“You’re grown and single. He’s grown and single. What’s weird about that?”
She shrugs. This is new. I’ve never seen Haley embarrassed. Ever. It humanizes her a little.
“But you should probably hurry up and finish. Hector sounds hungry.” I laugh and wink, then go find my hot chocolate.
I’m curled up under my blanket, halfway through one of my favorite episodes of The Golden Girls. It’s the one where Blanche finally meets a guy she actually has feelings for only to find out later that he’s married. I feel you, Blanche. I feel you. Except my guy isn’t married. He’s just emotionally unavailable.
My phone pings.
Blaze: Hector and Haley, huh?
Apparently, the cat is out of the bag.
Me: Yeah. Who knew?
Blaze: Does Liam know he’s a matchmaker?
Me: Pretty sure this isn’t the kind of fire he intended to spark. *wink emoji* *fire emoji*
God, am I seriously sending emojis in a text? What the hell has happened to me?
Blaze: I can think of a million ways I’d rather have met you, but I’ll take the lick fate gave me.
Blaze: Speaking of licks, I want to take you out on my boat tomorrow.
Blaze: If you don’t have plans.
Blaze: *three water droplet emojis*
Oh my God, this man.
Me: I was going to watch a Backstreet Boys documentary and dunk Funyuns in cheese dip, but I can reschedule.
Blaze: Fuck the Backstreet Boys.
Blaze: Delete that message. You’re not fucking anyone but me.
Blaze: I’m picking you up tomorrow at 7.
That attitude. The way he barks out orders like the world belongs to him and him alone. On anyone else it would seem arrogant and rude, but I know Blaze. I know his heart. There’s not an arrogant bone in his body. Still, when he talks like that all I want to do is answer back: Yes, please, and thank you… sir.
Lake Norman is beautiful. The water is this amazing blend of blue and green, smooth like glass except for the occasional wave when another boat passes. Along the shore, there are multi-million-dollar mansions with docks that lead out into the water. All the homes are separated by thick groves of trees with full green branches. It’s breathtaking.
We’re floating with the motor off somewhere in the middle of the lake. He’s in his swim trunks and I’m in my bikini. Lying on a benchseat underneath the hardtop, I’m between his legs with my back to his chest, and he’s reading The Scarlet Letter and feeding me strawberries. One of his hands holds the book while the other drapes lazily over my shoulder and traces circles around my nipple through my bikini top. Eventually, he slips the fabric off my boob entirely, leaving me exposed. Sometimes he takes a break long enough to reach for a strawberry. He’ll take one bite, rub the fruit across my hard peak then feed me the rest of it. Life really doesn’t get any better than this.
“In our nature, however, there is a provision, alike marvelous and merciful, that the sufferer should never know the intensity of what he endures by its present torture, but chiefly by the pang that rankles after it.”
His chest heaves against my back, and I feel the sharp intake of breath when he reads that passage. I turn on my side so I can look at him.
“What do you think he means?” Blaze asks when his eyes meet mine.
I trail a fingertip across his chest. “I think it means there’s an inner strength in all of us, something that protects our minds from the pain of our reality. We have a built-in numbness.”
“But it always catches up with us, the pain.”
He’s talking about Micah. He still blames himself.
“True. It does. But that pain, the second wave of it, is something we bring upon ourselves. We can control it.” I close my eyes briefly, deciding whether or not to open up another part of myself to this man. When I open them again, he’s looking straight at me, straight into me.
“When I was thirteen, someone broke into our house. I was in the shower when I heard glass shatter. I turned the water off, wrapped myself in a towel, and hid in the closet. I should’ve panicked, but I didn’t. I didn’t even scream. I don’t know what they were looking for or if they took anything at all. I just know I waited there, cold, naked, in the dark closet until my mom got home. It was like I was watching it happen to someone else. My mind never caught up to the reality that I was a thirteen-year-old girl naked in a closet while God-knows-who roamed around our house. I think even now a part of me still feels the effects of that day because every time I hear a noise while I’m in the shower, it shakes me a little. Yet I wake up every morning, and I shower. That fear doesn’t control me.”
My finger moves over his chest and to his arm, tracing every outline of the tattoos on his shoulder then down his bicep. He watches me and smiles when I get to the eyes of a wolf.
“Micah loved to draw. We’d do homework together, and he would draw the whole time. This…” He points to the wolf face. “Was the last drawing he ever gave me.”
“Wow. He was good.” I think about the tattoos all over Micah’s body and wonder if he drew them himself. “And this?” I trace a tattoo of a checkered flag with a tribal outline. “Is this for Levi?”
His jaw tenses. “No. That’s to remind me to keep going no matter what. To not stop until I finish.”
There’s a set of numbers between the flag and the wolf. 2.21.16. I run my fingers across them, and he winces.
“Somewhere around three years ago, his girlfriend died in a car accident.”
I pull my hand away. “It’s okay. You don’t have to tell me what that one means. I don’t need to know.”
I have a feeling I already do.
He reaches for my hand again then brings it to his chest. “I want to.”
Waves of anxiety roll around in my gut. It’s the same feeling I used to get when I would hear Sugar fumbling for her keys outside the front door after I’d waited up for her all night. It’s knowing this won’t be pleasant but not knowing why.
“Okay.”
His heart is hammering beneath our hands. His chocolate-caramel eyes are tainted with sorrow. It’s happening. We’re falling, crashing. All I can do is brace myself for the impact. “Three years ago, I caught my girlfriend fucking my brother.”
Oh.
He blows out a steady, controlled breath. It’s warm against my skin. “She walked into my life when I was ten years old and became my everything. She knew Micah too. She was the only thing that got me through the grief when they took him. We laughed together. We cried together. We remembered together. We grew up together in every sense of the word. The only time we were apart was in college, and even then she was only a few hours away. As soon as we graduated, we both moved to Charlotte. I came home one night, excited about opening the brewery, and there they were, on the couch, naked as the day they were born. I wanted to beat his face in right then and there, but she stopped me. So, I packed my shit and left. I went to Hector’s. The next day, Levi called me and told me he’d race me for her. Like she was some kind of piece of fucking property. That’s what she meant to him. Fucking nothing. She was my everything, and she was his nothing.” He blows out another steady breath as if he’s trying to hold it together.