The First Hello

by Willa Okati

  “What are you, some kind of a magician?” Shawn asked, shrugging out of the coat. He started to fold it over one arm, stopped, and draped it across the end of a banister instead. There. Now he couldn’t forget and wear it back home again, and it almost seemed as if he’d be too warm to want it any minute. Strange how alive it all was in here now. Like it’d never been an empty shell at all.

  Shawn shivered, abruptly almost uneasy.

  “Not a magician. Just a believer in second chances.” Raleigh made an encouraging noise. “I can see you from where I am. You’re almost there. Keep going.”

  He did sound louder. Shawn poked his head around one door—nope, wrong, that’s the library—and then another and finally found the right one. When he looked through there, he expected his jaw to drop either over the size or the spectacle, but…he did neither. Though it would have been worth it, to be sure.

  Raleigh was what caught his eye and held it. He sat on the floor like he was posing for a statue of The Studious Man, braced on his arms above a sheaf of blueprints spread out on the cracked parquet tiles. A pencil nested behind one ear, and he’d hooked a pair of reading glasses into the collar of his deep blue Henley. His jeans looked old, washed soft and snugly fitted, and his boots were scuffed and scarred as if they’d seen some hard roads. When he looked up, the muscles in his shoulders rolled smoothly, hinting at just how strong he might be.

  Beautiful.

  Raleigh’s smile was like the sun coming up. “There you are,” he said, pushing the blueprints aside. “I knew you could do it. You found me.”

  Shawn faltered, one foot in the door. He—

  * * * *

  “It’s all right. No one’s here; no one’s around. We’re safe.”

  Stefan looked down at his hand. His lover held it with both of his, broader and tougher than Stefan’s, the two of them almost swallowing his whole. He flexed his fingers and let his lover wind them together. “I believe you. I do. It’s just…” A long exhale slid through his lips. “It’s hard. That’s all.”

  “I know.” A warm kiss fell by his ear. Though Stefan didn’t look up at his lover’s face, he knew what expression he would find there—concerned, careful, caring. “That’s why I’m not rushing you. It takes as long as it takes. Sometimes longer than either of us would like, at the beginning of the wheel’s turn, but as long as you choose me and I choose you, I’m not going anywhere.”

  Stefan swallowed, a knot going down his throat, and turned his hand slowly so that he could press his fingertips to his lover’s wrist. He moved his mouth, trying out the shape of a smile. It came more easily than he’d anticipated.

  “There you are,” his lover murmured. “And you are worth the effort. Every time.”

  “You think so?” Stefan asked.

  “I know so.” His lover took two steps away, his broad shoulders blocking out the dim light, but with Stefan’s hand still held safely between his. Walking backward to lead Stefan forward. Safe as houses. “Almost there.”

  “In a ballroom,” Stefan said, the smile still tickling at the corners of his lips.

  “In a ballroom,” his lover agreed. He raised Stefan’s hand to brush another, lighter kiss against the knuckles. Fresh paint speckled the skin, robin’s-egg-blue freckles. “There’s no music, but there never needed to be. I’ve missed you, love. Put aside your fears for now. I’m here. You’re safe. That’s all that matters, isn’t it?”

  Stefan wanted to believe him. To love him and never worry about another thing again. And he was tempted…

  His lover took two steps back, though he kept careful hold of Stefan’s hand, raising it between them and smiling like a boy as he said, “May I have this dance?”

  * * * *

  Shawn blinked. He drew in a sharp breath.

  Raleigh Carter rested his hand on Shawn’s shoulder. Standing side by side with him, he looked up at the ceiling, not at Shawn’s face. “Isn’t it?”

  Shawn took his next breath carefully. It helped, almost as much as the sturdiness of Raleigh’s form and touch. The vertigo faded, and he eased back into his own skin more smoothly than usual. Odd. “Sorry. Didn’t catch that,” he said instead of asking Raleigh to repeat himself.

  “I could tell. You were a million miles away. That’s all right.” Raleigh clapped him lightly on the back. “Besides, I already got my answer from the way you were looking at it. It’s something else in here, isn’t it?”

  Shawn scrunched up his nose in an almost involuntary grimace. He stepped away from the warm hand on him, his heart beating too quickly to be comfortable with touch, and covered himself—he hoped—by pushing his hands into his pockets and moving in a slow circle. Cracked tiles caught the toes of his boots with every step, and if he went much farther back he’d start crunching over shards of a fallen mirror. When he looked up at the fresco, he could barely make out any of the details beneath the damage time and weather had wrought. Miss Anna must have kept this room shut up and let the chips fall where they might over the years.

  Raleigh watched him, quietly grinning to himself. He stood out like a lantern in the middle of the tattered room. “No, really. Tell me. What do you think?”

  “You don’t want to know.” Shawn made himself look at the walls, not the man. He whistled, long and low. “It must have been something back in the day, I’ll give you that, but you’d need a team of workers going all-out day and night just to make a dent in this mess. What do you figure just you and me are going to accomplish besides making it worse?”

  Raleigh laughed. “That’s your opinion.”

  Shawn shook his head and chuffed to himself. He already knew but wanted to ask, casting a sideways glance at the man. “I’m guessing you don’t agree.”

  “Nope,” Raleigh said, closing the distance Shawn had put between them as if it wasn’t even there. He rested his forearm on Shawn’s shoulder, trusting that Shawn wouldn’t step away and let him stumble.

  God, he was so warm. Shawn wanted, more than he could say, to rest his head against that shoulder. If he hadn’t burned that bridge good and proper…

  “Then you’re a special kind of crazy, Raleigh Carter,” he said instead, without moving away from the touch. He’d never learned how to be gentle with anyone besides Gabrielle. He didn’t know how to be kind, and he wasn’t sure he could figure it out. This was the best he was capable of. All he could do was hope Raleigh would take it as it was meant, and let that be enough.

  And it was.

  Raleigh patted Shawn on the chest, slow as a heartbeat, and let out a contented sort of hum that at the same time reminded Shawn of the way it felt to roll up his sleeves, ready for work. “I think you’re going to be surprised at what we can manage between the two of us when we put our minds to it. Let’s get started.”

  Chapter Five

  Slowly but surely they were turning the place around. A week later, Shawn knelt in the kitchen garden with his hands buried up to the wrists in good clean earth, amazed at himself. Maybe Raleigh’s particular brand of faith was catching, or maybe he’d started to believe it too. With just two men, they ought to have only started scratching the surface. And in a way, they had. They were.

  Shawn sat back on his heels to look up at the house. He had lists as long as the clinging ivy of things that needed doing, but at the heart of it all, Raleigh hadn’t been wrong.

  Scratch that surface, and it was right there for anyone to see. The heart of the place. The strong, clean bones, coming back to life.

  Shawn shook his head in slow wonder. Who’d have thought?

  Raleigh might have. As Shawn bent back to his self-assigned task of hauling years’ worth of weeds out of what had once been beds of green herbs, he pricked up his ears to the sound of a door swinging open and slamming casually shut. He’d learned that kind of carelessness when it came to Raleigh usually meant—

  Yep. Nose in a book. An apple in one hand, a single winter-white bite taken from the crisp crimson skin, and a paperback-sized volume in the
other. Its pages were yellowed with time and fat with humidity, rustling together with the sound of fallen leaves over stone. The sheepskin coat Shawn had left draped over a banister hugged his shoulders but fell loosely open at his waist.

  “You’re going to trip and fall, you know,” Shawn said. He backhanded away the hair that’d escaped his haphazard knot to tangle over his eyes.

  The corners of Raleigh’s eyes crinkled when he smiled. “Nah. Never happen. Not when I have you to warn me in time.”

  “How you haven’t broken your neck before now, I have no idea.”

  “Sometimes, me neither.” Raleigh tucked the book into his coat pocket and shaded his eyes to look up at the watery late-season sunlight sifting through the clouds above. “You think it’ll ever be spring again?”

  “Nope.”

  Raleigh laughed—as Shawn had hoped he would. His own lips twitched, strangely shy about being pleased.

  “Still, it’s a pretty day so far as winter goes,” Raleigh said philosophically. “Good idea, to work in the gardens. Take advantage of the light while it lasts. You mind if I join you?”

  Shawn hesitated, hands deep in the earth, tugging out tough and stringy roots. He’d like that. God yes, he would, but he never, never knew what to say to the man these days. Couldn’t talk to him the way he would Gabrielle, but wouldn’t talk to him at arm’s length, the way he did with everyone else. Made conversation about as easy as waltzing through a minefield sometimes.

  Raleigh’s smile began to dim. “I don’t have to, you know. Not if you’d rather be alone.”

  “No. It’s not— I mean, I don’t.” Shawn scrubbed at the tip of his nose, embarrassed. “God. Just—sit.” He waved at a more or less clear stretch beneath one of the weeping willows that he suspected hadn’t been planted on purpose. “Ignore me.”

  “Not likely,” Raleigh said, but the smile was back, so Shawn could roll with that. Raleigh took the book back out of his pocket, folded himself down as gracefully as a bird in its nest, and sighed around another crunch of his apple. “Find anything salvageable yet?”

  “I’m not a gardener.” Shawn shook his head. “I don’t know what most of these are. Might be best to just yank them all out and let you start fresh.”

  Raleigh chuckled.

  Shawn shook the dirt off something he thought might have been rosemary a dozen years ago, and laid it aside to look up later. “What?”

  “Nothing. Just thinking about someone I used to know who loved digging in the dirt.” Crunch went a bite of the apple. Raleigh held it briefly in his teeth as he opened the book, its pages falling apart to what must have been a familiar place. “The other day—you said you didn’t believe in reincarnation. Or did I hear that wrong?”

  “I don’t believe in it because it’s not real.”

  Raleigh watched him over the top of the book. “Huh.”

  “Sorry to disappoint you,” Shawn said, feeling awkward. “Just…” With relief, he thought he recognized that specific volume. “Is that the one you stole from the library that first night?”

  “Didn’t steal it,” Raleigh replied smartly, turning a page.

  Shawn flicked the possible rosemary at Raleigh, glad he wasn’t—too—upset at having his hobbyhorse dismissed. It’d be nice if there was such a thing as past lives, future lives. He guessed. Just didn’t make sense to him. “Clown.”

  “Hedgehog.” Raleigh used his finger as a bookmark and turned to lie on his side. All the better to watch him, Shawn guessed. It made his skin prickle, the way Raleigh did that. Like he mattered. Raleigh probably did that with everyone, though. “Have you been down to the shore yet?”

  “Not often.” Shawn shrugged. “I keep thinking about walking down the jetty just to see how far it really feels like out at the end, but—”

  “Don’t do that.” Raleigh brought his head up sharply, without even a hint of teasing. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to snap at you, but it’s dangerous. The rocks are slick, too easy to slip on, and there’s a rip current along the sides. Some swimmers have died. I saw it happen once, and it’s not a good way to go.”

  Was there ever a good way to go? All Shawn could do was nod. “There isn’t a warning sign.”

  “Isn’t there? There should be. I’ll see what I can do about it.”

  Which wouldn’t stop anyone who really wanted to walk those rocks from going out there, but maybe it’d help Raleigh sleep better at night. Shawn understood that. He picked up a fallen stick and used it to dig at a stubborn clump of something he honestly couldn’t identify. “What’s in it?”

  “Hmm?”

  “The book, Raleigh Carter. Why that one? There’s a few hundred others to choose from, last I counted.”

  “Because of what’s in it,” Raleigh said. He grinned when Shawn rolled his eyes. “Sorry. I’ll stop teasing, I promise. It’s a book of household accounts. Didn’t I tell you before?”

  Raleigh had, but Shawn didn’t know what that meant now any more than he had then.

  “And that’s a what, now?” He’d discovered he could pick weeds and still watch Raleigh at the same time if he didn’t care what he was tearing up, and at that point there wasn’t any saving what had passed and gone. Might as well.

  Raleigh let the book fall open on the ground before him. He danced the pads of his fingertips over the edges of its pages, patient and kind. “Household accounts, mostly. Daily records of management. Lists of expenses, supplies, production. That sort of thing.”

  Shawn wrinkled his nose.

  “It’s more interesting than it sounds. Cross my heart.”

  “It’d have to be.”

  “No, really, it is.” Raleigh propped his cheek in one hand, watching Shawn. “In their way, they’re like journals. A record of everyday life, down to the nitty-gritty. Favorite recipes. Who came, who went, what happened while they were here, where they went to when they left. Joys and sorrows and the price of pease porridge on Tuesdays. I like that. It’s almost like being there.”

  Shawn sneezed. Probably some old ragweed among the rest of the tangle. “Who wrote it?”

  Raleigh let one shoulder rise and fall. “Usually the lady of the house would take care of the records. Sometimes the gentleman of the house did. This one was written by a visitor who ended up staying for a few years. Which happened, back then. You could make a lifelong occupation out of being a professional guest.”

  “Huh.” Shawn plucked at the weeds, frowning. “Sounds lonely. The professional-guest thing.”

  Raleigh’s eyebrows went up, as if Shawn had intrigued him. “I guess it could be. This guy was good friends with the household, though, so for him it was like visiting his buddies for a summer that just never ended. He stayed busy. Did a lot of the carpentry work in there, if I have my facts straight, and in the end, he was like one of the family.”

  Shawn frowned. It still sounded—not lonely, but odd—but if it’d made that long-ago man happy, it wasn’t his place to judge. “What was his name?”

  But he’d asked a second too late, his window of opportunity sliding shut. Raleigh had turned a page and gotten involved again, his finger tracing over the spidery scrawls of faded ink. “I wish I could find some pictures. There should be a few photographs in the attic.”

  “You never said.” Shawn knelt back, hesitant. “I could go look for them.”

  Raleigh must not have heard him. “I want to show you how beautiful it was,” he said, turning another page more roughly than before. “How the people who lived here were happy, at least for a while. They loved each other. They laughed. They kissed. They made love. Pictures aren’t enough. I wish you could see it the way I do.”

  Something about the way he spoke made Shawn uneasy. Like he cared way too much about the answer.

  “I could try,” he said, sounding lame and limping even to himself.

  “Trying and doing aren’t the same thing.” Raleigh shut the book and shoved it aside. The rough carelessness set the hairs on the back of Shawn’s neck pr
ickling. More so when Raleigh knelt up and forward, thrust-rolling himself within arm’s reach. “People think history is dead. But that’s the thing. It’s not. It still lives and breathes in books like these. In the old houses. It’s everywhere if you know how to look. Where to look. If you have the eyes to see it.”

  Shawn held himself very, very still. He hadn’t made it past twenty without knowing how to defend himself. Or how to defuse live wires. Somehow Raleigh muddled it all up, though. The blue-gray of his eyes crackled with emotion as he pinned Shawn with his stare.

  Any second, Raleigh would reach for him. Shawn touched the tip of his tongue to his upper lip, breath catching in his throat.

  “You don’t get it,” Raleigh said. The storm in his aura began to fade, though not fast enough for Shawn’s taste. “Though I suppose I should thank you for the effort. It’s the damnedest thing, Shawn. Memory doesn’t work the way it should. We forget the things that matter, and fixate on the things that don’t. You ever find it to be like that?”

  “Yeah, sometimes. Jesus. Calm down.” Shawn rolled his head on his neck, trying to crack out the stiffness of tension. Didn’t work. He could feel a tug at the back of his mind and went tighter than before with alarm. This feeling, he knew. An episode waiting to happen. Vague, ghostly images of men in uniform and women draped in yards of silk dancing behind his eyes. A lover’s arm around his shoulders.

  God. Not now. Please.

  Raleigh laughed with none of his usual pleasure in the sound. A rough, broken noise. He pushed back, out of reach, and stood. “I think I’m almost out of calm, Shawn. Sometimes I think I’m never going to find it again.”

  Shawn didn’t mean to follow Raleigh to his feet. Nor to reach out, and to catch him by the forearm. Just happened.

  The episode—stopped. Like a soap bubble popping in the sunshine. Gone.

  Raleigh looked down at Shawn’s hand. Shawn too. It was filthy, caked in dirt that smudged and smeared over Raleigh’s sleeve, cracked from exposure, calloused and hard, and swear to God he could not let go. His fingers refused. They flexed, knotting tighter in the soft sheepskin and suede.