“I am not helping you put a stripper pole in the middle of your living room.”
My dad folded his arms sternly across his chest, caterpillar eyebrows furrowed the way they always were when he was yelling at one of his players.
“Help me or don’t help me, it’s going up,” I told him, fitting the chrome extension to the pole before tightening the screws.
“There’s a giant window that faces the street.”
I just shrugged, indifferent. “Then I guess the neighbors will get a free show.”
Dad scowled more, and I wish I still had the human emotion of joy left inside me so I could smile and put him at ease. Instead, I put the pole aside long enough to climb to my feet and wrap him in a hug — massive arms across his chest and all.
“I’ll get curtains, okay?”
He didn’t seem convinced.
“Remember why I love it,” I told him — begged him.
The inhale he dragged through his nose was enough to cause a draft in the room, but he softened with the exhale, uncrossing his arms and hugging me in return. He pressed a quick kiss to my forehead before pulling back.
“I know,” he said. “Doesn’t mean I want to see it.”
“Fair enough,” I conceded. Then, I hung my hands on my hips, chewing the inside of my cheek. “Thank you, Dad. For letting me do this.”
He nodded, then made his way to the kitchen to continue unpacking a box that did not include a chrome apparatus I would be clinging to while half naked.
I decided to wait to put the pole up until later, settling on a box labeled bedroom, instead. It was a miracle my father was trusting me enough to live on my own — well, with a roommate, but without him. It was the first time in my new adult life that he’d granted the permission to do so, and I had a feeling it was because he felt guilty moving me in the middle of my junior year of college last spring when he took the job as head coach of the North Boston University football team.
Not that I cared.
It wasn’t like I left a group of friends behind — like I had any friends at all. I’d given up on trying to establish anything close to a relationship, friendly or otherwise, since the night I lost my sister.
As if the universe heard my thoughts, I opened the box on the floor to find a picture of Abby looking back at me.
What was left of my heart stuttered at the sight, at the neon blue eyes, the wide smile, the way she hugged my waist like I was her best friend while I stood there looking annoyed with life — like always.
But I didn’t cry, didn’t pick up the picture and run a hand over the glass, didn’t do anything other than set it aside and continue unpacking the personal items beneath it.
The front door burst open, and I glanced up at the frazzled girl who stumbled through the entryway, arms loaded with shopping bags.
She paused at the sight of me, her dark sunglasses sliding down her nose a bit. She arched a brow over them, taking in the length of me as I did the same to her.
I knew without asking who she was — Mary Silver, my new roommate.
We’d found each other through an app that reminded me of a dating app, except it matched you with potential roommates in the Boston area, instead. We’d both “swiped right” on each other, and after a couple nights of conversing, decided we could tolerate each other enough to live together. That was maybe what I’d liked most about her — she wasn’t bubbly and annoying, she wasn’t trying to be my best friend, she wasn’t expecting anything other than for me to pay my bills on time.
I felt the same.
My first impression of her in person was that she was gorgeous. That much I ascertained within seconds.
Her long blonde hair was styled in waves over her shoulders, her makeup immaculate, blush-painted lips and cat-lined eyes that made me wonder if she did it professionally. She wore a forest green dress covered in delicate flowers, her lush hips and thick thighs straining the fabric and calling attention to her curves I was already envious of. She paired that dress with a leather jacket it was far too hot to be wearing and black combat boots, and I noted the tattoos visible on her legs, her sternum, the piercings through the septum of her nose, and lining both her ears.
A subtle tilt of her chin was her first greeting. “Hey.”
“Hey,” I said back.
Dad paused where he was unpacking in the kitchen, and though he looked pleasant enough on the outside, I knew as his daughter what he was thinking as he eyeballed my new roommate.
Mary’s eyes drifted to the half-built pole in the middle of the floor.
“You dance?”
I shrugged. “Tricks and combos mostly, but I dance sometimes, too.”
She nodded, bottom lip poking out like she was impressed and maybe a little surprised. “Cool. Just don’t break anything. I want to get our deposit back.”
With that, she slid past me and Dad both, on her way down the back hallway toward the stairs that led to our rooms. She glanced into the kitchen as she passed. “’Sup, Pops.”
I actually felt the corners of my mouth tilt up at that, at how my dad’s eyebrow slid into his hairline with the greeting.
Once Mary climbed the stairs and shut her bedroom door, Dad looked at me.
“She seems nice,” I said.
He blinked but refrained from saying anything else and went back to unpacking.
Bending, I heaved the box I’d been sifting through into my arms and carried it up the stairs, too — to my own bedroom. The house Mary and I were renting together was ancient, the wood floors creaking with every step and the plumbing a delicate situation I was sure would give us trouble more than once. I was pretty sure we’d be haunted at night by a ghost from the Revolution era. But I loved the natural light that streamed through the large bay window in my room, loved the idea of filling my space with plants and all my favorite yard sale finds.
I finally had a space of my own.
I couldn’t blame my father for worrying about me. I had given him every right to after the way I’d completely lost control of my life when Abby died. Between the partying, the alcohol, the drugs, and the numbness with which I gave myself to any boy who wanted me… I had turned into someone no one recognized, most of all me.
I would have done anything to feel something, even though it never worked.
My mother gave up on me. I didn’t hate her for it, mostly because I was too busy hating myself. But it surprised me, the ease with which she seemed to dismiss me after the third or fourth time I showed up at their house in the middle of the night and puked on the lawn. I was lucky that my actions didn’t end my parents’ marriage. But somehow, they managed to hold on to each other even when I tested every last nerve they had.
But while Dad and I had moved here for his new job, she’d stayed back home in Alabama.
She claimed it was because she loved our house too much to leave it, that the church wouldn’t be able to go on without her, that the yoga studios wouldn’t be the same in New England.
I knew it was because she was happy for the chance to get away from me.
Dad, on the other hand, had never lost hope. He’d never lost faith in me. And somehow, that was worse.
I’d never forget the night my father broke down in tears at my feet, begging me to get straight, to go to college, to find a will to live again.
“I can’t lose you, too.”
Those words would haunt me for the rest of my life.
And so here I was, a sports medicine major who only drank a glass or two of wine a week, trying to do whatever it was that would make him happy. Because there wasn’t a shot in hell that I’d ever find that state of being again.
The least I could do with my miserable life was make his a little less hard to bear.
Rock music started blasting from Mary’s room as I got to unpacking, pulling out a hollow golden Buddha statue I’d picked up at an estate sale a few years ago and setting it on the floor next to my bedside table. Piece by piece, I filled my new bedroom with the vases and paintings and stained mirrors and tchotchkes and whatever else I’d thrifted over the years. The space became more and more eclectic as I did so, and each new addition made me feel a little less dead inside.
I liked surrounding myself with other peoples’ stories, liked the thought of having a piece of them in my own life — as if strangers could feel a little less lonely with just a simple connection like an old, chipped teacup.
Eventually, I came back to the picture of me and Abby, and I carefully sat it on my desk before my eyes caught on someone in the yard of the house across the street.
The house itself looked as decrepit as the one we were living in, the paint peeling and roof in desperate need of new shingles. The porch was littered with beer cans and bottles, and there was a massive kid passed out on the porch swing with one leg hanging off it holding him steady.
But that wasn’t what held my attention.
From downstairs, I could only see the front of the house, as well as the old half-rotted fence that surrounded the side yard and wrapped around the back. But up here in my room, I could see over the fence completely.
And it was the boy in the back yard I couldn’t look away from.
I’ll admit, boy seemed like the wrong term to describe him. He was shirtless, his thick, ebbing muscles gleaming in the sunlight as he ripped weeds from a bed of flowers. Sweat ran along his chiseled back as he did, and when he sat back on his heels to wipe his forehead with the back of his forearm, I frowned.
Holden Moore.
I recognized him instantly. It was impossible for anyone not to know who the NBU quarterback was. And given that I’d studied under our athletic trainers over summer training and watched them work on his shoulder, wrap his ankle before every practice, and torture him with a combination of ice baths and deep tissue work each week — I’d have known his body anywhere.
I’d also have known that head of hair, thick and a dark, sandy blond that reminded me of the beach. And though his head was down, focus on the garden, I knew the dimples that framed his smile, the one that had popped on his left cheek the first time he laid eyes on me during spring training.
Maybe I was shocked to see him like that, tending carefully to a bed of flowers instead of launching a football down the field. Maybe I was fascinated to see him doing anything other than football — which had seemed to be the only thing he cared about since the moment I first met him. Or maybe there was a small part of me that wasn’t completely dead, a part of me still capable of feeling a touch of heat at the sight of a shirtless, muscled man sweating in the New England sun.
He stood, gloved hand wrapped around the neck of a black trash bag full of weeds as he dragged himself back toward the house. He set the bag aside and grabbed a water bottle, drinking for only a moment before he dumped the rest overhead, the water mixing with the sweat already lining his arms and abdomen.
Then, he froze, frowning as if he sensed something.
And his green eyes shot to me.
I could have hidden. I could have jumped back or pretended to focus on the photograph I’d just unpacked. I could have shied away and acted like I hadn’t been watching him. But instead, I stood my ground, holding his gaze as he squinted up at me.
When he realized who I was, his eyebrows ticked up a notch — just barely enough that I noticed.
For a moment, he just stood there, staring at me as I stared at him. But then, hesitantly, he lifted his hand in greeting.
I blinked.
And then I drew the curtains shut and got back to work.
