Game (Jasper Dent #2)(45)

It was no good. She couldn’t relax. She blew out a frustrated breath and opened her eyes.

“Whiz!” she yelped. She must have been more relaxed than she’d imagined. Or at least more distracted—her younger brother had managed to sneak into her room without her hearing the door open.

“You are in so much trouble!” Whiz said, with something like awe in his voice. He wasn’t even taking delight in his older sister’s travails. He was just impressed at the sheer level of trouble, like a man reaching a mountaintop only to see a taller peak in the near distance. “I didn’t think you could get in this much trouble!”

“I know,” Connie said, pretending not to care. She couldn’t keep up the pretense for long. “Uh, exactly what have you heard? What did they say while I was gone?”

Whiz scampered over to her bed and plopped down next to her. “Dad was cussing.”

Ouch. Never a good sign. As if Connie needed to know, Whiz proceeded to reel off the exact words Dad had used. Connie blinked. She hadn’t even known Whiz knew some of those words.

“What about Mom?”

“She cried. Not much. Just a little.”

Connie deflated. Her father’s anger was one thing. Bringing her mother to tears was another. She didn’t know why, but those tears touched her more deeply than her father’s anger ever could. In a way, she was glad her parents didn’t know this. Such knowledge would make controlling her almost trivially easy: Don’t do X, Y, or Z, Connie—you’ll make your mother cry.

“Was it worth it?” Whiz wanted to know. “You’re gonna be grounded until, like, you’re eighty years old.”

“They can’t ground me that long,” Connie said.

“But was it worth it? You know”—and here Whiz looked around as if under surveillance and dropped his voice to a near whisper—“S-E-X?”

As much as she wanted to drop-kick Whiz into a garbage chute most days, Connie had to admit she loved the little snot monster, who was simultaneously too grown-up and too childlike. After busting out a plethora of Dad’s four-letter words, he still felt the need to spell out sex.

“We didn’t have S-E-X,” she informed him. “Not that it’s any of your business.”

“Well, that’s good. ’Cause Mom was really worried about that.”

“Dad wasn’t?”

“Dad was…” Whiz hesitated. “Never mind.”

“Come on. Tell me.”

Whiz shook his head defiantly.

“God, it’s more of his black/white crap, isn’t it? It’s not the nineteen-sixties. It’s not like when his parents were growing up or even when he was growing up. It’s—”

“That’s not it,” Whiz said quietly.

“What’s not it?”

“The black-and-white thing. The racial stuff.”

Connie stared at her kid brother, searching his expression for signs of one of his pranks or tricks. But he was utterly solemn, totally serious.

“What do you mean? Ever since I started dating Jazz, it’s been ‘white men this’ and ‘black women that,’ and ‘Sally Hemmings’ and—”

Whiz shook his head. “He doesn’t care. He said, ‘She can date a whole platoon of white boys, just not that one.’ ”

Connie set her jaw. She knew what was coming next. “How do you know this?”

Whiz rolled his eyes. “Jeez, Connie. I listen to them at night through the air-conditioning vents. Don’t you?”

Actually… no.

“It’s the serial-killer thing.”

Well, of course it was the serial-killer thing. Her father didn’t trust Jazz. So typical. No matter how much Jazz had proven himself—

“And,” Whiz went on, “he told Mom that the idea of you getting hurt scares him so much that he can’t even talk to you about it. And all the race stuff is just the only way he can think of to keep you guys apart without thinking about you…”

Without thinking of me raped, tortured, mutilated, and murdered by my own boyfriend. Ah, crap. She couldn’t find it in her heart to stay angry at her dad. Not anymore.

“Jesus, Whiz. Talking to you is better than yoga sometimes.”

“Don’t take—”

“—the Lord’s name in vain. I know. Sorry.”

“It isn’t gonna happen, is it?” Whiz asked.

“What’s that?”

Whiz swallowed. “Jazz isn’t gonna hurt you, is he?”

Aw, man… As big of a pain in the butt as her little brother could be, she knew he loved her in that stunted way little brothers have. It killed her to see the conflicted pain in his eyes as he asked. She saw more than merely her brother’s concern; she saw Dad’s fear reflected there, too. All her life, her father had been so powerful, loomed so large, that she’d never been able to imagine him afraid of anything. Not even Jazz. Not even something…

“No one’s gonna hurt me,” she told Whiz. Seized by a rare impulse, she hugged him to her, pleasantly surprised that he didn’t pull away.

She kissed him on the exact center of the top of his head and said it again, this time louder, loud enough to convince herself, too.