The First Hello

by Willa Okati

  He’d left his book splayed open on the grass.

  Shawn dropped spread-eagled next to it, the heels of his hands pressed too hard against his eyes, mouth open and working on a shout that started silent and then exploded in a bark, shredding his already raw throat.

  The noise he made echoed in the too-quiet air.

  If Raleigh heard—and he must have—he made no reply. The door stayed shut.

  Fuck! Shawn ground his hands down, drawing sparks of light and pain to explode behind his closed eyelids. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

  He took his hands away to stare at the sky, which had no answers for him. “Fuck,” he said out loud, the word oddly shaped on his numb lips.

  He’d thrown his arms wide when he took his hands away. The grass, dirt, and dying weeds prickled at the palm of his left hand, but the right? Rough-smooth. Hard-edged. Raleigh’s book. Without looking, Shawn curled his fingers around it, meaning to pick it up, to throw it against the house…

  But he didn’t. He sat up, head pressed to his knees, and let the book lie where it’d fallen. Wasn’t the first time he’d fucked up. It surely wouldn’t be the last.

  He’d just let himself think of things that couldn’t be possible, instead of doing what he knew needed to be done.

  Okay, he thought to himself, pressing his forehead against the bony cap of his knee. Okay. All right.

  When he sat up again, his eyes were dry—they burned, but they weren’t wet—and he reached for the book with a different purpose in mind, flipping it open and paging through to the end. Were there blank pages? Yes? Good. Hell of a use to put them to, but he had a pencil stub in his hip pocket he’d used for measuring repair work inside the house.

  Scribbling a note for Raleigh didn’t take long. Just a few words.

  I’m sorry and I fucked up and I won’t bother you again.

  But you fucked up too, he thought as he folded the note, knowing he should add that, but also that he wouldn’t do it.

  He left the note wedged into a broken root of the tree, and the book on top to hold it down. As an afterthought, he stacked the remains of the wrapped sandwiches Gabrielle had brought beside the book. Someone might as well get some good out of them.

  A pencil wasn’t the only thing he carried in his pockets, and Gabrielle wasn’t the only one to have developed a habit of tucking away spare change whenever they came across a coin or two. Shawn knew he had handful of wrinkled dollar bills, folded tight, hidden inside his back pocket. If he could get change for them, they’d be enough to start making phone calls.

  There was a pay phone across the street from Della’s office. He’d seen it.

  As a place to begin, he could have done worse.

  * * * *

  The sun had started on its downhill slide to the horizon by the time Shawn replaced the black plastic of the pay phone in its cradle for the last time. His fingers were sore from being cramped around its handle, and his thighs cramping from standing in one place for so long, but he’d done it. Made a start. Some of the numbers he’d looked up before they came to the coast, and some he’d memorized. Others he’d been referred to by people who couldn’t or wouldn’t help him but were willing to pass him along the line. Not many wanted to believe a man who didn’t own a cell phone had the cash to pay for the kind of treatment he wouldn’t settle for less than, but in the end he’d gotten lucky.

  There was a place in Savannah. Not so far from him, as the crow flew or the old station wagon drove. He could settle Gabrielle there and still camp out in the caretaker’s cottage until he was made to leave. Might not happen right away. Raleigh would want someone to finish up the repairs, and even if Shawn didn’t have his hands on the hammers, it was his responsibility. He could find a crew. Somewhere.

  And after that, whatever happened to him wouldn’t matter.

  He’d gotten a few funny looks as the afternoon went on. No one used pay phones anymore, not if they didn’t have to, and a man camping out for the duration would look strange. He hadn’t been bothered for the past hour, though, and when he pushed away from the phone booth and onto the sidewalk, no one of the few passersby batted an eyelash at him.

  But across the way, the blink of a light switching off caught his eye. That and Della locking her office door. She saw him right about the moment when he saw her, too late to pretend either one of them wasn’t there—and she smiled at him as if he was worth smiling at. It suited her proud, regal features in a way nothing else could. Had she said she was…what, sixty? She both did and didn’t look it.

  Feeling just about as awkward as fuck, Shawn ducked his head in a rough nod to her. “Miss Della,” he said. Would have been ruder not to.

  “I thought that was you in the phone booth.” She hooked her cane over one wrist and tucked her keys away in the little square purse she carried. Shawn didn’t know the names for all the different kinds of bags—Gabrielle was the kind of girl who’d rather carry a wallet than a pocketbook, if she’d had a choice—but Della’s suited her somehow, neat and efficient. With that done, Della stood beside him, smiling up.

  He didn’t get what she wanted before she sighed with an impatience so clearly feigned even Shawn could see through it, and nudged his arm with the point of her elbow. “Escort an old woman to her car, Mr. Tillerman? That is, if you don’t mind.”

  “You’re not old,” Shawn blurted, then wanted to cover his face when she laughed.

  “Kind of you to say, but I think we both know the truth.”

  Shawn’s face had gone hot, but he’d already started digging the hole for himself. His mouth kept talking. “You’re not, though. Sixty isn’t—”

  “It’s older than I used to be. Put it that way.” She patted his arm when she took his elbow. What for, he didn’t know. Della was probably more sure-footed than himself. “My car isn’t far. I like to park in the lot down by the wharf. It’s a pretty sight, pulling up there in the morning and looking out at the sea. Makes coming to work almost worth being awake so early.”

  Shawn lifted his eyebrows in surprised understanding. “I could see that,” he tried. Still awkward but better. Maybe?

  Seemed she approved of his putting in the effort, anyway. Her hold on his elbow tightened, then loosened, almost a squeeze, and she gave him an arch sideways look as pointed as an arrow. “I would have been glad to let you use the office phone.”

  Shawn shook his head. “No. I needed privacy, but…” He cleared his throat. “Thank you.”

  She made an amused noise. “You’re welcome. You’ll note that although I am curious, I’m not defeating your purpose by asking what you needed the privacy for.”

  “Um. Thank you?”

  “And again, you’re welcome.” Della faced forward, toward the sea, probably giving him the space to search for equilibrium without letting him go. She reminded him of Raleigh in that way, actually. And like Raleigh, she didn’t appear to notice the ever-present wind tugging at her sleeves or the hem of her pretty scarf. “I’ll admit, I wasn’t sure you’d stay as long as you have, Shawn, but it’s good to have you here.”

  So much for equilibrium. “Why?” Shawn asked. “That’s what I don’t get. Why you’re so nice to me.” Raleigh, he could understand. After that kiss the night they’d met…but Della? “You don’t know me, and if you did, you wouldn’t like me.”

  Again, she looked at him sideways, but this time, she said nothing.

  Shawn couldn’t shut up now that he’d started. “I’m just a guy who’s barely, barely related to Miss Anna. If she’d had any other relatives alive, she’d have—”

  “Left the house to you, exactly as she did,” Della said, crisp and clipped, the kind of voice that closed Shawn’s mouth for him. “Anna knew what she was doing, Shawn. You weren’t the last of all possible options. I didn’t know her as well as I might have liked in this life, but I knew her well enough for that.”

  Shawn frowned. “In this life?”

  Della waved a hand sideways. “Figure of speech. Anna and I enj
oyed the same sorts of stories, but we weren’t close enough in age to consider ourselves the same generation.”

  Which made sense, Shawn supposed. So why did something about it seem to ring false?

  He didn’t have time to consider the question. Della had pointed to a mint-green hybrid, as glossy as a glass of crème de menthe and clean as if it’d just rolled off the showroom floor. “Here we are. Won’t be long now, Shawn, until we’re all home.”

  “I guess,” Shawn said, still so damned awkward that it’d started making him crazy. Crazier. Fidgety inside his skin, like she was trying to see beneath it with every word he said, every move he made. But he’d started the job. He’d see it through. “I’ll walk you to the door. If you want me to.”

  “As a gentleman should,” Della said with a quiet chuckle and a click of her tongue. “All right, then.”

  Which was—Ah, hell with it. Shawn pushed away the tangle of thoughts. Della was older than some, and maybe her mind had started to wander. He’d have hated that, he thought with some surprise. Someone like her deserved to stay in control of themselves until the last grain of sand in the hourglass ran out.

  Gabrielle too.

  * * * *

  Shawn practiced his speech as he walked from Main to the edge of the property that’d been his for a hot second. No regrets about selling the place, though, not even now. He looked at the shape of the house on the horizon and thought, Still good.

  For Gabrielle, it’d be worth it.

  Except of fucking course, when Shawn let himself inside the cottage, she wasn’t there—and as best as he could tell, she hadn’t been there for hours. Maybe not since she’d met him and Raleigh in the kitchen gardens of the house. An empty bacon wrapper and a cast-iron frying pan soaking in the sink. An abandoned jar of chunky peanut butter and one of apricot jelly both sat open, a butter knife stuck in the peanut butter jar. The loaf of bread hadn’t been closed up, and spilled slices over the rough surface of the kitchen table. Bedding sprawled from the kitchen couch across the floor, close to the wood stove. Would have been dangerous, if there had been anything but cold gray ash in the stove’s iron guts.

  And he’d thought this was her getting better?

  “Gabrielle?” he called as he stalked through the short passages of the cottage. They never went into the front room or the attic, and she’d stuck to the kitchen couch instead of claiming a turn in the old bed, but he checked all the same. Nothing. Nothing. More nothing.

  Gone like a ghost.

  Shawn pushed his fingers through his hair, trying to beat his brain into working. He could feel it trying to turn over like a cold engine on a winter’s morning, clank-clank-clunk. Come on, he thought savagely over the roaring of his stomach, snarling hungry for the sandwich he’d lost in the garden now that he’d laid eyes on the open jars of peanut butter and jam. There’d be time for that later. He slapped at his head, hard. Work!

  A hand landed on his shoulder. Not Gabrielle’s. “Shawn?”

  “Fuck!” Shawn turned too sharply at the waist, heart crashing behind his sternum, then dropping heavy as a brick to the floor. “Raleigh?”

  Raleigh it was, in the solid flesh, standing behind Shawn. No telling how long he’d been there or what he’d seen, but the man had quick instincts. He stepped sideways and inserted himself between Shawn and the door before any ideas could fully form in Shawn’s head. Like maybe pushing him out of the way. Not that Shawn would have. He looked—

  Awful. Dark shadows under his eyes, and white lines around his lips where he held his mouth too firmly shut. Shoulders racked into right angles with tension. Hair tousled into a windswept mess worse than if he’d spent the day riding a motorbike down the highway at top speed.

  “You look like hell,” Shawn said, surprised dumb.

  “Sweet talker,” Raleigh said, his lips twitching in a not-smile. “I know I’m the last person you want to see right now, and that’s okay. You can hate me all you want. I would too, in your shoes.”

  God, Shawn thought. He really didn’t have any idea, did he? “What do you want?”

  Raleigh hesitated. Barely a second’s worth of indecision. “Gabrielle. It’s about Gabrielle.”

  Shawn didn’t mean to prickle up, but it happened all the same. “Leave my sister out of this.”

  “No, you don’t understand.” Agitation started to work its way out from beneath Raleigh’s skin. He looked back over his shoulder and shook it off, but with effort that showed. “I need your help.”

  Shawn lifted his head sharply. “What did you do to her?”

  “I haven’t hurt her. I wouldn’t lay a hand on her, and if you weren’t so stubborn, you’d know that better than your own name.” Raleigh held his ground but somehow at the same time, without reaching out a hand, made it seem as if he’d done so. “Damn it, Shawn. I found her at the hotel. Out back, at the loading dock, with the rest of the…hell. With the rest of them. I brought her home, but I need your help to get her inside.”

  Shit, Shawn thought, covering his mouth. If he hadn’t shouted at her, would she have done this?

  “Stop blaming yourself. You didn’t do this to her,” Raleigh said. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry.”

  * * * *

  It wasn’t as bad as it could have been. But it would have been better not to happen at all. She’d only had enough to make her stupid.

  “Gabrielle.” Shawn knelt in front of his sister, who’d sprawled on the lawn to better giggle up at the stars. Pink-cheeked and too loud. Her skinny arms stuck out akimbo, starfished, the sweater she wore so oversize it’d twisted askew. Shawn moved his hands behind Gabrielle’s head, careful in case he hurt her without meaning to. No lumps and no sore spots that he could find. “Did she fall?” he asked Raleigh.

  Raleigh hung back a few feet, arms crossed and jaw tight as he watched them. “I don’t think so. If she did, it wasn’t far, and she’s loose right now. Will she come for you without making a fuss?”

  “She’d better.” Shawn thought she would, anyway. Fuck. She’d been doing well. Hadn’t she? Or had he just wanted to see that?

  A warm hand lit on the back of his neck. “It’s all right,” Raleigh said, and even though it wasn’t, not at all, Shawn wanted to believe him. “You left that sandwich with the note, and if I know you, you haven’t eaten anything else since. There are circles under your eyes as dark as storm clouds, and whether you knew it or not, your hands are shaking. I just needed you to know I was willing, and I wouldn’t hurt her. I’ll pick her up. Tell me where her room is, and I’ll take care of this.”

  “You don’t have to—”

  “I know,” Raleigh said. “But I want to. Will you let me?”

  Shawn should say no. He wanted that too. And yet…and yet, when he looked up at Raleigh, he could have drowned in the man’s blue-gray stare, as calm and cool as frosted glass. Steady hands, strong arms, honest face.

  Beautiful, he thought once again.

  “She likes sleeping on the couch in the kitchen,” he said. “I haven’t—the blankets are a mess.”

  Raleigh only nodded. “Blankets can be fixed. You can watch me the whole time, if you want, or you could take that jar of peanut butter and go outside in the fresh air. Whichever works better for you. But she’ll be as safe with me as she is with you. I promise.”

  “How safe is that?” Shawn asked. “As safe as me walking out on the jetty?” Because he wanted to. More now than ever before. The peace of the sea out there, what it must be like with just the quiet and the waves and the rocks… He exhaled. “Don’t answer that. Just…please.”

  He watched. Raleigh wasn’t wrong. He did have the strength to pick Gabrielle up as easily as a doll. God, she’d hate that.

  The peanut butter tasted good, though. Still fresh, with nuts that crunched in every bite. He took a bite, rubbing the flavor against the roof of his mouth—

  * * * *

  Sean breathed in. Too sharp, too quickly, and it hurt going down.

  �
�Easy,” his lover soothed. Warm, work-roughened hands stroked his sides, his flanks. “Easy. It’s just thunder. It can’t hurt you. Put your worries aside. We’re safe now.”

  “For now.”

  “Now is all we need.”

  Sean knelt on a bed, knees braced at both sides of his lover’s hips. He couldn’t see in the dark of night. Wasn’t used to it yet, sleeping so far away from every light in the city, and on a night like this it still jarred.

  His lips tingled, and when he licked them, they tasted of cinnamon and wine.

  Sean couldn’t see, but his sense of touch worked fine and he used that to ground himself. With his eyes closed, his body seemed more alive, more awake. His lover lay beneath him, slick from exertion—and hard, so hard, pressing into his hand when he reached down to feel.

  Laughter and surprise made his lover sound light, free, happy. “Better?”

  “Yes.” He splayed his palm wide over his lover’s chest. He was hard too, aching with it, and the heat of his lover’s skin, the flex of his muscles reminded Sean why he was there. What he wanted so much that he caught his breath again with the strength of the urge for it. He rolled his hips, dragging his cock along the taut strength of his lover’s abdomen. “Oh yes.”

  When Sean moved, he felt the slickness inside, and a supernova burst inside him, a punch of memory of long, strong fingers moving to open him. He bowed forward, arms and shoulders forming a curve, and struggled to catch his breath.

  His lover laughed, low and rolling as the thunder. “Let me take care of you. Of us.”

  Those hands fit on his hips as if they had been sculpted from the same block of stone, Sean and the man naked, ready beneath him. Lightning flashed and dazzled his eyes. He shut them, the world easier when it was invisible, and raised his hips. Let the man—his lover—hold him there, and let all the rest of thinking and breathing escape from him with the burn of penetration. He raised his hips to meet his lover’s thrusts inside, working his way deep and slow, not stopping before Sean arched his back and let his mouth fall open on a silent shout.