Chapter Fifteen
Lucy
The ride back in the car was silent. Eerie, in a settling way. Like the blades of grass blown by a wind the body cannot feel, or a crashing wave upon the shore of a mirror-like ocean. Our connection grew stronger between us, and the lens from which I viewed him reverberated a severely different light from the lens I looked through at the beginning of this date. The air was thick and fraught with tension, not even sliceable with a knife sharpened by the blades of the gods themselves. It was hard to breathe when I first got into the car, but his hand clamping down around my hand steadied my breathing as well as my mind.
We shared a fundamental connection, an understanding. He sympathized with the chaos of my life ever since I’d lost David, and I understood the emotional swells he had experienced after watching his wife die. We talked about how lifeless their eyes looked, dead and barren after years of being filled to the brim with memories, feelings, and desires.
I recounted to him the first time I’d seen David. His eyes were still open, and the doctors were guarding the door. They were trying to release him from the ports and the IV’s, and they were struggling to get them from underneath his still-warmed skin. It was as if his brain hadn’t quite shut down, his body not quite ready to let go, and I could still feel the pain bubbling in my toes as my eyes drifted over the skeletal structure of who had once been my husband.
He recounted for me the moment he saw the life drain from Danielle’s eyes. Jenna was being cleaned off, and she had wrapped her little fingers around his. She was crying and flailing, looking for the one person she had been fully and completely connected to for nine solid months. He told me about how the droning sounds of all the machines mocked him in the depths of his memories for months after the fact, how her lifeless eyes would be staring back at him every time he looked in the mirror.
He admitted to taking down all the mirrors at one point, only to see the bright, lively eyes of his wife in Jenna’s eyes.
There was a respect there for him I hadn’t had up until this point. The windows of his truck were rolled down, and my hand was on top of his, while we cruised back into a town that seemed somehow shifted in perspective. I’d found someone who got it, who had lived the trauma of loss and come out the other end completely and utterly altered at their base functions. I’d met a man whose guard had been up for years, like mine had been, in order to keep out any intrusions that might upset the balance of the juggling act he was practicing.
The balance of living, breathing, and crying alone at night.
I talked with him about how I had to remind myself to live. I had to remind myself that I would wake up in the morning and that tomorrow would come, whether I wanted it or not. I talked with him about talking myself off ledges spawned from trains of thought that conjured from the deepest, darkest recesses of my mind. I regaled him with memories of how I had to teach myself how to breathe again, how the simple act of doing something he was no longer doing ached me in a place I never understood existed until I’d met him.
David.
The love of my life.
He told me about their first dance. How he held her beneath the sunrise of the morning after hours of fighting. He told me of their explosive moments, the times where her passion overflowed into their arguments, and things were thrown against walls. He told me it was why he fell in love with her, because the passion she threw into everything she did triumphed over everything he thought he did best. He told me she pushed him to be the best he could and then outdid him in that same respect just for a laugh.
And he gladly did it to see the laugh lines appear on her face.
This man, this wounded soul, had been raising a child by himself for years. This was not the carcass of a playboy whose dick sunk into every woman he’d come across. This was not the body of a man who threw himself at desperate redheads walking down the road in need of his attention. This was not even the body of a man who was actively looking for anything in his life.
This was simply the body of a man whose world had been torn apart by the very thing that should bring beauty into it. I was holding onto the hand of a soul whose dichotomous existence bordered on the happy and the depressed with every glance he took in his daughter’s direction. The joyful glee of his child’s smile brought a searing pain at what he’d lost that day, and celebrating her birthday was simply a practice in refrain.
Refraining from grieving over the loss of his wife to celebrate the birth of his daughter.
I didn’t care what the rumors around town said. I didn’t care what reputation he may have held back home, nor did I care where he decided to lay his bed after tonight. I didn’t understand where the Maximum rumor came into play, who started it, or why it began in the first place.
I could choose to dwell on it, or I could choose to ignore it.
And as I looked at his face, his stoic, chiseled profile with the stars twinkling upon his skin and the moonlight peppering the shadows of the trees upon his chin, I realized what I would do with all the information that had been thrown my way.
I would ignore it.
The truck ride was silent, save for the crickets as we passed through the town. The cool autumn air seemed to boast of winter, and the cold snap that descended upon us shivered me to my bones. My hand gripped his a little tighter, and he turned his head slowly toward me. I saw the exact thoughts I had been thinking all the way home deep within the confines of his mind.
He felt the same way. There was a kindred spirit existing within this beautiful man, and from the moment he had told me about Jenna’s mother, I’d been hooked.
I was bound to this man by common experiences and emotions, and there would be no relationship from here on out that would permeate what we had just built.
“Did you have a good time tonight?” he asked. We pulled into his driveway and sat there for a while, and I allowed the question to ricochet off the corners of his truck. The town was blanketed in sleep, and the stars were out in droves, and as the wind kicked up again, it blew the sweet smell of apples our way. It was as if the Earth was reminding us that life moved on. Questions would be asked, and people would be met, experiences would be had, and plants would be grown.
And then they would wither away and die before life sprouted from the ground again.
“Oddly enough, I did,” I said.
“Despite what happened, I really did want things to be fun for you. I didn’t expect them to get so heavy, and I’m sorry for that,” he said.
“Please don’t feel sorry. I haven’t—”
My words caught in my throat, and he turned his hand up to mine. Our fingers laced, like shoes on a child’s feet, and I raised my teary gaze to him while the moonlight shone behind his head.
“I haven’t ever told anyone some of those things. I knew they’d fall on deaf ears a-and finding someone who—”
“I know,” he said. He squeezed my hand before he brought it to his lips to kiss, and the electricity that shot through my veins caused the tears to spill over onto my cheeks.
“Please, don’t cry,” he said with a whisper.
“I feel so relaxed with you. The most relaxed I’ve felt in a very long time.”
“Then, I suppose it would do you good to know you’re not alone,” he said.
“I know I said some things at the beginning that might have, I don’t know, made it sound like this was just a onetime thing.”
“Yes?” he asked.
“But I really would enjoy getting to know you better. If you wanted to, of course.”
“Are you wanting to get to know me because of this common element we share?” he asked.
“Partially, I suppose,” I admitted. “I haven’t ever found anyone who understood, and it felt good to talk about those things with someone. Someone who understood the complexity of the emotions and the soul-sucking, barren wasteland that happened after.”
“Yeah. I know,” I said. “So, you don’t want to get to know me in a romantic sense?”
“I didn’t say that,” I said. “But for me, right now? What happened tonight was more vulnerability than I ever would’ve experienced with anything romantic. For the first time in years, I opened up to someone. Someone other than David.”
“Honestly? Same here. I mean, I’ve kept myself closed off intentionally because of Jenna, but this is the first time I’ve been around a woman I thought might...”
“Might what?” I asked.
“Might accept me for the package I come with.”
I studied his face and realized how hard that was for him to admit. This strong man, with his broad shoulders and his pulsing veins protruding from his rippling forearms, was simply looking for someone to accept him and his situation. To understand that he had a child and that, for once, they would have to be accepted into the fold instead of the other way around. This man was lonely, and hurt, and he felt that the prime time of his life had passed him by.
“I guess this date didn’t really go like either of us expected, huh?” I asked.
“No, which is why I was asking all those questions,” he said.
“Huh?”
“I was asking all those questions because I was wondering if you’d be interested in trying this again. A second first date, if you will.”
“What if I don’t want to redo our first date?” I asked.
“You’d really call this a date?” he said, chuckling.
“In a heartbeat, I would.”
His eyes connected with mine while the crickets kicked up their chorus. No, the date didn’t go as expected, but it laid this unique foundation found only between the two of us. We shared a fundamental set of emotions and life experiences that we would always carry with us, and the idea of being with someone who understood that, who wouldn’t push me to get over those memories, was something I never thought I’d find. I thought I was forever doomed to listen to people like my sister push me in a direction they thought I wanted to go based on the person I was.
The person I’d been before I’d lost David.
“I think I would enjoy a second date, if it’s alright to leave our first date like this,” I said.
“I think that can be done.” He smiled.
His gaze flickered down ever so slightly to my lips. I caught the motion as the blood began to rush through my ears. I knew that look, and I understood that movement, but before I could decide on what to do with it, his lips were upon mine. They were soft. Sweet. Tinged with the wine we’d indulged in and the fruit we’d fed one another while sitting silently along the shores of Crossroad Lake. His tongue lightly swiped against my lips, and I was surprised when I parted them for him, allowing him entry to a place that had only been touched by David since I’d met him.
And the electricity that flowed up my spine threw my hand to the back of his head.
The attraction I felt to him was unmistakable. He cupped my cheek and cocked his head to the side, and while the kiss deepened, I slid my arms around his neck. The rippling of his muscles and the strength of his arms warmed a part of me I thought had died with my husband, but with every ministration his tongue sliding against mine, it stoked a fire growing within my pelvis.
I hadn’t ever been attracted to someone like this before, and I was even more shocked when I realized that reality also included David.
He finally broke the kiss, and his lips were swollen with my attack. We breathed each other’s air before I sat back down into my seat, and the blush that rose to my cheeks caused a chuckle to pull from Jason’s throat.
“Would you let me walk you to your door?” he asked.
“Will you kiss me like that again?” I asked.
“Anytime you want, Lucy.”
And I held his hand while we walked across his yard and headed for my porch.