Into the Night We Shine

by Heidi Hutchinson

  He grinned, his teeth as white as the snow surrounding them. “If you fall, aim for the bushes in the front.” He made a circle with his thumb and forefinger, giving her the “okay” sign, and winked.

  She couldn't help it, she snorted her laugh. She tried to cover it by bending over to staple gun something. But her boot caught on a light strand and she lost her balance.

  The stapler tumbled to the roof and instead of trying to right herself, she reached to pick it up. Because somehow, in her head, she prioritized saving the stapler over saving herself.

  She failed at both.

  Sway was trying to reach her, yelling out instructions. But she was sort of in the middle of something — he'd have to wait his turn.

  One foot broke free and sent her to her knees. Her arms windmilled helplessly until they struck the shingles and couldn't find purchase — because she was wearing mittens. Like a little kid. She had time to berate herself internally about such a poor decision while her body pivoted on the one remaining toe and sent her head-first sliding towards the front yard.

  She flew off the roof with her arms outstretched, a weak impersonation of a superhero. Especially with the deep guttural scream that bellowed from her lungs.

  The bushes were not as soft as Sway had led her to believe. Though, she had overshot them just a touch. She tumbled out of the evergreen and into the deep snow of their yard.

  This is exactly what a being a squirrel would feel like, she thought, remembering an incident involving a ball of gray fur trying in vain to carry his nuts back to his nest. He just couldn't get any traction. Poor guy.

  Her back hit the yard, arms spreadeagled, and she sighed.

  “That was very exciting,” she said dryly to the bright blue sky.

  “Ryan!” Sway yelled from the edge of the roof.

  She flopped one hand his direction. “I'm alive.”

  Soon he was hovering over her, his face pained with worry. “Where does it hurt? Can you move?”

  She rolled her eyes. “I'm fine.”

  Sway yanked his gloves off and tossed them aside. His hands skated lightly over the sides of her face as he inspected her. “Are you sure.”

  His concern was so fierce she actually felt sorry for him. Which was weird, because she was the one who'd shot off the roof like a fluffy bunny with a superhero complex.

  “'Come help me with the Christmas lights,' you said. 'It'll be fun,' you said. 'Aim for the bushes,' you said.”

  That's when the giggling started.

  She half-laughed, half-choked herself into breathlessness. Sway joined in, sitting down next to her. They both laughed until tears rolled down their faces and her stomach cramped.

  Ryan took a deep breath. Her face hurt from laughing so hard and the cold was seeping into her clothes. But she was warm inside. Warmer than she'd ever been.

  “I really love you,” she said.

  Sway arched an eyebrow. “Even though my idea of a good time is to throw you off of the roof?”

  She nodded. “Help me up and let's finish this.”

  Sway balked. “You want to get back up there?”

  “Well, I'm not giving up, if that's what you're implying,” she replied.

  He stood and reached a hand out to help her. She took it, regained her feet, and smiled hugely at him. “I didn't die.”

  His smile was more hesitant. “Nope.”

  She pushed up on her toes and kissed his cold cheek. “Thank you for always pushing me into the next adventure.”

  Moving around him, she headed back to the ladder. Sway spun on a foot and followed her calling, “Now you're thanking me? Are you sure you didn't hit your head?”

  At the base of the ladder, Ryan faced him. “I'm not going to have regrets with you. If you ask me to do something crazy, I'll do it. Now let's go make a memory. And then drink all the hot chocolate.”

  Sway's smile started small with her words but grew to beaming by the end of her small speech. He cupped the back of her head and pulled her in for a kiss.

  By the time they were finished, their house was the prettiest, most lit up house in a ten mile radius.

  Ryan curled up next to her husband with cake and hot chocolate in their bellies while they watched the most ridiculous Christmas movie of all time. She had new memories mixing with old memories, and they were all good.

  It was all so very, very good.

  “For You To Mend”

  Carl and Miranda

  Note from Author: Dear Reader, this story happened unexpectedly. I had originally planned to write Carl's story some day. Then I decided that maybe I wouldn't. Then I decided to add a short story to this collection for fun. And it turned into a beast. I have not (as of this moment) decided if I'm going to finish their story. You already know how it ends from the epilogue in In Your Honor. That doesn't mean it was an easy road for them. If I decide to write the rest (complete with more history of the band), as always, you will be the first to know.

  Carl and Miranda's love story spans fourteen years from first meeting to their wedding day. It's a lot of ground to cover. I chose the most significant moments of their beginning and focused on those.

  I hope you love them the way I love them, with intensity and compassion.

  Love, Heidi

  Part 1

  “Study Dates”

  “I told you that you couldn't hang out in the kitchen today.”

  “Yes. You did. But I forgot.”

  Miranda sighed around her smile. Her little sister was always going to be a wiseguy.

  The eleven-year-old spitfire grinned at her from the stool at the counter, mischief shining in her blue eyes. “Why are you making cookies?”

  “I have a student coming over.” Miranda busied her hands with the cooling racks. Spacing them evenly on the counter.

  “Ran?” Greta asked.

  “Yeah?”

  “Why are you making your best cookies?”

  Miranda frowned and glanced at her little sister. “I'm just making cookies. They relax people and the sugar gets their brain working.”

  Miranda had been tutoring for years now. She enjoyed it. The “ah-hah” moment that inevitably happened in every student always made her feel like she was a part of something bigger. Having someone understand something they had previously struggled with, was a victory she wanted everyone to experience. Because little things like that showed them they could do whatever they wanted. The future was wide open.

  Some people showed up already defensive. Maybe they'd had a bad lot handed to them by life or their parents or dyslexia. Or maybe they were just embarrassed. Miranda had discovered that fresh baked cookies made a huge difference. It wasn't bribing. It was a method. A good one.

  The professor who had referred this student to Miranda had warned her that he might be a little “rough.” She didn't get much more out of him. Except for the obvious: he was failing all of his classes and needed to do some significant repairs.

  That might intimidate another tutor, especially this late in the year. It was only a week away from mid-semester and they would have to work fast.

  But Miranda had a perfect record. She'd never not been able to help someone.

  “Yes, I made the good cookies,” she admitted. “I want to make sure he really listens.” She winked at Greta as the younger girl laughed.

  “You're so weird.”

  Miranda smiled to herself. She knew she was weird. It was something she'd grown more comfortable with as she'd aged. The weird kids were always going to be her tribe, her people, her safe place. She was the weird Queen of Weirdonium.

  “Get out of here, pipsqueak,” she commanded.

  Greta hopped off the stool and stood at the edge of the counter. Miranda slid her eyes over to her. Greta tapped her paint stained fingers on the counter top, pursing her lips.

  “Do you have a question?”

  Greta took a small breath. “If he doesn't eat all the cookies, can I have one?”

  This was a valid qu
estion. They lived in the same house as Harrison. Boys ate food. All the food, all the time. Greta and Miranda had been trained to eat now or not at all.

  Miranda handed a still warm cookie to her sister with a begrudging smile. Greta's eyes widened and her mouth curved happily.

  “Don't tell your brother.”

  Greta was already out the door, long dark hair streaming out behind her.

  Miranda finished straightening up and prepared for her newest, and probably last student.

  She loved tutoring, truly. But she didn't really have the extra time this year. She was pursuing simultaneous degrees, and the extra work was weighing her down. She didn't remember ever being this tired before.

  In fact, she hadn't been planning on tutoring at all this year. But Professor Rice had talked her into it. He had said this was a special case and she would understand when she met him.

  It wasn't the first time the professor had used her good heart to get her to do something extra for someone. It hardly took anything at all, honestly.

  Miranda liked people. She liked helping people.

  Like Greta had pointed out just a minute ago, she was weird.

  ***

  Carl Darrow eyed the sprawling grounds of the O'Neil estate in perplexed annoyance. He checked the slip of paper in his hand with the address scrawled across it.

  It was the right place.

  He'd just had no idea that Miranda O'Neil, his new tutor — eh, his potential tutor — was of the Boston O'Neils. It didn't actually make much sense. The O'Neils were a lot like his own family — rich, established, upper crust. Essentially, not people Carl got along with.

  He avoided anything and everything to do with that side of the population. It was too suffocating. Well, avoided was a strong word. Occasionally he would throw a cherry bomb into the toilet at the country club just to see if he could make his dad finally disown him for something ridiculous.

  What didn't jive was Miranda O'Neil being a tutor. She probably had someone do all of her homework for her. That's how people like this operated. Carl would know, he'd grown up around them, been surrounded on all sides his entire life.

  He crumpled the paper into his pocket and shook his head. This was such a waste of time. He was going to need another cigarette.

  Carl wasn't sure why he'd decided to close the door on his truck and walk down the gravel lane that led to the massive house. In the future he would look back at this moment and not be able to remember what was going through his head. He remembered the cigarette and the cool fall air. He remembered the way the gravel crunched under his biker boots. He remembered the sound of chaos coming from the closed garage.

  But he would never be able to tell anyone what it was that made him put one foot in front of another when everything that was in his nature would have had him driving back into the city for happy hour. College be damned.

  Maybe it was something as simple as curiosity. And he liked to be right. He was normally right, and he found a great reassurance in verifying when he was right.

  Or maybe it was something else. Or maybe his curiosity had finally delivered something to him he would never be able to understand.

  Whatever it was, he was suddenly ringing the bell by the front door.

  The setting sun bounced off of the glass door and hit him in the eyes when it opened. He squinted against the flash as he took a final drag of his smoke. His eyes dropped to two bare feet with bright red toenail polish. He allowed his gaze to travel leisurely up long tanned legs to cut-off jean shorts and an over-sized gray sweatshirt with a multitude of dried paint splotches on it. Dark hair tumbled over feminine shoulders, a heart-shaped face with dark chocolate eyes was frowning slightly at him. And two perfectly pink and plump lips were actually begging for him to kiss them.

  Okay, not like literally or anything.

  But Carl could tell. Those lips wanted him.

  “Are — are you Carl?” the lips asked him.

  Carl gave her his best non-committal smirk. “Last time I checked.”

  She smiled hesitantly and stepped back, holding an arm out for him to enter. “You can come inside when you put your cigarette out. No smoking in the house.”

  Carl glanced at the spent smoke in his fingers and dropped it in the flower pot by the front door.

  “I'm Miranda,” she introduced herself, her eyes on where he'd left his butt. He paused, half-expecting her to clean it out of the flower pot and chew him out for being disgusting. She surprised him when she didn't. Her desire to do exactly that was apparent.

  Carl decided to keep track of how many times he was right before he finally would be asked to leave.

  One. Uptight rich girls don't like smokers.

  He stepped into the house and she turned, leading him though the entry way and down a hallway to a large living room and into a massive kitchen. Carl's eyes didn't have any desire to look at the ostentatious surroundings. All rich people's house looked the same. He suspected they all had the same decorator.

  The world was small because people kept it small. They liked what they liked and who they liked and people didn't change. They were the same as they were a hundred years ago, or a thousand years ago. Technology changed, people didn't.

  His eyes did, however, stay firmly affixed to Miranda's legs.

  Pair of stems on this chick, he thought. They didn't give her much height, she was probably only five six, pretty average. But the skin looked petal soft and again, her body parts were begging him to touch them.

  “You can sit over there.”

  Carl glanced at where she was pointing. A little study nook, or something like that. It was kind of adorable. She had two chairs, books, notebooks, pens, pencils all set up like there was going to be actual tutoring happening.

  He could humor her. Until the actual tutor showed up. Not that Carl was going for this whole tutoring thing anyway. He'd been iffy about it already and after finding out Miranda's station in life — nah, he wasn't going to be doing this.

  Hey, look at that. Cookies.

  ***

  Carl slid his jacket off of his shoulders and hung it on the back of the chair. Then he sat down with just enough force so that the chair slid across the wood floor, closer to the second chair. Her chair.

  He picked up a cookie and stuck in between his teeth, his dark eyes watching her intently. Miranda swallowed and cast a glance out the window behind him in an attempt to settle her nerves.

  Because he had unnerved her.

  He was unnerving. It appeared to be his natural state. A state of unnerving intensity. It was all over him. He vibrated with it. A simmering stew of maleness under a leather jacket and faded Levi's.

  It wasn't not like Miranda had never been around attractive guys before, she had. Plenty of times. And there was always somewhat of a learning curve to handling their attractiveness. After an hour or so of conversation, the hottness factor diminished considerably. Sometimes it only took about ten minutes depending on how smart they already thought they were. Or how funny.

  Nothing was worse than a guy who thought he was funny when he just was not.

  Carl was better looking than she had expected. Exponentially so. He had dark hair with matching dark eyes, a strong straight nose, hard jaw, hard hands, hard everything. He didn't look anything like the boys she normally tutored. Mostly because there was so little “boy” left in him.

  “Professor Rice said that you were a sophomore...?” she asked on a deep breath, deciding to get a couple additional bottles of water from the refrigerator rather than try to hold eye contact with him while he answered.

  “Supposed to be. Though by the end of this semester it looks like I'll be a freshman again.”

  She reached into the cool of the fridge and felt it wash over her arms and her face. Even his voice was hard. Almost dangerous. Like everything he said was supposed to be a challenge for something or someone else.

  She returned to the table and smiled at the surface of it, still unable to have full
eye contact with him just yet. “Well, hopefully we can fix that for you.”

  “We?” he asked, already on his third cookie she noted.

  She pulled her seat toward her before sitting down. His dark eyes watched the movement and his lips twitched. She looked away again before his eyes returned to hers. “Yes, we.”

  He leaned onto the table with his elbows. “All right. Tell me what 'we' are going to do.”

  Miranda was familiar with the hostility. It was something she often had to battle against. People didn't like to be told they needed help. They didn't like to feel stupid or incompetent. So they often came in with an air of defensiveness.

  “Let's talk about what you want to accomplish.” She took the folder off the stack of books and opened it to his class schedule and grades. “Did you bring anything with you?”

  “Besides the chip on my shoulder and surly attitude?”

  Miranda let out a startled laugh as her eyes went straight to his with his unexpected answer.

  “There's her eyes,” he muttered, looking pleased with himself.

  She smiled, feeling the blush creep up the back of her neck and was thankful she'd left her hair down.

  “Yes, besides those things. Did you bring what you're working on now or any questions you might have?”

  “I have about a thousand questions but none of them are probably what you want to hear,” Carl said with a sigh. He cracked open a bottle of water and drained it swiftly. Miranda found herself watching his Adam's apple bob up and down.

  “You can ask me any questions you have,” she said. “I'm actually more knowledgeable than I look.”

  Carl arched an eyebrow and looked her over. She felt it. His examination. The weight of his inquiry, trying to read into her words and face. She tightened her stomach and braced as she held his gaze. She was going to have to get used to looking at him in order to work together. She might as well start now.