Slow Twitch Read online

  Slow Twitch:

  A Brenna Blixen Novel

  Book 3

  by

  Liz Reinhardt

  © 2012 by Liz Reinhardt

  All Rights Reserved worldwide under the Berne Convention. May not be copied or distributed without prior written permission.

  Cover design by Steven Peterson

  SLOW TWITCH:

  Muscle fibers that determine if a runner is suited to distance running.

  Chapter One

  Brenna

  The day I met Jake Kelly and Saxon Maclean, my heart thumped, strummed, sang, and dove through every single exhilarating hour of that entire day right up until I fell asleep that night. The moment I laid eyes on them, it was like I’d been waiting for the day I was supposed to meet them and the chemistry was like an electrical storm. I thought that it had to do with like. Or lust. Or chemistry. And I thought it happened because I was a girl and they were very attractive guys.

  Then, nearly a year later, my plane landed in Dublin, Ireland, and I got off and went to check into the gray, sterile dormitories I’d live in for a few weeks that summer. I shivered from a cold sweat brought on by worry and alien loneliness, sure I’d made a huge, stupid mistake in coming across the entire Atlantic for weeks on end. The little part of me that had wanted to just stay in New Jersey and keep things easy and fun wrestled energetically with the part of me that was ready to cliff jump into whatever changes were coming in the next few weeks. To grow or not to grow? To accept change or claw at its eyeballs, kicking and screaming all the way?

  I was desperate for a sign, any sign to give me some assurance that I wasn’t going to rot in dejected unhappiness without the boy I loved and the one I sort-of-loved-in-a-whole-different-way.

  Then I saw a face that felt like tasting my mother’s flakey-crusted, homemade-whipped-cream-topped apple pie after Thanksgiving dinner.

  My entire focus pinpointed on a smile so bright and sweet, I felt wobbly on my particularly gorgeous buttercup-yellow espadrilles, like the muscles in my ankles spontaneously lost their strength. I felt like that smile was as familiarly comforting as my own, and also like I was peeking at something special and real for the first time in longer than I could remember. I knew I should be normal and introduce myself, but I felt uncharacteristically tongue-tied.

  But the object of my attention didn’t wait for me to come over and make social niceties. Before I knew it, a hand with delicate fishnet-embellished nails reached out and shook mine.

  “I just came over to introduce myself and say those are the goddamn darlingest fucking shoes I’ve ever laid eyes on, and I might steal them like a thief in the night if you don’t sleep in them.” She pumped my arm up and down and these Arctic blue eyes stared right at me, at full attention, with a weird combination of frigid interest and melting friendliness that matched the cool-worded/honey-sweet-drawl mix of her voice. “Evan Lennox. Don’t look at me like that. I swear on all that’s holy, if I do bite you, it will barely hurt.”

  “Brenna Blixen.” I got my name out on a gasp while my eyes slid down her long, curvy legs, drank in the most decadently sexy peep-toe kitten heels I’d ever seen, and felt an instant kinship. “What’s your shoe size?”

  When her smile cracked wide, it was apparent that her bee-stung lips looked even plumper because of the slightest overbite. “If I’m gonna run a mile? A straight eight. If a pair of shoes starts flirting with me and then gets frisky, a seven won’t even pinch.” She turned her heel to the side and showed off a perfectly arched foot. “You?”

  “Nine. Always. I can’t deal with pinched toes.” I smoothed my hand over my skirt, and felt a strange, shy blush when she looked at me with frank approval.

  “That’s good news for me, and I have some for you.” She locked her arm through mine and leaned her head so close, her long, glossy brown hair tickled the inside of my elbow. “I’ll put up with a pinch that will deform my feet, but I will never, ever wear a shoe that slides around. It ruins the entire silhouette. You know what? I don’t think I would have stolen those shoes, no matter what size. I like you too much already.”

  She moved her icy eyes left and right, watching the other students claim their rooms and settle their luggage, squeal, hug, and commiserate, and she slapped that gorgeous smile right at me. It was so neon bright, I almost missed catching the nervous flutter of her lashes. “So, let’s room next to each other. You want to?”

  I did.

  “That sounds perfect.” We exchanged tentative smiles for a split second before we nodded and got to work.

  Evan and I gathered out suitcases with a flurry of giggles and uncoordinated maneuvering and crammed the contents of them into our tiny dorm rooms. She claimed that she was happy enough to let all of her worldly possessions topple onto the scratchy cream blanket and call her room done, then followed me to mine and watched while I hung up all the clothes in my suitcase and put all my accessories in the appropriate drawers.

  “Brenna, I just want to tell you that you are so neat it’s exhausting.” She pulled a nail file out of a tiny clutch studded with pink leather rosebuds and leaned back in the old wooden desk chair, legs crossed like a lady, while I made hospital corners on the bed.

  “Doesn’t it just feel better when you come into a room and everything’s put away? More like home?” I blew my bangs out of my eyes and stretched my stomach across the mattress to more firmly tuck the sheet under while Evan made miniscule adjustments to the length of her nails with quick swishes of the file.

  “I guess. But it doesn’t matter how it feels. It’s never really home anyway, is it?” She stopped swaying her foot back and forth to music only she could hear, and scowled at her innocent, lovely shoe.

  “Are you homesick?” My voice came out just a fraction of a decibel louder than a whisper, and my gut clenched with organ-deep sympathy. I turned down the bed and smoothed a hand over the pillow, then looked around. I would have sat on the desk chair to avoid mussing the bed I had just perfected if Evan wasn’t already sitting there, and I wondered, briefly, if it would be totally strange if I sat on the floor instead. But Evan’s stricken face and far-off stare made me forget my neat-nick habits, and I sat on the edge of the mattress, barely noticing the sheet that came half-untucked, and reached out to put a comforting hand on her shoulder. “Because I get being homesick. I really do. This trip? It’s the first time I’m away from my parents in my life. And my boyfriend and I wanted to spend the summer together, but I’d signed up for this. So, if you’re homesick, I don’t think that’s a weird thing.”

  Her neck jerked up and she looked up at me, wild-eyed, nostrils flared, mouth pinched tight. “You can’t be homesick if you haven’t got a home to go back to.” Her voice grated out harshly. Shock knotted any words of comfort I knew I should try to say, and her mouth softened. “Oh, Lord, ignore me! I’m dead serious, ignore ninety percent of what comes out of my mouth. I’m just being a drama queen.” She snuck me a sidelong glance. “But my daddy did fuck up big time, and the house is officially gone.”

  “You lost your house?” I pressed my lips together and held my breath, trying to imagine what it would be like to lose your house. Where would she go? What would her family do? I’d just met her, but she already made my worry radar buzz out of control. I moved my hand to grab hers, almost by instinct, eager to offer her some kind of comfort. She squeezed my hand tight.

  Evan blinked hard a few times and scratched at her eyebrow, which was bold and dark and wouldn’t have worked on a face less gorgeous than hers. “I can’t believe I’m just spouting this all out. I mean, I know we just met, and you don’t really know anything about me, and here I am just blabbing all these things I haven’t told a single soul back home.”

  “You don’t have to
tell me anything you don’t want to.” I felt awkward holding her hand now, and our palms were both a little sweaty, but it also seemed unfriendly to break the connection. Just as the thought ran through my head, she squeezed my fingers tight again.

  Her lips wobbled a little, and she had to snatch her hand away because she was on the precipice of crying. “I use eighteen coats of mascara.” She laughed a watery laugh, and waved a hand in front of her eyes. “It’s my lucky number, eighteen. But it’s going to leave a sludge pit on my face if I don’t mop it up this second.”

  I grabbed my purse and handed her a little crinkly packet of tissues. She blotted the tears and pressed her lips together. “Brenna Blixen? My name is Evan Lennox, and, even though I am a self-proclaimed drama queen, I mean it when I tell you that my life is about to fall apart.”

  I crooked a tiny smile in her direction. “Hi Evan.”

  She chuckled, blotted a little more, until the whole tissue was dotted with sooty black patches, and blew out a long, shaky breath. “Ever feel like you’re just wearing this mask for everyone’s benefit, and if you have to keep it up for one more second, you’re going to have a nervous fucking breakdown?”

  I realized that it was my good luck that I actually never felt that way. And my thoughts immediately pounced on Saxon and the mask he never seemed to be able to get rid of, no matter how exhausted and spent it made him. “Don’t keep it on, then,” I suggested gently. “Take the mask off, Evan. Because, honestly, I hardly know anything about you, but I like you already. I don’t think you should fake anything about yourself.”

  She licked her lips, then reached into her little pink clutch and took out a lipgloss. She smoothed some on with two neat strokes and passed it to me. I coated my lips, and they smelled like raspberries. Our lips both smelled like raspberries, and that made me feel weirdly, wonderfully linked to her. She looked at the tube and smiled. “I thought this trip was going to be total shit. Now I’m really glad I came.”

  I got to my feet and held my hand out to pull her up.

  “Where are we going, dollface?” She ran a quick hand over her hair and gave me a falsely bright smile.

  “We’re going to your room. You sit and talk about whatever you want. I’ll make hospital corners on your bed and hang all your clothes up. It will make you feel better. I promise.” I opened and closed my hand and tilted my head. “C’mon.”

  She blew her nose and wadded up the tissue, then took my hand and stood. “You know what? I think I might love you already.”

  Listening to her voice was like listening to my mother’s Celtic mixes. It was so gorgeous and sad, lilting in these waves and twists, that I was fairly sure she could read me a trigonometry textbook or a Joseph Conrad short story and it would sound like pure music. I made her sit on the chair while I fixed her bed, but when it was done, I patted the neatly made surface, inviting her to sit.

  “Thank you for doing this, by the way. You seriously don’t have to. And I’m not sitting there. You actually have sweat on your forehead from tucking all that in so perfectly. I’m not mussing it up.” She shook her head and all that glossy hair swished from side to side like tall, dark grass in the wind.

  “I like doing this. It’s very soothing for me. Come on. Sit. I’m not that anal retentive, I promise. Sit.” I coaxed her over and she did sit while I went through her clothes.

  My parents had never had money problems, and they were always very generous when it came to an allowance for my clothes. I also made a nice chunk of my own money designing tshirts back home, so I was able to shop in some fairly upscale stores. Or so I thought.

  Evan’s clothes had tags from stores and designers I’d only ever read about in celebrity magazines. Every piece was more beautiful than the last, and, if I didn’t like her so much already, my blood would have been poisoned with pure, hateful clothing envy.

  “I see you eyeing that pink suede skirt,” she accused happily from her spot on the bed. “We can’t switch shoes, but I bet we’ll be able to share clothes if you want.”

  “I have to admit, I’m having a hard time not hating your guts right now.” I held up a canary dress with wild black floral patterns all over it and a designer label that I couldn’t help but run my greedy fingers over. “This is a dress that could make a girl do bad, desperate things.”

  “Don’t hate me.” She sighed and flopped her long arms out on either side of her body, wrinkling the covers. “That dress was an apology from my daddy for missing my end-of-the-year dance recital. Also, he had to cancel my private dance classes for a few months because we were so behind on the bill. And, of course, we were losing the house.”

  I edged my fingers over the delicately embroidered fabric and tried to follow the swirling floral designs, but it made my eyes swell. And the story behind the dress made my heart squeeze and choke. This dress was seductively gorgeous, like electric sunshine and deep, velvet midnight, but, with that back-story, I could imagine there was any way Evan could wear it and taste anything but the hard swallow of bitter misery.

  “That sucks.” It’s all I could think to say as I slid the dress on the hanger and slipped it into the tiny, dark closet.

  Evan’s voice twined in my ears. “Money means everything to my parents. Daddy especially, because his family seems to have this knack for almost losing it all once a generation or so. Mama comes from money, too, but my daddy can waste a whole lotta money. Two family fortune’s worth. Piles and piles and piles of money.” Her voice sing-songed a little, and she turned her face toward me, her forehead wrinkled and her eyebrows squished low over her eyes. “You know, I’ve never told my best friend any of this. I never even told my boyfriend.” She pulled her hands in and folded them over her stomach. “I just feel like I can trust you.”

  I finished hanging the last of her dresses and surveyed the now-neat room, feeling totally content. I fell onto the bed next to her, only caring a tiny bit that all the tight corners had loosened up. “You can trust me. I won’t tell anyone.” She was chewing her lips with such quick, desperate nips, I was sure her teeth would bite right through the skin, but they didn’t. “So, you have a boyfriend back home?” I asked to take her mind off of everything in her world that was buckling and folding like cheap luggage.

  She rolled her eyes in a circle that had to be nerve-damaging and popped up on her elbow. “It’s very, very, very complicated. Very crazy and tempestuous and all this make-up and breakup drama. Ugh. And complicated.” She covered her eyes with her hands and laughed. “Did I mention complicated already?”

  “So, was he upset about you coming here?”

  My boyfriend Jake was so good. Deliciously good. Amazingly good. He was the one wiping my tears before we left for the airport. He was the one who bought me a guide to Dublin and spent nights going over how awesome this whole experience would be until I calmed down and slept with peaceful Irish dreams dancing in my brain. He was my rock, and I missed him so much at that moment, the ache of it cut me to the quick.

  “Rabin doesn’t get upset.” She raised her dark eyebrows. “He gets wild. Like Heathcliff and Catherine wailing on the fucking moors wild.” She shrugged a quick shoulder. “But he’s beyond hot. I swear to God, I’ve never been with a guy who does the kinds of things he does to me. He has, like, no boundaries.” She laughed and clapped a hand over her mouth. “I just shocked the hell out of you, didn’t I?” she said from behind her slightly splayed fingers. “I can see it in your face. I’m sorry. It’s weird right? I talk too much. Just tell me to shut my big mouth.”

  “No, it’s not weird. That he’s…hot. That’s hot. I’m glad.” I stumbled all over the words and tried to kick back the images that suddenly flooded my brain of my imagined version of hot Rabin doing things that were sexy and forbidden with Evan. I noticed her watching my hand smoothing the blanket frantically, but by the time I stopped myself, it was too late to take my nervous twitch back.

  “I know why you’re so shocked. You look more like a logical love girl.
Like a Lizzie Bennett. You like to think it all out, right? You’re not going to go wild and throw yourself off the turret over some chump with a big dick.” Her laugh ribboned around me, pulling me in.

  “Jake…” I cleared my throat before I continued. “Jake is amazing. And I love him, so much. He’s like my best friend and the guy I love. And, I mean, I try to be logical, but I don’t know if I really am with him. See, he has this brother and he and I got together for a while. It was a big mistake, really big, and I knew it was—”

  “No! You did not!” Evan jumped off of the bed so fast the springs didn’t have time to squeak. She pointed at me, the look on her face pure, undisguised glee. “But you have that sweet look. My gramma would say that butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth if she saw you!”

  I was collecting the words to explain, but the door swung open and a girl with a strawberry-blonde pixie cut said, “Hiya! A whole bunch of us are going out to find something edible in the city. You girls wanna come with?”

  Evan nodded and clapped, then turned to me. “Food? Yes?”

  “Sure.” I slid off the bed, and we headed out with a big gaggle of girls, Evan bumping my shoulder now and then to let me know that she hadn’t forgotten my partial confession and would grill me later.

  We crossed the hallway, and the girl with the pixie cut ducked into an open room where a whole group of guys were playing video games. Several of them get up to join our crew. One looked so familiar for a reason I couldn’t put my finger on. He was tall with tousled brown hair and a lanky, loose frame, but what I really honed in on is his vest. It was blue and brown paisley, not easy for anyone to wear, but this guy was pulling it off like nobody’s business, and the fashionista in me was turning multiple one-armed cartwheels.

  “Mmm, he’s gorgeous. Too bad he’s gay,” Evan said, following my gaze. “Plus that, aren’t two brothers enough for you?”

  I jabbed her with my elbow and we doubled over in a fit of giggles. “It wasn’t the guy, for your information,” I said with a determined glare in her direction. I did not want her to know how easily she charmed me, especially since I had the feeling any encouragement would bring out even worse behavior. “I mean, he’s cute, but it’s his vest I’m falling hard for. I love it. I wish my boyfriend would try to pull something like that off. Jake’s got pretty simple tastes when it comes to clothes.”