Helens-of-Troy (19 page)

“Ryan was a bit of a jerk to Ellie this
afternoon. I’m leaving him alone to think about it,” he finally
answered Helena.

Sure you are, Helena thought, but she
gave no indication that she was any the wiser.

“So that’s why Ellie has been in a foul
mood since she got home,” she offered, holding the kitchen door
open for him. “I wondered what was up. Go on, do tell. Do I have to
box his ears?” She propped herself up against the island in the
kitchen and waited for his answer.

“Huh?”

“It’s an expression my own mother used
to say. Let me translate. Do I have to smack Ryan up the side of
his head?”

Tom looked uncomfortably at Helena. He
didn’t really want to talk about it, but she had him cornered. “He
just said some stuff. He didn’t mean it. You know how he is. He
thinks he’s being funny. He is kind of funny...to me, but to
girls...”

“Girls not so much, hmm?” She pulled a
chair out for Tom. “Sit.” She waited for him to do so before
continuing. “Would he have said it to me? I appreciate a good
stand-up routine. Was it that kind of funny?”

Tom squirmed uncomfortably in the
chair.

“I take it that’s a no.” She moved and
took a seat across from him at the table. “Relax, Tom. I know
Ryan's harmless. His libido and his mouth just work faster than his
brain. There's nothing so strange about that in a sixteen-year-old.
Male or female. I’m sure Ellie’s heard it all before. A simple
apology can go a long way. Tell him to try it.”

“Well,” Tom confessed. “We were both
kind of jerks.”

“I kind of figured that,” Helena said.
“Do you want to tell me about it?”

“No,” he laughed nervously.

Helena leaned forward, her green eyes
gazing intently into Tom’s. “Once upon a time I was a teenager
myself. There’s not much that you can get up to that I haven’t seen
or done.” She sat back and smiled knowingly at him.

Tom found himself in the peculiar
position of thinking that Ryan was right about at least two of the
LaRoses. Helena was having an effect on his emotions, and if he
weren’t careful, those emotions would become visible in his tight
jeans. He was pretty sure she knew that. And he wasn’t sure whether
she was doing it on purpose or not.

Helena rose slowly from the table.
“Keep that in mind, Tom Williams,” she said, in a breathy voice
that reminded Tom of a late-night Playboy Channel vixen. “And
remember, I will always be one step ahead of you. Watching. You
hurt my Ellie, you answer to me.”

“Did you just give me ‘the lecture’ in
four sentences?” he asked, not wanting to look her directly in the
eye.

“I believe I did,” she
agreed.

“Well thanks for that. It took Jacey’s
foster parents an hour. Their English isn’t so good. Not that I’m
two-timing Jacey or anything. Or Ellie. Jacey and I are just
friends. Just like Ellie and me. No two-timing here,” he tried to
assure Helena.

“That does make things less
complicated,” Helena agreed. “Jacey lives with foster
parents?”

“She lives with the Kim’s. They’re the
Koreans who own the landscaping business above my dad’s
store.”

“Oh, that’s right. The Kim’s. I heard
something about that, come to think of it. Jacey’s father was in
some kind of accident back in England wasn’t he?”

“Yeah. She doesn’t like to talk about
it though.”

“There’s a lot of that going around.
People talking about things that are superficial and not talking
about things that matter. They say it’s a defense mechanism, but
I’m not so sure it’s effective in the end. A lot of my patients
wind up with ulcers. How did she wind up with the
Kim’s?”

Tom, relieved the conversation topic
had changed to something other than him, was more than willing to
fill Helena in on as many of the details as he knew. “Mr. Kim and
Jacey’s dad were in the war together. Mr. Kim saved her father’s
life. He’s her godfather or something. So when her father died and
there was no one to take care of her, Mr. Kim got Jacey a plane
ticket over here. She’s been with them almost a year
now.”

“Where’s her mother?”

“She doesn’t know. It was a messy
divorce or something.”

“Ooh, I know how that can go. Still,
it’s odd she’d totally abandon her own daughter.”

She thought about that. Helen hadn’t
been much older than the teenagers when she left home and refused
to keep in contact with her. People sometimes had their own reasons
for non-communication.

“I guess they moved around a lot, what
with her dad being in the service. She doesn’t have any other
relatives that she knows of. The Kim’s have become her
family.”

“Well then, I’ll be extra nice when I
finally meet her. I’m sure she and Ellie will get along just fine.
Speaking of Ellie, I guess I’d better get her for you. I’ve held
you captive here long enough.”

She opened the kitchen door and yelled
upstairs. “Ellie. There’s a hot guy down in the kitchen for you and
if you don’t come down right now, I’ll send him up to your mother’s
room.” She looked at Tom and winked. “That ought to get her down
here. She’ll come through that door and give me a look that could
boil water, just you watch. Or Helen will. There are fifty/fifty
odds on that one if you’d care to make a bet.”

Tom laughed.

As if on cue, Ellie’s face turned beet
red when she walked into the kitchen and saw Tom sitting
there.

“Looks like the lobster’s already in
the water,” Helena quipped.

“Nan...” Ellie pleaded. “Please don’t
embarrass me. That’s Mom’s job. It’s the only one she has. Taking
that away from her might push her over the edge.”

“It got you down here, didn’t it?”
Helena said. “And as I am an equal opportunity embarrasser, Tom has
something he wants to say to you. Go ahead Tom. Spit it out. Don’t
just sit there like a goof. It doesn’t become you.”

Tom’s eyebrows rose in surprise. This
wasn’t how he had pictured giving Ellie an apology. “Um,
okay...listen, Ellie, I’m sorry about this afternoon. Ryan and I
making fun of you, I mean.”

“Ellie, accept his apology so I can
leave you two alone. If you need me to kick him out, I can do that,
but I should really change my shoes. The six-inch heels would poke
him in the ass much better, if that’s the way you want to go on
this.”

Ellie rolled her eyes. “No, Nan. It’s
okay.”

“Good.” She turned to Tom. “The four
sentences. Remember them. If I have to cut them down to one, you’re
a dead man,” Helena said, heading into the hallway.

“Gotcha, Mrs. LaRose,” he
said.

“What was that all about?” Ellie
asked.

Tom shrugged. “Never mind. It’ll take
me more than four sentences to explain.”

An awkward silence fell between the two
as Ellie waited for Tom to say something. She hoped he’d make it
quick. She could hear the toilet flush upstairs, followed by the
sound of her mother’s feet thundering down the
staircase.

In the hallway, Helena blocked Helen
from entering the kitchen. “Uh-uh, leave them alone.”

“Them?” Helen asked. She glanced
nervously towards the door.

“Ellie and Tom.”

“Tom’s the ‘hot guy’? Then I’m
definitely going in there.”

“No, you’re not. He's not the demon
seed. You don’t have to go in there like some religious nutcase to
save her from his evil spawn,” Helena said, her voice getting
louder. “Give them some space.”

“You don't know what they'll get up to
in there.”

“I know exactly what they’ll get up
to,” she insisted. Her voice was now quite loud. “That's why we're
staying out here. Hellsbelles, Helen. Must you be
omnipresent?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Well, you don't really want to watch
them try to control their raging hormones do you? I didn’t peg you
as that kind of a voyeur.”

“Mother, really!”

Ellie poked her head momentarily into
the hallways. “Control your own raging hormones. The demon seed and
I can hear you in here!”

Helena pointed her finger angrily at
Helen. “That’s your fault.”

“Trust me, she’s only beginning to find
out what it’s like living under your roof,” Helen growled
back.

“Tom, I’m so sorry you had to hear
that,” Ellie said as she returned to the kitchen. If nothing else,
the Helens outburst had cleared the air between the teenagers.
“Separately they’re bearable, but you put them together in the same
room and...”

Tom laughed. “It's okay. I like them.
Your mom seems a little uptight, but your Nan’s actually... (don’t
say hot)... pretty cool. She calls it as she sees it, that’s for
sure.”

“I guess so.”

“Okay then,” he said, patting the seat
next to him at the table, indicating Ellie should sit down. “Forget
about them. Come over here.”

Ellie was apprehensive. “Why are you
here, Tom? Have you come to see whether they keep Goth-Chic in a
padded room?” She sat in the seat Helena had occupied earlier and
studied him. The blue in his sweater perfectly matched the deep
blue of his eyes. That wasn’t making it any easier to stay mad at
him. She wondered whether he had agonized about what to wear before
coming over. Probably not. Guys weren’t like that.

“You’re looking at my sweater. Do you
like it?”

“Uh huh,” she sighed.

Tom inched his chair closer to her,
“El,” he began, “I'm really sorry about this afternoon. “We
shouldn’t have made fun of your dream. We were all a little
spooked-out down at the gravel pit. It’s not every day we talk
about finding a dead body when, you know, there actually might be
one.” He moved his chair closer to her. “Ryan can be an insensitive
jerk at times. It’s not his fault. He plays defense. He's not
supposed to be nice. It goes against his nature. In fact, they
spend hours out there on the field, training him to desensitize
from humankind. Sometimes he just forgets that the field has
boundaries. Somebody has to call foul on him. Which you
did.”

“I guess so,” Ellie contemplated. She
found herself wondering whether Tom’s hair was streaked naturally,
or had a little help. Not that it mattered.

Tom noticed the dimmer switch on the
wall behind him. With one arm, he reached up and lowered the light.
Following through with a well-practiced move, he began to put his
arm around Ellie with the other.

“Um...what are you doing?” Ellie asked,
her voice quivering. She knew what he was doing. She just wasn’t
sure why he was doing it. She raised her hand between
them.

“Please don’t shock me this time,
Ellie. I like you. Electricity between us is supposed to be
figurative.”

Ellie blushed and looked deep into his
baby blues. She had spent a lot of time earlier hoping and dreaming
that this new guy she met would say something sweet and wonderful
to her, but now that it was actually happening, she found herself
full of reservation. Part of her wanted to say, in a husky, sexy
voice, “you are the finest thing I have seen in my life, take me
now,” but barely audibly out came “I um, I like you
too.”

“Does your Nan have any bandages? I
think I scraped my knee when I fell for you.”

That was enough to give Ellie her voice
back. She couldn’t contain her laughter. “Oh puh-lease. That is the
worst line I have ever heard.”

“I swear it worked for Ryan
once.”

“Who’d he say it to? Another
de-sensitized football player?”

They both laughed.

“How come you hang around with him?”
Ellie asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, if I had seen both your pictures
in a yearbook. I wouldn’t have thought the two of you were friends.
I would have thought you were a ‘Prom King’ and he was more of a
‘Burger King.’”

“Now who’s being insensitive?” Tom
pointed out. His ego was starting to sigh in relief. ‘Burger’ was
probably not the adjective you’d use to describe someone you were
hot for. Whatever had happened between Ellie and Ryan last night
was most likely innocent.

“It’s not like he’s my only friend, but
he is my best friend. He’s a ‘go-to’ guy. I can’t really say any
more about that. You’ll just have to come to your own conclusions
about him. Just give him a chance. A lot of people write Ryan off
way too quickly.”

He reached up and took some of Ellie’s
hair into his hand. “Your hair is so soft,” he said, waiving the
strand under his nose. “And it smells so good.”

Ellie bit her lip nervously. This
wasn’t the first time a guy had come on to her, but it was safe to
say it was the first time one of them looked as
‘oh-my-God-I-can’t-breathe’ to her as this one did.

“I’m also sorry about that fainting
thing the other night,” Tom said, his voice dropping as he put his
chin on her shoulder, and looked up at her.

“It's nothing to be embarrassed about.
I hear it happens to perfectly healthy males from time to time. If
it gets to be a problem, you can take a pill for it,” Ellie
saidbefore the ‘don’t say something stupid’ part of her brain
could kick in. She could feel his breath on her neck, and it was
sending her heartbeat straight to the heavens. It was hard to be
witty when you were trying not to gasp in sheer passion.