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  CATCHING TATUM

  LUCY H. DELANEY

  Booktrope Editions

  Seattle, WA 2015

  COPYRIGHT 2015 LUCY H. DELANEY

  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

  Attribution — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).

  Noncommercial — You may not use this work for commercial purposes.

  No Derivative Works — You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work.

  Inquiries about additional permissions

  should be directed to: [email protected]

  Cover Design by Shari Ryan

  Edited by Mary Ward Menke

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to similarly named places or to persons living or deceased is unintentional.

  PRINT ISBN 978-1-62015-759-6

  EPUB ISBN 978-1-62015-780-0

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2015904843

  CONTENTS

  COVER

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT PAGE

  DEDICATION

  PROLOGUE

  THE ROAD NOT TAKEN

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  EPILOGUE

  SONGS THAT INSPIRED CATCHING TATUM

  SEXUAL EXPOSURE CHART

  PREVIEW OF WAITING ON JUSTIN

  MORE FROM LUCY H. DELANEY & BOOKTROPE

  To my Auntie Kathy, the best sports mom her boys could ask for, mother hen her wayward niece needed, and Organ Lady to the rest. May the LORD grant you peace as you lean on Him for strength down the road you now travel. You got this!

  To my gym, the best gym on the planet, Crossfit Performance – Wenatchee, and my gym family, especially those 5:15 p.m. and lunchtime crews. Thanks for letting me workout with the cool kids!

  And to my Tatum and her number one fan, her mama, Kristy. May the bond the two of you share strengthen and grow as you race together through all life's turns. Thanks for letting me be a part of it.

  I love you all!

  PROLOGUE

  MY MOM had a picture of a yellow poplar wood and this poem hanging in every house we ever lived in. It was from her mom and someday it will be mine. She told me what it meant the year I had my own two roads to choose from. I was so careful after my high school romance turned tragic to set rules and make a plan so that my heart didn't get broken ever again, so that my head stayed in control. The rules were supposed to save me but instead they made it even harder to choose my path. I had two men to choose from and I stayed at the beginning of the roads and looked down both paths as far as I could, as long as I could, until it was too late to choose either ...

  THE ROAD NOT TAKEN

  Robert Frost

  Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

  And sorry I could not travel both

  And be one traveler, long I stood

  And looked down one as far as I could

  To where it bent in the undergrowth;

  Then I took the other, just as fair,

  And having perhaps the better claim,

  Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

  Though as for that the passing there

  Had worn them really about the same,

  And both that morning equally lay

  In leaves no step had trodden black.

  Oh, I kept the first for another day!

  Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

  I doubted if I should ever come back.

  I shall be telling this with a sigh

  Somewhere ages and ages hence:

  Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –

  I took the one less traveled by,

  And that has made all the difference.

  CHAPTER 1

  I AM a memory maker. My mom inspired that in me. She was always stopping me or one of my brothers (I had four of them, two older, two younger) in the middle of something to make a memory. She would tell us to freeze and realize our surroundings. Then she would tell us to gather it all up: the sights, the sounds, the smells, and feelings ... like a long, deep breath. “Look around you. What's your emotion? What do you see, hear, smell and feel? Will there ever be a moment like this again?” she would ask and then tell us to let the memory fill us up completely, then blow it out, bottle it up, put a cork in it, and save it for all time and eternity. At some point, when I was really young, I had so many memories I couldn't hold them in my arms anymore, and I invented an imaginary storage house for all of them.

  My memories rested neatly on thick, dark wooden shelves carved into the walls of an old, cozy cave. The rough-hewn walls scratched my fingertips when I thought about touching them, and inside a soft light glowed from everywhere; dim, warm and safe. Everything in my memory cave was old and the stopped up bottles were sorted onto several dusty shelves. The good memories always stayed at eye level where I could reach out and uncork them easily and, in an instant, inhale the sweetness of days and years gone by.

  One of my favorites, my wedding night, sits at the very edge of the best shelf. We've been married so long now that things get mundane and predictable. Don't get me wrong; there's something to be said for regular, routine, curl-my-toes kind of sex, but I also like to remember how we used to be, so I pull out the stopper and I breathe in the memory of our youth and yearning, and the need to prove our vows were true by becoming one, like we already were in heart and soul.

  “Give me first,” he said, and leaned in for a kiss outside our five-star hotel room.

  I was cradled in his arms. He carried me from the elevator. I wrapped my arms around his neck and let my fingers and thumbs climb up into his thick hair.

  “Come and get it!” I purred.

  His mouth covered mine. His lips, his tongue, the stubble on his chin, the aftershave, and pheromones that swirled around him were new and old all at the same time. He was mine forever and always and he still had a score to settle. We were going all the way and this time I would not be stopping him. The moment was perfect. He played my game and we both won. As soon as he carried me over the threshold, I jumped out of his arms and reached behind me to undo the zipper of my dress. I can't say that I purposely planned to have a dress that was easy to take off, but subconsciously I must have been thinking about that. There was no undressing slowly to tease him; we'd been teasing each other for way too long. It was all about getting the deed done.

  “Second base,” he said in my ear, reaching to help unzip the back of the dress. His head dipped as the dress slumped to the floor in a swoosh of billowing fabric. I don't even remember my bra coming off, just his hands on my bare breasts. He pushed them together and took both in at once, sucking hard. After an eternity of bliss, he let them go but continued to knead and tease the right one with his thumb. His other hand slid down my torso to my bare backside. “Perfection,” he said, with a squeeze and pat for emphasis, before stepping back to undress.

  He was already hard and I laughed at him trying to un
do his rented tux pants that would be returned the next day. Naked and unashamed I stood before him, impatiently waiting, letting him take me in, stupid grin on his face, while his hands fought with his waistband. I smiled and jumped up on him. He grabbed my thighs and pushed me further into the room, stumbling over my gown pooled on the floor in front of the door. The granite sink counter, ice cold on my flesh, sent a shiver through me when he set me on it.

  “I can't get these things off!” he roared.

  We laughed, we kissed. “Don't break them, they'll charge us a fortune to fix them!” I said before kissing him again. The pants had a hook and eye instead of a button and though he undid my bra in milliseconds, he was no match for the pants’ clasp.

  “Let me,” I said, wrapping my legs around him, pulling him closer. I bit the flesh of his shoulder just to let him know that I wanted him as badly as he wanted out of his pants. His hands wrapped-up in my waist-long dreads and he pulled my head back exposing the tanned skin of my neck and kissed me from ear to ear while I blindly fumbled with the clasp.

  Finally, he was free and our mouths found each other again. I used my feet and hands to push his pants down, briefs off, and grab all that was him and squeeze. Tongue, hands, legs, all of me wrapped around him, tempting, teasing, tasting. We were ready for each other. He lifted me up, our lips never separating. I could feel his smile when I guided him into a better position between my legs. I opened my eyes; he was staring at me. Forehead to forehead, eyes locked, noses touching, it was time. “What are you waiting for?” I asked with a devilish grin.

  “Third base ... Don't say it if you don't mean it.”

  “You know I love you,” I answered.

  “That's my girl. I love you, too. Be mine forever?” he said, pushing his way inside me faster than I expected.

  “Ahhhh,” I gasped.

  “Yeah?”

  “Oh, baby, forever,” I stuttered. “You feel so good.” And then words disappeared from our consciousness. We were one and they were irrelevant in our world of passion and pleasure. I met his movements and held on for dear life as my own body tensed in expectation. He ended furiously, built up anticipation spilling into and out of me. I felt him throbbing and gushing and it sent me into my own oblivion, where not even he existed anymore, except as an agent of rapture. It was not my first climax, but it was the best I had ever known up until then. That's why the memory of that night has such a special place on the shelf.

  I wish they were all like that, full of love and excitement and happiness, but I saved others too: memories that are not so nice, but in some weird way they are just as special. Mom taught us to save the bad along with the good. She told us that all memories were important and deserved respect, if only to remind us of roads we should not travel again, or to help us empathize with others saving their own dark memories. I keep the sad ones and bad ones on a higher shelf in my musty memory cave. Almost all of them are covered in thick dust and cobwebs; the way a bad memory should be. But I know them as much as the good ones, though I seldom uncork and savor them. They are harder to relive and only come out in emergency situations.

  All it takes is a quick glance up there to those sad, sorrowful, moments in my history and I can remember enough. Really, how can I ever forget the searing pain of my physical and emotional scars? I think they stick with me easier than the good ones, whether I want them to or not, so I leave them up there, out of my way … except for two.

  I'm lucky that the worst physical pain I've ever been in was just a busted face, but the memory of it haunts me every day when I look in the mirror. It happened in a fight with my brothers, Theo and Brett. They were playing keep away with my favorite GI Joe, Scarlet, when I was seven. I tried to karate kick Theo but he moved out of the way too fast and I flew straight at the porch rail. My leg slid between the slats and I turned my head and caught the top edge of the railing with the side of my face. My face exploded in fantastic pain like I had never felt before nor have I since. I saw stars and fell to the slatted wood below me in a daze.

  Then the blood came. It was spectacular; my shirt was drenched in seconds. All I remember at first was Theo saying, “I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry,” and throwing Scarlet at me. I knew it was bad but I ran after him, chasing him into the house. I was going to make him pay for taking my toy and hurting me. Mom started yelling for me to cover my face to keep the blood from getting everywhere before she even asked what happened. I ended up with ten or eleven catgut stitches that she sewed herself with a sterilized needle. Theo and Brett were forced to be her surgical assistants and get her what she needed to fix me up. She grew up on a farm; they fixed the animals all the time when they got torn up, so I don't think she was thinking about the long term effects of a home-stitched fix on my face when she did it. She was reacting quickly, like she had to on the farm. The whole time she was sewing and squeezing my face together, I was screaming and she was lecturing the boys about sharing and including me in their games.

  Once it was sealed up, I got the last laugh. The boys both got whooped and I got Fudgsicles for a week. I loved asking mom for one and eating it right in front of them. I guess that memory is tempered with a little bit of sweet-smelling revenge.

  Unfortunately, Mom left the stitches in a little too long so when she pulled them out she had to yank hard to get them to come through my skin. I swear that part hurt as bad as when she put them in. The scar, a jagged and glaring two-and-three-quarter-inch flaw on my face, is pock-marked above and below with little dots from the stitches. I don't blame her for the hideousness of it, but I think she blames herself. Eventually the physical pain faded even though the scar never has. It's a memory I can't escape even if I wanted to. It uncorks itself every time I look in the mirror.

  That's the easy part—my physical pain healed quickly—it is the emotional scars that are bad. Sometimes I can still hear old classmates calling me Scar Face like it was yesterday. I hate those memories of being picked on because of the way that I looked. I wanted to cry but knew that would only make it worse, so I endured and pretended like I didn't hear them when they called me names. As hard as the name calling was, it was nothing compared to the pain of heartbreak.

  That bottle is the darkest of them all. The memory: a name. Cole.

  Cole Jackson, sixteen years old with hazel eyes and a dimpled grin that weakened my knees.

  He was a memory on my bad shelf that tormented me the way my scar did for years. He was the first to hold equal space on both shelves. He was my first official date, my first back-seat make-out session ... my first time. It took a long time for me to decide what shelf he truly belonged on, and by then it was too late to go back down the road and start over. I loved him but I loved others, too, and therein was my problem.

  The thing is: I have always known that I am strong, capable, and independent; that's how my parents raised me. I am happy doing my own thing and living life on my terms. I don't need a man, but I want one. I've always wanted one. Worse than that, I was so eager to make memories with my man that I fell in love easily, with everyone. It was my greatest weakness; my heart wouldn't behave itself. If there was the slightest chance I could find love with a boy, I was all in, even if the object of my affection wasn't. That's just me, who I am, how I am—passionate, hopeful, lovesick. Yep, I fall in love easily and all I want is love in return.

  I blame it on my parents. They are strong-willed, opinionated, proud, and they have always been ridiculously in love with each other despite it. I'm not saying their love is perfect. I remember them fighting from time to time when I was a kid. My mom, Kathy, has Italian in her blood, so when she's mad everyone knows about it. My dad is a Colonel in the United States Air Force and is used to things his way. They've had some pretty good arguments, not hitting and screaming and throwing things, but heated and awkward-to-be-a-kid-in-the-room kind of fights. But they're both hopeless romantics. They promised forever to each other and they're either proud enough to keep their promises or too proud to break them, one
or the other. I was doomed to be a passionate, romantic soul when they conceived me. I prefer passionate to aggressive; romantic to desperate, but I've been called the latter a whole lot more than the former. What can I say? It's not easy to balance my personality, especially when my heart gets involved.

  Then there were my brothers. I was the girl sandwiched in between the four of them. Thomas and Theo were just as hopeless when it came to passion and love. Thomas so much so that when he found the girl of his dreams in fourth grade he kept her through all of our military moves, and hers; even when he enlisted in the Air Force, and she in the Navy, it's always been Thomas and Belle. They found love as children and stayed in it their whole lives—well at least their lives so far—and there's no sign of their love fading. Theo was more of the hopeless kind of romantic (we are the same like that) but he didn't fall hard until his senior year in school. That's when he met the girl of his dreams, Kennedy, and completely changed his lifelong plan to enlist and follow the family into the military, to suit her. Don't get me started on how Mom and Dad handled that.

  The younger boys were less of an influence. Brett's my closest brother (don't ask me why my parents gave us all “T” names except for him; I do not know). During the time of my great indecision and heartbreak, we lived together in a small apartment about fifteen minutes from McChord Air Force Base, which was home to our family unit since my junior year of high school. Brett is passion incarnate. He's so passionate about baseball he can't think about a girl, only making it to the majors. Lastly, there's Travis, the perfect mix of us all—passionate, opinionated, proud, and a hopeless romantic who had his heart completely and utterly broken by the girl he wanted. I had bottles full of memories of one boy after another—crushes, kisses, dates, and infatuations. Not Trav; nope, he found his girl young. Like Thomas, he poured his heart and soul into her and had it ripped out when she broke up with him in a letter when he was a teen. I made my rules to be sure I didn't fall in love with the wrong guy ever again. But when Travis got ditched he made rules to be sure he never fell in love again ... ever. Now he is so distracted by military life and training that he has maybe forgotten her, but she is, as yet, still irreplaceable.