Tall, Dark and Devastating: Harvard's Education

“Damn,” Harvard said. “Compared to you, I grew up in paradise.” He swore. “Now I really feel like some kind of pouting child.”

P.J. looked at the ocean stretching all the way to the horizon. She loved knowing that it kept going and going and going, way past the point where the earth curved and she couldn’t see it anymore.

“I’ve begun to think of you as a friend,” she told Harvard. She turned to look at him, gazing directly into his eyes. “So I have to warn you—I only have guilt-free friendships. You can’t take anything I’ve told you and use it to invalidate your own bad stuff. I mean, everyone’s got their own luggage, right? And friends shouldn’t set their personal suitcase down next to someone else’s, size them both up and say, hey, mine’s not as big as yours, or hey, mine’s bigger and fancier so yours doesn’t count.” She smiled. “I’ll tell you right now, Senior Chief, I travel with an old refrigerator box, and it’s packed solid. Just don’t knock it over, and I’ll be all right. Yours, on the other hand, is very classy Masonite. But your parents’ move made the lock break, and now you’ve got to tidy everything up before you can get it fixed and sealed up tight again.”

Harvard nodded, smiling at her. “That’s a very poetic way of telling me don’t bother to stage a pissing contest, ’cause you’d win, hands down.”

“That’s right. But I’m also telling you don’t jam yourself up because you feel sad about your parents leaving your hometown,” P.J. said. “It makes perfect sense that you’ll miss that house you grew up in—that house you’ve gone home to for the past thirty years. There’s nothing wrong with feeling sad about that. But I’m also saying that even though you feel sad, you should also feel happy. Just think—you’ve had that place to call home and those people to make it a good, happy home for all these years. You’ve got memories, good memories you’ll always be able to look back on and take comfort from. You know what having a home means, while most of the rest of the people in the world are just floating around, upside down, not even knowing what they’re missing but missing it just the same.”

He was silent, so she kept going. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d talked so much. But this man, this new friend with the whiskey-colored eyes, who made her feel like cheating the rules—he was worth the effort.

“You can choose to have a house and a family someday, kids, the whole nine yards, like your parents did,” she told him. “Or you can hang on to those memories you carry in your heart. That way, you can go back to that home you had, wherever you are, whenever you want.”

There. She’d said everything she wanted to say to him. But he was so quiet, she began to wonder if she’d gone too far. She was the queen of dysfunctional families. What did she know about normal? What right did she have to tell him her view of the world with such authority in her voice?

He cleared his throat. “So where do you live now, P.J.?”

She liked it when Harvard called her P.J. instead of Richards. It shouldn’t have mattered, but it did. She liked the chill she got up her spine from the heat she could sometimes see simmering in his eyes. And she especially liked knowing he respected her enough to hold back. He wanted her. His attraction was powerful, but he respected her enough to not keep hammering her with come-on lines and thinly veiled innuendos. Yeah, she liked that a lot.

“I have an apartment in D.C., but I’m hardly ever there.” She picked up a handful of sand and let it sift through her fingers. “See, I’m one of the floaters. I still haven’t unpacked most of my boxes from college. I haven’t even bought furniture for the place, although I do have a bed and a kitchen table.” She shot him a rueful smile. “I don’t need extensive therapy to know that my nesting instincts are busted, big-time. I figure it’s a holdover from when I was a kid. I learned not to get attached to any one place because sooner or later the landlord would be kicking us out and we’d be living somewhere else.”

“If you could live anywhere in the world,” he asked, “where would you live?”

“Doesn’t matter where, as long as it’s not in the middle of a city,” P.J. answered without hesitation. “Some cute little house with a little yard—doesn’t have to be big. It just has to have some land. Enough for a flower garden. I’ve never lived anywhere long enough to let a garden grow,” she added wistfully.

Harvard was struck by the picture she made sitting there. She’d just run eight miles at a speed that had his men cursing, then walked three miles more. She was sandy, she was sticky from salt and sweat, her hair was less than perfect, her makeup long since gone. She was tough, she was driven, she was used to not just getting by but getting ahead in a man’s world, and despite all that, she was sweetly sentimental as all get out.

She turned to meet his gaze, and as if she could somehow read his mind, she laughed. “God, I sound like a sap.” Her eyes narrowed. “If you tell anyone what I said, you’re a dead man.”

“What, that you like flowers? Since when is that late-breaking piece of news something you need to keep hidden from the world?”

Something shifted in her eyes. “You can like flowers,” she told him. “You can read Jane Austen in the mess hall at lunch. You can drink iced tea instead of whiskey shots with beer chasers. You can do what you want. But if I’m caught acting like a woman, if I wear soft, lacy underwear instead of the kind made from fifty percent cotton and fifty percent sandpaper, I get looked at funny. People start to wonder if I’m capable of doing my job.”

Harvard tried to make her smile. “Personally, I stay away from the lacy underwear myself.”

“Yeah, but you could wear silk boxers, and your men would think, ‘Gee, the Senior Chief is really cool.’ I wear silk, and those same men start thinking with a nonbrain part of their anatomy.”

“That’s human nature,” he argued. “That’s because you’re a beautiful woman and—”

“You know, it always comes down to sex,” P.J. told him crossly. “Always. You can’t put men and women in a room together without something happening. And I’m not saying it’s entirely the men’s fault, although men can be total dogs. Do you know that I had to start fighting off my mother’s boyfriends back when I was ten? Ten. They’d come over, get high with her, and then when she passed out, they’d start sniffing around my bedroom door. My grandmother was alive then, and she’d give ’em a piece of her mind, chase ’em out of the house. But after she died, when I was twelve, I was on my own. I grew up fast, I’ll tell you that much.”

When Harvard was twelve, he’d had a paper route. The toughest thing he’d had to deal with was getting up early every morning to deliver those papers. And the Doberman on the corner of Parker and Reingold. That mean old dog had been a problem for about a week or two. But in time, Harvard had gotten used to the early mornings, and he’d made friends with the Doberman.

Somehow he doubted P.J. had had equally easy solutions to her problems.

She gazed at the ocean, the wind moving a stray curl across her face. She didn’t seem to feel it, or if she did, she didn’t care enough to push it away.

He tried to picture her at twelve years old. She must’ve been tiny. Hell, she was tiny now. It wouldn’t have taken much of a man to overpower her and—

The thought made him sick. But he had to know. He had to ask. “Did you ever… Did they ever…”

She turned to look at him, and he couldn’t find any immediate answers in the bottomless darkness of her eyes.

“There was one,” she said softly, staring at the ocean. “He didn’t back off when I threatened to call my uncle. Of course, I didn’t really have any uncle. It’s possible he knew that. Or maybe he was just too stoned to care. I had to go out the window to get away from him—only in my panic, I went out the wrong window. I went out the one without the fire escape. Once I was out there, I couldn’t go back. I went onto the ledge and I just stood there, sixteen stories up, scared out of my mind, staring at those little toy cars on the street, knowing if I slipped, I’d be dead, but certain if I went back inside I’d be as good as dead.” She looked at Harvard. “I honestly think I would’ve jumped before I would’ve let him touch me.”

Harvard believed her. This man, whoever he’d been, may not have hurt P.J. physically, but he’d done one hell of a job on her emotionally and psychologically.

He had to clear his throat before he could speak. “I don’t suppose you remember this son of a bitch’s name?” he asked.

“Ron something. I don’t think I ever knew his last name.”

He nodded. “Too bad.”

“Why?”

Harvard shrugged. “Nothing important. I was just thinking it might make me feel a little better to hunt him down and kick the hell out of him.”

P.J. laughed—a shaky burst of air that was part humor and part surprise. “But he didn’t hurt me, Daryl. I took care of myself and…I was okay.”

“Were you?” Harvard reached out for her. He knew he shouldn’t. He knew that just touching her lightly under the chin to turn her to face him would be too much. He knew her skin would be sinfully soft beneath his fingers, and he knew that once he touched her, he wouldn’t want to let go. But he wanted to look into her eyes, so he did. “Tell me this—are you still afraid of heights?”

She didn’t need to answer. He saw the shock of the truth in her eyes before she pulled away. She stood up, moved toward the water, stopping on the edge of the beach, letting the waves wash over her feet.

Harvard followed, waiting for her to look at him again.

P.J.’s head was spinning. Afraid of heights? Terrified was more like it.

She couldn’t believe he’d figured that out. She couldn’t believe she’d told him enough to give herself away. Steeling herself, she looked at him. “I can handle heights, Senior Chief. It’s not a problem.”

She could tell from the look on his face he didn’t believe her.

“It’s not a problem,” she said again.

Damn. She’d told him too much.

It was one thing to joke around about her dream house. But telling him about her problem with heights was going way too far.

It would do her absolutely no good to let this man know her weaknesses. She had to have absolutely no vulnerabilities to coexist in his macho world. She could not be afraid of heights. She would not be. She could handle it—but not if he made it into an issue.

P.J. rinsed her hands in the ocean. “We better get back if we want to have any lunch.”

But Harvard blocked the way to where her sneakers and T-shirt were lying on the sand. “Thanks for taking the time to talk to me,” he said.

She nodded, still afraid to meet his eyes. “Yeah, I’m glad we’re friends.”

“It’s nice to be able to talk to someone in confidence—and know you don’t have to worry about other people finding out all your deep, dark secrets,” Harvard told her.

P.J. did look at him then, but he’d already turned away.