Thick Love (Thin Love, #2)(45)
You’re late, slacker!
Even over a text she managed to be bossy and funny at the same time, a fact that pissed me off. I was going to toss my cell on the empty seat next to me, but deleted her message and pulled up Ironside’s last text to send him a new one. My single focus was on keeping Aly out of my head.
Am I still getting my performance? I texted, holding my breath a little until he replied, not caring that the voice kept nagging me, not caring that it felt almost wrong to want the unknown dancer now. It felt like I was somehow stepping out on Aly. That made no damn sense.
And then, when his reply came, I decided I didn’t care about what seemed right or what made sense to me.
Yeah, man. No problem.
My breath came out easy, relieved even though my chest felt tight, even though that voice in my head kept silent.
10
April, 2015
Leann wanted to host a fundraiser. Jambalaya sale, $12 a plate and a car wash with the students doing all the dirty work. Just a little something that would bring in sales and help fund her recital budge. Carl had scheduled me for a double shift that I couldn’t get out of so it was late, very late when I got back to my apartment. The fundraiser had long since finished but Leann was still there, barking orders at Tristian and Ransom as they returned tables back to the storage room next to my front door.
“Sorry, Aly,” Tristian had apologized, when he and Ransom blocked the path to my door with a long card table. “I’ll get Mom. Somebody put all the chairs in the way and we can’t get the table in. Let me go see what she wants us to do.”
“I can wait.” I’d been tired, hungry and to be honest, didn’t mind that Tristian ran off, leaving Ransom inside that tiny storage room holding one end of the table. “I can help you,” I’d told him, moving my head over the top of the table.
“I got it.”
Same tone that he’d been using since that horrible accident on the lake. It was deep and impassive, as though he’d been taken over by an android who’d offer the blandest, most evasive communication possible. That sound broke my heart.
Stuck with that large table and larger boy blocking my door, I sat on the steps with my purse swinging from my fingers, and looked up at the sky, unaccountably self-conscious with him so close to me.
But, I couldn’t take the silence or the feel of indifference that radiated from him. When someone is hurt, it’s human nature to want to help. And that night, Ransom’s silence had seemed like an unbearable wound.
The sky was dark and peppered around the few spindly clouds were four stars brighter than the rest, twinkling in a square.
“Pegasus,” I said, to fill up the silence.
A quick glance to see if he heard me and Ransom followed my nod to stare up at the sky. He didn’t say a thing.
“My grann told me once that Pegasus brought renewal wherever he ran. He was a mammoth, guarding the skies, giving the earth a new start, something to look forward to.”
When I didn’t hear even a low grunt of acknowledgement, I glanced over my shoulder to find Ransom watching me.
“Pegasus is charging above us,” I said, looking back up at the constellation.
It seemed like a minute, maybe two, before Ransom said anything. “Hydra is bigger, fiercer. Pegasus isn’t charging. He’s fleeing.”
Present
Ransom Riley-Hale had swagger. It wasn’t something I noticed very often because, being honest here, nobody really gets the definition of “swagger” quite right. It wasn’t the way he carried himself or how the dip of his chin made me think no one could pull off flirting like Ransom. It wasn’t even how those black eyes of his sometimes looked right through you, like he saw people deeper, could claim to know the filthiest secrets you tried to keep from the world. It wasn’t any of those individual things that had my attention focused directly on him. It was everything—the skill it took to make the world think he was perfectly himself. The strength in his body, the power in a single look that could make any woman desperate to know everything about him and too cowardly to make the attempt.
His swagger was this undefinable way he had to take the challenges set in front of him and overcome them like the effort was nothing. But behind that boldness, the cool, confident man the world saw, there was someone else. Something darker. I’d seen a hint of it that night he’d barged into the studio calling me a liar. His anger had been real, a stinging bite that had shoved back any composure my introverted mind told me to put on display. He’d pissed me off with his shouting and put me into a rage when he called me a liar. No one, not even Ransom, could quell my temper when it had been stoked.
So that night, it was my anger, my irritation with myself at not perfecting the dance and his attitude that kept me from shying away from him. At his parents’ lake house, the first time we’d sung together, I didn’t have my anger pushing me to lash out. I went in utterly unprotected.
Keira was amazing, a determined woman who, in my mind, could tackle anything and usually overcome it. She was fierce, but then she’d have to be to endure a life on her own, raising a son when she’d barely been more than a kid herself.
She and Kona welcomed me, trusted me to look over their son, take care of their home and I felt humbled by their determination to make me comfortable. The woman even helped me with my voice lesson, gave me advice on stage presence and pitch and everything seemed normal to me then, easy. I liked Keira and Kona, respected how much they’d endured together and instantly fell in love with Koa when I first met him. The day should have been relaxed, being there, getting first rate advice from a Grammy winner. And then, he walked through the door, larger than life, engulfing the empty space between me behind that piano, and the path he blocked for an escape. There would be no running, not with him watching me the way he did. So, I shot for subtle, casual, hoping I could make myself small enough that he’d continue on not realizing I existed. But my wrong-note singing had caught Ransom’s eye.