Page 83 of Final Drive

He sits across from me, forearms on the table. “You had a granola bar at seven this morning and you’ve been running on adrenaline and spite for nine hours. Six bites, then you can do whatever you want.”

I eat six bites while he watches without making a production of it. Somewhere around the fourth one my hands quit shaking and my shoulders come down off my ears for the first time since I walked into that hearing room.

I set the spoon down.

“He was right,” I say.

“Say again?”

“Quinton. About the university.” I push the bowl an inch away. “Okafor as good as told me. We won and the win opened a door I can’t close. Carmine’s already writing her report. Kinsley’s finished and it doesn’t matter, since every administrator in that building now knows what I am, and they’re never going to look at me as a person again.”

“They’ll look at you however they look at you.” He waits until I’m looking at him. “Doesn’t change what you are.”

“Which is what, exactly?”

“Best cox in this conference. Meanest woman I ever met.”

A laugh comes out of me, cracked and unattractive. Then my eyes are burning, and I press the heels of my hands against them until I see static.

Bo doesn’t move or say anything. He sits there like a piling in a current and lets me have it until I take my hands down.

“I need a shower,” I say.

“Okay.”

“I need his smell off me.”

“I know what you need it for.”

I stand up, and he’s out of his chair before I’m all the way out of mine. We’re eighteen inches apart, and now I can smell him instead. Cut grass, warm hay, the faint diesel of his truck. My whole body pulls toward it hard enough that I have to plant my feet.

“Bo.”

“Yeah.”

“Come upstairs.”

He takes his time answering, and the look he gives me isn’t the hungry one. It’s the careful one that used to make me want to throw a clipboard at his head.

“Not for that,” he says.

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me.” He tucks a piece of hair behind my ear and leaves his hand there, warm along my jaw, deliberately covering every place Quinton put his fingers. “You’re still halfway out of your body. I’m not touching you till you’re all the way back in it.”

“Don’t handle me.”

“I’m not.” His thumb moves once across my cheekbone. “I’m telling you what I’ll do. You want me to wash that boy off you, I’ll do it. You want me to sit outside the bathroom door and keep my mouth shut, I’ll do that too. But I’m not going to help you get around it.”

I stand there with my heart going hard enough to hurt.

“That’s the meanest thing anybody’s said to me today,” I tell him, “and I spent two hours with a lawyer.”

“I know.”

“I hate you.”

“No, you don’t.”