Slow Twitch - Реинхардт Лиз (бесплатные серии книг .txt) 📗

“It’s a shit job,” she said quietly.

I reached out and made a move to put my hand to her face, but I was watching to see if she was going to flinch or give me that deserved right jab. She bit her bottom lip and closed her eyes. I pushed her hair out of her eyes and cupped my hand under her pointy little chin. Her skin was unbelievably soft and warm. She nestled her face on my palm for a minute.

“I’ve had shittier.” It broke the spell.

She pulled away from my hand, and I could still feel the residual heat from her cheek on the skin of my palm and up along my thumb.

“Alright.” She nodded. “I guess we should do it, then.”

She got up and pressed her fingers hard under her still-watering eyes, wiping away the leftover mascara. She went through some boxes and fished out a few white t-shirts and black pants, then pulled over three pairs of skates, black with red wheels.

They were the old-fashioned, four-wheeled kind. I had skated on them before, but way back when I was a kid. Even roller blades and hockey skates were about five years in my past.

“You need to try them on,” she said. “Everyone likes a different fit. And it’s not as easy as matching shoe size.”

I put them all on and watched her while I laced up. Some of the enormous wall she had put up was slowly crumbling down.

I wanted to see her smile.

I wanted to see her naked.

I looked at her and grinned, and I got my first wish. She obviously had no idea what perverted things I was thinking.

“I think these are the pair.” I moved my ankles back and forth, hoping I chose a good size. I unlaced them and stuffed my feet back in my sneakers. “Mind if I go around the parking lot a few times before I become your private clown tomorrow?”

She nodded, bit her lip cutely, and tossed me that unbelievably sexy smile. We walked up the stairs, our hands just barely brushing.

By the time we were upstairs, the restaurant was fairly deserted. It was late on a Friday night, and everyone had somewhere to be. Except one juvenile delinquent and the kids of two harried restaurant owners. Pamela and Jimmy leaned against the Jetta, waiting patiently. When I sat to put my skates on, Jimmy laughed.

“Oh, man, that sucks. Did my mom make you?” He was almost shaky with lanky excitement.

“Kind of.” I tied the laces tight, stood up, and moved forward awkwardly. Pamela ended her phone conversation and hooted.

“Now try it with a tray of food and drinks,” she taunted good-naturedly.

I clomped around the parking lot a little, once in a while glancing down at the unforgiving cement that would be my unquestioned fate if I couldn’t keep on my feet.

Or wheels. Whatever.

I started to go faster, and as soon as I got a sense of my balance, I was racing and it felt good. Soccer season seemed like it had been a hundred years ago, and I hadn’t been on a dirt bike in months. This was as close to flying as I’d come, at least physically, in a long time.

Jimmy and Pamela cheered and encouraged me to do stupid shit in a way that’s probably the copyright of idiot teenagers. I closed in on a cement barricade, put my feet together, and propelled myself over it. Even Cadence cheered at that one.

“More! More!” Jimmy chanted.

The bright white parking lot lights flooded the cement circle with dizzying blue-white brilliance, and the hot air leftover from the long summer day sizzled off the blacktop and was pushed away by the cool air of the late night. It was just me and the Eriksons and the moths, hanging out in the lonely, nearly empty parking lot of their parents’ place.

I skated fast and hard toward a planter that was at least three feet high and jumped it with the worried screams of Pamela and Cadence and the crowing encouragement of Jimmy in my ears. I sailed over, landed fine, but couldn’t stop my own momentum, and wound up slamming into the side of the building.

“Stop!” Cadence laughed. “Stop! You’re going to break your leg, and then who will I force to work with me tomorrow?”

I rubbed my shoulder and shook my head. “You’re a cold-hearted snake, Cadence,” I said and unlaced the skates. I put then in the little booth that was no man’s land, the skater’s hovel, the little piece of random turf between the interior of the restaurant and the screeching cars and chaos of the customers outside. I slid inside Pamela’s car, stuffing my feet into my shoes as I went.

Cadence didn’t plaster herself to her door on this particular night. She didn’t curl into my lap like I would have liked either, but it was nice that she was giving me the benefit of some of her company. She put her hand down on the portion of the seat that was technically between us, but if you were a calculating bastard like myself, you would have noticed that her fingertips were just a quarter of an inch closer to my side than to hers.

I tilted my body toward the middle, and she leaned over too. We made a strange double pyramid, inches from touching at the crowns of our heads and growing apart slightly with every inch downward, then closer again at our legs and feet. When she looked up at me, there was something in her eyes that hadn’t been there before. Maybe it was friendship. Hell, I would take that happily this time around.

I abandoned any hope of getting her into my bed. I abandoned any hope of seducing her in other ways. For once, I knew that I could do with her what I’d never quite had the guts to do with Brenna.

I could fall for her more than just a little and pull her into falling for me. And if it all worked without a hitch, we would fall right into each other’s arms and mean something.

At that point, in Pamela’s backseat, it was just a promise of things that might come and nothing more. But I was willing to bank on that promise. When Pamela pulled up at Aunt Helene’s house, I swear I saw a glint of regret in Cadence’s eyes. Whether or not we were going to admit it, we were pulling together.

“I’ll see you tomorrow.” I slammed my door and looked back in through the open window.

Cadence pulled at her hair, smoothing it over and over in her hands, then nodded. “Tomorrow. Saxon,” she added.

Thatwas the way I had imagined my name sounding on her lips.

I gave a short wave and walked up the stairs to the food I knew would be warming for me in the oven. God bless my fucking saint of an aunt.

The next morning, I put new shelving in Aunt Helene’s linen closet. Whoever had done it the first time must have been on meth. I should have known, considering the number of tweakers I’d been around in my short career as a dealer.

It was strangely comforting to go through the motions; cut the shelf, cover it in the smelly flower paper Aunt Helene gave me, measure the brackets out, drill the holes, set the shelves up, fold the linens back onto them.

The house was starting to look a hell of a lot better. It had been my idea to paint the mismatched chairs in the dining room one color. Okay, technically it was Cassidy Adams’s idea. She was the dipshit host of some Home and Garden Television show Aunt Helene loved, and I watched it with her. It seemed weird to me to love something like Home and Garden TV when you lived in a craphole. It was like watching the Food Network and eating Chef Boyardee. So when Aunt Helene saw something she liked, I got my shit together and we did it.

Like the dining room chairs. Then the painting on the walls. Then the molding, all set up in fancy rectangles with corners that took me a few hellish hours to get right. Then the chandelier that I almost electrocuted myself putting up. We found an old piece-of-shit buffet thing that I stripped and refinished and put new wallpaper inserts in where the doors were recessed (another Cassidy Adams idea). When I was done hanging up pictures of her parents that I had scanned, enlarged, and framed, Aunt Helene cried.