by Lily White
“There’s nothing we can do.”
“I’m not giving up. And I won’t let you give up either.”
Sad laughter shook my shoulders. “What would you like to do? Run away? Become fugitives? You can be my captive while I hitchhike across the country because I don’t even have a car to use in my escape mission?”
Her expression fell and I wanted nothing more than to see her smile again. I just didn’t know how to make that happen, or if I even should. Delving deeper into this alliance we’d formed would be dangerous for both of us. Going to prison was one thing. Going there after finally finding the woman that makes your heart jump into your throat and your mouth go dry was a whole other tragedy. I would be willing to take the risk just to have five minutes of knowing what it felt like to genuinely love a woman in the romantic sense. But, I would never do it to her. I would never risk a woman’s heart.
“I’m not your captive,” she whispered, her eyes narrowing on me in feigned anger. Damn if it wasn’t the cutest expression I’d ever seen.
What the hell was wrong with me?
This was Michaela Paige of all people and I was sitting here imagining what a future would be like together, including naming the kids. I didn’t even want to think of my other bodily responses. Didn’t want to think how my pants were becoming painfully tight when she hadn’t done anything but look in my direction.
I needed to get up. Needed to run. Needed to get as far away from her as possible.
Instead, I reached out to run the tip of my finger over the raw skin of her wrist. “The rope burns say otherwise.”
Naked heat flashed behind her eyes and I thanked God for my loose jeans and long hoodie. Her knowing the way she was affecting me would have been just one more tragedy to toss on the pile.
Clearing my throat, I said, “We should probably get out of here. You can’t possibly enjoy sitting on a bunch of old drop cloths in a room that smells like paint.”
Lips curling at the corners, Michaela’s gaze returned to my art. “Actually, I do like it in here. It’s calm, you know? Nothing’s happening except...I don’t know. It feels different, like nothing going on outside that door matters. Not in here.” Her head rolled over the wall, her eyes finding mine. “I know I sound stupid for saying that.”
Not at all...
I definitely needed to leave.
“Well, I’m tired of sitting on a drop cloth so I say we head to bed. I have a double again tomorrow.”
Pushing to my feet, I made the mistake of reaching down to help Michaela to hers. The second her hand touched mine, a current of want buzzed just beneath my skin, expanding and pulsing until I felt it everywhere.
Once she was balanced on her feet, I let go, immediately stepping back to place distance between us. “Goodnight,” I said, leaping toward the door to escape like a fucking coward.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Michaela
I dreamed about him that night. I know, it’s stupid, but I did. It was one of those ridiculously sweet dreams that leaves you with perma-grin the next day. The type of dream that makes you think about the idea of possibility until you find yourself doodling your first name with his last, like some lovesick adolescent girl.
But while I thought our talk in his studio that night had brought us a touch closer, Holden acted as if I wasn’t there...most of the time, anyway. Yes, he was always polite, aggravatingly so. And yes, he loaned me some of Deli’s and his clothes, including boxers, since I had one pair of underwear to my name. And yes, he made sure I was as comfortable as possible while spending day in and day out in his house that didn’t have much in the way of entertainment. But most of the time, it felt like he was running from me, not because he disliked me, but because he was scared. Or, at least, that’s the title I would assign it. The question became: Was he afraid of me? Or was he so concerned about prison that he couldn’t function like a normal human male when he had an interested female within easy reach?
Or, maybe, that was just Holden.
He’d never had a serious relationship from what I knew of him. Most people believed it was because no girl wanted to be with the town’s ‘crazy freak’, but I was beginning to believe that wasn’t the case at all. If I’d been asked to guess after the time I spent with Holden, I would say that he was the one avoiding emotional entanglements, the question then becoming: Why?
Four days had passed since the first time I saw Holden’s studio. And in those four days, I learned that Holden had a very predictable schedule. Every morning, he woke up, showered and got dressed (mostly black, of course), cooked breakfast and left for work. Ten hours later, Holden returned, ate dinner, showered and disappeared into his studio. The music would turn on and I’d lose him for another hour or two.
This was is usual, his pattern, his manner of navigating life that left very little room for complications. Often, I wondered if he was this closed off when Delilah was here, or if he took the time to spend with his sister that he was adamant not to spend with me. However, despite the standard, Holden had one hour every night when his walls came tumbling down.
Photographers also have that one hour, the golden hour as they call it, usually occurring just after the sun rises or just before it sets again. It’s an hour when the light outside is perfect for capturing images that reveal the breathtaking beauty of a landscape, a human being, or whatever subject they happen to be photographing. Maybe it was an artist thing, despite the medium, because Holden, too, had this golden hour, always occurring just after he left his studio. It was an hour that he would come talk to me, he would laugh with me about stupid jokes, an hour in which the light inside him was bright enough and alive enough to reveal who he truly was inside.
Jokingly, I referred to it as the Holden Hour.
I not only adored that hour, I clung to it, waited for it, dreamed about it when the time came for us to part and go our separate ways. The next morning would always come, Holden would be sheltered inside himself once again, and I’d spend the next ten hours waiting for the hour I knew he’d grant me that night.
I wouldn’t call it a miserable existence for me, just a boring one, an existence that gave me way too much time to think about all the mistakes I’d made growing up, including letting the opinion of a shallow town dictate my behavior.
If the time spent alone weren’t bad enough, Holden’s golden hour swept in to open him up and enlighten me as to all of his thoughts of the town of Tranquil Falls. In the past four days I’d learned of the wrongs committed against Delilah and him. I’d been schooled on the horrifying reality of what was being done and ignored at the team’s parties. I’d learned that the lives of other people beyond the Bishop kids had been trampled on and diminished by my silence in watching it all go down without ever questioning what was occurring. And although our conversations during that one hour of the night weren’t always about depressing subjects that made me feel like the world’s most boring and silent villain, I still went to bed each night with a healthy dose of guilt to swallow down. Not because of my past mistakes, but because I got to know one of Tranquil Fall’s most famous victims – I’d learned that he was exactly the type of man I could easily love, and that I’d watched without much complaint as the town tore him down.
Thankfully, on the fifth night, Holden’s Hour wasn’t started with discussions of prison, the past or tragedy, it began with a dab of paint smeared against the tip of my nose at a moment Holden had closed the distance he’d always kept between us and allowed himself to touch me. I felt that simple touch down to the tips of my toes.
After emerging from his studio with paint splatted over his bare chest, Holden had taken one look at me, shook his head and closed the distance between us so fast my heart actually leapt into my throat.
“You have flour on your nose,” he’d said. “Hold still.”
Holding still in his presence was easier said than done.
Realizing the flour must have dusted my nose when I was cooking dinner earlier that evening
, my cheeks flared red with embarrassment at the thought that the flour had been there since Holden got home, since we ate dinner together, since he disappeared into his studio and I sat on the couch in the living room staring at whatever happened to be on television.
Reaching up, Holden wiped the flour off my nose, only to smile and laugh while pulling his hand away to show me his fingers that were apparently still wet with paint. “Whoops.”
Closing my eyes and opening them again, I locked my gaze to his. “The tip of my nose is red now, isn’t it?”
Soft laughter shook his shoulders. “Uh, yeah. You look like you should be leading Santa’s sleigh on Christmas.”
“Damn you and your reindeer games, Holden Bishop.”
His laughter was louder this time, a genuine smile stretching his lips that revealed those shy dimples of his that only came out to play on rare occasions. I loved those dimples, wanted to see them more often, and briefly wondered what I could do to make them a permanent fixture on his face.
“We need to get you cleaned up,” he said, the movement of his lips drawing my eyes away from those dimples and to his mouth, my gaze tracing the lines of it, the fullness. My thoughts...
Crap. My thoughts were all over the place and I felt absolutely ridiculous because never, and I mean never, had I reacted to a man this way. Not even Jack. Not even when we first started dating and he hadn’t yet revealed the monster inside him.
“Cleaned up sounds good,” I agreed, my voice breathless and robotic.
I’m not sure what happened in that moment, and I wasn’t positive I understood how electricity had traveled between us, a pulsing, living thing that silenced our voices and froze time at a point where our eyes had met and neither of us were blinking. My heart was a thundering drum in my chest, my pulse a frenetic fluttering creature trapped just beneath my skin, my body temperature rising to levels I wasn’t sure were entirely healthy. But there we stood, lost to whatever chemistry experiment had gone horribly wrong, the solution created by our mutual desires bubbling to the surface until we were drowning in it.
“Yeah,” he practically choked on the word before clearing his throat and repeating it more smoothly. “Yeah, let’s get that off your nose before it dries all the way. I have a solution in my studio.”
He walked away without indicating whether I should follow him or not, so I padded barefoot behind him, taking his silence as an unspoken invite into the studio that I hadn’t seen since the last time he shoved me in there to hide me from Kaley.
My curiosity had nagged at me over the last several days, my desire to see what he’d added to the unfinished paintings pushing me down that hall several times while he was at work. However, it felt intrusive to walk in without his permission, like I was invading a holy place that only he could use to worship. I’d turned around, never opening the door much less touching the knob.
He didn’t turn around or tell me to wait for him to grab the solution and come back, so when he opened the studio door, I walked in behind him, my eyes immediately going to the paintings and my breath catching in my lungs.
“Oh my God. That’s Jimmy.”
Without thinking, I stepped forward for a closer inspection, my hand reaching out to touch a painting that was so accurate and lifelike that I didn’t even stop to think that I shouldn’t lay a finger on it. Luckily, Holden remembered for me, his fingers clasping over my wrist to stop the forward motion of my arm. “Careful,” he warned. “The paint isn’t dry yet.”
Thoughts raced through my head, memories of the seedy drug den I was dragged to when Jack had forced me, the rotten teeth I knew were beneath those sorrowful lips, the scratchy voice I could still hear in my head. But while those memories crashed against my skull and forced my stomach to roll over itself in memory of the night I’d been there before Holden’s accident, another thought came to me that was more disturbing.
“You knew Jimmy?”
Was Holden buying drugs from him as well?
“I knew of him,” he finally answered, his voice careful and devoid of emotion. “He came into the diner late at night and would sit at the counter slowly eating whatever he ordered. That painting is of a memory I had of him the last time he came in. I haven’t seen him since. Why?”
“He’s dead,” I whispered. “He died of a drug overdose six months ago. His body wasn’t found for several days from what I heard.”
Still holding my wrist, Holden spun me to face him. “You knew that guy?” Expression twisting with disgust, his gaze locked to mine. “Why would you know somebody like him?”
The obvious disapproval in both his voice and expression confirmed that Holden had never known Jimmy for the same reasons as me. I breathed out in relief. I couldn’t stand it if I found out Holden was another loser scoring powdered death off Jack’s dealer.
“Jack bought his drugs from that guy. Every once in a while he’d drag me to the house with him before driving back to my side of town for a party.” Swallowing hard, I confessed about the memory that was banging against my thoughts, clenching my heart in its cruel fingers as images of Holden’s body lying limp beneath the hood of his car flashed in my mind’s eye. “We were coming back from his house the night Jack ran into you with his car.”
Lips pulling into a thin line, he released my wrist, disappointment filling me to lose contact with him. It seemed like no matter how many steps we took toward each other, the past would come crashing in to push us apart again.
“He took you to this guy’s house?” he asked, anger in his voice, his hand indicating the painting to our side.
All I could do was nod in response.
“Why?” Holden sneered, the word coming out on a soft growl.
Shrugging, I reminded him, “Because that’s where he got his drugs.”
“No, I mean why did you stay with a guy who would take you around people like this? Why didn’t you demand more respect than that?”
Caught off guard by the sudden vehemence in his voice, I stared at him open-mouthed for several seconds.
Reaching, he closed my jaw with his hand, trapping my chin between his thumb and forefinger to keep my eyes locked to his. “I want you to promise me something. Can you do that?”
Nodding was a little difficult given the way he was holding my face, but I managed.
A sad smile pulled at his lips. “Promise me that, in the future, when you meet a new guy and start dating him, you’ll demand to be treated as you should be treated. Make me that promise, because the little you’ve already told me about your life with Jack and everybody else makes me want to personally go around and kick all their asses before I’m hauled off to prison.”
“You’re not going to prison,” I fought to say around my trapped chin.
Sorrow filled his eyes, matching his fading smile. “Yeah, Michaela, we can pretend that for a little longer, but that’s not the point of what I’m asking you.”
Tilting my chin up and stepping closer, Holden brought his face down to mine, our noses practically touching as the serious intensity in his eyes took me hostage. “Promise me, that from this day forward, you won’t let people push you around anymore, and you won’t go near guys like Jimmy again, and you won’t stay so deafeningly silent when you know something around you is wrong. Promise me that.”
I didn’t want to lose physical contact with him, didn’t want the connection lost again, for the distance to return that I know he’d place between us. But I pulled my chin away from his fingers to answer him, to question him, to understand why he’d become so concerned over learning I’d been around Jimmy. Barely able to speak louder than a shaky whisper, I kept my eyes locked to his and asked, “Why? Why does it matter to you?”
“Because if you had done those things years ago, I may have had a chance to know you before it was too late to-“
Shaking his head of the thought, he stepped away to dig through a bin of random bottles and other supplies, the silence infuriating me only because I was desperate to know what
he’d intended to say. Impatiently, I waited for several seconds while he found what he wanted and grabbed a roll of paper towels.
Holden may have decided he was done speaking, that whatever unspoken thoughts lingering in his head wouldn’t be voiced, but I was tired of the silence, of the distance, of the way he seemed to run from me every time we reached a point where we were communicating what was real.
“Too late for what, Holden?”
“Never mind. Just forget it.” Shaking a bottle until the clear contents were mixed, bubbles forming at the top before he soaked a paper towel with the solution, he turned to me without meeting my gaze. “Come here. Let me get that off your nose...and chin.”
I stepped back, purposely staying out of reach. “Too late for what?”
His expression hardened, his jaw ticking with annoyance that I wouldn’t let the subject drop. But maybe that had been my problem all along...all my life, in fact. I’d always allowed other people to dictate what was said and what was done, and here I was being made to promise to stop remaining silent while Holden was forcing me into the exact same corner he’d asked me never to be forced in again. So I wouldn’t. I would make the promise. And I would keep it. Starting now.
“I want to know what you were going to say, and I won’t let you come near me until you say it.”
“Michaela, just drop it-“
“No. I won’t just drop it. You don’t want me to be silent anymore, Holden. You just said that. So, fine, I promise you I’ll push for what I want in life. I promise I’ll speak up when I should. I promise I won’t bow down to what other people want when I know it goes against everything I know is right. And this, whatever it was you were about to say, is important to me. It’s right. So I won’t just drop it. Tell me what you were going to say.”
My eyes locked to his, determination holding me in place as I stared down a man that looked like he was ready to stalk away like he always did. “Too late for what?”