Chapter 7 The Problem With Tea
JAKE POV
Coach blows the whistle so hard Jake feels it in his back teeth.
"Mercer! Again! What is WRONG with you today?"
Jake jogs back to the line. His helmet is too tight. The sun is too bright. Marcus runs up beside him and bumps his shoulder pad. "Dude. Where are you right now? Because it is not here."
"I'm here," Jake says.
"You just ran the wrong route. Twice."
"I know."
"Coach is going to pull you."
"I know, Marcus."
Marcus looks at him for a second longer than necessary, the way he does when he's deciding whether to push or let it go. He lets it go. They line up. Jake takes the snap, and this time his feet go the right way, and his arm follows, and the ball goes where it's supposed to go, and Coach says nothing, which from Coach means good job.
But his brain is still in the kitchen.
Still at midnight. Still watching Penny walk to the counter and fill the kettle like she'd done it a thousand times. Like she wasn't standing in a stranger's kitchen at midnight next to a guy she barely knew who was falling apart over a photograph.
She didn't say are you okay.
She didn't say I'm so sorry.
She didn't make it weird.
She just made tea.
Jake runs the next route. He runs it clean. He runs seven more after that without thinking, because his body knows football the way it knows breathing. But his mind keeps going back to that kitchen. To the blue mug on the drying rack. To the sound of the kettle clicking off in the quiet house.
He has known a lot of people in his eighteen years. He has known people who said all the right words and meant none of them. He has known people who looked at his life, the nice house, the football, the friends, and thought he had everything figured out. Not a single one of them ever just sat down and said nothing and made it feel like enough.
Penny Cruz did that.
And she went to voicemail on him for two whole weeks before that.
Practice ends at five. Jake is pulling off his helmet when Brianna appears at the edge of the field.
She is smiling. She always smiles like that when she wants something wide and easy, as she practiced it. She walks up and links her arm through his before he can move and says, "Finally. I feel like I haven't seen you in forever."
"Hey," Jake says.
She talks. He walks. She tells him about a party at someone's lake house this weekend, about how the whole team is going, about how everyone keeps asking where he's been. He nods. He says yeah. He says maybe. He says the right things in the right places because he has been doing this with Brianna for two years, and he knows exactly which words go where.
But he is watching the parking lot. Watching the street past the fence.
Watching for nothing in particular.
"Jake." Brianna stops walking. Her arm is still in his. "Are you even listening to me?"
"Party. Lake house. This weekend," he says.
She stares at him. "What is going on with you lately?"
"Nothing."
"You've been weird since school started." She tilts her head. "Is it the babysitter thing? Because if that girl is making things uncomfortable at home."
"She's not making anything uncomfortable," Jake says. His voice comes out flatter than he meant it to. "Everything at home is fine."
Brianna looks at him for a long moment. Her smile stays on, but her eyes are doing something different behind it. Calculating. Like she just filed something away.
"Okay," she says softly. "I just worry about you."
She squeezes his arm. She walks to her car. She looks back once and waves.
Jake watches her go.
He does not feel anything warm about that wave. He used to. Or maybe he just thought he was supposed to.
He gets home forty minutes earlier than usual.
He tells himself it's because practice ended on time for once. He tells himself it has nothing to do with a girl who keeps tea bags in the cabinet next to the mugs because she memorized where everything is in a kitchen that isn't hers.
He opens the front door.
The house hits him first. The sound of it. Lily is laughing in the living room, big, helpless laughing, the kind that means she can barely breathe. Jake drops his bag and follows the sound.
Penny is on the living room floor.
She has a sock on her hand. She is making it talk in a ridiculous voice, very deep and very serious, while the sock interviews Lily's stuffed stegosaurus about what it is like to be extinct. Lily is completely losing her mind. She is rolling on the carpet. She is saying stop, stop, while clearly meaning never stop.
Jake stands in the doorway.
Penny doesn't hear him come in. She keeps going, sock puppet voice and all, and Lily spots him over Penny's shoulder and points, and Penny turns around and
She goes still.
Her face does that thing. The guard comes up. She sits back on her heels and pulls the sock off her hand and says, in her normal voice, "Lily wanted to make puppets."
"I heard," Jake says.
Lily runs at him. He catches her automatically, swings her up, and she is still laughing against his shoulder. Over her head, he looks at Penny.
She is already standing and already straightening. Putting the sock on the couch cushion like it's evidence she needs to hide.
"Dinner in an hour," she says. She goes to the kitchen.
Jake puts Lily down. Lily grabs his hand, pulls him toward the couch, and starts telling him about the sock interview. He sits. He listens. He watches the kitchen doorway.
After dinner, after Lily's bath, after the bedtime story, Jake comes downstairs.
The kitchen light is on. Penny is at the table with her homework spread out. She doesn't look up. He goes to the fridge. He gets a glass of water. He almost goes upstairs.
He sits down across from her instead.
She looks up.
He says, "I sent Brianna's call to voicemail today. You saw that, right?"
Penny looks at him. Her face gives nothing.
"I just wanted you to know it wasn't an accident," he says. "I chose not to answer."
She is quiet for a moment. Then she says, "You don't owe me an explanation about your calls."
"I know."
"Then why are you explaining?"
He doesn't have a clean answer for that. He has a real one, but it's not clean, and he's not sure he's ready to say it out loud. He drums his fingers once on the table and says, "Just wanted to be honest with you."
Penny looks at him for a long time. Something moves behind her eyes that he can't read.
Then she says, "Jake. Why did you really come home early today?"
He opens his mouth.
His phone buzzes on the table between them.
They both look down at the same time.
It is not Brianna.
It is a text from Marcus. Jake picks it up and reads it, and his whole body goes cold.
Bro. Did you know there's a video going around from the locker room? It's Penny. Someone recorded her. Brianna's people. It's bad.
Jake looks up slowly.
Penny is watching his face. She sees something change in it. She reaches across the table before he can turn the phone over, and she reads the message.
The kitchen goes completely silent.
She pulls her hand back. She sits very still. Her face is flat in a way that is worse than crying.
"Penny"
"I have to finish my homework," she says.
Her voice doesn't shake. Not even a little.
Jake sits there holding his phone and watching her pick up her pencil and look down at her textbook, and he has never in his life felt more useless than he does right now.