"I doubt she'd be much help anyway," she says.
"Excuse me?"
"Alzheimer's," she whispers. "I'm not supposed to tell you that, but hers is pretty advanced. She doesn't remember anybody these days."
"How long has she been with you?" Somehow I know before I've even asked the question that the answer will only make things worse.
"Well, I'm not supposed to release that kind of information either," she says, and then her voice drops to a whisper again. "But it's been a little over four years."
Olivia wasn't even out of high school yet. So who was raising her all those years? And where are her parents?
I'm distracted through dinner at Jessica's that night. The minute I think I'm beginning to grasp what Olivia's been through, it just gets worse.
"What kind of work did you have to do last night anyway?" Jessica asks, pulling my attention back to her.
My intentions were completely innocent with Olivia. And had it all stayed that way I'd probably tell Jessica the truth.
Except that it hadn't.
Because something changed in me when I caught her last night. And then it changed again, in a far more dangerous way, this morning. When I saw her asleep in my bed, her back bare, her breathing even, her hair spread over the pillow …
I've tried a hundred times to block the image. And the one that followed, when she sat up and the sheet slid to her waist.
I can't.
It's pretty much all I've thought about all day, despite my best efforts. It's left me feeling as if a small crack has formed, a fault line, one that could grow into something unmanageable.
It's the first time in the year we've dated that I tell Jessica a lie.
22
Olivia
I run hard for him the next day.
I follow his every command to the letter. In the end, when he has not a single criticism to offer, I feign shock.
"Wow. Nothing shitty to say? Does that mean you were actually pleased?"
"You know you did well," he says. "Don't fish for compliments."
"I'm pretty sure it's the only way to get them out of you," I gripe.
"Try running like that in the meet and the compliments will flow freely."
My mouth goes into a hard line. "Awesome. So basically, as soon as I'm able to stop doing something in my sleep I don't even know I'm doing, that's when you'll be pleased."
He sighs, pinching his nose between thumb and forefinger. I know his moods now, his tells. He does this when he's frustrated, and when he's about to face something he doesn't want to face.
"Go shower and come to my office."
I can't imagine what he thinks a talk in his office will accomplish. He's probably going to send me back to that idiotic counselor, who will send me off with some stupid fucking homework. Last time, I was supposed to list things that make me happy. "Like bubble baths," she'd said. "Doesn't a nice bubble bath make you happy?" I told her a bubble bath would make me feel like I was wasting valuable time, which still makes me laugh although she didn't seem to appreciate that much.
He's waiting for me, sitting behind his desk and looking grim.
"I'm not going back to the counselor if that's what this is about."
He runs a hand through his hair and almost smiles. "Yes, you've made your feelings about her known."
"So what do you want me to do? The only thing that ever works is keeping myself up, which usually fails, or running the night before the meet. Sometimes if I do six just before bed, I'm tired enough-"
"No, I want you fresh, and that'll just give me some version of the half-assed running you give me when you've had a nightmare."
I frown at him. "So what's your magic solution then?"
"You're going to stay with my mom."
"With your mom?" I scoff. "Are you crazy? I punched you! What would I do to her? And how could she possibly stop me?"
"I'll be there too." His shoulders sag a little. "It still looks bad, but no one needs to know I was there. I'll sleep on the couch so you can't get by without me hearing."
The effort he is making causes something to tighten and twist in my chest, a small pain that radiates outward and makes me long to walk away from this whole conversation. "You shouldn't have to do all that," I mumble.
///
"I want to."
When I reluctantly meet his gaze, I see how badly he wants me to succeed-not for him, but for me. The pain in my chest gets worse, and I look away. "Okay," I mumble, a single word that doesn't begin to express what I am feeling. No one has ever made an effort for me.
Until now.
He picks me up on Friday at 6 p.m.
"This is embarrassing," I mutter as I put on my seatbelt.
"What's embarrassing?"
"Your mom is going to think I'm some kind of freak."
"And she'd be wrong to think that because ...?" he asks with a grin.
I give him my most menacing look, which he seems to now be impervious to, annoyingly enough.
"She's not going to think you're a freak," he continues. "My brother used to sleepwalk when he was little. It's not that different."
It's actually really fucking different, but okay.
"Have you eaten?" he asks.
"Yes."
"What did you have?"
"Oatmeal."
"It's the night before a meet," he grumbles. "You can't possibly think that's enough food, not after what happened last time."
I shrug. "Last time was sort of an anomaly."
"You are aware that 'anomaly' means 'an unusual occurrence,' right?"
"That's why I said 'sort of' an anomaly," I argue.
"And that's why you're 'sort of' going to eat dinner at my mom's house."
It's surprising how quickly the town becomes rural once you move away from campus. It reminds me of where my grandmother lived, the endless roads with nothing but farmland and forest on either side. He pulls onto a bumpy gravel road littered with potholes that send me bouncing toward the ceiling of his truck, and in the distance I see a small house and a substantial barn.
"This is where you grew up?" I ask.
"Yes, I suppose you have some smart-ass comment about it?"
I did, but now that he's called me on it I'm inclined to keep it to myself. "No," I say huffily. "I was going to say it looks nice."
"Right." He jumps out of the truck, leaving me to follow.
The house seems substantially larger on the inside, like some kind of "Alice in Wonderland" trick of perception. There's a big living room with a kitchen on the right, bedrooms to the left.
His mom comes out of the kitchen. "You must be Olivia," she says. "I'm Dorothy." She hugs me with so much enthusiasm I feel certain Will has kept a number of details about me to himself. She tells us it's a while until dinner and suggests we go out for a quick horseback ride, which he greets with a look of disgust.
I huff in exasperation. "Am I really that awful, Will?" I demand. "You're acting like she just asked you to give me both kidneys."
"It's the night before a meet. You might get sore."
"I spent the whole summer riding horses. I'll be fine."
"Okay, Olivia," he says with just a touch of acid to his voice. "Would you care to go horseback riding?"
I walk out the front door without bothering to reply.
"Do you even know how to saddle a horse?" he asks, coming out behind me.
"Are you seriously asking me this question? Did you think I was just going to jump on bareback and take off?"
"Right, how silly of me, when you have such a reputation for restraint and good judgment."
I march toward the stables, trying to ignore him. The smell hits me first. It is, without a doubt, an unpleasant smell, hay and manure and grass baked in sunshine, the faint smell of leather beneath it. But the memories it brings back are good ones. I spent summers as a girl cleaning out the stables down the road from my grandmother's house. I got to ride in the afternoons when I was done, worth far more to me than the crappy pay I got for doing it.
He puts me on Trixie, who looks so docile I'm not sure she'll even wake up long enough to be ridden.
"Don't even think about going faster than a trot," he warns.
I roll my eyes. "I doubt this horse is able to trot," I retort.
I can tell he's assessing my seat, and the only sign of approval I get is his eventual decision to ride ahead.
I'd like to ignore the fact that he looks good riding a horse, really good, but cannot. He wears the hell out of a pair of jeans on his worst day, and even 20 feet behind him I can see the definition of his arms. I have a sudden desire to sneak up behind him and press my nose just to the nape of his neck, just below where his hair is shaved close. A small shiver brushes over my arms at the thought.
I don't want him.
I don't.
I don't want his bossiness and his bad temper and the way his upper lip curls when he's mad at me. Half the time I'd just as soon kick him in the balls as fuck him. I need to focus on the part of me that wants to watch him writhe in pain because right now, at this precise moment, the other part is winning easily.