SEALed With a Kiss: Even a Hero Needs Help Sometimes... (26 page)

To keep himself from grabbing her, from crushing her against him to feel her breasts and fill his hands with the roundness of her buttocks, Jax brought one hand up to cup the side of Pickett's face.

It was a sweet kiss, a kiss that tested, and teased with nibbles, the corners of her mouth. When her pliant lips opened of their own accord, he slowly swept his tongue just inside her bottom lip, exploring the silken softness, and was rewarded when her tongue darted forth in a shy game of tag. He wanted her. God knows he wanted her, and yet right this minute he wanted this ... he didn't know what to call it...
soft thing more.
Though his lower body clamored to pull her closer, his desire for the simple accord they had in this moment caused him to pull back, keeping his hand at her waist.

He tilted his head toward where his child slept. "So, the bed really is what you wanted, huh?"

"Yes. It looks exactly the way I hoped it would—just right for this room. By the time I give it several coats of polish and find the right spread for it, you'll never know it came from a junk shop." Pickett gave a little gurgle of laughter. "You should have seen your face when we pulled up to Isabel's store."

"I thought you were pulling my leg. I couldn't see you wanting something from a junk store."

They turned toward the stairs. "To tell you the truth," Pickett confided, "I was tempted to tease you a little. You looked so serious."

Jax got a beer from the refrigerator and Pickett got a handful of grapes. They returned to the living room to sit side by side on the big, outrageously flowered sofa. Shadows gathered in the corners of the high-ceilinged room. Pickett turned on the end table lamp and Jax reached over her to turn it off.

He picked up her hand and played with the soft fingers. "So why didn't you tease me? It was a perfect set-up."

Pickett shook her head. "It would have been unkind. I could tell buying the bed meant a lot to you whether I understood what was going on or not." She squirmed into the cushions, tucking her legs underneath her, and allowed her weight to lean against his arm. "What
was
going on with you? You never talk about your parents or your home. Didn't you have a bed when you were a little boy?"

"Of course I had a bed. The house we moved into when I was six had six bedrooms."

"Big house. Did you have a big family?"

"Just my mom and dad and me." Jax turned up the long-necked beer bottle, taking several swallows. "My mom left shortly after we moved there. Then it was just my father and me." Jax was silent a long time, looking sightlessly into the distance. The breeze from the open window rattled the plantation blinds. His arm moved to the back of the couch and one hand toyed with Pickett's hair. "I was a little shit."

"That sounds a tad harsh," Pickett murmured with deliberate understatement.

"It's the truth."

"You're not one now. What changed?"

"Corey Blanchard. You might say he saved me from myself."

"Sounds like there's a story there." Pickett finished her grapes and put her napkin on the end table. She settled deeper against Jax. "How did he do that?"

"Corey showed me what a hero was. It was one of those epiphanies." Jax's voice was a dark rumble.

"Epiphany?"
Pickett tried to pull away so that she could see his face better in the dim light from the lamp on the
secretaire.
"How old were you?"

"Ten." Jax pulled her back with ridiculous ease, efficiently arranging her so that she was tucked under his arm. "I'll tell this story my way. My way is holding you.

"We were both ten," he continued. "We had the same birthday and were in the same class. He was a scholarship student at the private school we attended.

"Like I told you, I was a shit. Two guys and me, we were hassling a first grader. We were telling him he was a mama's boy and his mother wasn't going to come for him today. Stuff like that to make him cry."

"Why?"

"Because I was a shit, okay?"

"Uhn-unh. Why did you choose
him
to pick on?"

"His mother was always there after school to pick him up. She would look so glad to see him, and he would run to her and they would hug and laugh and kiss. It was disgusting. You know how ten-year-old boys are."

"Who picked you up from school when you were six?"

"The housekeeper. Sometimes my mom sent a cab."

"Why didn't she come herself?"

"She had tennis lessons. She had been on the circuit before she married my dad. She wanted to go back to professional tennis." Jax shook his head. "That's not what this story is about. Stop interrupting me."

"I'm just trying to understand what was happening and why."

"No, this is about Corey, not me. Where was I? We were hassling this little kid and making him cry and Corey walked up and told us to leave him alone."

Jax shook his head in disbelief. "Here was this weedy-looking kid. He was taller than me, but skinny, and he had these glasses that sat sideways on his face, and he was new, and a scholarship kid, and he was telling three guys, all of them bigger, what to do."

"What did you think?"

"I thought he was going to get creamed, that's what. I thought he was too stupid to know it, when he knelt down beside the little kid, and kind of hugged him, and told him, 'Your mother's going to come for you.' Then he stepped between us and the kid and he told him to 'run to Mrs. Wilson. Run as fast as you can.' He was looking at me when he said it and I realized he did know he was going to get stomped. He was going to take us on so that the little kid would have time to get away.

"It was—I don't know how to describe it. I was suddenly so confused. Like when you get turned around in the dark and you think you're going through the door and you walk into a wall instead. I yelled at him, 'What the hell do you think you're doing, shithead?'

"And he said, 'What the hell do you think
you're
doing, asshole?' and suddenly I could see myself through his eyes. I mean that literally. I could see myself from the outside. I could see three big guys—we were all big for our age—being faced off by one skinny kid with lopsided glasses. And then I could see us before. Three big guys making a little guy cry. I was ashamed, disgusted, appalled. It hit me like a punch in the stomach."

"Wow. What did you do?"

"I threw up. All over Burt-the-Butt's new Converses."

Pickett smiled. "I guess that ended the fight."

"Yeah." Jax gave a little snort. "Burt and Connor just oozed away, and I was left spewing my guts in front of Corey."

"Corey didn't run away?"

"No." Jax's smile was sweetly reminiscent. "I learned after a while that Corey didn't run away from anything."

"I'm beginning to see what you mean about Corey being a hero."

"Wait until you hear the rest of it."

"Okay," Pickett said agreeably. "Then what happened?"

"His dad came to give him a ride home. His dad was the Presbyterian minister. And I'm thinking, 'Oh shit, can this get any worse? Now he's going to tell his father,' and Corey says, 'Can we give Jackson a ride, Dad? He doesn't feel so good. He's been throwing up.'

"When they found out there wasn't anybody home at my house, they took me home with them, and Corey's dad gave me some ginger ale to settle my stomach."

Pickett quietly noted the significance of the detail. The picture of Jax's growing up was becoming clear. A lonely, angry little boy, not a mean bully but a child overcome with jealousy, and then shame, encountering simple kindness would remember being given a glass of ginger ale.

"Then Corey's dad took a bag of blood out of the refrigerator and started Corey's infusion. Corey had hemophilia." Jax correctly interpreted Pickett's shocked intake of breath. "Yeah, that's right. If I had hit Corey he could have been hurt, he could've even died of internal injuries. Yet he had faced us off to protect somebody littler. I was always getting into fights. I would have hit him. I felt like throwing up all over again.

"Corey had done something I wouldn't do. I was in fights all the time, but I wouldn't have gone one on three. At first I had thought he was doing it because he was stupid. He knew he could get badly hurt even though we didn't. Corey had more courage than I did. After I really got to know him, I learned that he had more courage than anybody I've ever met."

"You talk about Corey in the past tense. What happened to him?"

"He died when he was—when we were—nineteen. Of AIDS. He got infected from transfusions."

"Oh, Jax, I'm so sorry. I can tell you loved him very much. That must have been a terrible time for you."

Terrible? Yeah, that just about summed it up. The stunned rage that had started in his gut after he heard the news from Corey's sister Aline had begun to feel like an overcoat by the day of the funeral. It wrapped him up and weighed him down and kept him from feeling much of anything else.

All the undertaker's arts could not disguise the truth of what lay in that satin-lined coffin: a cadaver. All the wit and intelligence, courage and love was reduced to this shrunken, yellowish
absolutely dead
thing. There was no trace of Corey.

Had Corey looked this starved when he'd seen him at spring break? Honesty compelled Jax to remember that he had. While his friend had been near death,
he
had talked about training for baseball and girls and preparing for final exams. If he had seen it coming he would have kept death at bay with his bare hands. But he had not. He had failed his friend and now that friend was utterly gone, every part of him.

Corey's family had insisted he sit with them under the funeral home canopy at the interment. A sharp April wind played rough with the tulips and dogwood blossoms. Jax thought he should be listening to what the minister, some high muck-amuck in the Presbyterian hierarchy, was saying, but he could only focus on two red tulips that seemed to swing in the wind in perfect alternation.

At some point he saw his father in the crowd standing in the sunshine. Trust his father to be scrupulous in observation of social obligations. His secretary had retained a service that sent cards, gifts, and flowers for all appropriate occasions. The service did a pretty good job. Jax knew. He smiled cynically. Poor Father. Attendance at a funeral just couldn't be delegated.

The distance that obscured details of retreating hairline and lines of maturity enabled Jax to see what he had never seen before. He looked like his old man. His build was from his mother, whipcord lean with intense energy, but his face had the same longish blade of a nose, gray eyes, and straight black hair.

Beside him, Corey's mother shivered in a blast of chilly spring wind that swept across the cemetery. Jax and Corey's father simultaneously put their arms across the back of her chair. Jax withdrew his arm but angled his body to shield her from the wind as much as possible.

"Tell me about it." Pickett's soft voice and softer hand interrupted his reverie.

So he told her things he had never told anybody. How he and Corey had become best friends. It was Corey who gave Jax his nickname, saying a name like Jackson made him sound like a pompous ass. He told her how he had spent more and more nights at Corey's house, sleeping in a sleeping bag on the floor of Corey's room, his dirty clothes piling up in a corner until Corey's mom demanded that he turn them over for washing.