SEPTEMBER 13, 2015
MY BODY WAS FINALLY ADJUSTING to Florida’s thick heat. It was unrelenting, even in September. Miserable, I’d hear most locals saying, but I loved misery. Like anything in life, the bad had to be embraced so the good would be that much sweeter. Being miserable only made those rare moments of happiness that much better. Like the afternoons when I’d sit on the back porch of my rented house and a soft breeze would blow through. I’d close my eyes and smile, grateful for the break. Or when the heat would get so intense I’d put on a bathing suit and rush down to the ocean to feel the cool water.
Misery drove us to seek happiness.
It was Friday, which meant I’d have plenty of opportunity to get good footage of local activity over the next two days. I liked people-watching. It made me feel smaller in some ways. Made my life take a backseat to what was going on around me.
Royalties from my last project were still consistent, so I decided to put a deposit down for another week. The small house was owned by an elderly woman who was more than happy to have a resident. According to her, business was slow.
There weren’t many on the road since I’d beat the rush-hour traffic. The traffic there was insanity. I planned my day around trying to avoid it. I’d never seen so many drivers scared of merging.
Sticking my hand out the window, the warm breeze laced through my fingers. A song came on the radio that pinged against my heart, so I reached over and cranked the volume.
There was nothing like the feeling of a good song with the windows down, driving alone on my way home. It was a unique cathartic feeling, as if the world was at my fingertips and all I had to do was grasp it. As I sang, an easy smile pulled at the corner of my lips. I pulled off into the gas station for my afternoon coffee. Nearly one month in, and I was already forming habits like a local. There was only one other car in the parking lot, a Monte Carlo.
I hated Monte Carlos.
They signified absence and confusion. Tears and a yearly change of scenery, which meant new friends at a new school. I shoved away the memories creeping up the back of my mind and hopped out. A piece of paper was taped to the machine, noting I needed to pay inside before pumping.
Crossing the graveled lot, I opened the door and headed straight for the cashier.
That’s when I saw him.
Hudson, standing at the register, digging into his pockets.
My stomach leapt to my throat, hiding beside my heart as my feet melded to the ground. Every thought inside my head vanished like a wisp of smoke except for one—why? It had been over two weeks since I last saw him. I hadn’t even thought of him.
So why did he have this effect on me?
A fresh cup of coffee sat between him and the cashier. He pulled his hands free from his pockets, empty. “I must have forgotten my wallet.”
The cashier stared at him. I’d seen her in a there a time or two. Always with smudged eyeliner and tired eyes. I didn’t take her for much of a talker. Maybe she was sick of words. Maybe they brought her no comfort; therefore, there was no need to engage in using them.
“I’m sorry,” Hudson continued, scratching the side of his beard. “It’s been one of those days, you know?”
The woman didn’t blink. I somehow found my senses.
“I’ve got it.” I moved around him, his masculine scent overwhelmingly sexy, and sat a twenty-dollar bill on the counter. Looking up into those tired, blue eyes, I said, “Can you put the rest on pump one, please?” I was trying to focus on her, my ears and my chest on fire.
He stared down at me, his face unchanged. Still stoic. Still reserved. But his eyes didn’t lie. The crystal blue color deepened with need and pain. How two small orbs could be more powerful than gravity itself boggled me, because I felt like I was floating when I gazed into them. Drifting away, to a place others had never been.
A place he’d made clear we’d never visit.
I cleared my throat. “Looks like I get to buy you that coffee after all,” I said, then I turned and left, my pulse skyrocketing.
“What’s your issue?” I whispered under my breath as I reached for the pump. My hands were shaking, heart still rattling as if it were trying to be released from its cage.
I was almost finished pumping when I heard the crunching of footsteps across the gravel, headed in my direction.
“Hey,” he said quietly, rounding the corner of my bus.
“Hi.” I kept my eyes forward, watching the numbers clicking past.
“I don’t really date.”
I flinched back as a small, surprised laugh awkwardly left my lips. “Well, there goes my cover. And here I thought I was indiscreetly pulling out all the stops to woo you.” I pinned him with a slitted look. “That means dinner by candlelight is off the table then?”
I could almost see the words tangling in his mouth before his eyes dropped to his feet. There might have even been a slight blush to his cheeks, but it was too hard to tell underneath all that gruff. Why was he still trying it with me? Couldn’t he see I was trouble?
“I’m… shit.” He ruffled a hand through the back of his hair before lifting his gaze to mine.
The ice in his eyes was thawing.
“Sorry,” he continued, his tone a bit softer. “I’m not a people person. I’ve never been good at holding a conversation. Martha, the woman who helps me run my diner, says it’s something I need to work on. She says I’m too abrasive.”
I remembered her. The tuft of gray. The scolding, mothering words. From what I’d gathered, she was exactly right.
I stared at him for a moment, partly because I was baffled and still trying to catch up to his change of mood, and partly because I wanted him to suffer. But it didn’t seem to work, because his eyes remained intent and focused on me, unswayed by my attempt at seeming aloof.
I was hot again, and I wasn’t sure if it was because of the angle the sun was cutting through, or because of the way his eyes played over me in such a familiar, intimate way. It was the palms turning clammy, cheeks building a sheen of discomfort kind of hot.
“I had a grandmother like her,” I said, finding my voice. I wasn’t going to let him win this. I could control my emotions. I would control my emotions. “Nona. She was a walking spitfire with enough love to fill the world. Always had a way of explaining things that helped the world make sense.”
He pulled a toothpick from his pocket, twirled it between his fingers, and then planted it between his teeth. Perfectly white teeth, I noted, as if carved out of marble. He twirled it a few times before speaking, and spoke around it without it ever falling out, as if he’d done that his whole life.
Judging by the plain white T-shirt, jean shorts, and flip-flops he had on, I figured he had.
I stuck my hand out. “Let’s have a do-over. I’m Hartley Fernsby.”
A smile hitched at the corner of his mouth, his large hand enveloping mine. “Hudson. Hudson Jameson.”
We shook, a small gesture. Simple. Endearing.
“It’s nice to meet you, Hudson,” I said as he let go of my hand.
He stood back, taking me in. A moment later, his lips parted and the dam was broken. “You said your nona helped you make sense of things. That’s Martha for me. She’s looked after me for as long as I can remember,” he said, opening our new metaphorical sharing circle a bit wider. “She stepped in when my dad stepped out, helping my mom run the restaurant before I took over.”
My heart gave one big, hard heart-wrenching thump.
He said that heavy piece of information like he’d said it a thousand times before. It yanked the little bit of control I had away from me. There was no typical middle with him. It was nothing at all, or all at once. Like a tornado sucking me in.
“How old were you?” I asked, turning to put the pump back and close my gas tank. I kept my voice even and smooth, feeling like I was splitting clean down the middle as images of my father surfaced.
“Seven.”
Old enough to remember, I thought with a pang to my gut. Just like me. “Do you know why?”
He gave a half-hearted shrug as he leaned against the side of my bus. “He wasn’t made for it, I guess. My mom didn’t ever say much about it, and I never had the guts to ask.”
I thought about Mom and the first night I cried for Dad when he didn’t come home. “I’m only going to tell you once, do you hear?” she’d said from where she sat at the foot of my bed in the pitch-dark room. “It’s the same piece of advice my mom gave me when my daddy walked out on us, and it got me through what you’re going through now. The only person who will never leave you is yourself, so you must love and protect yourself at all costs, because that is who should matter most. Not me. Not Nona. And most definitely not any man. Do you understand?”
I nodded at her even though I didn’t understand. I just didn’t want to upset her anymore.
It was the first and last time I ever cried for any man.
I inhaled and forced a smile. “That couldn’t have been easy.”
Hudson twirled the toothpick in his mouth. Maybe that was a part of the pain I recognized in his gaze. The loneliness left behind by an absent parent.
“We managed. Mom was enough. She was the backbone to our family.” The pain laced in his words struck me. He spoke in past tense. Hudson must have noticed the slight flicker of recognition to my features, because he added, “She died three weeks before I was supposed to leave for college. Left the diner to me.”
My hands found my mouth, his words splinting through my heart. “Oh, Hudson. I’m so sorry.”
Bravery shielded his gaze. “It was a long time ago.”
“Losing both your parents… I couldn’t imagine.” I was at a loss for words.
The ghosts of our pasts danced within the silence between us. Like a body of water, there was an undiscovered depth to him.
He chuckled nervously, scratching at his beard. “See what I mean? I’m not good with small talk. I say what’s on my mind, no matter if it’s appropriate or not.”
His personality started to take shape in front of me. His lack of words. He was cautious with them. Careful. Meticulous because he understood himself to his core. Maybe he wasn’t that bad after all.
“The world needs more honesty. Maybe then everyone could stop hiding behind masks and just fucking live.”
He regarded me. Toothpick twirling, twirling, twirling. I felt that nervous energy thing itching at the back of my throat again.
“This might sound off the wall, but did you know that when a cat licks its wounds, it’s because there’s something in their saliva that helps the clotting process?” I asked, just to get his eyes off me and fill the air with something other than tension.
He chuckled, looking a bit confused. “Is this something your nona said?”
He was disarmingly observant.
My stomach tingled. He paid attention enough to already peg where I pulled from, which could only mean he truly listened when I spoke. That was a rarity in people nowadays.
Especially men.
“No. Not this one, but it will make sense once I explain where I’m going with this,” I said, smiling. I decided then I liked him. Maybe more than I should. He didn’t toss one-liners in hopes for a dance in between the sheets. He didn’t pretend to care while only thinking with his second head.
He was raw. Honest. Fresh.
“Okay… I’ll bite.” He shifted his stance, still twirling that toothpick between those perfectly pouted lips.
I focused my gaze on the tip of his nose. “Cat saliva also carries bacteria. Sometimes, a cat thinks a wound has healed over because the skin has clotted and scarred, not knowing what’s festering beneath the surface. But what was left unattended to will continue to grow underneath the freshly healed skin, until one day it pops back open, worse than it was before.”
“I think I know where you’re going with this,” he said. There was a twinkle in his eyes that wasn’t there before. A twinkle I’d put there. “You think I have deep-rooted wounds?” he asked, one eyebrow raised.
I matched his gaze. “Speaking from experience, I don’t think… I know.”
A smirk lifted the corner of his mouth. Even his smirk was perfect. I feared what I’d feel when he let out a full-blown smile.
“Maybe you’re right.” His tone shifted to a more serious side. “But don’t we all have something festering beneath the surface? We wouldn’t be human if we didn’t.”
There was a moment then. One where I knew the person I’d locked eyes with was someone who’d wreck me in all the best ways. It me hit me so hard it scared me. Made me break away from the intensity of his gaze.
A gust of wind kicked up around our feet, pushing a stray Styrofoam cup across the parking lot. It reminded me of time and how it pushed us forward against our will. How even though in the flesh we were strong, present, and whole, it didn’t matter when stacked against the unseen forces of time.
Even if we weren’t ready to face the future, it would come one way or another.
“I don’t think I’ve ever had the pleasure of being compared to a cat and its saliva,” he said in passing thought, pulling the toothpick from his mouth.
“Bear,” I corrected, looking to my feet.
“Hmm?”
I lifted my gaze to his. “I’d say you’re more like a bear. But the way you treat your wounds is like a cat.”
He smiled then, and it stole my breath away. He didn’t just smile with his mouth. It was his entire face that lit up until his eyes shone like two bright stars. “Man, you remind me so much of someone I was once close to. Someone I—” His eyes flared, and my lungs stilled. He hadn’t meant to say that out loud.
“Who?” I asked, finding myself leaning closer, wanting to step through the crack in the door he left open.
But just as quickly as he had opened it, it was shut again.
“No one. Never mind.” He stood straight, watching as a car pulled into the parking lot and an old man stepped out. “I should get back to work.”
“Okay,” I found myself saying, trying to keep up with him.
He started heading to his car, but then stopped and turned. “It was nice… this.”
“It was,” I stated, letting him lead this time.
“Do you like coffee?”
I heard what he was really saying underneath that question.
My smile grew. “Yeah.”
“Well, I owe you one. If you stop by the diner, I make a killer concoction.”
“I’d like that,” I said, then he turned and got into his car.
Maybe a Monte Carlo wasn’t so bad after all.
I SPENT THE ENTIRE NIGHT playing back our conversation through my head, noting the little things about Hudson that set him apart from anyone I’d ever known. How could someone be so scared of communicating with another person, but then open up as if we had always known each other?
Because there was something more than chemistry brewing between us, I thought. I only ever went against my own principles when there was an attraction I couldn’t fight. It was a sign that there was something different there… something deeper, when I could spill everything to an almost stranger because it felt right.
I pulled out my phone, and searched for him on social media. I couldn’t help it. The stalker had awoken in me. There was a lot to be learned about someone by stalking them online. I knew, because I did it often. A way to fish out potential morons in the dating scene.
He had a Facebook page, but nothing else. I liked that. He was a private person. Real. Not trying to create a facade online for everyone to follow. I gave up social media a year ago as a New Year’s resolution, and haven’t done anything with it since.
I scrolled down his page, but didn’t have to go far. There was only one post. It was made seven years ago, in 2008.
I’ll be here, waiting.
That was all it said.
I wasn’t sure how many times I read, and then re-read those four mysterious words. Waiting for who? A lost love? Was that what I saw in his eyes? Was that why he was so hesitant around me? He didn’t have any friends to dig through. No about me or corny intro. Just a profile picture of what I could only assume was his house, which had that Old Florida southern flare I rarely saw around where I stayed. Most everything was gated communities with a limited amount of personality and space between each squared house.
I studied the profile. A two-story home with yellow siding and a green roof. Large knotty oak trees with swaying moss. Endless gardens and a sprawling green yard.
One thought popped into my head.
If I was stuck waiting somewhere for someone, I’d definitely want it to be there.