Chapter Ten
My fingers clawed into my scalp as if that would release the answers from my brain. Mallory had decided I needed a pop quiz. Or that’s what she called it. It was more like a final exam. How was I supposed to remember all this shit?
Okay, think, Aaron. I tried to recall the day we talked about this. Mallory’s brilliant idea of mixing my baseball knowledge with historical events helped. If I could remember anything. Test anxiety never bothered me before, but this was an unusual situation. It didn’t help that the drumming in my knee intensified the harder I tried to remember. It also didn’t help to think about baseball.
Bay of Pigs invasion. Pigs. There was a movie about a pig. Babe, that was it. Roger Maris broke Babe Ruth’s home run record in 1961. The light bulb dinged in my head. That was the year of the Bay of Pigs invasion.
My head almost fell off at the next question: What year was JFK assassinated?
I spent several minutes trying to sort through it but came up with nothing.
The next forty minutes went the same. I finally handed the test back to Mallory, more exhausted than after dead lifting for an hour. Leaning back in my seat, I propped my leg on a chair and closed my eyes.
Mallory shook me awake a few minutes later. I yawned, stretching my arms over my head.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
She bent toward me and put her hand on my forehead. I inhaled her scent, a soft perfume of wildflowers and meadows. It took what little energy I had left not to lean in to her neck. The gentle touch of her palm on my forehead didn’t help any, either. I closed my eyes, imagining her hand sliding down my face. God, even my imagination was turned on.
“No fever.” She lifted her hand from my head.
I opened my eyes and stared at her, holding her with my gaze. “I’m just tired after the day I’ve had.”
“What happened?” She sat back in her chair.
The usual. Hurt my knee again. Oh, and I woke up from a one-night stand with a woman whose name I can’t remember. Yeah, telling her that was not a good idea. “Was almost late for class and ran to beat Monroe into the room.”
She nodded and bit her lower lip. “He hates it when his students are late.”
“He hates me, Mal,” I said.
Her eyes widened as if I’d slapped her in the face. I assumed it was because she idolized Dr. Monroe. I was wrong.
“Please don’t call me that,” she said. Each word laced with distress. The kind that only comes out when something unexpected happens. The kind that bears emotional scars that don’t ever heal.
“Okay.” My fingers curled into the fabric of my joggers. It was the only way to keep them to myself. “But can I ask why?”
She stared past me, lost in whatever memory the nickname conjured. Her eyes aged while I watched her. The twenty-one-year-old girl with a brilliant mind turned into an old soul, like she’d seen more in her brief life than I ever would in mine. When she didn’t seem capable of returning to the here and now on her own, I took the risk and reached out, resting my fingers on her forearm.
“Mallory?” I whispered, not wanting to startle her.
Her head snapped toward me, as if only now realizing that I was there. She glanced down to where my fingers touched her skin and pulled her arm out from beneath my hand. The trance was broken, but so was she. I’d thought I’d seen it before, but the darkness that filled her eyes confirmed it. “My…dad used to call me that.”
I zeroed in on the key words: used to. As in not any more.
“So how’d I do, Miss Fine?” I asked to change the subject. Little nuggets of information were all I needed. Take down the wall one brick at a time.
She sucked her lower lip into her mouth and focused on the test, blinking as if it was the first time she’d seen it. “Not as good as I’d hoped.” Back to business. “You passed, but you can do better.”
For the next ten minutes, she went over the questions I got wrong, careful to praise the ones I got right. We were only halfway through the test when I yawned again. Then my stomach growled. I hadn’t eaten anything since the burger at lunch.
Mallory smiled, the anguish that held her face captive a moment ago disappearing. “Sounds like you need to eat.”
The idea to ask her to join me again jumped into my head. I couldn’t be as direct as last time, so I decided to go with honest. “Mallory, listen, I got your message the other day. And I’m not asking you out, okay? Just so we’re clear.”
Her face stayed passive while she waited for the other shoe to drop.
Taking a deep breath, I continued, “But I would like us to be friends. And friends hang out, right?”
At that she nodded, still wary of where I was going with this. The tension in her face drew lines into her forehead that could cut ice from the Arctic.
“So, as friends, why don’t we go get something to eat? You can continue to chastise me about my test scores if you want.” I mentally begged her to say yes. She got me. She listened when I talked. She gave a shit about what I said, too. And I wanted to know more about her. I needed to know everything about her.
“I…” Her head dropped, and she twisted her fingers into a pretzel. I leaned down to get a better look at her expression. It wasn’t pained, but it wasn’t happy, either. It was like she was working out a puzzle. “I don’t know if I can.”
“Why?” I asked as gently as I could. My need to understand her was an incurable disease.
Mallory lifted her head, locking onto me like a missile. “I’m not good at this. At friends.”
“You seem to be fine around those other girls. And with Hipster…your boyfriend?”
“My… What’re you talking about?” Her eyebrows furrowed together, creating a mini Grand Canyon between them.
“Faux hawk dude.” I ran my hand over my head as if that explained the hair.
Her face brightened. “You must mean Chandler.”
Chandler? He even has a hipster name. I kept my face relaxed, grateful the ability to read minds stayed in comics.
“Chandler’s just another education major. We’re…acquaintances.”
“Not friends?” I tapped my fingers on the table in a poor attempt not to show how happy this new information made me.
“I don’t have a lot of friends, Aaron.” Mallory slouched in her seat. “Not like you mean. Most of the people you’ve seen me with are just in my classes, and we sometimes study together.”
“You do fine around me,” I encouraged.
She huffed. “I’m tutoring you. Study buddies.”
“Then why teach?”
“I told you, I want to share what I know, and I want to teach college. But I need to get a job to get through the master’s and doctorate programs.” With a huge sigh, Mallory sat up and squeezed her hands together. “Tutoring won’t pay enough for that.”
“You’re a great teacher. I watched you… That sounds creepy, but I got here early that one day we were going to meet, and I saw you with the freshmen comp kids. You were amazing.” She smiled, and I took that as a sign to push a little. “Come with me to the lounge. I’ll eat, you tutor. If you feel like eating, great. If not, that’s fine, too. If you decide you can’t stand being around me in public, then you can leave and it won’t hurt my feelings. No commitment. No worries. Nothing you don’t want to do.” I moved to the edge of my chair, ready to throw it all out there. “I really like you, Mallory. You don’t put up with my bullshit. I don’t have enough people in my life like that. If that means I can only be your friend, I’m okay with it. But I’d like to be something, anything you want me to be. We can take our time. Get to really know each other.”
The debate waged in her eyes as she stared at me. I didn’t look away. She needed to know I wasn’t lying to her. If she couldn’t be anything more than my tutor, I’d take another history class and fail it. Just to hang around her. Mallory made me smile. She made me laugh. I liked how easy she was to hang out with. No pretensions. No ideals to live up to.
“Okay,” she said. “But no promises.”
The grin exploding on my face could’ve lit the plains of Africa. “No promises.”
We gathered our books and waited for the elevator in silence. When the doors dinged, the memory of the last time we were inside it rushed to my head. The feel of her lips on mine, her hands on my shoulders. I shook it off. Maybe I’d get to taste her lip gloss again, but not now. And it would have to be her move, not mine.
“And I like you, too,” she said. “You’re not the jackass I expected you to be.”
“Thanks.” I grinned and glanced at her out of the corner of my eyes. “I think.”
The doors closed and the agonizing descent began. We both stared forward at the carnival mirrors. I watched her reflection in the unpolished chrome. She rocked on her feet, a move I already knew meant she was nervous and maybe even a little scared.
“I never see you around campus at night,” I said in order to start a conversation that didn’t revolve around baseball or history.
She sucked her lip into her mouth. God, I wanted to suck it back out. “I live off campus.”
“Student housing?”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. Her eyebrows furrowed for several minutes before she elaborated. “My grandmother’s house. When she left to take care of Aunt Chrissy, she planned on being gone for a month at the most. It’s been three years.” She took a deep breath as the elevator stuttered to a stop. “What about you?”
“Um, I’m in Donaldson Hall.”
“That’s right, the athletic dorm.”
“Yeah, the athletes-live-on-campus rule sucks, but it’s cool that my teammates aren’t far away. History lesson for you.” Mallory raised her eyebrows. “That rule was enacted a few years after my dad fell down the steps at his frat. Blew out his knee and ruined his playing career.”
She squinted at me. “Is that true?”
“Every last word. Keeping the athletes on campus made it easier to enforce the curfews, too. Dad’s accident was just the first in a string of events that led to the rule change.” I tried to catch her eyes in the reflection. The elevator lurched again, heading down to the first floor. “See, this isn’t so bad, is it?”
Mallory laughed, and my heart swelled. I needed to hear that more. I needed to be the one to make that happen again. And it made me want to hear her moan beneath me. My body responded in its natural way, and I tried to put out the fire by thinking about the ethics paper due in a few days.
“How’s your knee?” Mallory asked, thankfully distracting me from my horny thoughts.
“It hurts, but it’s getting better, I think.” I leaned against the wall, wishing I hadn’t lied. My chances of playing diminished each day. But she didn’t want to hear any of my personal hell. “My therapist was pissed at me for running to class today. Barry didn’t help. He was more than happy to help her bitch me out.”
Mallory turned to face me as the doors opened to the first floor. She stepped out and waited until I was beside her. “Who’s Barry, and why was he with you?”
“He’s our first baseman. He drove me, since I can’t drive my truck yet.”
She raised her eyebrows.
“It’s a stick shift.”
She furrowed her brow, then nodded as if she got it. “Oh. That was nice of him.”
“Teammates stick together. Like a second family, you know?” I held the door for her as we stepped into the chilly October night.
“Yeah, actually I do.” Mallory clutched her sweater tighter around her chest.
The lounge wasn’t far from the library, but the cold seeped into my skin as soon as the doors closed behind us. We took our time. She led the way at a slow pace, which I suspected she did deliberately. We walked in silence for several minutes when my phone buzzed a text message.
“Shit,” I said as I read it.
Mallory stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. “What is it? Do you need to go?”
I glanced up at her. Her expressions were so varied that I couldn’t tell what she was really thinking. “No, but I forgot that the World Series starts tonight. I lost track of what day it was. The guys are going to be at the lounge. We don’t have to sit with them, though.”
My gut tightened. She could turn around and walk away. I wouldn’t blame her. She’d made it clear how she felt about the game. I didn’t want to force her to do something she was uncomfortable doing. Mallory’s expression shifted a million times before settling on one that I recognized so well. Determination.
“Okay. I think I can deal with that,” she said.
“Can I ask you another question?” Instinct told me to tiptoe around this subject, but curiosity ruled my brain. “Why don’t you like the game?”
Mallory stopped and faced me. Her eyes closed as she took a deep breath. This was going to be big. At least for her. When she opened them, the determination tightened the skin around her mouth.
“For a…huge part of my life, it seemed as if that was all anybody cared about. My dad spent more time with the game than he did with me. No matter what I did, what I accomplished, the game came first. I tried but…” Her fingers closed around the silver locket resting on her chest. “Softball… for him, it wasn’t the same.”
“Yeah, I get it.” My gaze shifted away from hers as I confessed something I’d never said to anyone. “My dad…he was heading to the pros before he blew out his leg. He pushed me hard to improve. Don’t get me wrong, I love baseball. Sometimes, though, it’s like he’s trying to live out his dreams through me.”
Mallory touched my arm, and I stared into her eyes. Her fingers slid down until they wrapped around mine. Her lip quivered as she squeezed then let go.
I smiled, saddened by the fact that this was harder for her than I realized and thrilled that she was making the effort. Chuck, as much as I hated to admit it, had been right. This girl was damaged. I just hoped she wasn’t beyond repair.