This Girl

I have a grip on the edge of the table that is so tight, I don’t even notice until Lake taps my leg and glances down at my hands. I release the table from my grasp and close my eyes, breathing slow and steady. Her confession should give me nothing but relief, knowing that my bout of jealousy will now be played off as if I were protecting her. However, I’m anything but relieved. I’m furious. Javier is lucky his ass isn’t in here, because there would have been an extremely detailed reenactment of last night right in this office.



Lake continues sharing her version of the story, but I don’t hear another word of it. I do my best to hold it together until everyone’s dismissed, but it’s the hardest five minutes I’ve ever had to contain myself. As soon as they dismiss her, Mr. Cruz and Officer Venturelli follow her out the door. I stand up in my seat and let out a breath. I pace back and forth under the intense gaze of Mr. Murphy. I’m not able to speak yet due to the rage coursing through me, so I continue to pace and he continues to silently watch me.



“Mr. Cooper,” he says calmly, “do you have anything else to add or is her version accurate?”



I pause and look at him. “I wish it wasn’t accurate,” I say, “but unfortunately it is.”



“Will,” Mr. Murphy says. “You did the right thing. Quit being so hard on yourself. Javier was completely out of line and if you weren’t there to stop him, there’s no telling what would have happened to that girl.”



“Is he being expelled?” I ask, stopping to grip the back of the chair.



Mr. Murphy stands and walks to the door where Officer Venturelli is outside speaking with Mr. Cruz. He closes the door and turns toward me. “We can’t expel him. He’s claiming it was a misunderstanding and he thought she wanted him to kiss her. We’ll suspend him for a few days for the fight, but that’s the extent of his punishment.”



I nod, very aware that what I’m about to do is the only answer at this point. There’s no way I can ever be in the same room with Javier again and not have it end badly.



“Then I’d like to resign,” I say evenly.



16.



the honeymoon



“YOU WILLINGLY RESIGNED?” Lake asks, dumbfounded. “I thought it was a mutual agreement. They would have let you keep your job, Will. Why the hell did you resign?”



“Lake, there’s no way I could have continued teaching there. I’d reached my breaking point. I was going to get fired one of two ways if I hadn’t resigned that day.”



“Why do you think that?”



“Because it’s true. They would have fired me the first day Javier returned to school because I would have kicked his ass the moment I laid eyes on him. That, or they would have fired me because one more second in a room with you and I would have jumped you, but in a completely different way.”



She laughs. “Yeah. The tension was intense. We would have lost control eventually.”



“Eventually? We lost control that same day,” I say, reminding her of our incident in the laundry room.



She frowns and closes her eyes, then sighs a deep sigh.



“What’s wrong?” I ask her.



She shakes her head. “Nothing. It’s just hard thinking about that night. It really hurt,” she whispers.



I kiss her lightly on the forehead. “I know. I’m sorry.”



laundry room



I SOMEHOW MADE it to the end of the workday without getting suspended, fired, or arrested. I’d say being transferred to Detroit to finish out my student teaching is one of the best outcomes I could have anticipated.



I pull into the driveway and the boys are helping Lake and Julia with groceries. I haven’t even made it out of the car yet when Caulder meets me at the door, beaming with excitement.



“Will!” he says, grabbing my hand. “Wait till you see this!”



I walk across the street with him and grab the rest of the sacks and take them inside. When I set them down, I notice the contents aren’t groceries. It looks like sewing supplies.



“Guess what we’re going to be for Halloween?” Caulder says.



“Uh—”



“Julia’s cancer!” he yells.



Did I just hear him right?



Julia walks into the room with her sewing machine and I give her a questioning look.



“You only live once, right?” She smiles and places the sewing machine on the bar.



“She’s letting us make the tumors for the lungs,” Kel says. “You want to make one? I’ll let you make the big one.”



I don’t even know how to respond. “Uh—”



“Kel,” Lake interrupts. “Will and Caulder can’t help, they’ll be out of town all weekend.”Seeing the excitement on Caulder’s face, there’s nowhere I’d rather be than right here. “Actually, that was before I found out we were making lung cancer,” I say. “I think we’ll have to reschedule our trip.”



“WHERE’S YOUR MEASURING tape?” Lake asks Julia.



“I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t know if I have one, actually.”



I have measuring tape, so I try to think of a way to get Lake to come with me to get it. I know she’s dying to know what happened today and I owe her a huge apology for acting the way I did toward her last night. She had experienced what was more than likely a horrifying event alone with Javi, and I acted like a jerk the entire way home. I was trying to refrain from yelling at her last night, when I should have been consoling her.



“Will has one. We can use his,” Lake says. “Will, do you mind getting it?”



I play dumb. “I have measuring tape?”



She rolls her eyes. “Yes, it’s in your sewing kit.”



“I have a sewing kit?”



“It’s in your laundry room.” She spreads the material out in front of her. “It’s next to the sewing machine on the shelf behind your mother’s patterns. I put them in chronological order according to pattern nu— Never mind,” she says quickly. She shakes her head and stands. “I’ll just show you.”



Thank you.



I quickly jump up, maybe a little too eagerly.



“You put his patterns in chronological order?” Julia asks.



“I was having a bad day,” Lake says over her shoulder.



I hold the door for Lake, then close it behind us. She turns around and completely loses her calm demeanor. “What happened? God, I’ve been worried sick all day,” she says.



“I got a slap on the wrist,” I say as we walk toward my house. “They told me since I was defending another student, they couldn’t really hold it against me.”



I jog a few steps and open my front door for her, stepping aside to let her in.



“That’s good. What about your internship?” she asks.



“Well, it’s a little tricky. The only available ones they had in Ypsilanti were all primary. My major is secondary, so I’ve been placed at a school in Detroit.”



She looks up at me, her eyes full of concern. “What’s that mean? Are y’all moving?”



I love the fact that the thought of our moving scares her so bad. I laugh. “No, Lake, we’re not moving. It’s just for eight weeks. I’ll be doing a lot of driving, though. I was actually going to talk to you and your mom about it later. I’m not going to be able to take the boys to school, or pick them up either. I’ll be gone a lot. I know this isn’t a good time to ask for your help—”



“Stop it. You know we’ll help.” She grabs the tape measure and shuts the box, then walks the kit back to the laundry room. I follow her, but I’m not sure why I feel compelled to. I’m afraid she’s about to head straight back to her house and I still have so much left I need to say to her. I walk into the laundry room behind her and pause in the doorway. She’s staring quietly in front of her, running her fingers across my mother’s patterns. She’s got that distant look in her eyes again. I lean against the doorframe and watch her.



I still can’t believe I thought she would willingly allow Javi to kiss her, especially after seeing my performance last night. I know her better than that, and she knows she deserves so much better than Javi.



Hell, she deserves so much better than me.



She reaches to the wall and flicks off the light, then turns toward me. She comes to a halt when she sees that I’m blocking the doorway. She quietly gasps and looks up at me, her beautiful green eyes full of hope again. She scrolls her eyes over my features, searching my face, waiting for me to either speak or move out of her way. I don’t want to do either. All I want to do is take her in my arms and show her how I feel about her, but I can’t. She stares up at me, slowly dropping her gaze to my mouth. She tugs on her bottom lip with her teeth and nervously darts her eyes to the floor.



I’ve never wanted to be teeth so bad in my entire life.



I take a deep breath and prepare to get out what I need to say, despite knowing I shouldn’t say it. I just need her to know why I did what I did last night, and why I acted the way I acted. I fold my arms across my chest and prop my foot against the doorway, looking down at it. Avoiding eye contact with her is probably best right now, considering my lack of resolve at the moment. It’s been a while since we’ve been alone in a situation like this. The way things have been going the past few weeks, I had myself convinced that I was stronger than I am, and that I’ve overcome the weakness I feel when I’m around her.



I was completely wrong.



My heart slams against my chest at record speed and I’m consumed by an insatiable desire to grab her by the waist and pull her to me. I hug myself tighter in an attempt to keep my hands to myself. I work my jaw back and forth, hell bent on finding a way to bury my urge to confess to her, but I can’t. The words spill out of me before I can stop them.



“Last night,” I say, my voice cracking the tension like a sledgehammer. “When I saw Javi kissing you . . . I thought you were kissing him back.”



I swing my eyes to her, searching for a reaction. Any reaction. I know how she tries to hide what she’s feeling more than any other person I’ve ever met.



Her eyes widen at the realization that I wasn’t defending her at all last night. I was reacting like a possessive boyfriend, not her knight in shining armor.



“Oh,” she says.



“I didn’t know the whole story until this morning, when you told your version,” I say. I don’t know how I held myself together in the office this morning when I found out. All I wanted to do was lunge across the table and punch Javi’s father across the jaw for raising such an asshole. Just thinking about it causes my blood to boil. I inhale a deep breath, filling my lungs to their maximum capacity before huffing out a sigh. I notice my hands are clenched into tight fists, so I relax them and run my hands through my hair, turning to face her.



“God, Lake. I can’t tell you how pissed I was. I wanted to hurt him so bad. And now? Now that I know he really was hurting you? I want to kill him.” I lean my head back against the doorframe and close my eyes. I have to get the thought of him out of my head. He hurt her, and I wasn’t there in time to protect her. The image of him pressing his mouth to hers against her will is clear in my mind, as is the fact that his lips were the last to touch hers. She doesn’t deserve to be kissed like that. She deserves to be kissed by someone who loves her. Someone who spends every waking moment trying to do everything right by her. Someone who would rather die than see her hurt. She doesn’t deserve to be kissed by anyone other than me.

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