by Lindsey Hart
“Are you okay?” Charity moved her hand to his shoulder. She kept it there, an anchor of hope and good in the world. He raised his eyes to hers. He wanted to stop. He told himself to keep silent, but he couldn’t hold it back.
“That wasn’t it. Ginny died. You know that. My wife. What they couldn’t have told you, because they didn’t know, was that she was pregnant.” Charity’s gasp filled the kitchen. She never tore her eyes from his. She was stronger than she knew and braver than she thought. She stared right into the heart of his pain and never backed away. “I was supposed to drive her home. I was going to go to that event with her. I was sick. Came down with something and I was fevered and achy and of course I stayed home. I went to bed that night, sure she’d wake me when she got back. Except it wasn’t her who woke me. It was the police. We moved out here because we thought we’d never have kids. We’d tried for years. We made our peace with that, bought this house. We were going to fulfill ourselves in a different way. And then, it happened. A miracle. She got pregnant. Maybe because we stopped trying. They say that happens. She was only a month along when she died.”
The silence in the kitchen was so thick it was painful. His eyes swept over Charity’s face, taking in the wash of emotion. The pain in her eyes was unmistakable. She grieved with him, for him. He read her terrible, raw pain, her empathy, and it touched him. It was the one thing no one had dared share with him. His pain. No, people expressed their sympathy and their pity, but they wanted to stay far away from him. He knew people avoided driving by the house, his yard. They avoided the spot of the accident, if they could, detouring around, even for miles. It was like he’d been cursed that night, forever punished, cast forever into the hellish world of grief.
Charity’s hand moved away from his shoulder, down his arm, to join his hands in the water. That hand gently covered one of his. She drew it out of the water and brought it into the watery sunlight that seeped through the one window in the kitchen he’d never boarded up since it faced the small plot of earth he grew vegetables in.
“It’s not your fault. What happened.”
Joe scoffed at Charity’s quiet statement. His gaze landed on his hand. Watery pink blood welled up from the wounds on his palm and the top of his hand and trickled down his arm. He could tell that the cuts weren’t as bad as he thought. Though he’d have a devil of a time picking out the thorns.
“I know it wasn’t my fucking fault. I don’t blame myself for what happened.”
“Yes, you do. You just said that you did.”
“No. I didn’t.”
“You said you should have been there with her. If you’d have driven home with her then it wouldn’t have happened. That’s what you think.”
“What I think is that we all have a designated time. A time we’re supposed to go and when that’s up there isn’t a damn thing anyone can do about it.” When they died, his wife, his child, it was his life that flashed before his eyes. The life he’d never get to have. The future they’d been denied. He saw all of it, the years marching on, the tears, the smiles, the joys and sorrows. It was gone, torn away in an instant. He’d created one hell of a fire a few nights later and burned most of the paintings he’d done of Ginny.
“But you live with the guilt. I can see it all over your face. I’ve seen it in your eyes right from the minute I met you. Survivor’s guilt.”
“Damn you,” he snarled, snatching his bloody hand back. “Don’t fucking touch me. Do me a favor and keep your opinions and your theories to yourself. I’m not something that can be fixed. I didn’t pay to have a shrink come, I paid for a model. For my damn paintings. I didn’t pay to have someone come into my house and tell me how to live my life or what I feel.”
“Joe…” That one word, his name, was laced with all the hurt in the world.
His heart clenched up in his chest, the beats irregular and horribly wrenching. He was bleeding out inside. It wasn’t just his palm that was in ribbons, torn to shreds by the barbs and wicked cruelty of life.
“Just get your things and get out.”
“I… please, don’t make me leave. You don’t mean it.”
He closed his eyes to shut out the pleading in hers. “I do mean it. Leave. Now.” She still didn’t move. “Now!” He bellowed, so loud that the room nearly shoo. His voice reverberated off the ceiling and bounced back to them, horrible and broken.
“Joe…”
“Go!” He slammed his bloody fist into the basin, spraying water all over both of them. Charity didn’t hesitate after that. She flew out of the kitchen, her soft footsteps padding on the tiled floor.
He tried to brace himself on the basin, keep himself upright, but instead, he sank to the floor. His knees hit the black and white checkered pattern hard, the bones crunching with the impact.
He listened to the sounds of Charity fleeing the house. She was a stranger, but she was the one person who had shown him exactly what he needed. Empathy. Compassion. Understanding or at least kindness. She’d come into that house, agreed to stay despite the state of it. Despite the state of him. She’d tried to help him, to intervene, to break the horrible curse of grief that held him prisoner there. And he’d driven her away. He’d done it because she represented hope and he was too damn scared of that beating heart in his chest coming to life ever again. He was so damn afraid of feeling he’d rather stay locked away in his grief-induced stupor than ever risk feeling anything again.
The front door slammed shut, the echo ricocheting horribly through the house. It was silent after that. Charity was gone, and he was alone once more.
Without even realizing what he was doing, he raised his bloody hands to his face and wept.
CHAPTER 9
Charity
“Keep going. You got this.” One glance in her rear-view mirror at the dust kicked up by her car tires, told her she didn’t. She didn’t have it. In that moment, she didn’t feel like she had anything. Her little pep talk didn’t work.
She no longer had a job, which meant she didn’t have any money, which meant she soon wouldn’t have an apartment. It wasn’t like she could get another job at the drop of a hat. Even if she quit trying to land jobs with the agency, it would still take some time to find something else. She sure as hell wasn’t about to set a foot back into her mother’s house.
It was more than that though. The sour churning her stomach, the hard burning in her lungs, the tightly clenched chest, the tears that constantly formed on her lashes and spilled over weren’t there because she’d lost her job or because she didn’t know where to go.
Joe isn’t anything more than a stranger. That wasn’t really true. I’ve only known him for two days. Sometimes that’s all it took. One minute could change a person’s life forever. A shiver ripped up her spine as she thought of Ginny and that terrible accident. If just a single moment could forever alter someone’s existence, then why couldn’t just a few days?
That isn’t all it has to be.
Charity’s mother, Joanne, always wanted her to have a calling. She was forever harping about Charity’s lack of direction. She’d demanded perfection and what she’d seen as her daughter’s aimlessness drove her to no end of distraction. Really, she just hadn’t listened. Nothing Charity ever said or did was enough. It wasn’t that she didn’t know where she wanted her life to end up, it was that her interests were never something her mother could have been proud of.
I don’t have to leave now. I don’t have to go and wonder for the rest of my life what happened to him.
Before she knew what she was doing, Charity brought her car to a slow stand still at the edge of the road. She sat panting in the heat, breathing in the dusty air blowing through the car’s vents.
He told me to leave, but he didn’t really mean it. It didn’t make sense that Joe would reveal his deepest wounds to her then shout at her to leave. It was all the pain pouring out. Charity leaned forward and rested her forehead on the hot steering wheel. She pictured Joe in the kitchen, his face contorte
d with grief and rage. She’d seen that horrible helplessness in his eyes. He wanted to move forward, but he didn’t know how. He’d begged her silently for her help.
One person to another, one human to another, Charity already knew what she was doing when she cranked the wheel and executed a perfect three-point turn. She crept along, slowly at first, then gained speed as she traveled back to the place she’d left ten miles back.
The house came into view, as strange and out of place as it had been the first time she’d seen it. She slowly pulled up the drive, parked closer to the house than she had the first time and got out. She didn’t bother with her suitcase. She marched up the steps and across the porch. She didn’t bother with knocking or waiting or hesitations. She was done with that.
She took a deep breath and pushed open the front door. She knew she’d find him in the kitchen.
He was still there, in a crumpled heap on the floor. His sobs echoed through the house, the horrible keening of the broken-hearted.
Charity had never seen a man cry before. It was unnerving and utterly terrifying, but the sound stirred the deepest, most elemental part of herself.
He looked up at her, blue eyes swollen and red-rimmed at the same she bent beside him. He tried to push her away with his bloody hands, but she wouldn’t be moved.
“Just go,” he begged her, voice echoing the broken wreckage of his soul. “Just leave me here.”
“No.” She wrapped her arms around his neck and leaned into him, forced him to hug her. Though she’d been very aware of him as a man on more than one occasion, that embrace had nothing to do with the heat of passion and everything to do with the need to heal. Somehow, even after a lifetime of being told she wasn’t good enough, she had something inside of her that he needed. Right from the minute she’d driven up and he’d stepped out onto the porch, she knew he was different.
She just didn’t know how. Until that moment. Knowing Joe was going to change her life. He already had. In that moment, for the first time in her twenty-three years, Charity was enough. Oddly enough, she was exactly what he needed. She was strong. Her mother’s words, pounding through her brain, telling her she wasn’t pretty enough, thin enough, smart enough, good enough, were finally silenced.
Joe raised his arms and clutched at her neck. His fingers tangled in her hair, ripping out the finer strands that caught along the way. Charity winced at the little stings that bloomed along her scalp. She tightened her hold and Joe clung to her.
Eventually, she moved her hand, running it over the sinewy muscles of his back. She awkwardly tried to soothe him with whispered words that weren’t words at all.
“I’m sorry,” he breathed, nearly at her ear. The warmth of his breath tickled the delicate skin of her neck just below her earlobe. “This is shameful.”
“It’s not,” she assured him gently.
“You don’t even know me.” He pulled away and their gazes met. Joe’s face was streaked with Kansas dust and tear tracks. “Why the hell would you come back?”
Charity offered a watery smile. She didn’t realize her own face was wet with tears until she pulled away and reached up. She swiped them away with the back of her hand. “You paid me to be an artist’s model. The least I can do is save your damn hands from sepsis before I go. Maybe I’d be the one who felt guilty otherwise. Maybe then I would think it was my fault if something happened to you and I’d be the one living with it for the rest of my life.”
He snorted, but his lips actually quirked upwards. They were such incredible lips, she realized when they smiled. She wondered what Joe would look like, eyes shining with life, shoulders straight, a rich, deep laugh bellowing from his throat.
Her body lit up at the image. It was completely the wrong time to feel any sort of attraction, but the desire inside her was so strong, she couldn’t force it away. It wasn’t exactly a physical desire, so much as it was a desire to see Joe get there, to that moment.
“Do you have tweezers?”
“What?” Those red-rimmed, ice blue eyes, eyes that could be so incredibly beautiful, stared hard at her, uncomprehending.
“Tweezers. To pick out the thorns. Maybe a first aid kit with some gauze or bandages? Something to sterilize it all?”
He finally nodded. “Yes. Uh- I’ll get the stuff. There’s a bottle of gin in the top shelf of that pantry over there.” Joe stared hard at the monolith from across the kitchen. “You know, I actually fucking hate that thing. I think it was created sometime in the mid eighteen hundreds. It’s just so damn gothic. I would love nothing more than to set fire to it.” He let out a shaky exhale. “I’d like to set fire to this whole damn place.”
“Okay, that’s enough talk of arson. Although, I don’t know if you can claim insurance if it’s really arson. Maybe just a strange form of demolition. Anyway, just please don’t do that. I don’t think it’s legal.”
There it was again, the shadow of a smile. This time it even entered his eyes. “Don’t worry. If I was truly going to burn it down, I would have done it long ago.”
Charity nodded as she forced her legs to a standing position. They resisted, screaming against the movement with a hot flood of pins and needles.
She gave Joe his space. She retreated to the cabinet that he said he hated so much. His heavy footfalls exited the kitchen behind her as her hand closed around the only bottle in the damn thing. It was huge, the kind of beast of a pantry that could serve to store food for an entire household.
The gin bottle was half empty. She shut the cabinet door behind her. It lined up perfectly, even though it was a century and a half old.
The house was so dark. She didn’t know where she could sit and actually see the thorns she needed to pull. She finally figured the front porch was as good a place as any. She let the door shut loudly behind her, so Joe wouldn’t have to search the house, wondering where she’d gone.
The sun was just as hot as it had been earlier. Charity sat down on the faded grey boards of the porch. She lined up her feet on the sagging step and waited.
It wasn’t long until the door creaked open and slammed shut behind her. She didn’t turn and Joe sat down soundlessly beside her a minute later. He wordlessly passed over a first aid kit that had definitely seen better days. The white metal was rusty all around. The tweezers were in slightly better shape.
“It’s going to be a miracle if I get into this without having to go for a Tetanus shot.” She sprang the latch on the kit and was relieved to see that though it was battle-scarred and ancient looking, it was fully stocked with all sorts of bandages. “Okay. Which hand first?”
Joe sighed. “You know, I could do this.”
“Not in that condition you couldn’t. You went at those brambles like you were a machine that didn’t register pain. I doubt you could even hold the tweezers.”
He shrugged. He hadn’t washed his face and it was still a mess, but she figured hers looked no better. He was, without a doubt, the most beautiful man she’d ever seen, and it wasn’t despite the way he looked, it was because of it. She’d never felt so close to another person’s soul in her life.
She tried not to let the heat of his poor hand register as it graced her palm. She held it gently, cradling it as she began the tedious task of picking out thorns.
CHAPTER 10
Joe
He’d once heard that the brain could only truly register one sensation at once. Joe didn’t know if that was true or not. Maybe it made sense, considering he felt so many things his body just numbed out, as though his brain needed to shut down since it was on sensory overload.
The ache in his heart was always there. The grief that weighed him down though, seemed to have eased just fractionally. It made all the difference in the world. When he breathed in though, his inhale and exhale were shaky. He felt his lungs actually expand and contract. The band of pain that wrapped around his chest seemed to have lost its hold and he could just… be.
He stared, through gritty, swollen eyes, at the bent he
ad of shimmering red-hued, golden hair in front of him. Even after hours sitting for his painting, of hard work in the yard and then god knew whatever he’d put her through, she still smelled good.
Charity. How apt her name was. She had a kindness that infused her soul, that shimmered around that beautiful bent head like an invisible halo, apparent only when he needed to see it most.
“Tell me,” he said thickly before he could stop himself. Her head whipped up and she stared at him for a second before she resumed what she was doing. It hurt like hell, her digging in the wounds, some of them deep and raw, but he barely felt it compared to the pain in his heart. Even that had changed though, as though the tears he’d so shamefully sobbed out had cleansed him, left him so very weak and helpless, like a newborn. “What made you like this?”
“What?” Charity’s head shot up again, confusion burning bright in her mysterious eyes.
“I- sorry. I just meant, why did you come back? Anyone in their right mind would have left.”
“I told you, I couldn’t just leave you like this.”
“You could have. You should have.”
“No.”
“So, what makes you different? What happened to you that makes you… understand what it feels to live like this. I’ve never known anyone so compassionate. Who did you lose?”
Charity glanced back down, but not before he caught the bloom of a vivid blush stealing over her cheeks. She slowly went back to picking out thorns. Joe didn’t flinch, even when the tweezers bit deep into his flesh. “No one. Not like you did. It was just me and my mom growing up. My dad left just after I was born. My mom is a strong woman, but I’ll be honest when I say I think she drove him away. I never knew him. Never. I don’t know if he ever thought about me or wanted to know me. Maybe he tried, and she wouldn’t let him. I can’t say. She’d never answer me, even if I asked.”