Pacing closer, all I can do is watch while she pulls herself up straight, legs unstable, everything about her unstable, and throws her head back with another roar.
“I’m not okay!”
Melody laughs again, releasing all these feelings I don’t understand. She spins around in clunky circles, arms spread wide.
I’m standing right in front of her now, nearly grazing the front end of the car. Watching. Still watching. I’ve been watching her since that very first day, and I haven’t figured out why.
Her laughter quiets down, her arms dropping, and she whispers to the stars one more time, “I’m not okay.” Then she slides down to her butt, her shoes squeaking against the hood, and leans forward until we’re only a few inches apart. Words of resolution follow as she stares right at me. “But I will be. I’m not ready yet.”
Despite the ice cold rain, I feel a current of heat travel up my neck. My eyes slide down her face and land on her drenched blouse, stuck to her skin, accentuating the swell of her breasts sheathed in a black bra. They heave with every drawn-out breath.
And then I feel some kind of ancient stirring from down below.
What the actual fuck?
I don’t notice shit like nice tits, or a woman’s smile, or the way she smells like fucking lemonade. My biological attraction to women has always been trumped by my emotional resentment towards them. Sex isn’t a part of my life—I haven’t been with a woman in well over a decade, and even then, I never truly enjoyed it. It almost felt like something I had to do—a societal coercion.
I don’t do intimacy, and sex is a breeding ground for intimacy. I much prefer my own hand whenever the itch arises, which isn’t very fucking often. I just don’t really care.
But I feel the itch right now, standing beneath pale moonshine, breathing in her rain-soaked skin, and staring at her tits like a fucking asshole while she’s in the midst of a mental breakdown. I gnash my teeth together and back the hell up, returning my attention to her face.
Her eyes glaze over when they meet with mine, maybe from the booze, or maybe because she noticed my brush with madness. Maybe she noticed me noticing her, and that makes it all the more irrefutable.
Fuck.
There must be something in the rain tonight.
“Parker.” Melody pierces through my miserable thoughts, her voice rough like sandpaper, raw from her screams. “Why did you come?”
I swallow, my jaw stiff. Everything stiff.
Damn it.
Dodging the question because I don’t fucking know, I counter with, “Why did you call me?”
Her legs dangle over the edge of the hood, swinging in opposite time, occasionally grazing my wet pant legs. She gnaws at her bottom lip, glancing away. “Amelia didn’t answer.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
The rain slows as we face each other through the drizzle and humidity, soaking wet, beaten down, and watching each other with matching eyes, green and tired. Melody doesn’t respond to the question, just as I hadn’t, but her expression shifts slightly. Her eyebrows wrinkle with an air of scrutiny, like she’s trying to read me somehow—trying to piece together a puzzle. Unravel my mysteries.
It’s almost as if her demons are interrogating mine and comparing notes.
The look in her eyes, the probing, invasive look, causes my defenses to flare, and a surge of anger pumps through my veins. Cocking my head to the side, I say bitterly, “Don’t. Don’t look at me like that.”
Her brows dip further, confusion marring them. “Like what?”
“Like I’m something you can fix.”
Melody hesitates, my response soaking in like the late-spring rainfall. She worries her lip again before sliding off the hood and landing on her feet, until we’re nearly toe-to-toe. Her body sways and teeters, still unbalanced from the alcohol she poisoned herself with, and she tilts her head up to meet my steely gaze.
And then she fucking smiles… because of course, she does.
“All broken things can be fixed. The hard part is deciding that they’re worth fixing.”
She makes a little sound after the words spill out, almost as if she surprised herself by them, caught herself off guard. Maybe she never thought to apply them to her own dents and cracks. Melody stares off over my shoulder, the ghost of her smile still lingering.
But the moment is severed when a car engine roars up, lights flashing at us, and a juiced-up Land Rover slows to a stop a few feet away. Melody jumps back, moving out of my bubble that she had no business invading in the first place, and her whole body tenses when she spots the vehicle.
She runs her fingers through her mess of matted hair. “Great,” she murmurs.
The driver hops out, looking ready to kill something. “What the fuck, Melody?”
I recognize him then as the headlights brighten his silhouette against the dark night. It’s her brother. He’s got fury in his gait and murder in his eyes. His sandy hair flies in a thousand different directions as he stalks over to us, and I inch backwards with my hands in my pockets, kind of wishing the storm would start up again, so maybe I could fall into that super low statistic of people who get struck by lightning.
“What are you doing here, West?” Melody almost tips over when her left foot sinks into the spongy mud.
“Tammy from O’Toole’s called me and said you walked out of the bar plastered. Then she saw your car speed out of the parking lot. Are you insane?” West suddenly seems to notice my existence and pulls his eyes from his sister, pinning them on me. A frown follows. “Aren’t you the contractor?”
Awesome. I’m fucking soaked and miserable, my dick is acting up, and now we’re having conversations. I blink at him, hoping my face portrays the fact that I’d rather be eaten alive by ancient scarab beetles than be standing here right now. “Yeah.”
West narrows his eyes at me like he’s trying to force pieces together that don’t fucking fit.
“I called him,” Melody intervenes, taking her brother by the arm and trying to guide him back to his car. “It had to do with Loving Lifelines. It’s a thing.”
He pulls his arm free. “Why didn’t you call me? Or Mom and Dad? Or Leah?”
“Can we talk at home? I’m emotionally exhausted right now.”
“Do you not trust us? Are you embarrassed that you’re still hurting? Jesus, Mel, we all love you. You don’t need to hide from us.”
Melody seems to wither, like she is trying to hide from him, and glances my way before reaching for her brother’s arm again. “Just take me home. I’ll get my car in the morning.”
Pinching the bridge of his nose, West reluctantly follows her lead with a harrowing sigh. They both climb into the vehicle while I watch from the ditch, up to my ass in muddy water. The engine rumbles to life as Melody fastens her seatbelt and wrings out her hair, her image hindered slightly by the rainy window. But she turns her head to look at me when the vehicle begins to pull away, tires tossing up mud and gravel, the stereo sounding through the glass with some kind of alternative rock bullshit.
I stare right back at her, our unanswered questions still hovering between us. Still lurking.
“Why did you come?”
“Why did you call me?”
I’ll reckon she called, and I came, for the same reason our eyes always seem to find one another’s, even when there’s a dozen other people in the room—but I don’t have a reason for that right now, so I bury those questions away with the rest of my ghosts and old bones.