need to stand tall. Some people are jerks, and you have to figure out how to ignore them and move on.”
Nathan’s arms wrapped around me and buried his face into my shoulder. I knew hallway eyes were on us, and I didn’t care. There was only the tick-tock of the clock overhead, our near-silent breaths, and the quiet rubbing of fabric as our arms latched onto one another. I wanted to freeze time. I wanted to reach in and pull out all his pain. Instead, I did the only thing I could do—I stood. I stood there in the hallway, allowing him to cling to me.
“Thank you for being so understanding,” he whispered.
“You don’t have to thank me for that.” I brushed a strand of his hair from his eye. “You okay?”
He nodded.
“Good.” I grabbed the keys from his hand and shoved them deep into his front pocket. His body twitched as my fingers rubbed against him. “Now go to class.” I walked away without looking back but smiled broadly with the hope that, as punishment for trying to get me in trouble, he’d have to walk around the rest of the afternoon hiding a semi.
****
At the end of the day, a form leaned against the locker next to mine, waving a paper in front of my face. “Seen this?” Lance asked me. His black hair was shorter than it had been last week. As the son of a hair dresser, he was always nicely coiffed.
I grabbed the school newspaper from him and scanned the headlines. The Shadville vandalism story was front and center.
“Word is you were hanging out with Nathan this weekend,” Lance said.
“Word is you were a real asshole to him today.”
“Okay, yeah, I probably crossed a line, but come on, the guy’s trouble. You shouldn’t hang out with him, he’s—”
“Who I hang out with is my choice, not yours,” I snapped, slamming my locker. “And Nathan didn’t vandalize the Shadville high school.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because I just do.”
Lance laughed. “You hardly know him.”
Try as I might, I couldn’t think of a good comeback.
“Anyway,” Lance said, “You should read the article about the Shadville school. I was up till two in the morning finishing it. My mom bought me a new computer for my birthday and it’s…”
I scanned the article as Lance rattled on about his computer, thankful the names Nathan and Stone were nowhere to be found in the text. Although the ‘thirty-three jersey’ was in there, and in a small school, jersey numbers were well known.
My eyes left the newspaper and stared at the metal locker. “Lance, you wrote this last night?”
“Yeah.”
“How did you know about the jersey last night?”
He opened his mouth, but no sound came out.
My eyes narrowed. “No one else knew about the jersey until this morning when Rollins and a bunch of rumors showed up.”
Lance stared at me, then darted his eyes to his shoes. “I, um, I was there and … I’m a reporter, I go where the news is. So I was there and overheard one of the Shadville cops mention it.”
I studied his face, his reddening cheeks and wrinkled brow. I couldn’t read his expression. Nervous? Lying?
“Here.” I shoved the newspaper into his chest. “I don’t want to read it. And I think it’s pretty pathetic that you’d sink so low as to use Nathan’s reputation to try to get your fancy journalism award.”
“This isn’t about an award, and I don’t wanna make you mad,” he said, trying to hand the newspaper back to me. “I just want you to understand who Nathan is.”
Movement down the hall caught my attention. Nathan’s lanky, muscular form made its way towards me. “Lance,” I said. “Please go.”
His face tightened. “Fine. Just watch yourself.” He turned to leave and came chest-to-chest with Nathan.
Nathan stared him down and didn’t move. His mouth twisted into a try me again smirk.
Lance stepped around him. “Asshole.”
Ignoring him, Nathan leaned against my locker.
“Ya know,” I said, “if you want people to be nicer to you, maybe you should be nicer to them.”
“He started it.”
“That’s not funny.”
The corner of his mouth turned up and he poked my side with his finger. “Are
you mad at me?”
I wanted to say yes. I swatted his hand away, but as he poked my side again, enjoying the tease, my face deceived me and a smile cracked free. With a shoulder against my locker, I stared up at him as he stared back—his dark eyes, his strong jaw. His no-good, devilish little grin. Right or wrong, good or bad, I was in deep.
My fingers curled into his t-shirt. “Take me somewhere tonight.” I stepped forward and kissed his chin.
His hands landed on my hips, fingers dangerously close to grabbing my ass. “I’ll pick you up at eight.”
****
It was hard to tell—given the dark sky and my lack of geographical knowledge—how far we had driven when Nathan stepped on the brake. In the side mirror, the deserted road behind us illuminated in a blood-red aura. A tiny shudder flew through me.
Nathan turned right onto a narrow dirt road next to a bridge.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“Cheyenne River.” He put the pickup into park, then opened his car door and hopped out.
I opened my door and jumped down from the truck. Tall weeds scrapped against the lower half of my jeans as I made my way toward Nathan. The air was cool, but my long-sleeve t-shirt and hoodie was more than enough to stave away shivers. The large moon was our only light. It was enough. Barely.
He took my hand and led me farther down into the creek area. The bridge and pickup disappeared behind us as we meandered our way into a small grove of trees. Darkness encompassed us with occasional rustling noises coming from who-knew-where. I removed my fingers from Nathan’s and then latched onto his arm, as though a better grasp would save me if a wild beast or maniacal killer descended upon us.
Through the trees, he led me to an opening—an expansive area of flat rock, jutting out over the river below. Across the water, moonlight painted rolling bluffs, creating dramatic contrasts of lit hills, murky valleys, and black cutouts in the land. At the edge of the flat rock, Nathan and I sat side by side. His warmth next to me, in contrast to the cool air, was a homing beacon. I leaned against him.
We watched the slow-moving water and listened to the wind. Some parts of the world were still wholly untouched. So naked, so virgin. There was a nothingness to it, but it was far more than nothing. It was nature—as-is. No pretenses.
“What was your favorite part about dancing?” he asked in hushed voice, as though not wanting to disturb the peacefulness around us.
A huge smile crossed my face—because of the question, and because he had thought to ask. “That’s a hard one,” I said. “I liked just about everything. The music, the movement … the way the two things worked together. When I danced, it was like I wasn’t even physically there anymore, like I morphed into something else entirely.” I glanced at him. “Probably sounds kind of dumb, huh?”
“Not at all.”
“It’s weird because, it was such hard work, and practices weren’t always fun. Sometimes they were downright awful and my body would be two seconds from giving out and my feet would hurt till I cried … but then”—I closed my eyes—“I’d get on a stage and all that went away.” My eyes opened, and I stared at my knee. “And that’s what I miss the most too. That feeling of victory, of accomplishment.”
“You can still accomplish things.”
“I know, but it’ll be different. From the second I got hurt, things changed.” I sat up straight and took a cleansing breath. “Like this summer, I went back to Minneapolis for a week. I had signed up to take part in a dance clinic run by this super awesome instructor from New York, and I was so excited for it. But the week before we left, I busted my stupid knee, so instead of dancing I had to sit in a folding chair all day and hand out souvenir t-shirts. It was awful and completely humiliating.” The familiar sting of self-pity rose up and welled in my eyes. “And afterwards, my parents took me out for dinner, and I couldn’t even eat. I just cried into my cheeseburger.”
Nathan wrapped an arm around my shoulder and kissed my temple. I melted into his side.
“I just don’t understand,” I whispered, wiping a tear away before it could run down my face. “I’ve done things the way I was supposed to. I get good grades, I listen to my parents. I’ve never gotten into big trouble, so why did this happen? I don’t get it.”
But it wasn’t just my knee, or the loss of my dance career plans. It was the phantom candy dust still stuck in my nose. The sound of a bullet hitting concrete. The glare of the police lights. The stares in the school hallway. The gossip behind my back—especially now that The Girl Who Nearly Died had taken up the company of The Town Delinquent.
None of it felt fair. And all of it pissed me off. My once safe, normal, and nicely planned life had spun out of my control.
“I should’ve cut class today. I need to do something totally crazy to prove I can take charge of my own life again—good or bad.”
Nathan leaned over, his face an inch away. “We could go skinny dipping.”
A laugh erupted out of me, effectively stopping my tears. I shook my head. “It’s too cold.” Chills waved over my skin, not at the sight of the cold river, but at the thought of being wet … with Nathan. Slippery skin, unabashed activities—sensory overload. I sighed in an attempt to reset my libido. It didn’t work. “I’ll go skinny dipping with you when the weather warms up again.” My heart pounded as the words came out. I had never scheduled a date to get naked with someone before.
“I’m gonna remember you said that.”
“But you have to jump in first.”
He smiled slyly. “Deal.”
The moonlight streaked Nathan’s brow, nose, and the tops of his cheekbones in a gray-white. He didn’t look like any of the other guys I had ever dated or even had crushes on. Not because he had long hair, or because he was a country boy, and or because he was Native, but because he was a man. Grown up. Solid. I scanned his broad shoulders and chest. There was no boy left.
His dark eyes looked black in the muted moonlight. They zeroed in on mine. Lance’s words and insinuations crept into my head. Maybe Nathan had done stupid stuff in the past, but that wasn’t the Nathan alongside me. That wasn’t the Nathan who busted his butt for his uncle or the Nathan who treated me kindly and listened patiently as I rattled his ear off.
His presence in my life couldn’t fix my knee or reverse time to keep the bullet from whizzing by my head, but he did ease the burden. A leaning post for when I was too tired to stand—a tall, handsome leaning post with muscles and strong hands.
I flung a leg over his lap, straddling him face-to-face. We studied each other’s faces until I could no longer hold back. My lips pressed into his and he returned the favor, over and over again. I sucked in a quick breath as his cold fingers moved under my shirt, landing on my bare torso. They traveled upwards, cupping my breasts, and the chill of the night evaporated. The material of my old cotton bra was worn thin; he might as well have been touching the real deal. A ragged breath escaped my lips as everything inside me intensified to the verge of exploding.
I jerked back.
Nathan’s fingers traced down my stomach and then pulled my shirt down into its original state. Despite all my longings and all the dirty thoughts that had a way of filtering into my head at all hours of the day, when presented with Nathan—his hands, his everything—anticipation and nerves rattled my senses.
Cupping the sides of his face, I gazed into his eyes. “You’re a good person. Don’t ever let anyone ever make you think otherwise.”
He buried his face into my neck. “My God, where did you come from?”
“Minnesota?”
He looked up at me. “Seriously. One day my life sucked, then the next day you were there.”
My eyes closed and his scent filled me, washing away the ache of my knee. “I know what you mean,” I whispered.
Chapter Twenty-Four
He’s Got Tools
I buried my face deep into Lydia’s neck and wasn’t sure I’d ever move again. The warm scent of her was a magnet for eve
ry ache inside me. In her presence, the confusion and misery melted. Within her arms, I was protected. Sweet and caring was not something I was familiar with, but it was definitely something I could get used to.
My phone in my back pocket buzzed for the tenth time in five minutes, but I ignored it for the tenth time, preferring the sanctity of the moment, not wanting to recognize the outside world.
But Lydia’s arms let go of me. She dug into her front pocket and pulled out her phone. Her moonlit eyes scanned the screen. “Daniel says, if Nathan’s with you tell him to check his damn phone.”
I grabbed my phone. There were nine text messages from Daniel. I scanned them, but the last one made my heart jolt.
Daniel: Where the hell r u the shack was hit
I hit the phone icon to dial Daniel back.
He answered before the first ring ended. “Where the hell are you? I’m on the way to your house. We need to talk … now.”
“I’m on my way,” I said, then ended the call. Lydia’s eyes were big with worry. “We gotta go meet Daniel at my house. The Shack was hit.”
She removed herself from my lap. As much as I hated her body leaving mine, my mind had snapped out of romance mode. It was now on full-blown what-the-fuck mode.
“Why would someone vandalize a restaurant?” she asked.
“In this town? Who the hell knows.”
Ten minutes later, I pulled into the long gravel driveway of my aunt and uncle’s house. Daniel and Nina were already there, standing near the open garage door. The yellowed exterior lights in front of the garage were barely enough to make out Daniel’s furrowed brow and clenched jaw. I had known him long enough to see that easy-going Daniel was one second from explosion.
Behind Daniel stood Nina, eyes red and puffy.
Daniel tossed something small my direction. My hand shot out and caught it. It was my wrench—hard to mistake with its black-and-white handles. “Why do you have this?”
“It was at The Shack,” Daniel said. “Someone threw rocks through the kitchen windows and … that.”
“What is it?” Lydia asked, looking over at my hand.