by April Lust
Emma nodded slowly. “All right, I guess I don’t. But I’m not the only one who is going to care. I mean, I have the least right to make any of these decisions. Hell, Kellan was closer to him than I ever was.”
Hannah’s brow shot up. “Bitter much?”
Emma sighed, looking at the dark wine swirling around the bottom of her glass. She decided she wanted a second one. She got up and Rocco followed her to the kitchen while she poured. “Maybe a little. I mean, this is my dad. We weren’t close, but he’s the only family I’ve got. Mom walked out. I like to blame him for that, but she didn’t take me with her, did she?”
“No,” Hannah agreed from the living room. “She didn’t.”
“I hate her for that. I mean, Dad and I had our problems. I never liked what he did for money, or how he chose to live his life, but he never abandoned me.”
“He was proud of you,” Hannah offered when Emma came back to the couch. “Said so all the time.”
“Really?”
“Oh yeah. He carried a picture of you from your graduation with him. He would pull it out whenever the opportunity presented itself. He’d flash it about and say, ‘That’s my girl! She’s in college, gonna be a vet. Take more brains to be a vet than it does to be a doctor. Animals can’t tell you where it hurts.’”
Emma found herself smiling. “He’s not wrong. Wait…wasn’t…he wasn’t wrong.”
Suddenly her smile collapsed on itself. The fact that he was gone, well and truly gone, hit her like a boulder. It wasn’t just frustration with decisions, or uncertainty with her future. It was the fact that he was gone and there was nothing to be done about it.
“My daddy is gone,” she whimpered as big fat tears rolled over her cheeks.
The door opened and Kellan walked in. “Shit, Hannah, what did you do?” He charged across the living room and stopped in front of Emma. “What happened?”
“I dunno,” Hannah said with an edge of bitterness “Maybe her father died and she’s overwhelmed.”
Kellan glared in Hannah’s direction. She crossed her arms over her chest.
“Stop,” Emma pleaded. “Just stop. She didn’t do anything. I just…I realized he is gone. That’s all, he’s just gone. He’s not somewhere else, waiting for me to give him a call. He is all gone. My daddy is gone.”
Kellan closed his eyes. “Sorry, Han. I got this.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah, yeah. Thanks for hanging out with her today.”
Hannah nodded. “Bye, Emma, call me if you need anything.”
Emma just gave a mute nod and pulled her knees up to her chest. She felt that she was very near breaking, like a thin glass bubble, floating on the miasma of her own sadness. She had been holding everything together since she got back, but she couldn’t anymore.
“Daddy,” she whispered. “Kellan, he’s gone.”
“I know, sweetie,” he said with a gentleness she hadn’t known he had. “I know. Come here.”
She felt Kellan sit next to her. She scrambled closer to him, desperate for the nearness of a living person. “He loved me.”
Emma curled up into a ball and started to sob. Her chest ached with the struggle to keep all the tears in. For some reason the hallway in her dad’s house popped into her head. The pictures of her from being born to gradating. He hadn’t moved them, hadn’t replaced them. He left them where they were, cheap frames and all.
“Yeah.” Kellan wrapped an arm around her. “He did.”
“I didn’t know that. I didn’t believe it. I thought he loved that life more than me. I thought he would have given it up if he really loved me.”
Kellan blew out a breath and stroked a hand down her back. “I don’t…I don’t think love is ever as easy as ‘if you love me, then you’ll do this.’ You know?”
She nodded. “Yeah, I think I do. I didn’t. I’ve never been in love.”
“That’s surprising.”
“What?”
“Here you are, pretty girl, smart brain, you’d think love would be falling at your feet.”
She shook her head, her tears beginning to abate. “I haven’t. I’ve had boyfriends, but never love. I thought I loved you when I was younger. But that was teen feelings, you know?”
“Yeah, I know.”
She looked up, and he looked down. They hadn’t been close since that afternoon in the kitchen, when they’d almost torn each other’s clothes to ribbons. The death of a loved one tended to put the brakes on lusty feelings.
At least, until now. If he kissed her now, she’d drag him into her. She’d use him to forget all this hate pain and fear. It was tempting, oh so tempting to think of it.
He cleared his throat, and shook his head as if he had heard her thoughts. “You need to eat.”
“What?” she asked.
“Food, you need it. You’ve been sitting in this house for weeks, basically waiting for nothing but bad things to happen. You’ve been cooking, cleaning, studying, who knows what you do. But you’ve been stuck here, and then all this happens? No, come on. You need to get out, and you need to eat.”
“There is a psychological connection between mood changes and food. That’s why there are foods everyone labels as comforts.”
He laughed. “You know, you say the weirdest shit. I like it.”
He stood up and offered her a hand. She took it and he levered her into a standing position. “Take a shower,” he said. “Get dressed, and do all the makeup stuff. Set aside all the crap that’s happened. I’m going to take you out for dinner.”
“Really?”
“Really. What is your comfort food?”
She didn’t even have to think about it. “Steak, maybe seafood.”
His grin widened. “I knew there was a reason I married you.”
# # #
Somewhere between her crab cakes and the porterhouse Emma realized she was falling in love with Kellan. She could blame the wine Hannah had given her at home, or the beer she had ordered when she arrived at the restaurant, but she didn’t really think that was it.
He was telling her about his first bike. She only understood half of it. Something about the pistons and the engine, and something else. She wasn’t actively listening to him, rather, she was focusing on the way he lit up when he was talking about it. The way his eyes took on that soft look.
“You found it where?” she asked.
“A yard sale! Can you believe it? This guy was getting rid of his bike. His wife didn’t think it was safe. I dunno. But it had been sitting in this dude’s garage for like five years. So it was half together to start with. So I plunked down two weeks’ worth of wages and walked it all the way back to the shop.”
“Oh god.” She laughed, tearing apart a piece of bread and dipping it into some honey butter. “My dad must have been thrilled.”
“He called me an idiot. Flat out. Like, there I was, not even twenty years old, still scrawny as hell. I was shaking from dragging that thing thirty blocks, and he just tells me to take it back.”
“You’re kidding?”
“Nope. He just points with one of those big fingers and tells me, ‘We don’t have room for junk.’”
She shook her head. Her golden locks, styled with gentle curls and held out of her face with butterfly pins, bounced with the subtle movement. “I can’t believe he ever called any bike junk.”
“You apparently never heard him talk about ninja bikes.”
She snorted. “Okay, that I do remember.”
“So anyway, there I was, standing all defiant. Saying I bought it with my money, I’d fix it with my money. I was going to do it. He rolled his eyes at me and told me I was wasting my time.” He paused as their dinner plates were set down in front of them. Hers had a steak covered in mushrooms and shrimp, his was another steak smothered in grilled onions and butter. “It took me weeks. Every night I was in the shop, fixing this or fiddling with that. I learned more about bike working on that junker than I did in the two years I had been wo
rking in the shop.”
“Did you fix it?”
“After replacing like ninety percent of the parts, yeah. It would have been cheaper if I had just bought a new bike by the end of everything. But I was young and proud.”
“I like that.”
“That I was young and proud?”
She rolled her eyes at him. “No, genius. I like that you got stubborn about it. It meant something to you. It didn’t matter what anyone else said about it. You wanted to rebuild that bike, you did it.”
“Like you with school.”
“Well, everyone thought I was going to go to college.”
He shrugged his shoulder, and dug into the steak. “Yeah, but you wanted to do it by yourself. You didn’t want anyone else’s time or their money. You wanted it to be on your own terms.”
It was close enough to the mark that she squirmed. “Well, until now.”
“Yeah, but you’d be an idiot if you didn’t accept help now. Let’s be honest, I was an idiot.”
“Maybe a little.”
He laughed, and she laughed alongside him, and it was about then she realized she was falling for him. He was smarter than she’d ever given him credit for. It wasn’t in a science or history way, but in a worldly way. He knew people, and how to handle them. It was a talent she certainly didn’t have.
“Maybe a little,” he agreed. “So, why a vet?”
“Well, I could be cliché and say it’s because I like animals.”
“I’ve seen you with Rocco, I know you like animals.”
She took another bite of steak. “I certainly do.”
“That was a little dark.” He did not sound disappointed. Indeed, there was a big grin on his soft lips.
She shrugged. “Humans are animals. While I fully believe that people do overeat meat, that you don’t have to have it with every meal in order to make it a meal and all that, I also believe that our digestive systems are set up to have some meat in our diet.”
“I’m down with that.” He took a healthy bite of his own dinner.
“Me too.” She finished her food and pushed her plate away. “But that being said. I do actually like animals, but you can’t love animals too much if you want to be a vet, and that’s the hard truth of it.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that animals die. They die more often than people do, what with the shorter lifespans. But it’s more than that.” She took another sip of her beer, finishing it off and pushing it to join her plate. “People get pets and haven’t got a clue how hard they can be to take care of. Oh, it’s adorable to get your five-year-old a bunny for Easter, but then you don’t understand why that tiny cage has your rabbit pulling its fur out. Or you get a cute dog from the SPCA, but you don’t notice that that dog doesn’t do well with your cat, and a fight happens, and I have to stitch them up because you didn’t read a thing.”
“I never thought of that.”
She shrugged. “A lot of people don’t. They don’t research how much a bird can stress out, or how cats need a high fat diet. Do you know I had a woman come in with this dog, not too different from Rocco, big and buff and all that. Or at least he would have been if she wasn’t feeding him a vegan diet.”
“Vegan? Like…veggies?”
“Yup! Like veggies. Only veggies. Like, a couple of people have published this literature that all animals can live together peacefully without killing another animal to survive, that you can just supplement their diet with chemicals. And I won’t go into all the science, but that’s not true. There are certain enzymes that animals need that only exist in meat.”
“This is a big deal to you,” he said gently.
“Animals are to me what bikes are to you.”
He nodded. “All right, fair enough. But it still sounds like you care a lot about animals.”
“I do, but not so much that I love every animal I see. You see, if I cared about every Fluffy with a broken tail, or every Rover with intestinal cancer, I would never be able to watch them die every day. It would be like you working in the world’s worst junkyard.”
“So you care, but not too much.”
“Exactly.”
“That’s really cool.” He paused for just a moment before asking. “So, do you want dessert?”
“Are you trying to make me fat? We had appetizers, and a huge dinner and—”
“Do you want dessert?” he asked again.
“This meal is going to be, like, a hundred dollars.”
“Do. You. Want. Dessert?”
She sighed ever so softly. “Yes, yes I want dessert.”
“Good, so do I.” He waved down the waitress and they put in a dessert order. The waitress beamed at them and wandered off. “Why do you always do that?”
“Do what?” she asked.
“Push away the things people offer.” He leaned across the table. “I didn’t ask you to come out so long as you didn’t spend more than twenty bucks. I asked you to come out so you could relax. If that takes two beers and a slice of…god, what did you order?”
“Chocolate and peanut butter cake.”
“How are you, like, ten pounds?”
“I don’t eat like this every day, Kellan.”
“That’s a shock. I’ve watched you cook.”
“Most days I eat ramen noodles with some stuff tossed in it. Lots of sodium, but not a lot of anything else.”
“Okay, that’s cool. But that doesn’t answer why you push people away. You seem like you have to do everything by yourself. I mean, go back to our talk about money and stuff. Yeah, I get wanting to do things for yourself, better than most I think.”
Emma sighed. “My mom.”
“What?”
“Look, I’ve spent a lot of time analyzing my mommy issues, and in my amateur opinion I can say that her leaving took a toll on me. I stopped depending on people and started depending on me. I’m sure it’s not really that simple, but that’s as close as I can get. She left. Yeah, I blame my dad for a lot of it, but the truth of the matter is she didn’t take me. She never contacted me, she never came around. My dad was absent, my mom just abandoned me. So yeah, I hate taking help, and I look at all nice things with suspicion. There’s probably a good reason I’ve never had a boyfriend.”
“Shit.” He blew out a breath. “You are going to need another beer.”
“That is absolutely correct.”
An hour two more beers, later Emma let Kellan carry her into the house. She wasn’t drunk, there had been enough food and enough time between the drinks than that, but just tipsy enough that her heels were not her best choice in footwear.
“Aw,” she said with a tipsy giggle. “You are carrying me over the threshold.”
“You’re cute when you are drunk.”
“Not drunk,” she said when he plopped her down in the living room. She immediately unstrapped her heels and kicked them off. With more instinct than thought she wandered to his stereo and began looking through the music there. “You don’t like iPods.”
“What?”
“I noticed it the first night I was back. You had this iPod, it was all wrapped up nice and neat, but your CDs were strewn everywhere.”
“I like CDs.” He shrugged. “Why did you notice that?”
“No idea,” she admitted. “Just noticed it. Do you have something against modern technology?”
“I use CDs,” he pointed out. “I can’t hate technology.”
“True. If you did, you’d be one of those vinyl boys.”
“Do you not like vinyl?”
“Do you like vinyl?” she mused.
“They’re all right.”
She nodded and put a CD into the player. Moments later the smooth tones of The Eagles poured out of the speakers. With more enthusiasm than skill she swayed along with it. “Dance with me.” She offered her hand to him.
“Are you serious?”
“Am I ever anything but serious?”
“Fair point.”
&nb
sp; He took her hand and swayed alongside her. She let her hands lay on the tops of his arms, the soft hair on his forearms tickling along her palms as she moved with him. He moved better than her, probably had more experience dancing.
After a moment his arms went around her back, pulling her a little closer. Her arms went around his neck and she looked up into his face. His hazel eyes were closed, but his lips looked soft, kissable. She stepped closer to him and his fingers dipped lower, brushing the top of the brown skirt she wore. His digits flexed, drawing her shirt up a couple inches, revealing a line of skin at her back. His thumbs caressed it, sending a thrill from the place he touched to a spot deeper inside her body.