Chapter Four
He was such an idiot.
Stumbling home about as steady as a blind man, Tyson cursed himself for being twenty kinds of a fool. She was no more than twenty-one or twenty-two. She was a baby for crying out loud. Her youth was evident in everything from her shy questioning eyes to the way she kissed. Christ, she even smelled young. And he, well, he was a letch.
“You’re an old pervert,” he mumbled to himself as he crossed onto his property.
But there was something irresistible about her. Something delicate and unspoiled, something from her past that took from the confidence she should rightly have.
Tyson walked through his front door and tossed his tools on the floor. Dim, dreamlike images of Kat played through his mind. His hand closed around the cool neck of a beer and he shut the fridge. Her face, soft with that wistful look of inexperience, filled his mind and his equilibrium slipped into that of a teenage boy again.
Fuck. He was strung tighter than a guitar string after a simple taste of those sweet, kiss-provoking lips. Chucking the beer cap across the room he groaned. His back hit the wall of his sparse living room as his weight dragged to the floor.
This was bad. How had he gone from a little flirting to mauling her in her kitchen in only a couple days?
He stopped by to make sure everything was all right. It was a simple fix that a plumber might’ve charged her a fortune to fix, but he hadn’t gone there because it was the honorable thing. He went there, because he finally had an excuse to get close to her.
The pressure of temptation had drilled through him like a molly bolt the second he brushed against her when she came to his door. Softer than rain, her skin had briefly touched his, but it was enough to have him dressing and grabbing his tools within a few minutes and chasing after her like some lovesick pup.
There was something so exquisitely simple about Kat. A strange and delicious shyness that was nothing like the other women he knew. Her outlook on life, although somewhat jaded by difficult events, was still fresh and untried in so many ways.
There was a sort of trusting hopefulness about her that came and went like the tide, her natural inclination to behave as women in their early twenties often do pulling against her common sense. He liked when she showed glimpses of her unguarded self.
He had no intention to pursue the desires stirring inside of him, until she looked at him with innocent eyes and he recognized the curiosity banked there.
Her gaze caressed him like a hand, slow, and teasing as her pulse noticeably fluttered. When her cheeks flushed like a blushing cloud and that delicate little smile hung lopsided on her pretty face, white-hot enthusiasm burst inside of him.
His body shivered, remembering how her voice had gone low and raspy. Something inquisitively suggestive reflected in her eyes and he needed to touch her.
Her skin was softer than silk. Once his thumb neared her lips, his mouth grew insanely jealous. Before considering the consequences, he was leaning down and kissing her.
Kat was a woman who hadn’t been kissed much. Her lack of experience was evident in her timid reception. He had to coax her soft mouth open and when she finally kissed him back, his need transcended to raw hunger. Seizing the moment, he possessively took a sampling of her sweet mouth. Knowing how skittish she could be, he was careful not to act too aggressively.
His body throbbed and his cock wept when she eased forward, her mouth chasing his, silently asking for more, but he had to walk away. He didn’t want to stick around to witness the moment reality came crashing back to her. Sometimes she was strung so tight he thought she would snap. But like a violin, the softest caress could make her purr.
Ty sipped his beer and let his head hit the wall, hoping to knock some sense into his thick skull. He shifted his legs in an attempt to make room in his pants as his mind replayed her sweet little moans. She probably made all sorts of delicious keening sounds during sex, a mixture of raw, unguarded headiness and untried wonderment. He wanted to see if he was right. But that would never happen.
Two houses and fifteen years—that’s what separated them. The chances of him fucking a woman like Kat were so low he was pathetic for even entertaining the fantasy. A pretty young mom like herself probably had high hopes for a nice young husband.
Pushing out a slow breath, he tried to let go of all thoughts of getting Kat naked. For all he knew, she was furious with him. As much as he used the excuse of fixing her sink to get into her house, he didn’t want her to think she owed him anything.
Massaging his temples, his empty beer hung from his fingers as he sighed. The depraved fantasies running through his mind needed to stop. Those sultry lips parted. His name on her tongue. Her smoky gaze crawling over him like little kisses. The last thing she needed was her middle-aged neighbor making her uncomfortable.
Groaning, he acknowledged what he needed to do, but snuffing out his attraction to her wouldn’t be easy. There was no telling his cock that she was out of the question when it perked up like a fucking weathervane every time she was around. And it wasn’t just the sexual tension that stirred him. Her presence was refreshing, wholesome and tempting.
Her family sounded like a bunch of assholes. Clearly they didn’t understand one thing about their daughter. Life was messy and accidents happened. There were plenty of girls who got pregnant when he was in high school. What kind of parents discarded their child at such a vulnerable moment in life?
But who’s looking out for Kat?
Retrieving another beer, he popped the cap and returned to his spot on the floor. He let out a frustrated breath and roughly rubbed his palm over his face.
“Not your concern, man.”
He laughed thinking about her little labels everywhere. She definitely had her shit under control, but something told him she was overdue to have some fun. No twenty-one-year-old should be that grown up. She was probably more mature than him.
No matter how tempting it was to interfere in her life—show her a little fun—he had to maintain a safe distance, because they were, in fact, going to be neighbors. His lust was probably one-sided anyway.
He was supposed to be looking for a wife, concentrating on starting a family of his own, not intruding on someone else’s. Once the house was done, he’d be back to his normal schedule and Kat would be someone he passed maybe once a week on the occasion that she was unloading groceries while he mowed the lawn.
Cruising the marriage aisle was something he’d never done. His life had revolved around the simple focus of starting his business and watching it grow. It wasn’t until his sister Sophia got sick that he started worrying about shit like mortality. And it wasn’t until she died that he realized how goddamn lonely his life had become.
Not wanting to sink into that swelling tide of memories, he finished his beer and hauled himself off the floor. Working a screwdriver under the rim of the paint can, he uncapped the lid. It was time to put pointless fantasies away and get something done.
He should have put on music, but he was already involved and didn’t want to stop. The slow spongy swish of the paint roller and his even breathing was the only sound in the empty house. His mind switched to autopilot, as he dragged the roller up and down the wall, and his thoughts wandered anyway.
Death was a naked fact of life. Everyone died. Some old, some young, the point of it all was to make use of time while time remained. Since Sophia’s passing, he’d suffered a nagging guilt that he wasn’t utilizing his time wisely—missing all the opportunities his sister wished she could have had. He didn’t want to leave this world without a trace.
He’d spent years building a legacy, but what the hell did a construction company mean in the grand scheme of things? Family was what mattered. He wanted to see his hard work passed onto a son or daughter, not some employee. And he wanted to leave behind more than an investment. He wanted to invest himself in the ongoing life of his children so they could do the same.
Thirty came in the blink of an eye. Thirty-five rung in quick like the bell of a boxing match. By then it had all seemed redundant and meaningless. His days passed routinely with little blips of interest along the way, but there was never anything significant happening, never anything exciting.
Sure, his friends had gotten married and had children and that was exciting, but those events were theirs. He had nothing going on in his own life deserving of such celebration. Time was running out.
Moving the lamp and bucket he was using for a table to the other side of the room, he dragged his tarp over the cement floor and replenished the pan of paint. Rotating his shoulders, he fell back into the repetitive motions of rolling the walls.
A familiar empty weight filled him that always did when he thought of his sister. He missed her and he didn’t think the void she left would ever go away. Gloria, his other sister, seemed to move on, but she had Darrel and the kids to keep her busy.
He hated when he got like this, thinking about the past, and moping around in a sad haze while pretending that everything was A-Okay on the outside. He wasn’t one to talk about feelings. No one wanted to hear that shit. Certainly not the men on his crew.
Sophia had always been the one to pull him out of his shell. It wasn’t that he was shy, he just went with the flow and anything that interrupted the flow got stuffed down and tucked away. But his little sister always knew when something was bothering him, sometimes even before he did. She was the one he could always depend on to smack him upside the head when he was being thickheaded. Even in the end, when she was barely holding on, she somehow found the strength to call him a fool and knock some sense into him. She’d reached a point where the cure became worse than the disease, but she still put up a fight when it came to worrying for him.
“Ty,” Sophia had whispered, her feeble hand reaching for his. She’d become too delicate, barely anything separating her flesh from her little bones. Her curls were too fine to braid anymore, and dark shadows surrounded her eyes.
He wished he could erase those memories of the way she looked in the end. No matter how many flashbacks he held of her looking young and vibrant, his mind always saw her the way she was in the end.
When he gave her a tender squeeze to let her know he was listening, she smiled and shut her eyes.
“I worry about you.” Her brow tensed as she released a deep breath, never admitting when the pain was gaining on her.
“You don’t need to worry for me, Phia.”
It was a terrible impression of bravery. His emotions were simply too strong at that point to hide.
“Hush.” She smirked. “You might have everyone else fooled, but not me, Ty. Not me.”
He didn’t have the energy for deep, so he tried to keep the moment light. “What’re you talking about, Phia? You’re high from the morphine.”
She breathed a raspy chuckle. No matter what, she always had a smile at the ready. “My senses are just fine.” Taking a deep breath, she held his hand a little tighter.
“So strong,” she mumbled while keeping her eyes closed. “You’ve done everything you set out to do. Got everything you wanted, but Ty, you’re a fool.” She peeked at him under sparse eyelashes. “You got them all fooled. But not me, Ty. Not me.”
He didn’t want to have this conversation. He didn’t want to have some final moment, wasn’t ready to see his baby sister wither away to nothingness. Her mind had always been so sharp. Her ramblings were only more proof of the cancer’s progression.
“Phia,” he soothed, fighting back the lump in his chest. “Rest, baby girl, rest.”
“There’ll be plenty of time for me to rest when I’m dead.”
“Phia,” he hissed.
“And that’ll be soon enough.”
Choked by a sense of importance, he allowed her to go on.
“I’ll never know what true love feels like. I’ll never experience a child growing inside of me. Never know what it’s like to be called mother or wife.”
His jaw locked as his vision blurred. “Jesus.”
“Now, Ty, don’t you go cussin’ God for this. The good Lord’s all I got and the only solace I find is that eventually He’ll stop the pain and welcome me into His kingdom.”
Losing the battle against his tears, he wept like a child, resting his forehead on their entwined hands. “I wish I could take this from you.”
“No. This isn’t your destiny. It’s mine. But you’ll do me this one favor before I go.”
“Anything.”
“I love you, but you’re a dumb ass.”
He scoffed and laughed, the weight in his chest slightly dissipating, but there was no room for humor. Only hollow sadness.
“What?” She chuckled and coughed. “You think no one around here can tell you how it is? Well, I ain’t got nothin’ to lose.”
He waited through another crackling cough.
“I want you to do all the things I can’t, Ty. I want you to find love. I want you to know what it is to hold a child of your own in your arms. I want you to get out of this area and finally be the man I know you’re meant to be.”
She wheezed in a short breath. “Dying does weird things to a person. Sometimes talkin’ gets too hard and all you do is stumble through your mind. You see things, you know? I see you. Not here, but somewhere that the air smells of fresh cut grass, somewhere that the breeze carries the chatter of children, and a tire swing hangs from an old oak tree or some such quaint shit like that. I see you coaching little league and packin’ brown bag lunches with cute smiley faces drawn on the napkins.
“When I go, Momma’ll be there for Daddy and Darrel’ll be there for Gloria. But who’ll be there for you, Ty? You know how to build a house, but I want you to build yourself a home. And once you do, I want you to find your soul mate and fill that home with babies and be the best daddy you can be.”
Just like that night, his vision blurred with tears. The paint hit the walls in wavering strokes as the memory play like a reoccurring nightmare. Sophia had died that evening. The funeral was on a Tuesday. After everyone left the cemetery to return to his parents’ house, Tyson stoically watched the burial of his baby sister.
The hours that followed passed like years. Days were lost in the shuffle of life and grief. Gloria was the first to put on a brave front and get on with her life. His mother and father would probably never completely recover, but they had eventually cleared out Phia’s things and figured out how to laugh again.
Ty seemed the only one who still suffered the weight of this unbearable loneliness most likely because he had no one to fill the void. The tension of tears striving for an outlet drove his mind away from such sad memories. He couldn’t keep going back to that time. She was gone and she wasn’t coming back.
He tried to think of some happy thought and there she was—Kat. Soft, brown wavy hair with a dusting of pale freckles across her nose. He gave in and let his mind wrap itself in everything Kat. The relief was swift and powerful. How did the thought of a person he barely knew affect him so strongly?
He wasn’t sure why he was so obsessed with this woman, but after so many hollow nights of grief, she seemed the only distraction great enough to pull him away from the sadness. As much as he promised to keep his distance, another part of him was inexplicably drawn to her.
As he finished painting the last coat, his mind decided on three things. One, it was time to let his grief go. Two, it was time to be happy again. And three, getting Kat naked would make him a very happy man. He just wasn’t sure if that made him a wise man.