I watched as Spot Conlon fell to his knees and pulled a scrub brush out of
the metal bucket that I, many weeks ago, had dropped on his head out the
window. He brushed with long strokes, his sleeves rolled up and his hair
falling in his face. He had left his cane by the door with his cap draped
on top of it. He looked over at me and said to me, "Well, you said to 'help
you clean the floor', Doll-Face, that implies that you're helpin' too."
I shook my head and kneeled down next to him, taking another scrub brush and starting to scrub the floor vigorously without even looking up at him. Yet, somehow out of the corner of my eye, I caught sight of his arms, partly covered by his rolled up sleeves, his muscles moved so gracefully, forcing the dirt off the floor. I smiled softly to myself, going back to my scrubbing. Realizing how much stuffier it was upstairs, I glanced at him to make sure he wouldn't see me and quickly undid two more buttons on my blouse.
"Here, it's easier if you take longer strokes," He said, obviously, he had been watching me scrub out of the corner of his eye. I took a stroke a bit longer, but he shook his head, "Like this," He said, swinging one arm over me and grasping the scrub brush on either side of my hands, pushing it down forcefully and moving his arms with mine. I could smell him just then. He smelt of the water from the river... His river. His hands worked slowly around mine, and I smiled lightly, rubbing some sweat off my forehead.
"And just how much experience have you had cleanin' floors?" I teased him. He looked back up at me and smiled, making me realize just how close his face was to mine.
"More than you'd think," he feigned seriousness, "just don't tell nobody."
I laughed a bit and looked back down at the floor, trying to concentrate on scrubbing away at it. My breath caught in my throat as I helplessly watched his hands slowly but deliberately slide on top of mine, all the while guiding the brush across the floor. Gulping, I glanced at him, his eyes were focused on our hands as well. I was curious as to what he was thinking, and even more curious about what he was thinking about doing. He moved his eyes up and met mine again, giving another half-smile. I tried to force one too, but all I could do was look back at the floor and feel my face turn red. Trying to keep my breathing steady, I unwillingly trembled as Spot's fingers ran across mine. His touch flooded through me, sending a shiver up my spine. It dawned on me that we had stopped moving the brush, but his hands were still resting on mine, and when I looked up at him, I saw no intention of moving in his eyes. Swallowing hard again, I realized that he had me cornered again. I couldn't move, and he was unbearably close to me He could kiss me if he wanted to, and I prayed that he wouldn't, but wished in the back of my mind that he would at least attempt it. I closed my eyes and tried to block it out. I hadn't realized it, but I was biting my lip near to making it bleed. All I was aware of was how softly he caressed my hands, gliding the tips of his fingers through the spaces between mine. It reminded me of what Kerry had said about fingers being intertwined forever.
Kerry. I was supposed to be waiting for him to come back, and here I was on the floor with Spot Conlon and trying to resist the overwhelming urge to kiss him. What kind of person was I?
I moved my hands under Spot's, trying to shake him off of me. His hands relaxed their grip on mine and he leaned back a bit. I opened my eyes and stared at him, feeling regret deep in my heart.
"I can't..." I begged him with my eyes to understand that this was wrong. This was the reason I didn't deserve Kerry MacKilligan, and this was everything I shouldn't and couldn't want.
Those deep green pools bore into me, and I feared that he could read my mind. "I'm sorry," he moved back from me a bit, but left his hands resting on top of my wrists lightly. "I just..."
There was a creak of the floor and then a familiar voice interrupted us. "Anabeth?" Spot and I both looked up to see Kerry standing in the doorway. Realizing that we hadn't closed or locked the door, I felt both relieved and disappointed. But Kerry looked confused, and Spot was quick to give him an explanation.
"Hey Kerry, just showin' your girl here how to wash the floor right," he gave a knowing look and smiled. It amazed me how fast he was to react, almost as if he'd expected Kerry to walk in and had armed himself with an alibi. But I wondered if Kerry believed him or not. I forced another smile and resumed scrubbing the brush across the floor, as if I'd only been taking a break, while Spot quickly moved his hands away from my wrists and pretended to help me. He looked back towards the door and said with a wink, "Just don't tell nobody you saw me doin' this, okay?"
"Sure, Spot..." Kerry smiled as if everything was just fine, but I really was curious as to what was going through his mind about where he'd found us. "Anabeth, I'll be outside when you two are finished with uh, the floor." I saw something unfamiliar in his eyes, but it was gone almost as soon as it had appeared.
"All right," with my fake smile still plastered to my face, I watched him turn and leave. When Spot and I had heard him walk out of the clubhouse, we both let out a deep sigh.
"Let's hope that never happens again," he finally let go of my hands and ran one of his own through his hair, pushing it out of his face. I glanced at him questioningly. "What?"
"Do you mean 'Let's never put ourselves in that situation again,' or do you mean," I hesitated, "'Let's never get caught again'?" He didn't answer me, so I went on. "We can't do this again. We can't... kiss under the streetlight and then pretend it never happened. So maybe we ought to just go back to not talkin' to each other."
Spot frowned slightly. "It's that serious? With Kerry, I mean, that you don't wanna risk anythin' bein' around me?"
"It might be," to be honest, I had no idea. Kerry loved me, and I wasn't sure if I felt completely the same way. But I did care about him enough to be faithful to him. "Well... it's at that point where it either is or isn't, so I need to find out, okay?"
"How does that have anythin' to do with you and me? Talkin', I mean."
"I... it's hard to explain, but you're kinda... you're a little bit of a distraction." I felt myself beginning to blush again.
"Distraction?" He looked confused, but I saw a hint of amusement in his eyes. Was he laughing at my discomfort? I shook my head, silently asking him to drop the subject. Picking up my brush again, I continued cleaning the floor, moving my hand back and forth in long strokes like Spot had showed me.
"Where's Fishface?" I had noticed that she hadn't been at her usual perch in the window when we had walked upstairs, and wondered where she had gone to mope now.
"Search me," he sighed again. I mused for a second over the thought of whether he was serious or not. "She got a letter from the Cowboy, so she may be out somewhere reading it a hundred times over."
"He finally wrote to her?"
"Yeah... she said somethin' about he was almost ready to send for her to come out to Santa Fe," he took a deep breath, "she was real happy about it."
"Well, that's good," I tried to sound happy for her, and I really was, but Spot's feelings for her had obviously not diminished and it irritated me for some reason.
"For her it is, anyway." He shrugged and stared down at the floor while I stopped scrubbing the floor.
I must have sounded a bit impatient when I asked him, "Why do you still beat yourself up with that anyway? Sorry, but I just don't get it."
He looked up at me as if I was crazy. "I told ya, I can't help it, can't help how I feel." His hand twitched a bit as he added softly, "Love ain't a choice, Anabeth."
I chewed on my lower lip a little and went back to scrubbing the floor. Long strokes, that way, Spot Conlon would have no excuse to throw his arm around me. I was trying so hard to concentrate on the floor that I didn't even notice when the necklace Patrick had given me for my sixteenth birthday fell out of my blouse through the unbuttoned space below my neck.
"What's that?" Spot asked me, his hand reaching over and lifting up my turquoise necklace gently under his fingers, "Where'd you get that? Steal it?"
I stared at him in disbelief, "No, I didn't steal it." I snapped, "Patrick gave it to me."
"Oh. where'd he get it?" Spot was just getting annoyingly curious now.
"I don't know, he gave it to me at Fishface's party." I remembered the party, the minutes afterwards had tainted what had been a beautiful night, despite the fact that the party had been held for someone whose mood swings came as often as the sunset.
"Oh yeah," Spot said uneasily, going back to scrubbing the floor. We were almost done by that time, "That night." It was an awkward thing to say, with nothing really to say back to it. I nodded and went back to scraping the bristles of the scrub brush across the last few feet of the dirty wooden floor.
I sat back on my heels easily as we finished, yet my mind was completely uneasy in this room, sweating from the heat, with Spot, wondering exactly WHERE Patrick had found this beautiful piece of jewelry. Perhaps he HAD in fact, stolen it to give to me. No, Patrick wouldn't have done anything like that. Patrick was, in fact, as wholesome as a bowl of oatmeal.
Spot glanced over at me awkwardly, sitting back on his heels next to me, "So." He smirked for a moment, his green eyes, damn them, laughing at me again, "You forgive me?" He asked, feigning a pathetic apologetic look.
I bit my lip again, trying not to smile. Then I pretended to be deep in thought. Finally I gave him a smirk of my own, "Not without an explanation." His trace of a smile faded quickly, he hadn't been expecting that. Lowering my voice, I added slowly, "And it better be a really good one."
Spot glanced around nervously, obviously looking for an escape, but if he went down the stairs he'd only have to face Kerry MacKilligan, who would, I expected, be fuming, or even worse: Ruth MacKilligan, who would regale him with what her correspondence from the one and only Jack Kelly had noted, and from the look on his face, he wasn't up to facing either one of them just yet, so he'd have to face me. With what had better have been a pretty damn good excuse for his behavior.
"I." He trailed off, seemingly for lack of an excuse at all, and I'll be honest with you, I was frustrated. But then he caught me off guard, and continued. "I've been rejected by women for most of my life, Anabeth," he said quietly, "And there you were, and I didn't know what I was doing, I wasn't thinking about who you were or what we were doing. All I knew was," he paused, "you weren't going to run away."
I stared at him for a moment, trying to let what he had just said sink in. He had said that I was his second choice basically, that I was his fallback, I looked into his eyes. They were no longer laughing at me, they just stared back at me blankly, there was no feeling behind them, and perhaps, even when he had kissed me, there never had been. But when Kerry gazed at me; when he would lightly brush his hand across the side of my face, there was a feeling in his eyes. A truth that couldn't be denied. I looked away from Spot Conlon, with the strongest voice I had, I said, "Well, I'm running now, Spot." I bit my lip and stood up, striding out of the clubhouse, leaving a bewildered Spot Conlon sitting on his heels on his freshly cleaned floor.
The hot air stuck to my half-way unbuttoned blouse, which I immediately buttoned up, despite the fact that the heat was far more intense now that I was outside. Tucking a loose lock of hair behind my ear, I glanced around the docks, now filled with Brooklyn newsboys, until I saw a familiar face, yet his eyes were distant, and he, for once in all the time I had known him, had his slingshot, which usually resided in his back pocket, out and aimed at an empty booze bottle. He let go and the bottle shattered to pieces. My eyes widened. I'd only once noticed the slingshot hanging out of Kerry's back pocket, and I never thought he'd use it. on anything. I watched him for a moment more, as he gulped and pulled another fragment of a rock out of a bag hanging at his waist. Just as he aimed it, I softly put my hand on his shoulder.
He jumped when I touched him, and when he looked at me, I could see something different in his eyes, something that, honestly, scared me. "Are you alright, Kerry?" I asked him, pulling my hand off his shoulder.
"I'm alright." He said simply, looking away from me and off towards the water, his hair was dirty, and it fell down into his face, covering his shockingly blue eyes from mine. I sighed.
"You sure?"
Kerry looked over at me, "Sometimes I just get a little jealous, that's all."
He was jealous? Kerry MacKilligan didn't strike me as the type to ever get jealous. Even stranger, he was jealous of Spot? "Well, you shouldn't. There's nothing to be jealous of," I shrugged my shoulders.
Looking back at me, he gave me a quick once-over. Then he reached over and touched my collar, saying quietly, "You missed one..." and redid the top button.
I looked down at my blouse guiltily, then swallowed hard and bit my lip. What was I supposed to say? I couldn't give him that age-old excuse that nothing was going on and it wasn't what it had looked like, because truthfully it was. Looking back up into his eyes, I saw that unfamiliar flash again that I'd caught for an instant when he'd found me on the floor with Spot. It worried me, especially because I had no idea what he was thinking. Without another word, he aimed his slingshot at another empty bottle that he had lined up and released the rock in his hand. I closed my eyes as I heard the bottle break into a hundred pieces.
It was at that moment that I realized how many dimensions there were to Kerry MacKilligan. That moment, when a sandy-haired newsie in brown pants and an undershirt placed his hand roughly on Kerry MacKilligan's shoulder and said in a husky Brooklyn accent, "Y'look angry, MacKilligan," His voice was dripping with disdain, and Kerry furrowed his eyebrows, trying to contain his anger as he shot another fragment of a pebble at another bottle, missing completely, "So angry your." He paused for a moment, trying to think of the word, "impeccable aim is off. Could it have somethin' to do with our oh-so-fearless leader?"
Kerry shot him a look, and I just stood there, watching the boy who had once held my hand and asked me to remember that he'd always be with me attempt to contain his anger at this stranger. Of course, he wasn't REALLY a stranger. I had seen him quite a few times before, though I didn't know his name. He walked the docks every morning like he owned them. He was one of the best shots in all of Brooklyn. I'd watched him practice out my window before Fishface stole it to sulk. "I ain't got any business with you, Buttons, so why don't you just go back to that fearless leader of yours?"
The sandy-haired boy called 'Buttons' continued, as if Kerry hadn't even spoken, "See, I was thinkin', y'see, and I think it might have somethin' to do with our fearless leader and the lovely Anabeth," His hazel eyes glanced over at me, but only briefly, then they shot back to Kerry, "'Cause y'know, I think it does."
Kerry struggled with his emotions for a moment, I saw it in his eyes and the way his shoulders tensed up, and then he turned and coolly raised his slingshot, a round pebble loaded, and aimed it directly at Buttons's forehead. "Go away." He said, his voice slipping back to the one he'd used with Spot Conlon a few weeks before, when they'd argued in the lower room of the clubhouse, "Leave or I'll shoot you dead right now, you dirty thief. I don't care what your leader does to me, you'll leave and not talk about Miss Anabeth Meyers again, you got it?"
I was shocked, Kerry never acted like that. Granted he didn't make a very good threat, it was still almost unbelievable.
Buttons didn't even flinch, "Oooh, 'Miss Anabeth Meyers'? Didn't know we was callin' the little whore by her whole name now."
"That's enough, Buttons," I turned around, and Spot Conlon was standing there, holding that ridiculous cane and looking nothing else but short. But his eyes were blazing, and it made even me shiver. Kerry lowered his slingshot, but didn't unload it. His eyes were still burning holes into Buttons, who didn't seem to notice. "You ain't got no business with MacKilligan, nor any with Shortstack. If I were you," Spot said icily, "I'd not be buttin' into business that wasn't mine, or you'd have an angry Scotsman with," he paused and raised a comical eyebrow at him, "impeccable aim to deal with." Spot made me wonder how long he had been listening to the conversations that had gone on out by the docks. "And you'd have me to deal with as well, and my aim is twice as good as MacKilligan's."
Kerry stared at Spot for a moment, and gave him what I thought was an almost thankful look; along with Kerry's thankfulness, Spot also received an icy glare from Buttons. Kerry then proceeded to shoot a glare of his own at the sandy-haired newsboy. I wondered to myself what was wrong with Kerry, but in my heart, I knew.
* * * *
Hey y'all, it's Anna. I know things have been going a bit slow the last couple of chapters, but things are about to pick up, so hang on! Cheesey, I know.
I shook my head and kneeled down next to him, taking another scrub brush and starting to scrub the floor vigorously without even looking up at him. Yet, somehow out of the corner of my eye, I caught sight of his arms, partly covered by his rolled up sleeves, his muscles moved so gracefully, forcing the dirt off the floor. I smiled softly to myself, going back to my scrubbing. Realizing how much stuffier it was upstairs, I glanced at him to make sure he wouldn't see me and quickly undid two more buttons on my blouse.
"Here, it's easier if you take longer strokes," He said, obviously, he had been watching me scrub out of the corner of his eye. I took a stroke a bit longer, but he shook his head, "Like this," He said, swinging one arm over me and grasping the scrub brush on either side of my hands, pushing it down forcefully and moving his arms with mine. I could smell him just then. He smelt of the water from the river... His river. His hands worked slowly around mine, and I smiled lightly, rubbing some sweat off my forehead.
"And just how much experience have you had cleanin' floors?" I teased him. He looked back up at me and smiled, making me realize just how close his face was to mine.
"More than you'd think," he feigned seriousness, "just don't tell nobody."
I laughed a bit and looked back down at the floor, trying to concentrate on scrubbing away at it. My breath caught in my throat as I helplessly watched his hands slowly but deliberately slide on top of mine, all the while guiding the brush across the floor. Gulping, I glanced at him, his eyes were focused on our hands as well. I was curious as to what he was thinking, and even more curious about what he was thinking about doing. He moved his eyes up and met mine again, giving another half-smile. I tried to force one too, but all I could do was look back at the floor and feel my face turn red. Trying to keep my breathing steady, I unwillingly trembled as Spot's fingers ran across mine. His touch flooded through me, sending a shiver up my spine. It dawned on me that we had stopped moving the brush, but his hands were still resting on mine, and when I looked up at him, I saw no intention of moving in his eyes. Swallowing hard again, I realized that he had me cornered again. I couldn't move, and he was unbearably close to me He could kiss me if he wanted to, and I prayed that he wouldn't, but wished in the back of my mind that he would at least attempt it. I closed my eyes and tried to block it out. I hadn't realized it, but I was biting my lip near to making it bleed. All I was aware of was how softly he caressed my hands, gliding the tips of his fingers through the spaces between mine. It reminded me of what Kerry had said about fingers being intertwined forever.
Kerry. I was supposed to be waiting for him to come back, and here I was on the floor with Spot Conlon and trying to resist the overwhelming urge to kiss him. What kind of person was I?
I moved my hands under Spot's, trying to shake him off of me. His hands relaxed their grip on mine and he leaned back a bit. I opened my eyes and stared at him, feeling regret deep in my heart.
"I can't..." I begged him with my eyes to understand that this was wrong. This was the reason I didn't deserve Kerry MacKilligan, and this was everything I shouldn't and couldn't want.
Those deep green pools bore into me, and I feared that he could read my mind. "I'm sorry," he moved back from me a bit, but left his hands resting on top of my wrists lightly. "I just..."
There was a creak of the floor and then a familiar voice interrupted us. "Anabeth?" Spot and I both looked up to see Kerry standing in the doorway. Realizing that we hadn't closed or locked the door, I felt both relieved and disappointed. But Kerry looked confused, and Spot was quick to give him an explanation.
"Hey Kerry, just showin' your girl here how to wash the floor right," he gave a knowing look and smiled. It amazed me how fast he was to react, almost as if he'd expected Kerry to walk in and had armed himself with an alibi. But I wondered if Kerry believed him or not. I forced another smile and resumed scrubbing the brush across the floor, as if I'd only been taking a break, while Spot quickly moved his hands away from my wrists and pretended to help me. He looked back towards the door and said with a wink, "Just don't tell nobody you saw me doin' this, okay?"
"Sure, Spot..." Kerry smiled as if everything was just fine, but I really was curious as to what was going through his mind about where he'd found us. "Anabeth, I'll be outside when you two are finished with uh, the floor." I saw something unfamiliar in his eyes, but it was gone almost as soon as it had appeared.
"All right," with my fake smile still plastered to my face, I watched him turn and leave. When Spot and I had heard him walk out of the clubhouse, we both let out a deep sigh.
"Let's hope that never happens again," he finally let go of my hands and ran one of his own through his hair, pushing it out of his face. I glanced at him questioningly. "What?"
"Do you mean 'Let's never put ourselves in that situation again,' or do you mean," I hesitated, "'Let's never get caught again'?" He didn't answer me, so I went on. "We can't do this again. We can't... kiss under the streetlight and then pretend it never happened. So maybe we ought to just go back to not talkin' to each other."
Spot frowned slightly. "It's that serious? With Kerry, I mean, that you don't wanna risk anythin' bein' around me?"
"It might be," to be honest, I had no idea. Kerry loved me, and I wasn't sure if I felt completely the same way. But I did care about him enough to be faithful to him. "Well... it's at that point where it either is or isn't, so I need to find out, okay?"
"How does that have anythin' to do with you and me? Talkin', I mean."
"I... it's hard to explain, but you're kinda... you're a little bit of a distraction." I felt myself beginning to blush again.
"Distraction?" He looked confused, but I saw a hint of amusement in his eyes. Was he laughing at my discomfort? I shook my head, silently asking him to drop the subject. Picking up my brush again, I continued cleaning the floor, moving my hand back and forth in long strokes like Spot had showed me.
"Where's Fishface?" I had noticed that she hadn't been at her usual perch in the window when we had walked upstairs, and wondered where she had gone to mope now.
"Search me," he sighed again. I mused for a second over the thought of whether he was serious or not. "She got a letter from the Cowboy, so she may be out somewhere reading it a hundred times over."
"He finally wrote to her?"
"Yeah... she said somethin' about he was almost ready to send for her to come out to Santa Fe," he took a deep breath, "she was real happy about it."
"Well, that's good," I tried to sound happy for her, and I really was, but Spot's feelings for her had obviously not diminished and it irritated me for some reason.
"For her it is, anyway." He shrugged and stared down at the floor while I stopped scrubbing the floor.
I must have sounded a bit impatient when I asked him, "Why do you still beat yourself up with that anyway? Sorry, but I just don't get it."
He looked up at me as if I was crazy. "I told ya, I can't help it, can't help how I feel." His hand twitched a bit as he added softly, "Love ain't a choice, Anabeth."
I chewed on my lower lip a little and went back to scrubbing the floor. Long strokes, that way, Spot Conlon would have no excuse to throw his arm around me. I was trying so hard to concentrate on the floor that I didn't even notice when the necklace Patrick had given me for my sixteenth birthday fell out of my blouse through the unbuttoned space below my neck.
"What's that?" Spot asked me, his hand reaching over and lifting up my turquoise necklace gently under his fingers, "Where'd you get that? Steal it?"
I stared at him in disbelief, "No, I didn't steal it." I snapped, "Patrick gave it to me."
"Oh. where'd he get it?" Spot was just getting annoyingly curious now.
"I don't know, he gave it to me at Fishface's party." I remembered the party, the minutes afterwards had tainted what had been a beautiful night, despite the fact that the party had been held for someone whose mood swings came as often as the sunset.
"Oh yeah," Spot said uneasily, going back to scrubbing the floor. We were almost done by that time, "That night." It was an awkward thing to say, with nothing really to say back to it. I nodded and went back to scraping the bristles of the scrub brush across the last few feet of the dirty wooden floor.
I sat back on my heels easily as we finished, yet my mind was completely uneasy in this room, sweating from the heat, with Spot, wondering exactly WHERE Patrick had found this beautiful piece of jewelry. Perhaps he HAD in fact, stolen it to give to me. No, Patrick wouldn't have done anything like that. Patrick was, in fact, as wholesome as a bowl of oatmeal.
Spot glanced over at me awkwardly, sitting back on his heels next to me, "So." He smirked for a moment, his green eyes, damn them, laughing at me again, "You forgive me?" He asked, feigning a pathetic apologetic look.
I bit my lip again, trying not to smile. Then I pretended to be deep in thought. Finally I gave him a smirk of my own, "Not without an explanation." His trace of a smile faded quickly, he hadn't been expecting that. Lowering my voice, I added slowly, "And it better be a really good one."
Spot glanced around nervously, obviously looking for an escape, but if he went down the stairs he'd only have to face Kerry MacKilligan, who would, I expected, be fuming, or even worse: Ruth MacKilligan, who would regale him with what her correspondence from the one and only Jack Kelly had noted, and from the look on his face, he wasn't up to facing either one of them just yet, so he'd have to face me. With what had better have been a pretty damn good excuse for his behavior.
"I." He trailed off, seemingly for lack of an excuse at all, and I'll be honest with you, I was frustrated. But then he caught me off guard, and continued. "I've been rejected by women for most of my life, Anabeth," he said quietly, "And there you were, and I didn't know what I was doing, I wasn't thinking about who you were or what we were doing. All I knew was," he paused, "you weren't going to run away."
I stared at him for a moment, trying to let what he had just said sink in. He had said that I was his second choice basically, that I was his fallback, I looked into his eyes. They were no longer laughing at me, they just stared back at me blankly, there was no feeling behind them, and perhaps, even when he had kissed me, there never had been. But when Kerry gazed at me; when he would lightly brush his hand across the side of my face, there was a feeling in his eyes. A truth that couldn't be denied. I looked away from Spot Conlon, with the strongest voice I had, I said, "Well, I'm running now, Spot." I bit my lip and stood up, striding out of the clubhouse, leaving a bewildered Spot Conlon sitting on his heels on his freshly cleaned floor.
The hot air stuck to my half-way unbuttoned blouse, which I immediately buttoned up, despite the fact that the heat was far more intense now that I was outside. Tucking a loose lock of hair behind my ear, I glanced around the docks, now filled with Brooklyn newsboys, until I saw a familiar face, yet his eyes were distant, and he, for once in all the time I had known him, had his slingshot, which usually resided in his back pocket, out and aimed at an empty booze bottle. He let go and the bottle shattered to pieces. My eyes widened. I'd only once noticed the slingshot hanging out of Kerry's back pocket, and I never thought he'd use it. on anything. I watched him for a moment more, as he gulped and pulled another fragment of a rock out of a bag hanging at his waist. Just as he aimed it, I softly put my hand on his shoulder.
He jumped when I touched him, and when he looked at me, I could see something different in his eyes, something that, honestly, scared me. "Are you alright, Kerry?" I asked him, pulling my hand off his shoulder.
"I'm alright." He said simply, looking away from me and off towards the water, his hair was dirty, and it fell down into his face, covering his shockingly blue eyes from mine. I sighed.
"You sure?"
Kerry looked over at me, "Sometimes I just get a little jealous, that's all."
He was jealous? Kerry MacKilligan didn't strike me as the type to ever get jealous. Even stranger, he was jealous of Spot? "Well, you shouldn't. There's nothing to be jealous of," I shrugged my shoulders.
Looking back at me, he gave me a quick once-over. Then he reached over and touched my collar, saying quietly, "You missed one..." and redid the top button.
I looked down at my blouse guiltily, then swallowed hard and bit my lip. What was I supposed to say? I couldn't give him that age-old excuse that nothing was going on and it wasn't what it had looked like, because truthfully it was. Looking back up into his eyes, I saw that unfamiliar flash again that I'd caught for an instant when he'd found me on the floor with Spot. It worried me, especially because I had no idea what he was thinking. Without another word, he aimed his slingshot at another empty bottle that he had lined up and released the rock in his hand. I closed my eyes as I heard the bottle break into a hundred pieces.
It was at that moment that I realized how many dimensions there were to Kerry MacKilligan. That moment, when a sandy-haired newsie in brown pants and an undershirt placed his hand roughly on Kerry MacKilligan's shoulder and said in a husky Brooklyn accent, "Y'look angry, MacKilligan," His voice was dripping with disdain, and Kerry furrowed his eyebrows, trying to contain his anger as he shot another fragment of a pebble at another bottle, missing completely, "So angry your." He paused for a moment, trying to think of the word, "impeccable aim is off. Could it have somethin' to do with our oh-so-fearless leader?"
Kerry shot him a look, and I just stood there, watching the boy who had once held my hand and asked me to remember that he'd always be with me attempt to contain his anger at this stranger. Of course, he wasn't REALLY a stranger. I had seen him quite a few times before, though I didn't know his name. He walked the docks every morning like he owned them. He was one of the best shots in all of Brooklyn. I'd watched him practice out my window before Fishface stole it to sulk. "I ain't got any business with you, Buttons, so why don't you just go back to that fearless leader of yours?"
The sandy-haired boy called 'Buttons' continued, as if Kerry hadn't even spoken, "See, I was thinkin', y'see, and I think it might have somethin' to do with our fearless leader and the lovely Anabeth," His hazel eyes glanced over at me, but only briefly, then they shot back to Kerry, "'Cause y'know, I think it does."
Kerry struggled with his emotions for a moment, I saw it in his eyes and the way his shoulders tensed up, and then he turned and coolly raised his slingshot, a round pebble loaded, and aimed it directly at Buttons's forehead. "Go away." He said, his voice slipping back to the one he'd used with Spot Conlon a few weeks before, when they'd argued in the lower room of the clubhouse, "Leave or I'll shoot you dead right now, you dirty thief. I don't care what your leader does to me, you'll leave and not talk about Miss Anabeth Meyers again, you got it?"
I was shocked, Kerry never acted like that. Granted he didn't make a very good threat, it was still almost unbelievable.
Buttons didn't even flinch, "Oooh, 'Miss Anabeth Meyers'? Didn't know we was callin' the little whore by her whole name now."
"That's enough, Buttons," I turned around, and Spot Conlon was standing there, holding that ridiculous cane and looking nothing else but short. But his eyes were blazing, and it made even me shiver. Kerry lowered his slingshot, but didn't unload it. His eyes were still burning holes into Buttons, who didn't seem to notice. "You ain't got no business with MacKilligan, nor any with Shortstack. If I were you," Spot said icily, "I'd not be buttin' into business that wasn't mine, or you'd have an angry Scotsman with," he paused and raised a comical eyebrow at him, "impeccable aim to deal with." Spot made me wonder how long he had been listening to the conversations that had gone on out by the docks. "And you'd have me to deal with as well, and my aim is twice as good as MacKilligan's."
Kerry stared at Spot for a moment, and gave him what I thought was an almost thankful look; along with Kerry's thankfulness, Spot also received an icy glare from Buttons. Kerry then proceeded to shoot a glare of his own at the sandy-haired newsboy. I wondered to myself what was wrong with Kerry, but in my heart, I knew.
* * * *
Hey y'all, it's Anna. I know things have been going a bit slow the last couple of chapters, but things are about to pick up, so hang on! Cheesey, I know.