The Big Hit Page 8

  But how Nico talked about going out with my brother’s friend in Madrid had made me a little wary. Over the years, I had heard plenty of stories about that particular swimmer, about his party lifestyle, about the women he had in cities all around the world. “Tatum, just be careful, ok? It sounds like maybe Nico is a player.”

  “So am I,” she told me, and laughed. “Let’s go in,” she urged, and I realized that my legs were moving more and more slowly, not wanting to. Nico called to her and she ducked over to answer him, laughing more.

  My phone made a noise, reminding me of a text, and I took it out of my purse. “I’ll come in just a minute,” I said to Tatum, and the three of them went into the bar while I checked it. When I saw the message, at first I didn’t believe my eyes. I thought it was a prank, for sure, but who would do something like that to me? Then I tried to be rational, so I looked up area code it had come from: 580, which was not a local number.

  In fact, that was an Oklahoma area code. So then I started to think that it was real:

  Daisy, this is Knox Lynch. Call me.

  Could it really have been from Knox? How had he gotten my number? Why did he want—

  “Daisy?” Tatum stuck her head through the entrance to Roy’s. “Are you ok? Are you coming?”

  I had been standing in the parking lot for a while. I nodded slowly and walked to the bar.

  “Roy’s is filthy dirty,” Tatum said as she pulled me inside. “You stick right to the floor. Everyone is so excited about a Woodsmen player being here that the owner gave me and Nico free drinks, then Bryce tried to act like he was a big deal too, because he works for the team, and Roy said he didn’t serve little pissants and to sit his ass down.” Her eyes were sparkling. “It’s awesome!”

  “Sounds great.” Roy’s was packed and hot, people everywhere. The music was a wall of sound pressing into me, and the room smelled sour, like beer with undertones of vomit. I immediately felt all my muscles tense. No, breathe, it’s ok, I told myself. Someone jostled me, and I tripped into Tatum.

  “Sit here. What do you want?” she was yelling, directing me to a chair. “Beer?” Nico had a tall glass in front of him and Bryce was sitting in his chair across the table, looking sulky.

  I shook my head at Tatum. No more alcohol, that could make things worse, and I had to focus on keeping it together. Tatum fanned herself and leaned over to say something into Nico’s ear so he could hear her over the music. Pool balls broke next to us, crashing wildly, and the players cheered and heckled. So much noise. The ceiling seemed low and I felt like I could reach out and touch the walls. Why would the room be so small? It started to waver a little around me, like the walls were shaking, moving. It was hard to focus with the room acting so weird. A chair backed up into mine, shoving me into our table. Why were the tables so tight, with people so close? The waitress in her skimpy shirt leaned over, brushing my shoulder, her perfume and sweat reeking.

  “I have to go,” I tried to say, and I stumbled as fast as I could out of Roy’s. I made it to my car and leaned against it, breathing, breathing, calming myself down, trying not to lose it completely.

  “Daisy?” Tatum burst out of the bar after me. “What’s the matter?”

  “I can’t,” I tried to explain. Tears were pouring down my face, and I felt like my heart would leave my chest.

  She stared at me. “Ok! Ok, we should go, right? Here, I can drive you. Get in.” She kind of pulled and pushed me over to the passenger side, then got in my car and moved the driver’s seat all the way up so she could reach the steering wheel.

  “What about Nico?” I whispered.

  “He’ll be in touch. I took his wallet.” She maneuvered us out of the parking lot.

  “Tatum!”

  “You want to make sure they’ll remember you,” she advised. “Feeling better?”

  I had the window open and the chilly night air streamed over me, cooling me down. “I’m better. I’m sorry.”

  “I was getting tired of that Bryce, anyway. He’s a drag.” She looked over at me. “We’ll find someone awesome for you, too.” She started to rehash the night with Nico, pretty much word for word.

  I listened with one ear, but I also closed my eyes and worked on refocusing, relaxing my muscles, steady breathing. By the time we made it to my house, I felt like I had a grip, the anxiety at a low-level hum rather than the high-pitched shriek which drove everything else from my mind.

  “Thanks, Tatum,” I told her.

  She nodded. “Any time.”

  ∞

  Cinderella: Ladies, taste test time. Did you ever make a guy eat a bunch of mints before you…

  My eyes widened as I read what she wrote, about how a certain male bodily fluid could taste minty. Was that true? Another yoga girl chimed in, talking about an experience with a former boyfriend after he ate a lot of roasted garlic on toasted baguettes, how she definitely noted it in his, uh, ejaculate.

  I closed the thread. It certainly wasn’t making me feel any less nervous to read this, and I had been trying to get myself to relax. I had made phone calls before, even to men. Only men like my brother and his old swim coach, but still, I had done it. And I could do it now. I stared at Knox’s text and hit the button on my phone before I could think about it anymore.

  “Daisy,” Knox answered, before it even rang on my end.

  “How did you get my number?” I blurted out, which was not what I had written on the script lying on the table in front of me. First, I was going to bring up the surprise snowfall that we’d had, then I would say I hoped he’d had a good workout at the gym at the stadium and stress that I was not stalking him. Only after all that and some other things about sports, about two-thirds of the way through the script, was I supposed to casually ferret out how he had managed to get my phone number.

  “I got it from the other guy who works in the college library. He was there yesterday, putting books on the shelves. The guy who’s as wide as he is tall.”

  “Solomon?” Knox wasn’t really one to talk about body width, since he dwarfed Solomon. “He gave you my number? You talked to him?”

  “Yes.”

  There was a big pause.

  “Did you want help with your paper again?” I asked.

  “I wanted to tell you that I handed it in. I talked to the professor on Friday and seems like I did all right, so thank you.”

  “It was my pleasure,” I told him. “I’m glad about your grade.”

  Big pause, again. This was the most awkward conversation I’d ever had in my life.

  “Um—” I started to say, just to fill the dead air, and at the same moment, Knox spoke.

  “Let’s go to dinner again. Tonight?”

  “Oh! Yes, ok.” Oh, God. Oh, wow.

  We settled on a time for him to pick me up and I gave him my address, and then he quickly hung up and I sat staring at my phone for a while, lost in thought. For the rest of the day, I tried to do the things I had set out to complete before Monday: cleaning, homework, laundry, cooking. But all I did was flit aimlessly around the cottage, staring at my clothes and wondering what I was going to wear, making lists of conversation topics on my phone so I could put it on my lap and secretly look at it during dinner if things got awkward, like they had when I had called him.

  Knox Lynch and I were going to dinner. The football player, the famous guy, the one who led the league in sacks. I was going out with him tonight.

  I was pacing in front my windows, watching for headlights, and pressing a bag of frozen peas to the nervous blotches that had formed on my chest, when Knox’s truck crunched in the gravel driveway. I walked to the door, preparing myself. “Knox, it’s great to see you,” I practiced aloud, forcing a smile on my face. “Hi Knox, glad we could get together. Hello, isn’t it a beautiful night?” He knocked and I threw open the door.

  “You’re here!” I loudly blurted out, and I actually startled the expressionless face right off him.

  “Yeah, I am,” he answered, and I jus
t stood there, staring. He pointed to my hand. “Is that for me?”

  I looked at the bag of frozen peas that I was holding out like an offering and quickly hid it behind my back. “No! Of course not. Uh, would you like to come in? Can I get you something besides peas?”

  Knox didn’t fit in my house. He filled the living room and he had to turn sideways in the kitchen when I showed him around. If my brother looked too big for this place, Knox made it seem like a dollhouse. An ant house. “It’s nice,” he told me, settling gingerly on a chair in the living room. “You own it?”

  “I rent it.” I watched the chair sag under his weight. It was probably best to leave since I also didn’t own the furniture. “Should we go?” I breathed easier when he stood up, but the chair stayed bent inwards. I hadn’t wanted it to break underneath him and send him onto the floor—he would have felt awful, probably, and it seemed like a bad way to begin a date.

  We went through some of the conversation topics that I had planned out while in his truck on the way to the restaurant. I told him about the cat that slunk around in my back yard, and all my attempts to lure him to make friends. “He’s totally wild. He’s not interested in me at all,” I said.

  “Was that guy last night?”

  I turned to stare at Knox across the bench seat. “The guy last night? Bryce? How did you know about him?”

  “I heard about it from Lyle, the security guard at the stadium. He knows everything that goes on.”

  I settled back to look out the front windshield. “Bryce seems like an ok guy but we didn’t have anything in common. And I’m older than he is, which weirded him out a lot. I wouldn’t say either of us was interested. That’s fine.”

  He made a noise that sounded like agreement. “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-six.” Twenty-six and a virgin, in every sense of the word, a little voice sang in my mind. Yuck.

  “I have a few years on both of you.” He patted the dashboard of the truck. “She has a few years on you, too.”

  “Really?”

  “Uh huh. This was my grandpa’s truck first. Good miles, isn’t that what you said?”

  “Right,” I nodded. “Did he give it to you when you moved here?”

  “He passed away when I was ten. Then it was me and my grandma.”

  “Is she your biggest fan?” I asked, smiling.

  He nodded, looking at the road. “She sure was. She came to every game, even practices if I let her. I could hear her yelling sometimes. Go, Knox, go!” He smiled at the memory, even though I heard him use the past tense when he talked about her.

  “Did she get to see you play in college?”

  “I stayed close to home because she was sick already. But she went to every one of my games there, before she got too weak. I declared for the draft after my junior year,” he told me.

  “My brother went professional before he graduated, too. He wanted to make some money,” I explained. Because he’d had me and our mom like weights around his neck. I flushed a little.

  “I was thinking I’d make some money too, help her, but she died just before the draft when the Woodsmen picked me.”

  “Oh. That’s so sad.”

  “Not really date conversation,” he agreed.

  “That’s not what I meant. I’m glad to know that about you. I bet she’d be pretty proud that you’re back in school now.”

  “I bet she would be.” He looked across at me. “You’re helping me finish,” he said, his voice gruff.

  “I only read your paper,” I answered, embarrassed. “It wasn’t very much. I have to get myself through, too. Like how you were trying to help your grandma? My brother still supports me. He doesn’t want me to have loans or debt.”

  “That’s a nice thing,” Knox said.

  “It’s not fair to him, though. For so many years, he’s worried so much about our mom and then me, too. I want him to be able to be free of that. He can have babies with his wife and I’ll be an aunt. I can’t wait.” I thought of how cute their kids would be. “I’ll be a good aunt, lots of candy and presents. And stern discipline.”

  Knox laughed in his low tones. It made me squirm a little, but in a good way. “Do you like school?” he asked me.

  “I do, a lot. I like my classes, and I really like my jobs.” That led to explaining my internship with Professor Amico and then to talking about the possibility that we had an Italian Old Master painting hiding within the art that had been sitting in the college basement. “I’ve been reading about the artist, Pisanello. Hardly any of his paintings are left. If we have one, it will be this major coup, at our tiny little college in our one-man department. Domenico has been practically out of his mind wanting to find it, but it’s not like we can go ripping through the boxes and crates. Most of the collection is old and delicate, and we have to be extremely careful. We can’t ruin one thing to find something else.”

  “Domenico. That’s the guy you work for.”

  I nodded. “He’s amazing. Such a sweet, wonderful man.”

  Knox made a sharp turn into a parking lot, making me lean against the car door with the speed. “We’re here,” he growled out, and I didn’t know why he suddenly seemed angry. Then he walked around to my side of the truck and opened the door for me. He held out his hand.

  “Thank you,” I said, my voice going up a little as I took it and got out of the truck.

  “You didn’t need my help getting down. I forget how tall you are,” he said. The growl in his voice was gone.

  I looked up into his face. “Compared to other people, you mean. I’m pretty short next to you.”

  “You don’t make me feel too big. You’re good, next to me.” He let go of my hand, slowly, and we walked together, close, but not touching.

  Chapter 6

  “Mr. Lynch, welcome to Chez Flagorneur. We couldn’t be prouder that you’ve graced our humble establishment with your patronage,” the host started to fawn as we came into the restaurant.

  I didn’t need to see Knox’s face behind me to know the expression he wore, because the host took a step back and his ingratiating smile fell. “I’ll show you to your table,” he told us. Once again, heads turned, but the restaurant was almost empty on a Sunday night before the summer season started. No one stared and picked up their phones to take pictures, or not that I could see.

  Knox didn’t look any more comfortable than the host did, though. “You know, we could have eaten at your house,” I commented as we sat down. “I didn’t need to go to a fancy restaurant.”

  “You should go out to a nice place.” He looked at the menu. “This is French?”

  I looked too. “Seems like it. I took it in high school but I don’t think my teacher really spoke the language and I didn’t learn very much. But that says chicken there,” I told him, pointing, “and that’s Lake Michigan whitefish. Which I know, because it says whitefish next to it in English.”

  “Thanks.” The chair creaked underneath him and I glanced at it.

  “Weak chairs,” I commented. “I’m going to have to rethink my own furniture if you’re coming over. Not that you would want to come over…”

  “I have some issues with that. My bed in college was a twin, and it was awful.”

  “When did you get so big?”

  “Not until my sophomore year. Of college, I mean. I grew about six inches after high school and it hurt like hell. I think it was because of the college cafeteria.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked. “You grew because of the cafeteria?”

  “I could eat as much as I wanted, three meals a day,” he explained. “And with the college workouts, I put on muscle with the height and suddenly, I could really play football.”

  I considered the fact that saying he ate as much as he wanted in the school cafeteria, three meals a day, probably meant that he hadn’t been doing that before he went away to college. I had the urge to feed him, to make up for that. “Maybe next time, I’ll cook dinner for us. I love to cook but it’s no fu
n for just one person.” There I went again, assuming there would be a next time. “I mean, if you’d ever want to come over, in the future. If I get new chairs, of course,” I said, trying to make it a joke.

  All Knox answered was, “I’m not much of a cook.” There was silence.

  I carefully got the phone out of my purse and opened it in my lap to my conversation topics list. I felt like I needed them.

  “Tell me more about your brother,” Knox said suddenly. “I saw he retired. What’s he doing now?”

  I was always happy to talk about Dylan, and I went on for quite a while. “I hope he and Julia will move back home when he’s done with school,” I concluded, “so I can see them more often.”

  “You plan on staying here after you graduate? What’s your major, art history? Any jobs locally for that?”

  “If not, I’ll go elsewhere,” I said. “I’ll need to find a job. I can’t always be a sponge on Dylan. I could go to New York. Chicago. Anywhere, I’m an adult.”

  “Hey.”

  I looked up into his silvery eyes.

  “Why are you getting upset?” He pointed at my hand, clenched around my water class, knuckles white to prevent it from trembling.

  “I get a little nervous when I talk about leaving home. A little anxious.” Just a little. My legs were shaking under the tablecloth.

  “So stay.”

  “Yes, sure. I’ll figure that out,” I said, trying to sound confident. I didn’t look across the table because I could feel his eyes still on me. “What do you want to do when you’re done with football?”

  He didn’t answer, so now I glanced up. Impassive, that was the word. Frozen.

  “I don’t like when you do that,” I said, surprising even myself. “When you look at me like that.”

  His face immediately softened. “Like what?”

  I tried to do it too, to make my features immobilize and blank. “When your face gets so…nothing. Like there’s nothing. That’s how my mom used to look, sometimes.” Or most of the time. “She didn’t speak and it was like she went away.” That was why it bothered me so much when he did it too. It didn’t scare me; it made me want to fix him, like I had wanted to with my mom, and of course I had never been able to help her. It made me incredibly sad.