Page 8 of The Cadence

I reached and swiped across his screen to move to a new image, this one of the exterior.

“Your house is so pretty, like a cottage in a book. There should be roses growing on it and a woman would live there…I think she would be a photographer, and one day she posts a picture of a couple, something that she took when she was a teenager just learning her craft. It turns out that the woman in the picture died. So the man comes and finds her to talk about it, and then they fall in love.”

“But instead, I live in this house and I only post pictures of my workouts,” he said. “It’s not romantic at all, unless you’re into sweat. You should write that book about the photographer.”

I knew all about his workout pictures. “I’ll take a pass on writing. I like books but only to read them.” The plane suddenly dipped in the sky and the engines roared. I looked up at him.

“Nothing out of the ordinary,” he reassured me. “Do you read a lot?”

“You’ll be surprised to hear that I do,” I answered. “My grandma worked on Saturdays and I started going to the library. When it wasn’t a game day and I didn’t have a shift of my own, I’d stay there until they had to lock the doors.”

“A game day,” he repeated. “You mean football games.”

“I mean your games. I couldn’t care less about the rest of them,” I answered, and he grinned.

I remembered trying to be funny so that he would smile like that.

“I spent a lot of Saturdays reading and that really helped with the school stuff. You know it does, because you always had a book yourself.”

“Not fiction,” he said, tapping the pink spine of my paperback.

“You might really like it,” I tempted but he did seem a little sickened.

I hoped it wasn’t due to the turbulence, because I’d just heard some sounds from the back of the plane that reminded me of when I’d been in his hotel bathroom after the whiskey and the very greasy hamburger…

my stomach flipped and I made myself stop thinking about that.

I turned my thoughts to my new home, which I would see when this scary flight was over.

I wondered if I’d be able to find a good used bookstore like the one I’d liked to visit before, which became one of my favorite spots after I had finished everything that interested me at the library.

At that store, they’d had a bin where all the books went for a quarter.

Maybe there was something similar in Michigan, or maybe they had a different selection at the local library and the shelves would be full of exciting things to read.

“How far is it to the library from your house?” I asked, but Will had no idea.

I wondered where the closest laundromat—no, a house like one in his pictures definitely had its own washer and dryer and probably a specialized room to hold them.

But I was realizing that there was a lot I didn’t know about the place I was going.

He flipped to the next picture. “Here’s where you’ll stay. The agent called it ‘the guest cottage’ and I kept doing it.”

“That sounds fancy.”

“It’s all right,” he answered. “It has the basics and if you need anything else, it’s only a hundred yards from the main house.”

“A football field away,” I noted. “Are you sure about me being there? Are you positive that you won’t need it for real guests?” I had already asked the same thing at least three or four times.

“No, I definitely won’t,” he responded, the same answer he’d given on every other occasion. I figured that after a while, I’d be able to move out and rent an apartment, and then maybe I’d be able to get some of my grandma’s stuff out of storage.

But I could see that the guest cottage, my new home, was very, very nice. “It’s basic, but you’ll be fine,” he responded when I told him so. “And there will be a security system installed out there on Monday.”

“Really? Do you live in a bad part of town?”

His eyes widened. “Not at all, and there’s not much of a town where I live. I have two cars and you can use one to get around.”

That was lucky, because my own car would not have made it all the way to almost the tippy-top of Michigan, which was where we were heading today. It had barely made it to the scrap yard, and I’d gotten some money for it but nowhere near enough to buy anything new.

“Do you know how to swim?” Will asked me.

“No. Do you go in the lakes there? Is it safe?”

“You have to be careful in any body of water, and the Great Lakes can have strong currents. You can learn to swim,” he said, but I wasn’t sure about that. I had been, after all, the girl who had nearly failed PE. “I get in the water as much as I can.”

“I might like to lay out on a beach. I never really did.”

“You’ve never been to a beach?” he asked. He sounded doubtful, like maybe he thought that I was pranking him.

“Will, before I went to live with my grandmother, I’d never seen a building taller than a couple of stories.

I never went to the beach, in an elevator, or up in an airplane—oh!

” This airplane banked and jerked, and a woman screamed.

The captain made another announcement about climbing to look for smoother air, and I hoped he would find some.

“Look. This is my kitchen,” Will said, drawing my attention back to his pictures.

“You could make anything in there!” I marveled. “It’s huge! Wait, is that the refrigerator? The whole wall?” It was glass so you could see in, like at a grocery store but a lot more elegant.

“I mostly use a meal delivery service instead of cooking,” he said. “I don’t have much in those cupboards.”

“I wish I had brought my grandma’s stuff, then,” I said wistfully. “Not that I’ll be using your kitchen. We probably won’t see each other too much outside of work. Speaking of, do you want to give me a better idea about what I’ll be doing?”

He’d already told me a few things: I’d check emails and regular mail, and do some filing. He’d also said that he didn’t have a separate office building but instead used one of the rooms in his house to run his business. From the pictures I’d seen of it, there seemed to be plenty of—

“Oh!” I’d said that very loud in the confines of this airplane. But a lot of people had screamed because that last jolt had been hard and I’d heard something fall with a clang in the area where the flight attendants sat. “Is that normal, too?”

“I expected some turbulence,” he admitted. Before we’d taken off, the captain had also warned us about “bumps” but I hadn’t really understood. “There’s a system of thunderstorms moving across our flight path.”

“Oh. Ok.” So far I wasn’t really enjoying my inaugural trip on a plane, despite being in first class and being with Will. I knew that everything was normal and there was nothing to be concerned about because he kept saying so, but I couldn’t help being scared.

Then the plane dropped like we were falling from the sky, and everyone screamed again. I reached over and grabbed his arm just like Miss Mozella did to me.

“Sorry,” I told him, and took my hand away.

“It’s ok. You can do that.”

He sounded uncomfortable, though, as you would be if a stranger latched onto you. We really didn’t know each other, which was the point that the ladies from church had made. Frequently.

“He’s a stranger,” Miss Theresa had stated. “You only knew him briefly in high school, and you’re so young that we have to look at this in a relative way. It’s like how dogs age in comparison to humans, that the years don’t mean the same thing.”

“I’m not a dog!”

She went right on. “High school would be a century ago in the span of your short lifetime.”

I understood that her sarcasm masked worry. “Will Bodine is a public figure,” I reassured her. “He can’t do anything too bad, or people would find out and get upset.”

She’d stared at me then rolled her eyes. “This is what I was afraid of,” she’d remarked to her friends. “She’s so na?ve! When I think of all the Bodine scandals…”

I wasn’t na?ve at all, but she was right that there had been more than a few negative incidents in his family’s history. His father’s drunk-driving accident was just one in a string of problems—but Will wasn’t like that.

She was right about something else, too.

He and I had been out of touch for a long time.

And seven years before (or a hundred, as some claimed), he had been my tutor.

Not my boyfriend, of course, but not even a friend.

He’d had a group of other large-sized and revered athletes that he hung out with, as well as a beautiful and much-admired girlfriend, Carlee.

But there were a few hours left on this flight and then we had another one after it, too.

There was no time like the present to get to know each other better.

We had already talked a bit about his football schedule, which was packed with training, meetings, practices, games, travel, and sessions with various healing-type people to get him back into shape to do those things all over again.

He’d shown me these pictures of his house, which I liked a lot despite the emptiness of the rooms. But I wanted to know more.

“Tell me about—ok, I’m sure that was normal,” I said, as we bounced in the sky. “Tell me about your friends on the team.”

“I would say that I’m friendly with most of the guys.”

“Who’s your best friend?”

“Who is your best friend?” he countered, and I had an immediate answer.

“My grandma. She was the best friend anybody could ever have. She listened to me and tried to help me, she was fun to be with and she taught me things. I wish I’d known her forever and not just when I moved into her house for high school.

” We’d only had one major issue between us, and he was buckled up and seated next to me.