Out of the Blue Bouquet (Crossroads Collection)

by Amanda Tru

  Only You can keep my feet from stumbling.

  Only You can wash these tears away.

  By Your side, my heart it never wavers,

  Keeping me from other loves untrue.

  By Your side, I never know true heartache.

  By Your side, forgiveness comes anew.

  Take the mess I make of each action

  And make it pure once more for only You…

  Only You…

  By Your side…

  Day by day…

  Help keep me true to You.

  The hush surrounded him—that beautiful hush that only came during Kelsey’s hours as watchman. The others all played worship music, but Kelsey chose silence and prayerful song.

  Reid missed the sound of her settling the guitar in its case and snapping the latches shut. He didn’t hear the swishing of her scrubs as she crossed the room. But he did feel her hand slipping into his and the gentle squeeze she gave it. “You okay today?”

  How does she do that? Anyone, no matter who it is—she can show affection to anyone. I just sit there silent and make them feel all awkward.

  “Reid?”

  “I’m good. Just letting that one sink into my soul.” Against his will, his eyes opened and fixated on hers. “You really have a gift, Kelsey.”

  To his relief, and utter disgust with himself for noticing, Kelsey kept hold of his hand as she tugged him toward “her” corner. Did she pause before she dropped it to retrieve the guitar again? He didn’t know, but it seemed like it. Maybe Wayne’s not crazy. Wouldn’t that be great?

  “Listen. This tune just keeps playing in my heart. I can’t get away from it. I probably heard it somewhere, but I don’t care. It’s been a bad week at the clinic, and this just feels so healing after it all.”

  Again, she played the slow, haunting notes that somehow soothed instead of ached. “I love that. Got it recorded, too.”

  “I’ll check Dropbox later, then.” After a few more notes, Kelsey put away her guitar again, this time with evident reluctance.

  Because she loves that song so much, or because she has to leave? He swallowed hope and didn’t allow himself to add, me.

  “Did you have a good day today?”

  Reid picked up the guitar case, ready to follow her out to her car. “Yeah. The boss says I’m getting a six-month raise at the first of December. Says I’m doing great.” The moment he spoke, Reid wished back the words. “Ouch. That sounds full of myself, doesn’t it?”

  “Sounds honest to me. He said it, not you.”

  “I repeated it?” Again, he wished the words back. Now I just sound like I’m fishing for… something.

  “Nope.”

  The little, banana yellow VW Beetle meant the end of that day’s chat. Reid pulled the little flower from his shirt pocket and offered it before stowing her case in the passenger’s seat. “Compliments of Wayne, of course.”

  “Yeah… but you brought it.”

  Another squeeze of his hand—had she been holding it all the time? The memory of following her out the door told him no. Still… she didn’t hesitate.

  “Thanks, Reid. See you tomorrow.”

  He stood there, hands in his pockets, watching as Kelsey pulled out of the parking space and zipped down Second Street toward the highway. When the red of her taillights disappeared around a corner, he turned to go back inside and saw Sister Arlene waiting for him to open the door for her.

  “Hey there, Sister Arlene. Sorry about that. Kelsey had another one of her inspiring prayers today. Want to hear it?”

  And that’s all it took to wipe out the matchmaking glint in the elderly woman’s eyes and spark a less personal one—for him, anyway.

  Kelsey entered her Brant’s Corners duplex on a mission to change out of her soiled scrubs immediately. Guitar on the couch—she grabbed it and wedged it between the mountains of blankets threatening to topple it off. Purse in the chair. By the time she reached the washing machine in the closet behind the kitchen, she’d stripped down to her underwear and bra.

  As she dashed for the shower, she ordered Siri to call her uncle. His voice broke through the shower spray as Kelsey stepped inside. “Did you do it?”

  “Half of it.” Try as she might, Kelsey couldn’t keep the defeat from her tone. “I asked about his day—even held his hand for a minute. But I couldn’t make myself ask.”

  “I have to meet this guy.”

  She stood there, water forcing soapy drizzles over her face and listened, waiting for more. It didn’t come. “All right, Uncle Mel. Tell me. Why?”

  “C’mon, Kelsey! You were the first girl at Brunswick High to ask a guy to prom. You’ve asked out more guys than all the women I’ve ever heard of—combined! But this one…”

  Kelsey swallowed a few times, rinsed the rest of her hair, and fumbled to ask the one question that had burdened her for weeks. “You don’t think it’s the Lord, do you? Do you think He’s preventing me because it’s not right for me?”

  Uncle Mel’s cough spoke more than a month-long sermon series. “Do I have to answer that?”

  “No. You’re right. I’m imposing this on me, not the Lord. Am I nuts to do it?”

  “Well, if it were any other woman, I’d say yes. If you like a guy and want to get to know him better, I don’t see why you have to wait around for him to figure it out. And, as a guy myself, it’s kind of nice to know that at least sometimes a guy doesn’t have to be the one to put himself out there.”

  “Projecting, are we?”

  Uncle Mel’s laughter took the sting from the entire conversation. “Perhaps a bit. But, since you have a history of asking out all the wrong men, waiting to say yes to one who you are interested in instead of pursuing him this time… yeah. It makes sense to me!”

  After shutting off the water, Kelsey stepped from the shower, grabbed a towel, and wrapped it around her. “That paramedic… Daniel something. He asked me out today.”

  “What’d you say?”

  Phone in hand, Kelsey went to find yoga pants and a t-shirt. “I told him to ask me next time he saw me. I didn’t want to say no, but I wanted to think about it.”

  “And you’re not going.”

  At that moment, Kelsey realized she never would have. “No. I thought maybe if Reid heard me say I needed to get ready for a date, it might get him moving, but that just made me feel icky. I mean, using one guy and manipulating another. Who is this person I’ve become?”

  “But you didn’t, Kels… you didn’t. Temptation isn’t equal to commission of sin. Remember?”

  “Yeah. You’re right.” But even as Kelsey wrestled into her clothes and combed through her wet hair, the reflection she saw had nothing to do with her physical appearance. She saw a young woman half in love with a guy who might not be interested in anything else. “Am I as pathetic as I feel?”

  Uncle Mel murmured loving reassurances and reminded Kelsey of half a dozen botched relationships with guys she’d been sure were “the one.” “Oh! Hey! I almost forgot to share my new theory!”

  “What’s this one? I swear, you’ve gone from one every other week to one a day. Is Reid secretly married this time or is he heir to a fortune as long as he doesn’t marry before he’s thirty?”

  This time Kelsey giggled, but with only a few miles separating them, Kelsey and the most important man in her life collapsed into fits of mirth. “You’ve…” Uncle Mel wheezed as his laughter turned to guffaws. “You’ve got to stop reading those Regency and Victorian romances.”

  “They’re fun! And besides, if those women had to wait back then, I can, too.” Phone in hand, Kelsey sprinted for the kitchen and began assembling a salad. “So… theory, my uncle-papa.”

  “Well, I was talking to Joan Oberton. She works in that prison ministry.”

  “The one Reid was in?”

  Uncle Mel’s shrug—oh, there’d been one, and Kelsey could have sworn she could hear it. “Don’t know. She just works with one. Anyway, she says she always counsels new belie
vers not to date for a year after conversion. She uses that Old Testament thing about not working or going to war for a year after marriage as proof that they need to concentrate on the Lord for a year before mixing other serious relationships into it. Maybe he heard her telling someone—or maybe she told him.”

  February. Valentine’s Day. He was so embarrassed to admit that his re-birthday was on Valentine’s Day. Three months.

  “Kels?”

  “Could be,” she finally admitted. “And really, what’s three more months? With Thanksgiving, Christmas, and the flu season ahead of us—”

  “Only you would lump flu season in with holidays.”

  “As I was saying before the man who taught me never to interrupt interrupted me…” Kelsey did a happy dance at the chagrin she knew her uncle now wore. “…I’ll be busy with fun and flu, so maybe it’ll keep my mind off him.”

  The fits of laughter returned. Uncle Mel found his voice first. “Yeah. I’ll keep trolling the pawn shops for a cheap guitar. You keep seeing him every day and pretending you don’t care. Yeah. I bet I succeed before you do.”

  Panic hit her at those words. She stared at a tomato in her hand, wondering when she’d picked it up and how she’d managed not to divest her hand of a finger or two in the process. “You don’t think he knows, do you?”

  “If he does, and if he’s letting you go on without any idea that he is or isn’t interested, then you don’t want him anyway.”

  The first slice of the knife took off the very tip of her nail. “I gotta go. Nearly cut my hand. And you’re nuts if you think he’s that kind of guy. He’s not. I just know it.”

  With silence filling around her, Kelsey sighed, flicked the piece of nail aside, and tried the tomato again. “I just know it, Lord. I just know it.”

  Reid appeared as Wayne pulled two buckets of white daisies from the back of his minivan. “Mornin’. You’re up early.”

  The younger man started to scratch his head and jerked his hand down. Just like every time. “Couldn’t sleep. Heard those squeaky brakes of yours and thought I’d come help while I wait for The Coventry to open.”

  Setting the buckets down with a huff, Wayne pointed. “Can you take those up by the front door? I’ll get ’em in the barrel as soon as I can.”

  But instead of retrieving the next buckets of fresh flowers from Rockland’s flower mart, Wayne went to pour a couple cups of coffee. He met Reid at the entrance to his workroom and suggested they sit for a bit. “Tell me when you’re going to ask Kelsey out.”

  He saw it. The darkening of Reid’s eyes from amber to umber, the wall slowly rising. Then it shifted almost as if nothing had changed. “February—the fourteenth, if you must know, but not why you think.”

  “Three months? It better not be for romantic reasons, because waiting like that just… isn’t.”

  Reid sipped at coffee that probably didn’t meet some culinary standard or another but said nothing. Just as Wayne was about to press again, Reid set the cup down at his feet, rubbed his hands on his pant legs, and inhaled like one about to jump off the high dive. “It’s just that I kind of made a commitment to myself.”

  “To yourself.” Wayne gave his best imitation of his father when he’d done something stupid.

  “Yeah. No dating for a year.”

  Oh, for cryin’ out the wazoo. Great. How do I work with that? When Reid proved less than forthcoming as to what would make him do something so obviously idiotic, Wayne asked. “Okay, why?”

  “There’s this lady who worked the prison ministry—helped those of us going through the anti-recidivism program. Anyway, when I moved here, she’s the one who brought me food and stuff that day.”

  “Joan Oberton? From Brunswick?”

  Reid nodded. She stood up there in my living room and prayed for me. It was nice, you know? Some lady who probably was afraid I’d tie her down and force her to take drugs or something just stood there and prayed for me. Then when she got done, she looked up at me with this weird expression on her face…”

  At this, Wayne laughed. “Joan’s face is a weird expression.”

  Again, with the hands rubbing against his legs. Reid fumbled and fought until Wayne nearly shook the words out of him. “Well, she said something. She said, ‘The Lord has given me a prophecy for you.’” Reid reached for coffee he obviously didn’t want to drink and took a swig anyway. “I’ll be honest. I thought I’d gotten duped about this Jesus thing when I heard that.”

  “I would’a run, so kudos to you for not burning your Bible right there.”

  “Well, she kept going. Said, ‘I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans for welfare and not calamity to give you a future and a hope. Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life and work with your hands. Treat younger women as sisters in absolute purity.’ As the Israelites spent their first year of marriage free of duty, let your first year as the Bride of Christ be committed only to the Lord.’”

  Silence, broken only by the constant hum of the floral coolers, descended over the room as Wayne worked through his emotions. When all attempts at diplomacy failed, Wayne went for his true opinion. “Excrement.”

  “As in…”

  “You heard me.” He fought to extricate himself from a couch too comfortable for his own good and began separating flowers. “Listen, Reid. That prophecy stuff…” Wayne shook his head. “Just not cool to do that to someone. You don’t have to follow that.”

  Reid began explaining as he got up to carry in the rest of the buckets. “I know. But when I found out most of those words were straight from the Bible, I thought about it. I mean, it makes sense, don’t you think? Take time to focus on learning what the Lord wants of His people. I mean, I’m one of those now, you know?”

  It galled not to blast out every objection he had up front, but Wayne knew enough about human nature to know he needed to tread as lightly as his lead feet would allow. “Look, my objection isn’t that Joan spoke Scripture to you. That’s good. If she’d said, ‘In my opinion, based on these verses, and in light of your recent circumstances, you should consider…’ That would have been good—smart. I couldn’t argue with it. But she didn’t! She called it a prophecy—that God took those verses, out of context, and told just you to ‘live them this way.’”

  “Well, yeah, but—”

  “You can’t just do that! You can’t go around telling people that ‘God said this and that.’ Just because you use Bible words, doesn’t make your ideas from the Bible. It’s a serious thing to claim that God spoke to you, outside the whole counsel of the Bible, and gave you extra revelation about it!” He cleared his throat. “Sorry.”

  “Soapbox?”

  “Yep.” Wayne stared down at a pile of daisies and calmed his racing heart. “Stirs my blood in all the wrong ways.” He picked a perfect daisy and held it out to Reid. “People do this too often. They take their own agendas, wrap it in a few Bible verses and some Christianese, and the next thing you know, someone’s in sin because they didn’t obey someone’s so-called ‘prophecy.’ Well, I’m telling you now. Those verses are out of context. And out of context isn’t something God does.”

  Reid’s fingers closed around the stem, and he gazed at it as if transfixed. “Yeah… that’s what Tom Allen said.”

  “Tom’s a good guy.” Wayne choked down what he really wanted to say and went for the sanitized truth. “If the rest of his church were like him, I’d be a part of it.”

  “They’re mostly people who—”

  The words flowed… the pain, the heartache, the double-standards imposed on him by people wielding Bibles with the grace of a blind man on a mass shooting spree. When he finished, Wayne dropped his head into his hands and forced himself not to weep. “Just because they are a ‘card-carrying Christian’ or sit in a pew on Sunday, doesn’t mean what they say is right.” His head shot up again. “Just remember that.”

  Reid stood there, hands shoved in his pockets, looking as miserable as Wayne felt. “Wayne
, I’m sorry. If I do that, you’ll tell me, right? You’ll tell me I’m out of line. ’Cause even if what I say is true, doing that to someone isn’t ever right. It can’t be.”

  He needed Reid out of there before he lost his self-control. With a nod to the flower, he sent Reid on his way. “Get her a fresh one before you go in today. Tell her about the daisy—all of it. Tell her how you feel. And if God doesn’t want you having a relationship, He knows how to put a stop to it before it’s too late.”

  With a glance back at him, twice, Reid left. Wayne, on the other hand, stood rooted in place and wept until the pain disappeared. The only proof that he’d even bared his hurt to anyone was a lone coffee cup abandoned by the corner of the couch.

  Give him the courage, Lord. I think he needs it.

  Daisy in hand, Reid reached The Prayer Room that evening still uncertain if he’d give it to her or not. Two days in a row might say more than he was ready for. Wayne had insisted that a date after nine months of focus only on the Lord wouldn’t be the destruction of his faith. As if I hadn’t already been thinking about her every day. His mother’s saying came to mind. And definitely twice… or more… on Sundays.

  Then a sense of the ridiculous came over him. I’m making too much of a stupid flower. She knows they’re from Wayne, anyhow. And with that, he peered through the window to watch for just a moment. Did she wait for him to arrive? He’d never allowed himself to look, but this time he did. He stood there, watching, waiting.

  But Kelsey only plucked at strings and sang. Just as he started to push open the door, a hand rose from the strings and wiped at her eyes. Oh, no…

  All hesitation vanished. Reid pushed open the door and crossed the room. The broken, fractured words tore at his heart. …comfort to the broken… strength to the weak… love to the lonely… hope for even me…

  Again, her voice cracked, this time on “me.”

  Kelsey nestled the bottom of the guitar in the case and leaned on it, her forehead resting on the headstock. Reid just sat beside her, waiting. When she lowered the rest of the guitar into the case, he reached for her hand and prayed.