Chapter 8
JUST KICK ASIDE the laundry, Kelly had said.
It seemed easy enough in theory. Execution, however, was slightly more difficult.
Because it seemed to Tom as if most of the laundry that was scattered about the room was underwear. Lacy, silky, completely feminine underwear.
It was on the bed, on the floor, on the chair in front of the computer, spilling out of the open top drawer of Kelly’s dresser.
Sure, there were jeans and shorts and T-shirts, too. But he had those things in his own laundry hamper. He was used to them. He could kick that aside, no problem—he had many times in his own room. But the bras and panties and pantyhose . . . Yikes.
And when he had actually tried to push the laundry gingerly aside with his foot, a pair of green satin and lace panties had caught on his sandal, the fabric decadently cool against his bare toes.
Kelly Ashton’s underwear.
That alone would have been too much to deal with. But when he’d leaned over to pull the green lace free, he’d found out something he wasn’t sure he wanted to know.
Kelly Ashton wore thong panties.
Tom sat at her computer now, head pounding, slightly nauseated from dizziness, breathing in the ghostly fragrance of her perfumes and lotions, still slightly shocked. Jesus, he didn’t want that image in his head—Kelly in her underwear was bad enough, but Kelly wearing that?
Forget about his head injury—that image alone was enough to make him dizzy.
And it was definitely not what he wanted to be thinking about when he had dinner with her tomorrow night, God help him.
Kelly Ashton had asked him to have dinner with her.
Down boy. It was only dinner.
Or was it?
He’d assumed that whipped cream comment she’d made this morning had been a joke. But what if she’d been only half kidding? What if she truly wanted . . .
Don’t go there, dirtbrain.
Kelly Ashton probably wouldn’t have agreed to let him use her computer if she’d known that he’d sit here, ogling her underwear, imagining her naked and locked with him in heart stopping, gymnastically energetic sex.
Or maybe not energetic sex. Maybe sex with Kelly would be pulse-hammeringly slow. Devastatingly lethargic. Like one of those pseudo-erotic, black-and-white fragrance commercials on TV. Except there would be nothing pseudo about it. He would surround himself with her infinitely slowly, losing himself in her body as surely as he lost himself in her eyes. It would be the kind of sex where just one touch, just one of her fingers trailed lightly down the length of his arm, would be enough to push him over the edge and . . .
Christ, he had to get out of here.
Because that wasn’t going to happen. Not tomorrow night, not ever.
Even if she wanted it, he was in no position right now to begin anything with a woman like Kelly Ashton. He’d spent his entire life avoiding women like her—the sweet, the innocent, the nice women who deserved lasting, committed relationships with gentle, caring men—and Kelly was their queen.
But, sweet God, he wanted her. He’d always wanted her, even when it was illegal to want her. Back then, it was easy. If he had touched her the way he’d wanted to touch her, he’d go to jail. It was bad enough that he’d kissed her. He’d banished himself for that, forcing himself to face the hurt in her eyes as he left without any real explanation. Afraid to be alone with her, he’d written a note. “I’m sorry. I can’t do this.” He’d said nothing about her being too young, nothing about his fear that he’d be swept away by passion if he so much as faced her again.
He could still hear her whisper, “Meet me later tonight. In the tree house,” when he closed his eyes.
He’d wanted to. God, he had wanted Kelly more than he’d ever wanted anyone or anything. But his passion had terrified him. He’d taken only the time to scribble that note and put it where she’d find it before he’d taken off on his motorcycle, riding hard and fast until he’d run out of gas, until he’d stranded himself far from home.
Until there was no possible way he could make it back to Baldwin’s Bridge that night, to meet Kelly in her tree house.
But he was back in Baldwin’s Bridge now. And she wasn’t too young any longer. No, now the risks were far less well-defined, and mostly emotional.
But they were no less dangerous, because it was Kelly’s heart he’d be risking.
As Tom waited for the printer to spit out the second of his pictures of the Merchant, he glanced around Kelly’s room, trying to ignore the underwear.
Her bed was unmade. It was a colorful jumble of flowery sheets, an antique four poster complete with a blue canopy that matched the window curtains. It looked comfortable and cool, and he longed to crawl in, to soothe his aching head by closing his eyes and sinking back among her sweetly fragranced pillows.
Like a reverse Goldilocks and the three bears, he’d be there when she got home and . . .
Well, there you go. If he ended up getting kicked out of the Navy, he had a future writing scripts for porno flicks.
Jesus, what was wrong with him that he should be completely unable to stop fantasizing about Kelly this way? And the truly stupid part was that she wasn’t just some low-wattage babe he’d spotted in some trashy bar. The truth was that he respected Kelly. He admired her. She was brilliant and bright.
Back when they were both in high school, he’d loved to talk to her, to watch her brain work. She wasn’t afraid to disagree with him, although always politely, of course. She was one of the nicest, sweetest, kindest people on the face of the earth.
His instincts should have been to protect her, to revere her, to worship her from afar. To hold her in esteem, as she deserved to be—the way he did his grandmother, Mother Teresa, and Julie Andrews.
Sunlight streamed in through the curtains, through the French doors that opened onto a narrow balcony. It was pretty enough to look at, but completely idiotic when it came to Kelly’s personal safety. Any fool could climb up to the balcony in half a second. And the locks on the French doors were bush league. A four-year-old could have kicked them in.
Tom made a mental note to go back to Home Depot, get some proper locks. Dead bolts. After all, he wasn’t going to be in town forever.
Surely she knew. So why, then, had she asked him to dinner?
She was still attracted to him. He’d have to be a fool not to see it. But if he was a bad candidate for a love affair this morning, this afternoon he was even worse.
The fear that had grabbed him when he’d seen the Merchant at the Home Depot had lodged in his chest, solid and unmoving. What if he was crazy? What if he started seeing terrorists everywhere he went? What if, because of this, he really did have to leave the Navy?
Now, more than ever, he had to keep Kelly at arm’s length.
But now, more than ever, Tom wanted to lose himself in the sweet comfort of her arms.
God, he wanted her. And if she wanted him, how the hell was he going to keep turning her down?
The printer fell silent, and Tom shut down Kelly’s computer. As he crossed to the door, he had to shake another piece of silk and lace from his foot. Cursing, he took the pictures he’d printed out into the hallway, down the stairs, and into the dining room, only to find Charles and Joe smack in the middle of another argument.
“You’re wrong,” Charles said hotly. “That’s too obvious.”
“Keep it simple, stupid,” Joe countered.
Charles glared. “Who are you calling stupid?”
Pain knifed behind Tom’s left eye and his stomach churned. “Mother of God,” he ground out, and they turned to look at him. “I leave you alone for thirty minutes and you’re back at it. If you can’t get along without fighting, I don’t want your help.” He gazed sternly at his uncle. “I expected better from you,” he told Joe. “I mean, come on. Calling him names? . . .”
“Names?” Joe looked from Tom to Charles, clearly confused.
“Stupid, stupid,” Charles reminded him.
Dawn broke. “No,” Joe said. “It’s that expression. Tommy, you say it all the time. KISS simple. KISS stands for Keep It Simple, Stupid. I wasn’t . . .” He started to chuckle. “You thought I was calling Charles . . .” He looked at Charles, sitting at the table, taking a grim hit from his oxygen tank. “You thought it, too. I could call you a lot of things, Ashton, but I’d never call you stupid.”
Charles looked mollified. “Well, thank you. I think.”
“We were trying to figure out the best place near the hotel for a terrorist to leave a car bomb,” Joe told Tom.
Tom saw that, indeed, they’d spread out a huge map of the town on the dining room table.
Joe put one finger down on the map, directly on top of the circular drive that graced the front of the hotel. “I thought this Merchant fellow would just pull right up to the front doors, but Charles thought that would be too obvious.” He looked at his friend. “You went with us once, to take out the train tracks the Germans were using to send reinforcements and supplies to the front line. The Nazis were expecting sabotage. They expected us to sneak to some secluded part of the track, in the night. Do you remember what we did?”
Charles didn’t answer.
“We went in near the town, near the German barracks,” Joe reminded him. “They never expected us to come so close, so the tracks weren’t guarded there. It was Cybele’s idea—”
“Of course I remember,” Charles cut him off, suddenly looking every minute of his age. “You know I remember. God damn it!”
“Was this back in ’44?” Tom asked. He honestly wanted to know, but even more than that, he wanted to keep them talking. Who was this Cybele?
They both would have been impossibly young. Joe something ridiculous, like twenty, Charles barely twenty-four.
When Tom was twenty-four, he’d just finished BUD/S, the SEAL training program. He’d just been assigned to his first team, and he’d taken part in some dangerous covert operations almost right away. But he’d been trained. Extensively and exhaustively, for years. He was strong and fit, both physically and psychologically. He was prepared to deal with damn near anything.
And despite all his massive preparation, there had been times down through the years when he’d been scared shitless.
Joe and Charles had had a few short months, at best, of boot camp before they were tossed into the fray. Fate had dealt them a hand requiring them to fight a very personal war from deep within enemy territory—one of the very things Tom had been trained so extensively to do.
But they’d had no training in covert operations, no experience—not much more than an intense conviction that what they were doing was right and necessary.
Tom had grown up knowing Joe and Charles had fought in the Second World War, but he’d never known exactly what that meant before this. Sabotaging German trains. Going in close to the German barracks. Cybele . . .
Of course, he wasn’t likely to find out any more details, since both were silent, neither of them answering his questions, Joe looking at him as if he’d said what he’d said only because he’d forgotten Tom was standing there.
His uncle sat down on the other side of the table as if he were suddenly feeling as ancient and ill as Charles.
“You want me to leave so you can keep talking about this?” Tom asked them quietly.
“No.” They spoke in unison, both vehemently.
“I’ve made a few phone calls,” Charles said, clearing his throat repeatedly, changing the subject. “I figured we’d need a few more computers if we were going to catch this terrorist. I ordered three. We can use the east wing for our HQ. I ordered more phone lines, too. I had to pay out my butt to get them to come on Friday. And that was the absolute earliest they could get here.”
“Whoa.” Tom was dizzy now for an entirely new reason. “Before you start spending any money, you need to know—”
“That your superiors don’t believe this man you saw is really the Merchant?” Charles fixed him with a gaze that was laser-beam sharp.
“There is that little problem,” Tom agreed.
“Figured as much. It does sound crazy. A terrorist planning to blow up a New England seaside resort? What drugs are you on?”
“Which is why you shouldn’t be so quick to spend your money,” Tom countered.
“It’s my money,” Charles said crankily. “I’ll spend it however I damn please. It’s not like I’m going to be able to use it in a few months, so I might as well use it now.”
Tom sat at the table, wishing his legs didn’t feel so weak, pressing his left eyebrow with his thumb. Christ, his head hurt.
“What I have to do,” Tom told them, “is make my story sound less crazy. Tracking down this guy or finding this bomb I’m pretty sure he’s making would help.”
“A photo of him,” Charles suggested. He reached for the telephone. “I’ll get us some cameras.”
Tom stopped him, gently moving the telephone out of the old man’s reach.
“A photo won’t necessarily help.” He slid the two pictures he’d printed off Kelly’s computer toward the old men.
“That’s him, huh?” Charles asked, fumbling for the reading glasses he kept in his shirt pocket. “The Merchant?”
“I’m pretty sure this was the man I saw,” Tom told them. “But he doesn’t look much like this anymore.”
“He wouldn’t,” Joe commented. “Considering half the world is after him.”
“The changes he’s made to his face are subtle but it really does the trick,” Tom admitted.
“Any identifying marks?” Joe asked. “Something that would give him away?”
“Nothing that he wouldn’t have already changed. However, the extremist group he’s associated with in the past all wore the same tattoo,” Tom told him. “A stylized eye on the back of their right hands.” He drew the circular symbol of power and omnipotence for them on the back of one of the pictures. “It’s relatively small—no larger than a quarter, probably more like the size of a nickel. The Merchant I knew wouldn’t have had that removed, but now, who knows. If he’s still got it, he probably wears a Band-Aid to conceal it.”
“So we should look for a man about your height,” Charles clarified, “graying hair, bad skin, with a Band-Aid or a tattooed eyeball on the back of his right hand.”
Charles was really getting into this. In fact, ever since Tom had shown them the pictures of the Merchant, the old man hadn’t looked quite such a deadly shade of pale. While he didn’t quite have color in his cheeks, it had been several minutes since he’d needed his oxygen tank, since he’d had one of his coughing spells.
Still, Tom couldn’t keep from smiling, imagining Charles wandering up and down the streets of Baldwin’s Bridge with his walker and his oxygen tank, glaring at every passerby, searching for a man with a Band-Aid on the back on his right hand.
“What we need to do is get this Merchant’s fingerprints.” Charles declared. “They’ll believe you then.”
“Provided NAVINTEL or the CIA has a record of his fingerprints on file, getting a match would probably solve our problems,” Tom said cautiously. “But before we can get his prints, we’ve got to find the man. We’re going to need more than just three pairs of eyes for that. My XO, Lieutenant Jacquette, is coming into town Friday afternoon, along with Ensign Starrett and Lieutenant Locke.”
There had been email from Jazz. The rest of the men in the SO squad were tied down, but he and Sam Starrett could and would get leave. They would rent a car from Logan and drive out to Baldwin’s Bridge, ETA 1500 hours. Oh yeah, Alyssa Locke would be with them, too, God help them all.
“They can stay here,” Charles decided. “We’ve got plenty of room.”
“It would probably be a good idea to check with Kelly first,” Joe suggested.
“Why do I have to check with Kelly? It’s my house—”
“Because she’s your daughter and she lives here, too,” Tom cut him off. “Although it would be good when you check with her if you could ask if she minds my vacationing friends staying in some of your spare rooms.”
“You don’t want Kelly to know about this?” Joe asked.
Tom hesitated. Maybe Kelly should know everything. Maybe if she thought he was looney tunes, she’d back off and he wouldn’t have to worry about finding the strength to push her away.
“I don’t know,” he finally said. “Let me decide what to tell her. In the meantime, no one knows.” He looked from Charles to Joe. “We need to keep this to ourselves, gentlemen. I know you can keep a secret.” Obviously, since they’d been keeping something secret since 1944. “And I’m serious about needing you to stop the bullshit quarreling. If you can’t do that, then you better just stay the hell away. I don’t need that kind of help. Am I understood?”
Charles looked at Joe, and Joe looked at Charles. They both looked at Tom and nodded. Jesus, it was reluctant, though. As if they’d been mortal enemies these past sixty years instead of best friends.
Tom stuck it to them mercilessly. “From now on, I need you to be inseparable. Whenever you leave this estate, you go together, and you go with a cell phone. You see anyone suspicious, you stay out of sight. You follow them—if you can—and you call me. No heroics.”
“Do you want us to go over to the hotel, set up surveillance in the lobby?” Charles asked, enjoying this immensely. “If this Merchant’s in town, he’s got to be staying somewhere.”
“I’ll get the chess set,” Joe said. “It’ll be the perfect cover. This terrorist will never suspect that two old men playing chess in the hotel lobby are really looking for him.”
He disappeared into the other room, and Charles stood up, too. “Better get my hat.”
Tom watched him shuffle from the room, his oxygen tank forgotten. And for the first time in his life, he found himself thinking, thank God for the Merchant.
After hearing at the farm stand that Mrs. Ellis had seen her father and Joe playing chess in the lobby of the Baldwin’s Bridge Hotel, Kelly had been in a real rush to get home. But now that she was here, she paused just outside the door. She could see Tom through the screen, sitting at the kitchen table, surrounded by piles of papers and file folders.
He was wearing reading glasses, half glasses that made him look completely paradoxical—the intellectual warrior, or the thug librarian—and he rested his forehead in the palm of one hand. As she stood for a moment, holding the bag of fresh fruit and vegetables she’d picked up, he closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead as if he still had that terrible headache.
She shifted her weight slightly, and the brown paper of the bag made only the very softest sound, but he looked up, looked out into the darkness toward her, instantly alert. He was up on his feet, moving toward the door in one graceful motion. Flipping on the outside light, he opened the screen.
Kelly stood there, blinking at him in the sudden brightness.
He grabbed the glasses off his face and all but hid them behind his back.
Hi, honey, I’m home. For a few brief seconds, Kelly let herself imagine what it could be like to come home after a hard day of work to someone like Tom Paoletti. He’d meet her at the door with a soul kiss, start stripping her out of her professional doctor’s clothes before they even made it down the hall to the bedroom. They’d have sex right there on the kitchen table, or up against the wall outside her bedroom door, or on the living room floor, and all the struggles and pain and frustrations of her day would just slip away.
“Sorry,” he said, stepping aside to let her in. “I wasn’t thinking. I should’ve turned on that outside light earlier.”
“That’s okay.” Her voice sounded breathy and she cleared her throat, afraid he’d somehow know the direction her thoughts had gone. “It’s not as dark out there as it looks from in here.”
She put the bag down on the counter as he started to gather up his papers, having neatly made his glasses vanish into one of his pockets. He was wearing a loose-fitting T-shirt and a baggy pair of shorts that tried to hide the hard perfection of his body. But she could see most of his legs—long and tanned, lightly covered with golden brown, sun-bleached hair. His calves were muscular, his taut thighs disappearing up into the loose legs of his shorts. It didn’t take much imagination to visualize the way those thighs would keep going, leading up to the sculpted perfection of his rear end and narrow hips.
“You don’t have to put that away,” she told him. “You can work here as long as you like.”
“Thanks,” he said, “but I’m pretty much done. Everything okay?”
She managed to smile. “As okay as it can be when a six-year-old has a potentially terminal illness. Betsy’s going into the hospital first thing in the morning. There’s a few more tests to run before we start the chemo and . . .”
Kelly realized she could hear the sounds of a baseball game coming from the living room. The living room. When Charles was alone, he watched from his favorite chair in the room he called the TV room. But he usually watched in the living room on the big screen television when he wasn’t alone.
When Joe was with him.
She pushed open the kitchen door that led into the darkened dining room and moved toward the archway that separated the banquet-size area from the enormous living room. There was only one lamp on, but the light from the big screen TV more than illuminated the large room.
It flickered across Charles’s and Joe’s faces.
They were sitting together, in the same room, on the very same sofa, watching the Red Sox play Baltimore, discussing Nomar Garciaparra, who’d just gotten up to bat.
As she stood in the shadows and watched, Nomar hit one, and both men shouted in excitement as the ball went clear out of the park. She didn’t hear what Joe said then, but whatever it was, it made her father laugh.
Charles was laughing. With Joe.
Kelly felt more than heard Tom move behind her, and she turned to face him, putting one finger up to her lips. Whatever had happened between Charles and Joe today had to have been the result of some powerful magic, and she wasn’t going to risk breaking the spell. Gesturing for him to follow, she quickly led the way out onto the deck, through the dining room sliders.
Only when the door was shut behind them did she speak. “What did you do?” she asked Tom. “What did you say to them?”
“Don’t get too excited,” he warned her. “This thing they’re fighting about—it’s still not resolved.”
“But they’re sitting there. . . . How did you do it? Did you hypnotize them? I thought nothing short of a miracle—” Kelly’s voice broke, and she turned away as her eyes welled with tears. It was a miracle.
“I didn’t really do much of anything,” Tom said. “I just told them about a . . . well, a project I’m working on, and I said if they wanted to help me with it, their arguments and fighting would have to stop.”
Kelly could feel him watching her, feel him wondering if she was about to experience emotional meltdown and burst into tears. But he needn’t have worried. Ashtons didn’t do meltdowns. They tried to stay as far as possible from such unpleasantly base things as emotions. She herself had been well trained. Get a grip, her father had told her without passion back when she’d been small, burying himself behind his open newspaper. Come back when you’re prepared to discuss this like a rational human being. Tears of any kind—even joy—were to be avoided at all costs.
She’d learned to distance herself from her emotions—to separate and partition away everything she was feeling so she’d be calm and collected. It was an ability that had proven quite useful in her medical career. In fact, she’d used it extensively just today when talking to Betsy McKenna’s distraught parents.
The only problem was, it didn’t keep her from feeling all those untidy emotions. And it didn’t keep her from carrying them around with her until she reached a time and a place where she could unload. Or explode.
Now was neither the time nor the place.
“Are you all right?” Tom asked, his voice gentle in the growing darkness. “Tough day, huh?”
“I’m a little . . . tired,” she admitted. Ashtons were the kings and queens of understatement, too, god damn it. But why was she being so careful, so polite? This was Tom she was talking to—the closest thing to a friend she had here in Baldwin’s Bridge. So she told him the truth. “Actually, I’m so exhausted I can barely see straight. It’s been a complete bitch of a day.”
Her voice broke again, but she no longer cared.
“Or at least it was until I stopped at the farm stand and heard that my father and Joe spent the afternoon playing chess together in the hotel lobby.” Her voice wobbled as she turned to face him. “I don’t know what I can say or do to thank you for whatever it was you did.”
She wanted to embrace him, the way Joe had embraced him out on the driveway, but she didn’t. She couldn’t. She didn’t know how.
Besides, she could see from the look on his face that she was scaring him to death—the same way she’d scared Gary back when they were first married, before she’d learned to hide everything she was feeling from him, too, the same way she’d scared her father when she was a little girl.
“Don’t worry,” she reassured Tom. “I’m not going to cry.”
Of course that was the precise moment she burst into tears. But it wasn’t just tears—she was laughing, too. Laughing at her perfect timing, at the comical look on his face, at the thought of all those pure Bostonian Ashtons rolling in their graves at the idea of their offspring emoting so loudly and violently.
She did the only thing she could do under the circumstances.
She excused herself—politely, of course—and ran for the privacy of her room.
Tom didn’t follow.
She hadn’t expected him to.
“She isn’t going to show.”
David glanced up from putting a new roll of film into his camera to see that Brandon still had on his jeans and T-shirt. “She’ll be here soon. Get changed, will you?”
“No way, bro. Not until she’s here. No point to it. I’ve got places to go, people to see—Sharon, that redheaded cocktail waitress who works the pool the same shift I do? She dropped a major hint that she was going to go see the Jimmy Buffett wannabe over at the Marina Grill tonight. She’s definitely mine if I want her.” Bran wandered over to David’s drawing table. “Whoa. Is this Mallory?”
“Yeah.” David had done some preliminary sketches this afternoon, from memory.
“You’re using her just for her face, right? I mean, this body—that’s whatchamacallit . . . artistic license, right?”
David adjusted the white sheet he’d spread out on the bare wooden floor. “Nope.”
Brandon whistled. “Yow. I hope she does show.”
He looked up at his friend. “Don’t hit on her, Bran. She’s . . .” Fragile. It was true, but no one would know that from the tough bitch facade Mallory had erected for the world to see. Most people wouldn’t try to see what was behind that mask. “She’s too young,” he finally said. “I don’t think she’s even eighteen yet.”
The doorbell rang.
“Please,” David said, heading for the door. “Don’t scare her off.”
He took a deep breath before he opened it, but then there she was. Standing out on the wooden steps that led up to his top-floor apartment, trying to hide the fact that she was having second thoughts about being here.
“Hi,” he said, coming out onto the little wooden landing instead of pushing open the screen door so she could come inside. If she was at all nervous, taking it slowly might help. “Did you have any trouble finding this place?”
She shook her head. God, she was young. And incredibly uncertain.
“You know,” he said, “it’s okay if you’ve changed your mind. I don’t want you to do this if you’re—”
Scared. He was going to say scared, and he realized just in time that that would not be a word this girl would ever want used to describe her—even it if was true.
She lifted her chin and gave him a scathing look. “I’m not, like, afraid,” she told him.
“She says she’s not afraid,” Bran echoed from behind the screen door. “But I am—because you have completely lost your mind. You’re supposed to talk her into doing this, fool, not give her permission to run away. Mallory, you gorgeous thing, come in here and see what Sully’s done just from memory.”
Brandon opened the door and, taking Mallory by the hand, drew her inside.
“Oh, my God, it’s cool in here,” she said. “You have air-conditioning.”
“You and me, babe,” Bran said as he led Mallory toward David’s drawing table, “we are going to be so freaking famous when Sul hits it big. Hasbro’s gonna make little action figures with our faces on ’em. We’ll go to comic book conventions and sign autographs until our hands hurt. It is gonna be such a blast.”
As David closed the door, Mallory leaned over his drawings, studying them carefully. And then she looked up at him, seeming to examine him just as completely. As she did, he could not for the life of him read the look in her eyes.
Self-consciously, he glanced down to make sure his fly was zipped—to make sure he’d remembered to put pants on in the first place. But he was still wearing the bathing trunks he’d thrown on after this evening’s sweatfest—when he’d cleaned and vacuumed his apartment in the oppressive heat. He hadn’t turned on the air conditioner until about a half hour ago—it cost way too much to run and he was saving every penny. He’d showered after cleaning, but putting on anything more than his bathing suit had seemed insane.
He’d finally pulled on a T-shirt when he’d gone out to get a pizza for dinner. He now double-checked the logo on the front to make sure he wasn’t wearing something offensive or too strange. No, it was his “Spock for President” shirt, faded and loose, with a small but growing hole in the shoulder, along the seam.
“Why don’t you get new glasses?” Mallory asked. “You know, there’s one of those one-hour places down on Route 1.”
David wasn’t sure what to say. Was she trying to feel more in control of this situation by pointing out his obvious flaws? Except why stop with his broken glasses?
“I don’t have the money.” He answered her as if her question was sincere. “Right now everything I’ve got is going toward getting Nightshade drawn and printed.”
“What about your parents?” she asked. “Couldn’t you call them and tell them your glasses broke? I bet if you went to visit them, the first thing they’d do would be to take you to get new glasses.”
She was right, except . . . “It’s one thing when they offer to help, but to call and ask for money . . .” He shook his head.
Mallory nodded solemnly. “I know what you mean.”
“I’ll be going home about a week before school starts,” he told her. “I’ll probably get new glasses then.”
Her question had been sincere, not a thinly veiled put-down. She was talking to him, having this conversation as if she cared what he said, as if his thoughts and opinions were valid, as if she actually liked him. David’s pulse kicked into a higher speed as he stood there, gazing into her luminescent eyes, unable to look away, barely able to breathe.
He and Mallory and Brandon were in a room together, and Mal was talking to him, looking at him, liking him.
“What’s the big deal?” Bran said loudly. “They’re your parents. They expect you to call and ask for money.” He yanked his shirt over his head and began unfastening his pants.
His gleaming golden abs and pecs seemed to fill the room, and Mallory turned away from David to stare. The look of awe on her face would have been funny, except for the fact that it completely killed the little seed of hope that had unfurled just seconds ago in David’s stomach.
And as Brandon kicked off his sneakers and stepped out of his jeans, as Mallory turned, wide-eyed, to watch him walk across the room in his boxers, David felt himself return to his normal invisible, unnoticed state.
Which was just as well, since he had work to do.