CHAPTER FOUR- Chaos Starts
"You're not eating much, love." Gen reached across the table and lightly tapped the back of his hands with her fingertips. She'd been mortally afraid he'd mention Drake to her parents, which would have started an interrogation, which would have started a string of tiny white lies she didn't wish to get tangled in. It wasn't as though she could tell her parents she'd gotten in trouble, after all. But he'd spent the meal preoccupied, his face a shade paler than usual, and he'd not said a word of his encounter that day.
She'd waited until her parents had gotten up from the table, her mother engaged in writing a letter to one of their older brothers, her father elbow-deep in nuts, bolts, and screws in one of his latest gadget-improvement projects, and then she'd spoken quietly, trying to get his attention without getting theirs.
He didn't feel like eating, for once. He'd walked home from practice with a heavy, uneasy feeling plaguing him, a cross between guilt and doubt. After Lovejoy had left him standing alone at the fields, he'd sort of… come to, embarrassed at what he'd said to her and worried about that ever-scribbling pen of hers.
And mixed in there, maddeningly and frighteningly and inexplicably, was that length of leg he'd seen, the unintentional revelation, like an overheard secret. And had she been wearing white under that skirt?
If he concentrated hard enough on that split-second memory, Rob thought she had been.
"Hm?" he asked, looking up at his sister and blinking owlishly. He just needed rest, was all. A well-rested young man didn't think about Lucia Lovejoy's knickers. She was insane, after all, and you didn't think about insane people in that manner, it was… insane. "Oh. Fine, thanks."
Genevieve's immediate reaction was to giggle at his inappropriate answer, but the light laugh morphed into a frown. It was unlike him to act this way.
"I said you weren't eating much," she repeated. Was the whole world going mad, then? First she'd gotten in trouble, then she'd been paired up with Mallory, and she'd even gotten in his car.
Perhaps both she and Rob were going mad.
"And I said I'm fine!" Rob said loudly, embarrassed at his thoughts and the fact that he'd nearly been caught with them, standing up from the table and setting his plate on the counter with a hard snap of ceramic. "Anything else, Mother Hen?"
Gen got up from the table and stood near him, her eyes cast up to his. "You'd do well to remember that particular label next time you try to play queen's guard with Drake Mallory in the hallway, brother." With a raised eyebrow and a smirk Rob would have sworn he'd seen somewhere else, she turned on her heel and walked up the steps to her room.
It was a full two minutes before Rob realized it was supposed to be her night to do the dishes.
A bad day, indeed.
~~~
Determination bloomed in Lucia, giving her the courage she hadn't been able to muster on her own. Doing something for herself was hard, but doing something for someone else was much, much easier.
She armed herself with memories, the thoughts of her father directly after her mother's passing, the memory of a gangly young girl tailing her father around the house and pestering him endlessly, trying to get him to respond in someway. It had worked, and worked well enough. Alfred Lovejoy may not have blossomed into a social butterfly, but he was at least responsive now.
Well, discounting the tendency to daydream that seemed to be heredity, he was responsive.
At the moment, she'd been waiting five minutes for her father to answer her. Finally, when he'd finished scouring a years-old layout with a magnifying glass, he looked up at her.
"Ah… did you ask me what to do with a particularly reluctant source, darling?" That seemed to be what she'd asked, but it was ever so hard to remember, and God love her, she was so endlessly patient.
Just like her mother.
She nodded, pen at the ready to take notes. She needed to be fully armed, she thought, to deal with the oddly vulnerably athlete she'd been assigned to write about and whom her heart and mind had somehow attached to.
"A particularly reluctant source, my dear, is usually a source with the best story to tell," Alfred said, standing and circling around his desk. "I always find it best to encounter such a source with caution, give them a few days to ruminate on the story they really and truly want to tell, and then attack again with fervor!" He pounded his fist on his desk to make his point, sending a smattering of papers flurrying.
He watched as she nodded her head, obviously thinking about her own plan of attack, and he reached out a large, wide-fingered hand and tucked her hair behind her ear. "My little writer," he said fondly. "Is this the footballer you referred to?"
"Yes, Father." And so much more, she thought.
"Well, bring him to supper one evening," he said, easing his hip off the corner of his desk and retreating once more behind it. "Let your old man get the story out of him, eh?"
She couldn't stop the wide grin that spread over her face at the thought of Rob Wesley sitting down to a nice supper with her. She ducked her head to hide her blush and was gone from her father's study even as he re-engrossed himself in his work.
~~~
She gave it just a few days' rest, doing independent research, looking over the old Heralds, scouring through all the sports coverage, making a note each time his name was mentioned.
She was in her third year of back issues, starting out with a fall issue, loving the feel of the slightly stiffened paper beneath her fingers, careful not to smear the black newsprint as she pressed gentle fingers to the creases, when she stopped and frowned.
Rookie player Robert Wesley made his first appearance on Holforth's hallowed greens last night, kicking and blundering his way to what was possibly the poorest showing Holforth has ever seen. This reporter hesitates to call it football at all, instead choosing to call it folly.
She looked through the next several issues and read jab after jab, all from a nameless sports reporter, and Lucia found didn't want to read any further. She folded the paper back up, reflexively wiping her fingers on her skirt as though to rid them of something dirty. She propped her chin on her hands, her long hair curtaining the sides of her face, and thought once more about Robert and his reluctance.
Finally, when the bell rang and the hour she had for independent study was over, Lucia gathered her books and took to the halls.
She fell into step with him easily just outside his last class, knowing all too well which classes he had, and where he had them. Gen had sought him out often enough with Lucia in tow, and whether she had wanted to admit it or not, she'd always been paying attention, had always remembered exactly where he was and when.
It sounded a bit odd when you put it like that, she reckoned.
It was no wonder he was wary.
And speaking of wary, he was looking at her with an expression akin to alarm as she strode beside him, looking up at him with bright eyes. "Hello, Robert," she said kindly, trying for nonchalance. Perhaps if he didn't see her as a threat, he would talk a bit more.
But he only walked faster, his face flushing a bit under those darling freckles. She kept up with him easily, merely quickening her own steps to match his long strides."
"Lucia," he greeted her tersely, not realizing (though she certainly did) that he'd failed to address her by her surname.
"You know, I'd really planned on letting you be," she lied sweetly, fishing her notebook out of her pocket and deciding once and for all that all he needed was a little persuasion, a little flattery. "But you're the hero of the school, Robert, surely you can take the time for a really small piece. Even the Headmaster's interested."
He rubbed his hand over his hair, risking a glance down at her. She was like a bulldog, that one. Nothing put her off, nothing made her give up.
Rob wondered briefly if she was that tenacious about everything.
He made a strangled little noise in his throat and looked at her with a shocked expression. "I have to go," he said, his voice coming out in a wheeze.
He'd been knocked in the head at practice the evening before. Perhaps that was what was wrong with him.
"Really, this time I'll only ask one question, all right? We'll go at it nice and slow." She felt a hitch in her step as the words left her mouth. Freudian slip, she judged, but she'd play it cool. After all, perhaps he wouldn't notice.
He choked, coughed, wheezed again. Could she even hear herself? Normal girls didn't talk like that; they had some conception of what things sounded like coming out of their mouths.
"What do you do in your spare time, Robert?" Lucia bit the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing at his reaction and his obvious retreat as he pivoted to turn a corner and never looked back. This was a bit fun, really, putting him off his normally steady routine. Lucia wondered why he was so edgy-was it because she was a reporter, or was it because she was a girl?
She'd really and absolutely love it if it were the latter. She could be a reporter any old time. This time, she rather wanted to be a girl.
When he didn't answer, she addressed herself, bringing up her pace a notch and staying directly behind him. "Perhaps he didn't hear me," she said to herself, accidentally kicking the back of his foot. "I said, what do you do in your spare time, Robert?"
She heard people laughing around her and wondered what on earth they found so funny.
Rob felt his shoulders tense, felt himself nearly lose his cool, and stopped right in his tracks, knowing if he'd done so on the football field, his opponent would breeze right by him. Instead, she ran into his back, and he was all too aware of her pressed up against him, laughing as he jumped and turned around.
"Listen, Lucia…" He rolled his shoulders, still trying to rid himself of the feel of her against his back, her knees pressed just below the backs of his.
"Lovey," she insisted, her own brain addled now. He was so warm, damn it, and solid. She'd very nearly wrapped her arms around and buried her face between his shoulder blades. As one butterfly popped up in her stomach, then doubled and trebled, she wondered if she was even capable of doing this.
Perhaps she should just go to Headmaster Dunmore and tell him she couldn't do it.
But really, the thought broke her heart. She had something to prove to Robert Wesley, and she meant to do it.
"Lucia," he repeated, "I am not, nor am I planning on, giving you an interview for the Holforth Herald. Now… go terrorize someone else." She was… writing. He wasn't saying anything, really, but she was writing on that notepad of hers. "Oh, for pity's sake, Lovejoy, would you just-don't-" He stopped talking, now desperate for her to stop writing. What on earth could she be writing? He craned his neck a little, trying to read her writing, but found he couldn't.
Trying to stay casual, Lucia sketched a 'P' in the corner of her notes, but knew it was more than just paranoia bothering Rob. He certainly had a right to be a bit paranoid, considering what had been written once before. She saw movement from the corner of her eye and breathed a silent phrase of gratitude for whoever was interrupting the tense moment… even if it was Drake Mallory.
"Hello, Drake," she said brightly. She'd never once spoken to the young man, but she knew who he was, as everyone did. And it seemed of late there was something different about him, and he'd cropped up more and more often in Genevieve's conversation. "You look as though something's the matter," she continued, and seeing the murderous look on Rob's face, decided to try and make some peace. "How might Rob and I help you?"
Rob wanted to tell her to keep her nose out of it, but first things first. "I thought I told you to stay away from me and mine, Mallory." His frustration with Lucia and her insatiable flood of questions came out easily when directed at a target as deserving as Drake Mallory.
"Very overdramatic of you, Wesley. Where is she?" Drake stepped between Lucia and Rob, fully expecting the lunatic girl to move, but instead she stayed arm-to-arm with him, staring up at the two of them guilelessly.
To an outsider, she may have looked clueless, but Lucia Lovejoy wasn't about to budge an inch. If Rob would be getting into a physical altercation, he wouldn't be doing it as long as she was there to insert herself and make it completely impossible.
"She who?" Rob asked, though he had a sneaking suspicion. His sister hadn't looked all that sick when he'd left the house that morning, but she'd certainly sounded sick.
"She your idiot of a sister," Drake shouted, his expression unreadable behind his sunglasses. "Why else on earth would I talk to you?"
This was more than tutoring, Lucia thought, feeling the tension, the sheer passion radiating off Drake in waves. It was really a bit romantic, all that energy over one woman. She sighed and turned her attention back to Rob like a woman following the ball at a particularly good match of tennis.
"And because you're clearly dafter than I originally thought," Rob said, stepping up and wishing he were just a mite taller so he could really and truly look down at the overpriveleged arse, "I'm going to have to repeat myself. Stay away from me and mine. You're a loon if you think I'll tell you where she is." He was angry, nearly blindingly so. His sister wasn't telling him everything, and Rob knew he couldn't count on this prancing dandy to tell him a damned thing.
"Home sick, then, is it?" Drake asked, surprising Rob. "Not so hard to figure when she's been gone all day. Thanks again, chum." Sliding his sunglasses to the tip of his nose, he roughly thumped Rob's shoulder in a mockery of camaraderie and took off down the hall.
Rob started after him thoughtlessly, wanting him nowhere near his sister. Things were just getting out of control, his little sister, his best friend slipping out from the meager protection he could actually offer her. But Lucia spoke softly, her statement surprising him into halting.
"He seems to be a very unhappy boy." She stared after the retreating young man, sighed, then looked up at Rob, wishing he could display just a little of that same passion. But hadn't he? Hadn't he nearly bitten her head off in the stands? "You never answered my question."
"He's not unhappy, Lovejoy, he's an arse. I can't figure out why she'd even bother putting up with him, punishment or no. It's not like Gen to get into trouble." He rubbed a hand over his face, wanting to call home but thinking of Genevieve the evening before, implying he was a mother hen.
"What about her first year?" Lucia asked without thinking. When Rob's eyes lit on hers, confused, she shook her head and the thought was gone. "I'm sorry, I don't know why I said that. I must have been thinking of someone else."
Rob shook his head, impatient with her, impatient with himself, and completely unwilling to deal with one more thing; he turned on his heel and walked out the double doors to practice, not looking back.
Lucia stood exactly where he'd left her, one hand touched to her temple, trying to figure out why she'd said what she had. Words were her life, her toys, her passion. It wasn't like her to mix up her words, and it was even less like her to mix up her facts.
Chalking it up to Robert-after all, she'd not been able to concentrate around him for quite some time now-Lucia shook her head and headed out to the fields just behind him.