Crash

  “Because he’s the ugliest dog I’ve ever seen,” Jude said. “He’s all but hairless and, I don’t want to get any closer because I fear he might rip my balls off, but I’m pretty sure that putrid smell is coming from him. Unless . . .” He leaned into me, moving my hair behind my shoulder as his nose all but connected with my neck. My instant reaction was to shudder, this boy knew what he was doing and how the lightest graze of fingers over just the right patches of skin or a warm breath fogged over the right spot of the neck could all but crush a girl’s most virtuous of intentions, but I fought the shudder down. I wasn’t going to be one of the girls that shuddered in his presence. He didn’t need another boost to that bloated ego. “Nope, I only smell sweet and innocent coming from over here,” he all but whispered against my neck before looking back at the dog. He grinned at me, knowing exactly what he was doing and knowing exactly what I was trying not to do. “I’d suggest taking that flea bag through a doggie car wash a few times.” He laughed as the dog began barking again at Jude’s proximity to me, but he leaned away from me again. “What did your parents think when you brought Cujo home?”

  This time I grimaced.

  “Ahh, let me fill in the blanks as I’m very familiar with that look. They don’t know their precious daughter snuck behind their backs and brought this animal with a questionable past into her life.”

  My grimaced deepened as he verbalized what I liked to sugar-coat.

  “And since I’m on a roll here, let me fill in the blanks as to what their reaction will be.” He tapped his chin, looking at the sky. “They’re going to tell you to drop that thing like a bad habit and send him back where you found him.”

  I blew out a rush of air. “Probably,” I said, attempting to form a rebuttal that would be convincing with my parents. I already knew dad would be on board by default, but mom was another story and my dad had learned years ago that life wasn’t pleasant if he wasn’t on the same parenting ship as mom.

  “So why did you do it?” he asked, still staring at the dog like he was a puzzle. “Because you don’t strike me as the kind of girl that rebels against whatever her parents say.”

  “I don’t,” I answered. “But we made kind of a big life change recently and I wasn’t able to give this up.”

  “Life change? Give this up?” he repeated. “Okay, my interest was peaked when you shot me down, now I’m absolutely smitten since you made dog adoption out to be a vice.” He grinned over at me from the side and I swore I could feel my stomach bottoming out. “So what’s this big life change you’re up to those pretty little blue eyes in?”

  I slid my sunglasses back into position out of principle. If he was going to find a way to be condescending about my eyes, he didn’t get to look into them. “We sold the house I grew up in and moved to our lake place,” I began, trying to sound as carefree as I could about it, “and the community we live in has the most ridiculous, restrictive covenants that don’t allow any kind of fence around the property, so it would only make sense those idiots won’t allow a dog off leash, right?” I was getting worked up just thinking about it, as my hands flying about expressed. “We don’t have a kennel, I can’t keep him inside the house because dad’s allergic, and you try putting a leash on this guy and he all but turns into the Tasmanian devil.” I glanced back at the dog, still eyeing Jude warily. “It’s like the idea of being tied to something sends him over the edge.”

  “I know the feeling,” he said, glancing back at the dog with something new in his eyes. Camaraderie, was it?

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said, reaching for my melted slurpee. “Already got the spiel about you not one for being tied down to things like girlfriends. No need for the instant replay.”

  As I took a long and final sip of blue raspberry syrup, Jude leveled me with a look that held too much emotion for a man of his shallow character. “There are others ways to be tied to something than via a woman. In fact, I’d say I’m tied to just about everything else but a woman.”

  Okay, I so wasn’t expecting this moment of vulnerability to slip from a guy who probably thought a nice first date included a visit to the backseat of his car. “Care to elaborate?” I asked, setting the empty cup into the sand.

  “Not even a little bit,” he replied, staring out into the water. “But thanks for asking.”

  “Jude!” someone yelled down the beach.

  Glancing over at the shouter, a middle aged man who was rotund at best and grossly obese truthfully, Jude waved his hand. “Coming, Uncle Joe.”

  “That’s your uncle?” My eyes flicked back and forth between Jude and Uncle Joe, finding no other resemblance than gender.

  Jude nodded once. “Uncle Joe.”

  “And those are your cousins?” Again, I surveyed the handful of boys ranging in age from probably kindergarten to high school, finding no definitive feature that would tie them to each other.

  Another nod from Jude as he popped up.

  “Do they all have different moms?” I asked, only teasing partly.

  That made him laugh a laugh that I felt all the way down to my toes. “I think you might be on to something.”

  Accepting the end was near, I decided to cut the tie early. “Well, it was . . .”—I searched for the right word, coming up empty —“something meeting you, Jude,” I said, as that smile of his angled at my word choice. “Have a nice life.”

  “You too . . . ” he said, his brows coming together as he searched me for something.

  “Lucy,” I offered, not sure why. I’d said my name a million different times and ways, but telling it to him seemed oddly intimate.

  “Lucy,” he repeated, tasting the word in his mouth. Shooting me another tilted smile, he turned and headed towards the trail of boys leaving the beach.

  “Oh god, Lucy,” I said to myself, flopping down on my beach towel. “What were you thinking? That was a serious heartbreak averted.”

  Even as I said the words, with as much conviction as I could muster, my eyes weren’t able to peel themselves away from him as he ambled down the beach, spinning the football between his fingers.

  Stopping suddenly, he turned around, that smile reforming when he found my stare on him. “So, Lucy,” he hollered, tucking the ball under his arm, “how much further are you going to let me get before you give me your phone number?”

  Whatever premonitions I’d had about Jude and heartbreak going hand in hand flew out the window. I wanted to get up and break dance I was so stoked.

  However, I still had some dignity in the name of all women and couldn’t make this easy on him. “How far do you think the edge of the world is?” I called back, rolling onto my side.

  Jude shook his head, chuckling silently. “You playing hard to get, Lucy?”

  “No, Jude,” I replied, arching a brow. “I’m impossible to get.”

  Outright lie, but he didn’t need to know that.

  “Jude!” Uncle Joe shouted again, this time sounding a special shade of pissed. “Right now!”

  Jude tensed, the smile faltering. “Coming!” he shouted over his shoulder before loping towards me. Kneeling beside me, his eyes locked on mine. “Number?”

  “No.” I was so close to breaking if he asked again, I knew I’d cave.

  “Why?”

  “Because you have to work harder than some lame attempt to get it,” I answered, hearing my conscience asking what the hell I was doing. This type of guy was every type of wrong on the surface, but there was something more there, something I’d seen in that flash of vulnerability that sucked me in.

  Leaning in so close his nose was almost brushing mine, he asked, “How much harder?”

  I sucked in a slow breath, hoping my answer wouldn’t make it seem like I was hyperventilating. “Use your brain, since you’ve made it clear you don’t use it for academics.”

  He waited a few seconds, maybe waiting for me to retract my “hard to get” routine. I sealed my lips tighter.

  “I’m going to come up with something g
ood,” he said finally, sliding my glasses back into position. “Really good.”

  “You come up with something that good,” I said, glad my eyes were covered so he couldn’t see the party in my pupils, “I’ll not only give you my number, I’ll let you take me out on a date.” I felt the uninhibited part of me I did my best to repress surfacing. The part of me I tried to convince myself was bad, evil, wrong, so on and so forth, but the part of me that felt most like I wasn’t fighting a current when I went against it.

  “What makes you think I want to go on a date with you?” His face was more serious than a teenage boy should be able to make.

  I cursed under my breath, wanting to spurt out another string of them when Jude’s expression stayed frozen. I was just about to reply nothing or grab my beach blanket and bag and scramble out of here with my tail between my legs when a smile split Jude’s face in half.

  “You’re kind of beautiful when you’re tortured, you know that?” He laughed, giving the football another spin. “Hell yeah I want to take you out. Even though dates aren’t really my thing, I think I can make an exception for a girl who rescues varmints,”—right on cue, a snarl sounded beneath the picnic bench—“one who reads quantum physics at the beach,”—I could have corrected him that I was brushing up on Biology, not quantum physics since I was taking AP Biology in the fall, but I don’t think he would have cared, or known the difference—“and one who adheres to the European way, not to mention my favorite way, of suntanning by going topless.” Jude’s smile pulled higher, giving me a knowing raise of his chin.

  “For someone who prefers the sans top thing, you must not adhere to that policy personally,” I replied, skimming my eyes down the long sleeve thermal clinging to his chest from sweat or water or some combination of both. Apparently full sun and ninety-five degree heat didn’t warrant shedding the layers in Jude’s book.

  He shrugged. “There’s a work of art, a true masterpiece, hiding beneath this shirt.” His muscles rolled and stretched to bring the point home. Not that I needed to be convinced. “I can’t let all this be displayed for free to the public.”

  If there weren’t already about three dozen red flags up as to why I should steer clear of the grinning, flexing, wrapped head to toe in caution tape boy in front of me, here was three dozen and one. So what did I do?

  Exactly what I knew I shouldn’t.

  “So what’s the price of admission to the Museum of Jude?”

  His smile faded into nothing, his eyes doing the same. “For girls like you, with the world-is-yours futures,” he said, toeing at the sand, “it’s expensive. Too expensive.”

  Another flash of vulnerability. I didn’t know if he had a bad case of mood swings or deep down was a sensitive guy banging against the walls to be set free. But I wanted to find out. “Was that you just inadvertently telling me to stay away from you?”

  “No,” he answered, meeting my eyes. “That was me telling you directly to listen to your gut and what’s it’s screaming at you right now.”

  “What makes you think you know what my gut is saying to me?”

  “Screaming,” he corrected. “And experience.”

  If Jude thought experience had given him the instruction manual to Lucy Larson, he’d never been so wrong. “So I’ll see you around then?”

  Shaking his head, his smile broke through again. “I’ll see you around then.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  After begging the Darcys, who I used to babysit for across the lake, to take the pup for one night while I figured out what I was going to do with him, my gut’s message had finally taken root and spread all the way into the careless, free-spirited pieces of my conscience.

  Jude Ryder wasn’t only trouble, he was trouble with a side of danger and a dessert of heartache. I didn’t talk the lingo of stereotypes, but I knew the path Jude was on and the one I was on would never intersect unless one of us forfeited our individual one to join the other.

  I’d worked too hard for too long to allow mine to dead end.

  Even as I veered off Sunrise Drive to bounce down the pitted dirt road to our once secondary home and present primary and sole home, the reasons I should delete Jude from my mind continued to pile up into a mountain I was incapable of climbing. I knew why I shouldn’t have anything to do with him and that all made sense, but something that didn’t make any sense just didn’t give a hoot about what I knew.

  Something was fighting back, telling my gut to take a hike. Something wanted Jude Ryder in my life, no matter the consequences or the outcome.

  And whatever that something was, I liked it.

  I cut my little Mazda’s engine outside the garage since it was filled to the rafters with boxes and pieces of furniture from our old home that was about four times as large. At one time, we never worried about money, but after dad’s business empire came crashing to the ground, savings dried up and things like second homes and European vacations became luxuries of the past. Mom’s job as an architect paid just enough to keep a family of three alive, but not thriving. Even if we still had all the money we’d once had, alive, but not thriving would still describe the Larson family unit. We hadn’t thrived in five years.

  Sliding my coverup over my swimsuit so I wouldn’t have to hear the always to be expected and ever so creative lectures of disapproval from my mom about giving the milk away before someone bought the cow, I jogged up the rickety steps of our front porch.

  “Hey, dad,” I said as I pulled the screen door open. After five years, I’d stopped glancing over at the worn blue armchair to confirm he was there, entranced by the television or a crossword puzzle. He was always there if it was any time before seven p.m. After seven, he transformed into a gourmet chef whipping up French cuisine with such instinct you never would have guessed he was Norwegian.

  “Hello, my Lucy in the sky,” was his expected response, as it had been for years. My dad was nothing if not a Beatles fan, and his second born had been named for his all time favorite song, to my mother’s mortification. She was, if there was such a thing, the anti-Beatle. I don’t know how my dad managed to get not one, but two children named after the band that created a generation, in my dad’s words, but there were plenty of things that didn’t make sense when it came to my parents’ relationship.

  “How was your day?” I asked, only by habit. My dad’s days were all the same now. The only variation was what color shirt he sported and what kind of sauce he whisked up with dinner.

  He was just opening his mouth when the first few notes of the Jeopardy jingle sounded and, like clockwork, he was out of his seat and striding into the kitchen like he’d just declared war on it. “Dinner will be ready in thirty,” he announced, cinching his apron ceremoniously.

  “All right,” I said, wondering why, after all this time, I still mourned what my dad and I had been. “I’m going to take a shower and I’ll be down to set the table.” I lunged at the stairway the moment I heard the click clack of heels pounding gravel, but I was too late.

  “Lucille.” The screen door screeched open, letting in an inescapable cold front also known as my mother. “Where are you running off to?”

  “The circus,” was my response.

  The ice queen went sub polar. “Judging by the way you’re dressed, or barely, and given your plummeting GPA the past few years, I would say a career as a trapeze artist isn’t that far-fetched.”

  Her words didn’t even hurt anymore, no more than a superficial wound. “Good to know I’m living up to your expectations,” I fired back. “I’ll be sure to send a postcard when I hit the big times with Cirque du Soleil.”

  Always a proponent of getting the last word, I whipped around and flew up the stairs before we really got wound up. However, I was only delaying the inevitable. We’d pick up right where we left off in thirty minutes when dad chimed the cowbell. Dinner should be interesting.

  Slamming my door shut, I leaned against the door, forcing myself to take deep breaths. It never really calmed me like dee
p breathing exercises were supposed to, but it backed me down from the ledge enough I could get on with the next thing in life, hopefully something that didn’t involve mom. I’m well aware most teenage girls believe their moms hate them and are out to ruin their lives.

  The thing about my mom is that she really does. Hate me, that is, and wish my life will one day be ruined the way I ruined hers. She wasn’t always this way, the definition of a dried up, ball busting, daughter loathing, career woman. In fact, the day my father became a borderline shut-in with some serious issues, I lost the woman who used to leave napkin notes in my lunch box that were signed heart, Mom.

  That person was never coming back, but I still found myself wishing she would whenever I slid my tray through the lunch line and grabbed a handful of napkins.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Some people had roosters. Others had alarm clocks.

  I had The Beatles.

  My dad was as prompt as he was predictable, and this morning “Come Together” was playing at three quarter volume, which meant it was seven a.m. For a teenager on summer vacation, The Beatles were as welcome as a fire alarm blasting into my ear at the crack of dawn.

  Groaning my way out of bed, I slid into the first pair of matching sandals I could locate. A smear of chapstick and a quick tear through my hair with my fingers and I was ready for the morning. The invention of the yoga pant and the pairing with a tank top ranked on my list of top ten most life changing inventions. The stretchy duo served as sleepwear, exercise attire, everyday duds, and the perfect outfit for a morning in the dance studio.

  There were a lot of things I could go without—shampoo, candy corns, red toe nail polish, sleep . . . hell, boys—before I could go without dance. Ballet to be specific, but not inclusive. Any and every opportunity I got, I was dancing. I’d been breaking, hip-hopping, waltzing, tangoing, and pirouetting my way through life since age three.