by Laura Drewry
Blushing, she chased the ball down and carried it back to the foul line. With her toes lined up about a breath away from the line, she stretched both hands as wide as she could around the ball, bent over at the waist and granny-styled it.
“Or you could do it that way,” Jack snorted. “Nice form.”
“Shut up.” Okay, so it wasn’t a strike, but by the time her turn was done, she’d knocked down half of them, so that was something.
Stepping aside, she waved Jack through for his turn, but instead of sitting down, she stayed standing so she could watch him. And no, she didn’t even try to hide which part of his form she was actually watching. She couldn’t have cared less how he lined himself up or followed through, it was the way his body moved, the way the muscles in his back rippled beneath his T-shirt, the way his biceps flexed and…wow…the way his butt looked in those jeans.
“Snip?”
Startled, she forced herself to blink past that last image still so clear in her mind to find him standing in front of her, grinning.
“Oh.” Busted, all she could do was laugh. “Sorry. Nice form.”
That turned his grin a little sheepish as they both went out of their way to switch spots without getting anywhere near the other. And so it went for the rest of the first game. At one point Jack went and ordered them burgers, which were surprisingly good, and by the time they’d eaten, Maya willingly agreed to a second game.
Of all the ways she thought that afternoon might go, she never would have guessed it’d be like that, or that she’d somehow be so relaxed and happy while still being so jittery. He did all of that to her with a smile, a wink, or anytime he glanced her way.
When they climbed back in the Jeep, Jack headed straight for the highway.
“Where’re we going?” she asked.
“Back to the hotel.” And then as if the weight of his words suddenly landed on him, Jack sighed. “I’m going to take Pete out for a quick walk and while I’m doing that, you can figure out what we do next. There’s a couple of those tourist guidebooks on the desk, so look through those and pick out something neither one of us has done. How’s that sound?”
“Kind of lame, actually.” She laughed. “But okay.”
So while Jack took a reluctant Pete out in the rain, Maya flipped through the booklets, using Jack’s ink-stained notepad and fountain pen to make a list. There were the railway and mining museums, the gondola ride up the back of The Chief, or maybe—
The knock on the door made her start. He’d had the key in his hand when he left; maybe it was housekeeping.
And maybe Maya should have used the damn peephole before opening the door.
“Oh!” Stella’s mouth hung open like a giant carp’s, her eyes huge and panicked. “I…I…”
Maya couldn’t have moved if she wanted to, because the tsunami of emotions raging through her right then cemented her feet in place. There were so many things she wanted to say right then—so many mean, horrible things, like how it was nice to see Stella with her clothes on for a change—and yet for some reason, all she did was clench her jaw shut as tight as she could and stare back at the woman who’d helped destroy her life.
If it wasn’t for Stella, Maya would still be married and living in the house she’d worked so hard to turn into a home. If it wasn’t for Stella, Maya might already have a baby, she might—
The elevator door slid open, out stepped Jack and Pete, and in that moment, every other “might” vanished from her mind except these: If it wasn’t for Stella, Maya might never have discovered these feelings for Jack. If it wasn’t for Stella, she might never have known about his feelings for her. If it wasn’t for Stella, Maya might never have known what it was like to walk around with jitters so bad she could hardly think straight.
For a fraction of a second there, she almost considered thanking Stella, but then she saw the look on Jack’s face.
He closed the distance in a dozen very long and very angry strides, and the whole way over, he didn’t once look at Maya, but kept his eyes locked on Stella as he stormed toward them. Pete, on the other hand, wagged his way straight to Maya and pushed up against her legs until she had to grab the doorframe for support.
“What are you doing here?” Jack’s voice, low, almost hostile, made even Maya do a double take.
“I…I—” Blinking incredibly fast, Stella took a step back and swallowed hard. “I’m sorry. I just wanted to talk to you about something; I had no idea…”
She darted a quick and twitchy glance at Maya.
“You couldn’t have called first?”
Maya had never seen Jack like this; his jaw so tight, it looked like it might snap with each word, his hands wrapped white-knuckled around Pete’s leash and his eyes…yikes…there was a storm she’d never imagined he had inside.
“No, I—” Stella licked her lips and took another step back. “I couldn’t…I didn’t…I didn’t want…”
With her fingernails leaving half-moon gouges in her leather purse, Stella took a second to inhale deeply.
“I’m sorry,” she said again, quiet, but seemingly sincere. “I shouldn’t have come.”
Neither Jack nor Maya argued; they both just stood there watching Stella make a run for the stairs, and it wasn’t until the door closed behind her that Jack finally turned to look at Maya, his eyes still storming mad.
“Are you okay?”
It took her a second to respond, not because Stella had freaked her out, but because Jack had.
“Yes, of course, I’m fine. Are you?”
“Me?” He ushered her and Pete back in the room, then pressed his hand flat against it until it closed. “I’m fine.”
“Good, but I think you just scared the crap out of poor Stella.”
“Poor—?” Jack stopped, inhaled deeply. “What the hell was she even doing here?”
“I don’t know, you showed up right after I opened the door so she didn’t exactly have a chance to say anything.” She started to sit on the edge of the bed, thought better of it, and moved to the chair at the desk again. “Did you see her face, though? Whatever she wanted to talk to you about must be something important. What do you think it was?”
“How the hell would I know? I haven’t known her long enough for her to be talking to me about anything important.”
“Wait. What?” Maya frowned. “She’s been with Will for two years, Jack, you must know each other pretty well by now.”
Jack sank down on the bed and leaned over with his elbows on his knees. “The day after I saw you at the pub, that was the first time I ever met Stella.”
Maybe if she blinked hard, it would make his words make sense. Nope.
“How is that even possible? Two years and you didn’t meet her until a month ago?”
“Couple times I got stuck talking to her on the phone.” He didn’t look up, just shook his head slowly. “But I just couldn’t do it. It was hard enough seeing Will, there was no way I could handle meeting her, not after what she did.”
“But what about…I don’t know…Christmas? Thanksgiving? Genie’s birthday?”
“If she was there, I didn’t go.” His head kept shaking, slowly, as he flexed his hands, folded them together, then flexed them again. “I didn’t tell them that’s why I didn’t go, but Stella’s not stupid.”
“Oh Jack.” Pushing off the chair, she squatted down in front of him, took his hands in hers and squeezed them tight. “You really are the sweetest guy ever.”
“Yeah?” he snorted, staring at their hands. “What about Alec?”
“He’s close,” she said quietly. “But you…you’ve had my back this whole time, haven’t you? Even when I thought you’d deserted me, you hadn’t. Not really.”
“I’m sorry, Snip.” Easing his hand free, he brushed her hair back from her face, then sighed when she pressed her cheek against his palm. “I wish I could’ve…but Genie—”
“I know.”
“No. You don’t.” He dropped his hand and pu
shed off the bed, putting as much distance between them as he could in the cramped room. “You don’t know what it was like before she saved me.”
“Saved you?” She took a step toward him, but he stopped her flat with a raised hand. “What do you mean she saved you?”
Jack’s complexion turned a faint shade of green as he let out a loud breath followed by a couple curses.
“I can’t do this. Not here.” Tucking the room key in his pocket, he tossed Maya a ball cap, pointed at her jacket, then Pete. “Let’s go get some air. You stay.”
And with that, he marched straight to the door and held it open until she hustled out into the hall. He didn’t say another word until they were a good couple hundred meters down the trail around the golf course, and as soon as he started talking, Maya wished she could tell him to stop.
Chapter 11
“You’ve been BAMBOOZLED!”
Joey Tribbiani, Friends, “The One with the Baby Shower”
It took Jack longer than he thought it would to start, because he didn’t know where to begin. Maya obviously knew he’d been in foster care, but if he had any hope of her understanding this, she needed to know everything, so with one deep breath, Jack jammed his hands deep in his pockets and started at the beginning, or at least as far back as he could remember.
“I was six and a half when the Ministry placed me with the Horbecks. It rained so hard that first night, and when they put me in that little bedroom at the top of the stairs, I just lay there in bed scared out of my freakin’ mind.”
He paused, swallowed, and forced himself to go on.
“I remember trying to tell them I’d be fine at home, that Mom left me there all the time so it was okay if she did it again but they wouldn’t even listen, they just put me up in that bedroom, turned off the light and told me to go to sleep, that everything would be fine. I don’t know how long I was up there, it seemed like forever, but it couldn’t have been more than a couple minutes, when their dog Sadie came in, climbed up next to me, and didn’t move all night. God, she was huge; Saint Bernard, maybe, I don’t know, but she took up almost the whole bed.”
“Jack.” Maya’s voice was so quiet, so soft.
“Anyway.” He gave his head a quick shake and forced the memory away with a couple hard blinks. “I don’t think I was there very long, a couple weeks maybe, before they moved me over to the Carpenters’ place.”
“Do you remember everywhere they sent you?”
“Yeah.” He nodded slowly. He could even recite the addresses and phone number of each place, as well as the names of everyone who lived there and what each place smelled like. “Most of them were okay. I mean, there was a definite difference in how they treated their own kids and how they treated me, but I think that’s normal, right, and I wasn’t in any one place long enough to dig in and become part of them, you know?”
Of course she didn’t know—how could she? Most people had no idea how many kids were out there bouncing from house to house, resigned to the fact that a “decent” family was as good as they were ever going to get. And it didn’t matter where the kid came from or what he did, he wasn’t their kid, he was disposable, and it was a rare foster family that had what it took to keep someone else’s kid for any length of time.
“I’ve never understood why they moved you so much.” She turned her face up to his, peering out from beneath his ball cap. “You weren’t a troublemaker, were you?”
“No. A couple times they moved me because I didn’t get along with the real kids, but the other times, I don’t know. Sometimes the family’s circumstances changed, sometimes they moved, and sometimes they just changed their mind and didn’t want me there anymore. The last place, though, the Weigerts, they sent me packing when they found weed in my room—can’t really blame them for kicking me out.”
“But nine times in six years? Surely the Ministry must know that’s not good for any kid.”
“No, but what else can they do?”
She pinched her lips together and exhaled slowly. “Go on.”
The rain hadn’t let up even a little bit, but Maya hadn’t so much as whispered a complaint about them being out there getting soaked. She just kept on moving, her legs working twice as hard as his to clear the same distance.
“When they pulled me out of the Weigerts’ place, they told me I’d be in the group home a week, maybe two, and then they’d have a new place for me, but that didn’t happen.”
He almost wished she’d interrupt him so he could put off the rest of it a little longer. She didn’t.
“The house I was in was co-ed, girls on the third floor, boys on the first and the general rooms in the middle, and it was pretty full most of the time. So they put me in a room with three other boys and for the first couple of months it was fine.”
He took another second or two to swallow the bile that crept up his throat.
“Just before Christmas that year, they moved two more into our room—Jason Ascough and Bryce Jorcke.” Just saying their names…
Maya’s hand against his arm instantly silenced him. He’d been looking down as they walked, but when he looked up, there were a couple of people walking toward them, close enough that Jack could hear their conversation clearly; they would have been able to hear him, too.
There was a round of smiles and “hello”s as they passed, but Jack made sure there was plenty of distance between them before saying anything else.
“It started with a couple punches every once in a while, not just to me, to the other guys in the room, too, but I was already five ten and weighed about a buck thirty, so I guess it was more fun for them to hone in on the gangly kid whose arms looked like a couple of pencils and who was so easy to knock down.”
He couldn’t see Maya’s face anymore, because she kept dipping her chin lower until the brim of the cap hid her almost completely.
“The other guys knew if they weren’t with Ascough and Jorcke, they were against them, and nobody wanted to be where I was, especially after they watched Ascough put me in a headlock and bash my head into the sink.”
Maya stopped dead in her tracks and looked up at him, her head shaking slowly as tears rolled down both cheeks. God he hated doing this to her, but if there was another way to make her fully understand, he didn’t know what it was. Forcing one side of his mouth up in what had no hope of looking anything like a smile, he swiped his thumbs slowly across her cheeks, but the tears just kept coming.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “But I really need you to know this.”
With her bottom lip clamped tight behind her teeth, she barely nodded, and they started down the trail again.
“I told the counselor the truth about that first time.” Jack snorted out a tight, choked laugh. “But that was a mistake I never made again.”
“How often did they do this to you?”
“Enough that I ran out of excuses to give the doctors in emerg.”
He didn’t think he hesitated that long, but he must have, because Maya’s voice pulled him out of his fog.
“What else?”
“A couple more times I had to get stitches, a minor concussion, bruised ribs, that kind of shit, but mostly it was everyday stuff, you know, a punch here, a trip there, nothing that required medical. But then Erica moved in upstairs.
“I wouldn’t even look at her because she had a thing going with Ascough, and I wasn’t going to give him another reason to take the boots to me.” Jack rolled his neck a little and forced himself to keep talking. “It was a couple days after my birthday and the two of them got into a fight about something, so to piss him off, she told him she’d let me feel her up on my birthday.”
“Oh shit.”
“Yeah.” Jack blew the word out on a hard breath.
“What did he do?”
“Welllllll…” He drew the word out, trying and failing to make the whole thing a little less horrible. “It was kind of a group effort, that one.”
“Jack.” Obviously she wasn’t i
nterested in the lighter version.
“When I got to the room that night, four of them jumped me and held onto me, each one with an arm or a leg, while Ascough let me have it. I tried to fight them off but I had about as much muscle on my whole body as you have in your big toe, and I swear to God Ascough must have been on steroids. Short, but holy shit, he was like a pit bull. And I remember it felt like I had cement blocks for legs, because I couldn’t move, but it was just Jorcke and one of the other guys who’d wrapped themselves around each of my legs and were sitting on my feet.
“No one said anything the whole time; all you heard was Ascough huffing every time he threw a punch and then the crunch when he connected with bone. I kept twisting and pulling my arms as hard as I could, figuring if I could get those free I could at least cover my head, but then I jerked too hard to the right while the guy holding my left arm jerked the other and my shoulder popped out of its joint. He let me go pretty quick after that, but the arm was useless to me then.”
“Jeezus, Jack.” She’d stopped walking again and just stood staring at him with her hand over her mouth.
“Yeah, I guess it freaked them all out, because the other guy let go of my right arm just as Ascough swung a bat down on me. I got my arm up in time to protect my head, but he had a helluva swing.” Jack rubbed his right arm where the bat had hit him. “Snapped like a twig.”
“Stop!” Hands covering her whole face, she stumbled back a step, then bent at the waist and pressed her hands against her knees. “I can’t…don’t make me listen to any more. Please.”
“I’m sorry, Snip.” Stepping closer, he set his hand on her back and smoothed it up and down the rain-soaked jacket slowly. “That’s it; that’s the worst of it.”
When she didn’t stand up right away, Jack curled his hands around her shoulders, pulled her up, then wrapped his arms around her and held on while she sniffed against him. The top of her head reached the middle of his chest and that’s where she clung, her small fists wrapped tight around his jacket.
“Why? Why didn’t you tell someone?”