Page 40 of The Summer of ’98

He pulled my face back to him and kissed me as his hand moved up the length of my torso. He gripped the neck of my tank top, easily pulling the off-the-shoulder garment down so that my chest was exposed to him. His hands were like magic. His fingertips were powerful but articulate and I was coming undone.

I was on the brink, a scream developing, an earth-shattering release begging to be granted. But before I reached that point, he spun us around so that I was leaning against the countertop. The sound of the telephone started ringing, piercing the quiet with an unwanted distraction. “Just ignore it,” Leroy ordered when I stiffened at the sound. I thought that it might have been hard to continue with its shrill ring surrounding us, but he was quick to distract me with his hands.

Until it started again. The ringing was relentless. It would pause for a moment before it began again and Leroy paused, resting his head on my shoulder as he took a deep, frustrated breath. He stormed over to the telephone.

“What?!” he snapped, his shoulders rising and falling with his anger. He listened for a few moments, and when his expression became more serious, I straightened up and pulled my tank top up. Whoever was on the phone spoke with panic. He leaned on the wall. “You have got to be fucking kidding me, Noah.”

I watched with piqued interest.

“I am so tempted to leave you there and let you deal with it. I was in the middle of something.”

It was brief, but I saw the way he flinched with a satisfied look before he was back to big brother mode.

“Fine,” he said. “I’m coming. But you’d better believe that I’m about to spend the next month cockblocking the fuck out of you.”

Leroy slammed the phone back on its base and immediately moved to the table and began blowing out the candles, descending us into darkness. The glow of the moon and pool lights outside allowed enough luminescence to see his profile as he stretched out and offered me his hand, waiting with little patience. “I’m sorry, Ellie,” he said. “I have to go and help Noah. Although it’s the last thing that I want to be doing.”

“What happened?” I asked. He opened the front door and locked it behind us.

“He’s locked in a girl’s spare bedroom because her father caught them having sex and now, he’s waiting with a baseball bat so that he can kill him.”

I waited for him to laugh, or tell me that he was joking. But he remained stone-faced as we got into the car and peeled out of the driveway. I was equal parts confused, scared, and to top it off, sexually frustrated. But more than that, I was disappointed for Cass, who would have been waiting for him to show up tonight.

“How are you going to help him?” I asked. “You might get hurt.”

He stared straight out at the road, the streetlights revealing his tense expression. He didn’t answer me, instead keeping his hands wound tight around the wheel as he sped up.

“I’ll be fine,” he murmured after a few minutes of tense silence.

The house was closer than I thought it would be. We swung into the driveway of a single-story home with a porch light illuminating the front path. It didn’t look like a lot was going on inside, but as soon as the engine was killed and Leroy pushed his door open, masculine and outraged shouting could be heard inside the house, along with the piercing, shrill voice of a girl.

“Ellie.” I glanced at where he stood outside of the car, leaning down with his hand rested on the roof. His expression left me with no room to argue over his next words. “Do not get out of this car.”

Leroy

The nerve Noah had. When he first met Ellie, he had accused her of not being good enough for this family. And here he was, at the Weismann house, about to be beaten to death by Natalie’s father. The front door was not surprisingly unlocked, and the house stank like old food.

It wasn’t hard to find where Noah would be hiding—somewhere close to the unhinged shouting of a madman. As I carefully wandered down the hallway, I noticed the smashed photo frames that had been knocked off the wall and the indents where the end of a bat had met the thin walls. As if the shouting wasn’t enough.

I had met Peter once or twice. He had a short temper and a distaste toward the upper class. If Noah got out of this without getting smacked, I would be giving him one just for being such a careless idiot. Natalie was an attractive girl, sure, but he was about to be beaten to death over her.

I cursed when I realized that the bedroom Peter was shouting at was the last one in the hallway and there was only one way out. For a moment, I wondered why Noah hadn’t gone out the window, but then I remembered that Peter barred them last time Natalie had been caught sneaking out.

The man stood just a little taller than me and used the baseball bat to bang on the door again, shouting an almost indecipherable threat. I was sure that he wasn’t that mad about Natalie being with a guy—it had more to do with who she was with. I took a deep breath and cleared my throat, hoping we could get out of this with little to no violence.

He snapped his head toward me and grimaced. “The hell are you doing in my house?”

“I came to get Noah.” I held my hands up to proclaim my innocence. “We’ll leave and he won’t be back. I swear.”

He started toward me. “I caught that little asshole in bed with my daughter.” I took a step back, but it didn’t deter him. He got up in my face as he spat his threats. “The second he comes out of that room, I’m batting his fucking head in.”

“Noah!” I shouted as loud as I could. “Call the police.”

I wasn’t sure why he hadn’t done that in the first place. Noah’s voice came from the bedroom, but I couldn’t hear what he said.

“What’s going on?”

I turned around and recoiled when I saw Natalie standing behind me.

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