Calmly, Carefully, Completely
Page 9

But all I see is the hand fisted in my shirt. My heart stutters, and my breaths freeze in my chest. I can’t get away. I turn back and punch him directly in the face with the heel of my hand. He jerks, his eyes closing as he winces and snaps his head back. I chop his wrist with my fist. One, two… Next, I’ll go for his eyes.
“Reagan!” Dad yells as he drops what he’s holding and rushes in my direction. He tackles Pete, who is still stunned from my punch to the face. They drop to the ground, with Pete rolling to the bottom. Dad flips him over and pulls his hands behind his back. “Reagan,” Dad grunts. “What happened?”
Pete lays there on the ground. He’s not even putting up a fight. He just winces, his eyes shut tightly as a slow trickle of blood streams from his nose.
“Stay down,” Dad warns.
Pete nods, and he doesn’t move. But his eyes finally open, and they meet mine. I don’t how to interpret that look at all or what to say. So, I turn and run back to the house. I run like the terrified little girl I am.
I burst through the back door and land in my mother’s arms. She grunts when I hit her in the chest, but it doesn’t stop her from hugging me tightly. “What in the world,” she breathes as she rocks me. She holds me close, stroking my hair until I can breathe. Then she pulls back, takes my face in her hands, and forces me to look at her. “Tell me what’s wrong,” she says.
“I think I made a mistake,” I sob.
“What happened?” she asks as she leads me to the kitchen table. She points to a chair, and I sink into it.
“Nothing,” I squeak, finally able to catch my breath.
I can’t believe I did that. I just assaulted some poor man who did nothing but flirt with me and then tell me he didn’t want to want me. I can’t tell my mother that.
She puts her hands on her hips. “It’s not nothing,” she insists.
The back door opens, and the evidence of my shame walks in behind my dad and Link. I wince and look everywhere but at Pete. “Can you get Pete some ice for his eye?” Dad asks my mom. Her brow arches at me, and she shoots me a glare that would drop a full-grown man in his tracks.
She starts to fill a zipper bag with ice. “And just why does Pete need ice for his eye?” she asks flippantly.
Dad points to me. “Your daughter hit him in the face.”
Mom gasps. “Reagan!”
Mom crosses to stand close to Pete. She looks him over, pressing on the bone beneath his eye with her thumb. He hisses in a breath. One side of his face is dirty, probably from where Dad rolled him into the dirt. Mom passes him a damp cloth, and he wipes gingerly at his face. When it’s clean, Mom presses his eye socket with the pad of her thumb. He winces and jerks his head back.
“I think Reagan did enough damage,” Dad warns. “Stop torturing the boy.” He glares at me, too. I want to hide my face in shame.
Suddenly, I notice the way that Pete is holding his left wrist in his hand. My gaze shoots up to meet his, and I don’t see anything but curiosity. He should be fuming mad. He has every right to be. “Is your arm hurt?” I ask quietly.
The corners of Pete’s lips tilt in a small smile. “It’s fine.”
“It’s not fine,” Dad gripes. “It might be broken.”
“Oh shit,” I breathe.
“Reagan,” Mom warns.
“Oh shit,” Link parrots.
Shit again. Now Link’s repeating me.
“Oh shit,” Link says again.
I bury my face in my hands. My parents are going to kill me when they get me alone.
“Reagan, I want you to take the truck into town and take Pete to Urgent Care,” Dad says.
I lift my head. He can’t be serious.
“Oh shit,” Link chimes in. Mom grits her teeth.
Dad motions for me to get up and tosses the keys to his truck at my head so that I have to catch them. “Dad,” I complain.
“If it makes you feel any better, I don’t particularly want to be in an enclosed space with you any more than you want to be in one with me,” Pete says. He gingerly touches his eye, his face scrunching up.
I deserve that. I really do. I heave a sigh. “Let’s go.”
Pete follows me to Dad’s truck, and then he opens the driver’s-side door for me to climb in. “Thanks,” I grumble. He goes around the truck and gets in the passenger side. “Are you sure you’re injured?”
“My heart’s broken,” he says.
My head jerks up. “What?”
His voice drops down low. “It absolutely kills me that you think I would try to hurt you.” He turns to face me directly. “I remember the way you looked that night. I would never, ever do anything to hurt you like that.”
I start the truck. It’s easier to avoid this conversation if I have something to occupy my hands and a reason not to look at him.
“Never mind.” Pete grunts, turning away from me. He faces the window and lays his temple against it. He cradles his wrist in his hand and doesn’t even look my way.
Pete
I don’t know what to say to her. I have no idea how to address this. I know my wrist hurts, but I also know it’s not broken. Her dad was insistent that she take me to Urgent Care, so I let him send us off. She’s been sitting there in the driver’s seat as we go down the road saying nothing for about ten minutes. Every now and then, she opens her mouth like she’s going to say something, and then she slams it shut.
Suddenly, she jerks the truck to the right, sliding into a turn-out spot and then slams on the breaks. I brace myself with my hands and instantly regret it when pain steals up my wrist. “Shit,” I mutter.
She heaves a sigh and drops her face into her hands. After a moment, she looks up, her green eyes meeting mine. “I’m sorry,” she says quietly.
That hurt like a mother fucker, and I’m irritated enough to want her to suffer for a minute. “For which part?” I gripe. I pull my wrist closer to my body and cradle it.
“All of it,” she says. She takes a deep breath and tears well up in her eyes. She blinks them back furiously. All of my anger melts at the sight of her tears.
“I’m fine,” I grumble. “Don’t worry your pretty little head about it.” Okay, that was crass and a little demeaning, but I’m still a little sore.
“You’re not fine,” she interjects. “I hit you.” She grits her teeth. “In the face.”
Silence falls over the cab of the truck like a wet blanket.
“I still have some issues from that night,” she finally says. She lays her head back against the headrest and looks up at the ceiling.
“Where’d you learn martial arts?” I ask. I may as well be sticking her full of pins and twisting them. And not in the good acupuncture way. I should let her off the hook.
“My dad taught me.” She looks over at me. She is so f**king vulnerable all of a sudden. “After what happened at college, I took a self-defense class. I realized I’m really good at it, so I kept going and got better.”
I press gently at my eye socket. Her face gets soft, and she looks so sorry. But she just left that comment hanging there in the air, and I feel the need to grab on to it. “Does it make you feel safer, knowing you can lay a man out flat?” I ask.
Her face pales, and she looks away. “Not right this second.”
“But usually?” I ask. Her face is still pale, and she her gaze skitters everywhere but at me.
“I like knowing that I can get away from danger,” she says quietly.
“You think I’m dangerous?” Lie to me, princess. Because my gut’s already twisting at the very thought of her being afraid of me.
“In that moment,” she hedges. “Can we just not talk about it?”
We need to talk about it. But I can tell she really doesn’t want to. “Okay,” I say, completely unbidden by me. It’s all her. It’s what she needs. “When I touch you, does your skin crawl?” I blurt out. I need to know what I’m up against here.
She nods and inhales deeply, acting as if I just tossed her a lifeline. “You make my heart beat faster, in a really, really good way.” She finally looks into my face. “I know you can’t forgive me, but I’m really sorry.”
I reach to take her face in my hand, but she flinches and draws back, so I let my hand drop into my lap. “I shouldn’t have grabbed you. It’s all my fault.” I don’t know what to say. I don’t know how to make this right for her. If it were any other guy, I would be f**king ecstatic that she hit him in the face rather than let him grab her.
“It’s not your fault,” she protests. “It’s my fault.” I feel more than hear her say something under her breath that sounds like his fault.
“I just didn’t want you to walk away until I got to explain,” I say. “I grabbed your shirt.”
“And I felt like I couldn’t get away there for a minute. I know that wasn’t your intention.”
I shake my head. “No, that was my intention. I didn’t want you to get away. Your instincts were right.”
“But you didn’t intend to hurt me.”
“You had no way of knowing that.” God, am I stupid. I’m arguing with her about all the reasons why she hit me.
“Then my dad shoved your face in the dirt.” She looks a little irked by that.
“Hell, princess, if I watched my daughter clock some asshole, I’d immediately assume it was his fault. Your dad did the right thing.” I believe that. That’s what dads are for. Well, mine wasn’t, but I have Paul and the others. They would protect me with their lives. Her dad did nothing less than they would have done for me. “Your dad knows all about the assault?”
She nods, biting her lower lip between her teeth. “Can you forgive me?” she asks.
“Nothing to forgive,” I say. She stares at me. “Forgiven,” I say instead. “I promise.”
She takes a deep breath. “Thanks.”
Are we going to discuss the elephant in the room? The reason why she was charging away from me in the first place. “I shouldn’t have made you feel like you had to get up and run away from me,” I admit. We could have avoided the whole punching-and-rolling-in-the-dirt fiasco if I’d just kept my mouth shut and not talked about my dick and how hard she made me. I get that little stirring in my lap just thinking about it. I groan beneath my breath.
“What?” she asks. “Are you hurting?”
Yep. I’m hurting. But not the way she thinks. “A little,” I admit. My wrist hurts.
“I like the way you like me,” she says. Her voice is so quiet that I can barely hear her.
“What?” I ask. I lean closer to her, but she leans away.
She grins and shakes her head. “I like the way you like me,” she says again, this time a little louder.
A smile tugs at the corners of my lips.
“You make me feel things,” she admits. Her face isn’t pale anymore. If anything, her cheeks are rosy.
“Right back at you,” I say.
“You can stop smirking now,” she says, but she’s laughing. This is good.
“You tell me you like me and you expect me to stop smirking?” I lay my good hand on my chest. “You have to be kidding me. I might have to do somersaults.”
“I don’t like men,” she says quietly.
“Oh.” I don’t get a lesbian vibe from her at all. Not a bit. But I’ve been wrong before. “You like women?”
She buries her face in her hands and lifts her head, laughing. “No!” she barks. “I don’t like women.” She does that little dance with her eyes again, looking everywhere but at me. “I like men. But you’re the only man I’ve liked for a long time.” She closes her eyes and flings her head back, groaning. “Being normal shouldn’t be this difficult!” she cries.
“Princess, you are anything but normal,” I say, laughter bubbling inside me.
She shrugs, looking a little chagrined. “I don’t know how to change.”
I laugh. “I wouldn’t change you for anything.”
Her eyes shoot to meet mine. There’s a vulnerability there, and I see something else. Hope? “I feel like I’ve known you for a really long time,” she says.
“Yep.” She likes me. She likes me lots. I’m suddenly more full of confidence than I have been in a long time. “If you tell me you want me to stay away from you while I’m camping in your backyard, you just say the word.” I wait a pause. She doesn’t say anything. “But if you don’t tell me to stay away from you, I’m going to keep trying to get to know you. And then when you get back to NYU, I’m going to take you out to dinner.”
Her brow furrows. “A date?”
“Yep.”
“You’re kind of cocky, aren’t you?” she asks.
“Yep.”
“Why were you in prison?” she blurts out.
This time it’s me who freezes. “I thought you knew about all that.”
She nods. “I knew you were there, but I don’t know why.”
“Do you care?”
She shrugs.
I mirror her actions. “What does that mean?”
“My dad was in prison,” she admits. “And not many people know that so I’d appreciate it if you didn’t spread it around.”
“What for?”
“People do stupid things when they’re desperate,” she says.