“Angel” The Weeknd
AJ won’t let go of my hand and after this morning, after my world crumbled, I’m grateful. I need him. Desperately. But Sarah’s words, her calling me selfish, is repeating on a loop in my head.
Before coming here, I knew he was cement between the bricks of this town. But being here, particularly being here today, showed me he was this giant retaining wall holding back the flood. I can’t dismantle that wall.
I can’t prove his mother right. I won’t.
The truck silences below me and I snap out of it enough to scan the building in front of us. It’s a clinical looking building with beige aluminum siding and a green aluminum roof, kennels wrap around the side and a few dogs are roughhousing in the yard.
“What are we doing here?” I ask, my voice still not my own.
“There’s someone I want you to meet.” Jealousy flares in my chest even though Jay hasn’t said anything about a woman. Utter defeat runs through a moment later, when I realize that someday there will be another woman. A metaphorical hand comes to my throat and squeezes. “He needs a ride home,” AJ adds and I can’t help but blow out a breath at the mention of a he. It’s not nearly as deep or easy as it should be.
I let AJ slide out of his seat and come around to collect me from mine. When he opens the door, I expect him to reach in for me but instead he turns around and gestures for me to jump on. He used to carry me everywhere claiming Bambi shouldn’t walk on ice. I always thought it was his way to hold on tight. Today, I have my proof.
Thank God.
He nods at the girl sitting at the front desk and she smiles widely. It only falters slightly when she sees me. But AJ doesn’t hesitate, he just rolls us a little so that my backside pushes open the swinging door.
Barks and yips and meows of all types greet us as AJ walks directly to the corner and sets me on my wedges. He bends down beside me and starts fiddling with the lock on the kennel in front of him. Wild yaps and a tail thumping against the metal crescendos as I mimic AJ and bend down.
“Gretzky,” I gasp.
“Crosby,” he gently corrects me as he pulls the terrier from the kennel only to be showered in puppy kisses. “Mom found him the other day. I wasn’t going to keep him but…” His voice trails off but I can finish the sentence easily enough.
Last night when I opened AJ’s never-locked front door and tiptoed through his bachelor pad, I’d done it just to be near him, his smell, his furniture, wrap myself in our blanket, but when I slid between his sheets, sheets that should be ours, a fierce determination started building in my stomach. I was going to keep the man I loved this time. I was going to pull him away from that empty house and back into my very full heart.
This morning had changed everything. The love that burned brightly for AJ was a small candle compared to the town that lit a bonfire for him. In a weird way, I loved him all the more for what he did for Willow Creek. When that grandmother looked at me with love, sincerity and gratitude beaming from her very pores, I crumbled. The resolve I’d found last night was laying in rubble around my feet. My want of him was replaced by a very real and very deep love for him.
I couldn’t take him away, and he knew it. He’d seen it written on my face.
“What else do we need for him?” I say softly, trying to find the warmth from this morning and shove it back into my voice.
AJ turns and looks me straight in the eye before letting out a heavy sigh and leaning in to kiss my temple. His lips won’t leave my skin even as the little puppy barrels into us, his tiny, warm tongue roughly lapping at every inch.
The puppy fills the void between us for a while, unaware of the heaviness existing in the cab of the truck, swirling around us like storm clouds. Crosby is the only thing that doesn’t make our trip to the store, across town, or to the liquor store awkward. He even gets excited as we drive toward AJ’s shop.
As soon as we park, Crosby bounds through the snow in darts and zigzags, barely able to plow through the light, fluffy power that’s up to my shins. I wobble when he darts in front of me and seamlessly AJ catches me.
“Whoa, easy there.” His laugh is warm and rich. Finally something has broken the mood.
Well, not broken it so much as suspended it the smallest bit out of reach. We can both breathe again, even if they are just shallow small breaths. I smile at him and there is a beautiful warmth on his face, finally thawing the bitter cold in my veins. His hand squeezes a little too hard on mine and pulls.
Watching AJ roll back the door of his workshop gives me a small thrill despite it all. The anticipation of seeing him in his space, doing what he loves, and bending the planks beneath those rough hands that bend me gently, sends something crackling beneath my skin. The way his muscles ripple against the flannel fabric of his shirt isn’t a bad sight either.
“Crosby,” he calls, his eyes never leaving mine. “Come on boy.” He whistles too as he pulls me fully into the warm space I’d only been in as an intruder before.
When the terrier launches into the shed, AJ finally drops my hand to shut the door behind us. He flips on a few caged bulbs where they hang from different stands here and there but the space is mostly lit by soft white snow reflecting sunlight onto warm wood.
It’s even more beautiful with AJ inside it.
“I snuck in here the other day.” Just like then I let my fingertips brush across the wood. “Well, I didn’t mean to sneak… I came over with Trigg and curiosity got the better of me.” I can’t help but blush.
“It’s okay, Camilla.” He gently clasps my fingers in his to keep me from running them along the grain of the wood. “As long as you stop touching my sanded beams.”
I smile and nod. This time I think it reaches my eyes.
“Tell me about it. All of it.” I use my other hand to gesture around the rest of the room.
And AJ does. His words are as beautiful as the plump lips telling me about the types of woods, the grains, the way he works the knots and the natural oils. He builds furniture of all shapes and sizes, and when I thumb through his portfolio, I can see the beautiful, sad heart that he’s been carrying around the past thirteen years.
“AJ—” I breathe in him, in the fresh and treated words and the myriad of emotions before I continue.
His lips against mine cut me off.
We collide into each other and then into the raw beams propped against the wall behind me. Our bodies entwine while we bounce the slightest bit off the pliant wood. His hands claw at the down of my jacket like his lips ravage at mine. When he can’t get the jacket off, he just shoves it up. I, for my part, can’t stop clinging to his biceps. Each grip and flex and roll of the muscles beneath my desperate hands makes my legs go to Jell-O.
One of his hands finds my breast as his tongue threads between my lips. His other flirts with the waistband of my jeans as Crosby adds himself to the fray, yapping at our calves.
“AJ…” his name is like air; I’m only breathing because of him.
He bends down and tucks beneath the rucked-up fabric of my layers and latches on to my nipple. My hands fall from his body and flatten to the wood behind us and I moan, loud and lustful.
Only to be cut short by the squeak of the door behind us as it rolls on its wheels. AJ lets my breast go and yanks on my shirt, barely covering me before Trigg’s big booming laughter fills the room. He leans against his forehead against my stomach, still holding tight to my hips.
“Twice in one week?” Trigg’s voice is still laced with laughter. “If straight sex were my thing, I’d get rid of my porn subscription.”
Crosby barks at her, running circles around Trigg’s Sorels.
“Gretzky?” Her eyes go wide as she scoops up the puppy.
“Crosby.” AJ turns, still resting against me to watch them. Trigg’s smiling at us even though Crosby’s tongue is assaulting the side of her face.
“It’s starting to feel like home here again,” she says softly. Her smile has nothing to do with the puppy in her arms.
We’re all silent for a few moments. Well, all of us except Crosby. But then Trigg sets him down and he yaps before running directly to AJ and burrowing into his thigh. My heart almost cracks.
“When you’re finished, you guys should come inside. We’re playing beer pong.” She smirks, shoots us some terribly wild eyebrow raises, then goes back into the snowy twilight from which she came.
I wait for AJ to make the next move, to shove my shirt up or tow me after Trigg, but he stays frozen. At least until the frigid night air reaches us and he blows out a deep breath. He stands up and his gorgeous eyes reveal how deeply he’s struggling with this decision. I can see how much he wants it to be a normal Friday night, how he wants to prolong the lust between us and literally ride it out later tonight. But it’s not a normal Friday, we barely have the night.
“We’ve been pretending all day.” I shrug. “Why not go inside?”
He closes his eyes into tight and seemingly painful lines then presses his lips to my forehead.
“We’ve been pretending a lot longer than that.” His words are not at all accusatory, not angry or hurtful, they’re simply, and rather beautifully, broken.