But the infatuation…it elated him above rational thoughts.
The morning air was dense with fog, the atmosphere gray and moist, and when Elizabeth appeared through it, at the end of her walkway, his heart jolted inside his chest. He still wasn’t used to the sensation, and it froze him in place. Her hair was up again, in a twist at the back of her neck, and she smiled. He returned it, unable to help himself. She was tired, he could see, but she appeared happy. Happier than he’d ever seen her, in fact. She glowed from the inside out, joy oozing from her eyes and exquisite smile. Could it be due to their late night again last night? Was it possible she received as much enjoyment out of their midnight walks as he did? She’d been waiting for him at her porch again when the sun had fallen and her smile had been just as exuberant then as it was now. He didn’t understand it.
“I’m beginning to think you’re waiting for me, Mr. Clayton.”
He cleared his throat, looking away from her eyes and back at the polished toes of his shoes as he began to walk again. She fell into step beside him.
“Oh, that’s right,” she added, “you don’t wait for anyone.”
He threw her a sidelong glance and her smile teased. He rubbed the back of his neck. “So, your pipe…” he began. “How’s it holding up?”
“Unfortunately, it’s holding up great so far.”
“Unfortunately?”
“I can’t exactly ask for your tools again if everything is in top shape, can I?” She wouldn’t meet his eyes but the corner of her mouth teased a potential smile.
“I…see,” he said, and he heard the smile in his own voice. “Perhaps I undercharged you for the house if everything is in top shape.”
“Perhaps, but I don’t think it’s in your nature to overcharge.”
He studied her as they turned onto Clayton Road, his brow taut with challenge. “And what do you think you know of my nature?”
She looked down, adjusting her purse. “I know it’s not what you portray it to be.”
Huffing, he picked up his pace.
“The Life on Wheels Foundation…”
He paused, merely from the sickness in his stomach, and stared at her. She hesitated, fearful.
“Well, it is you, isn’t it—the one who founded it?”
A feverish heat beat at his skin. Suddenly, his collar was too tight and he loosened his tie. “How do you know about that?” His voice came out harsher than it should have.
“Mr. Clayton, please. Frankly, I’m surprised others don’t. I read that same article in the paper last week, the one you were reading so intently on the morning we met. The one about Shane O’Donnell and his afterschool program for wheelchair-bound teens, funded by him and an unknown source.”
“And just because I read intently means I’m the unknown source?” His hand found his hip, resting on the leather of his belt.
“I know who Shane is, Mr. Clayton,” she said with reverence.
Air: he couldn’t find it.
“The teens who died in the accident ten years ago, on Mt. Hood Highway? One of them survived…didn’t he?”
Henry exhaled through his nose and trudged forward. “I suggest you stop snooping—”
“I wasn’t snooping,” she said, trying to keep up. “Not into you anyway. I was curious about the accident. It didn’t take long before I found Shane’s name and the link to the Life on Wheels Foundation.”
He turned on her abruptly, lifting his hands. The exposure, and the way she was so close to the truth, made his skin crawl. “You caught me.”
“Mr. Clayton.” With another step toward him, she lowered his hands. Hers were warm and soft. Just like her eyes. “I won’t tell anyone.”
He didn’t breathe during the following short seconds. Not until she released his hands and the sudden emptiness reminded him not to be foolish. With a sigh, he looked to the asphalt.
“Why?” she asked. “Why get involved?”
He couldn’t tell her it was because of guilt. Just like he’d never been able to tell Shane what he was and how it was all because of him he would never walk again. “I…It was my responsibility, Ms. Ashton. It’s my town, our beast that did it.”
Instead of defending the monster like he expected, she said, “Did starting the foundation take away the guilt?”
He recoiled. “Nothing can.”
“Is that what you do in Portland? Are you…involved?”
With a wipe down his face, he looked to the side. She brimmed with questions, and it was clear to him now that the only way to move past them was to answer. So that’s what he would do. This morning, he would answer what questions he safely could, until she stopped asking all together. And from that point on, he would never give into his infatuation again. He had to distance himself. She seemed to pick up on everything, and again he reminded himself it was foolish to think he could go on at this rate without her finding out what he was. After this moment, she would be nothing more than a new resident of Hemlock Veils, and he would be the same Mr. Clayton he’d trained himself to be. Only this time, he would have emptiness and heartache go with it.
“I went to see him in the hospital a few weeks after it happened,” he finally explained. He released another breath, his body strangely relaxed at the secret’s revelation. He met her eyes and they invited him to elaborate. “I guess I went in there hoping I would know what to say, that I could apologize…on the town’s behalf. But when I saw him like that, all beat up, no words felt appropriate. So…I just sat beside him, for at least an hour, neither of us saying a word.
“But eventually he asked who I was and why I was wasting my time there. I…told him I was a friend, someone who wanted to help. And I don’t know how it happened, but we spent nearly every day for weeks that way. I started bringing him things, like the books and music we’d talked about. I helped him with physical therapy, spent most hours of the week with him, actually. But I never told him who I was.”
“Why not?”
“Ms. Ashton,” he sighed. “It’s…complicated.”
“Who you are, Mr. Clayton, or why you didn’t tell him?”
“Both,” he said abrasively, stepping closer. “I started the foundation a year after we met and kept everything on my end purely anonymous. But he knew anyway. It was just last week he told me, actually.”
“It upsets you, people knowing your secrets.”
“Not him. After ten years, he deserved to know. We are very close.”
She lifted an eyebrow. “As opposed to me, you mean, who’s been here ten days”
He didn’t answer, knowing he didn’t need to.
“So,” she said, “how do you have time for it, running a business and a foundation?”
“I resigned as CEO of my father’s company years ago. I still own shares in Admiralty Bay, and stay involved in business decisions, but most days Arne and I are with Shane and the kids.”
“In a suit, no less,” she teased, folding her arms.
He folded his, too. “If you must know, most days I change in the car on the way there. When I’m not driving, that is. Arne actually hates driving, after doing it so many years.”
With a laugh, she shook her head. She didn’t seem to believe it, and he couldn’t blame her. It seemed she was trying to picture it.
“Is that hard to believe?” he asked through the cover of his own amusement.
“Very. Whose idea was it?”
“For me to drive?”
She chuckled. “The foundation.”
“Both Shane’s and mine, I suppose. After he was released from the hospital, he wallowed for days. I took him to some different homeless shelters around the city, even a soup kitchen or two…Anyway, we were playing basketball one day—he was kicking my ass even in a chair—and he said he wanted to do this for other kids like him. So…we did.”
A new awe filled her eyes and the way he didn’t deserve it left him uncomfortable. He cleared his throat and began walking again. “Are you done with the questions, Ms. A
shton?”
“Yes.”
This surprised him. He turned back, building the wall he needed to keep from here on out. “Good, because that will be the last time I answer any. I mean that. My reputation in this town is very important to me.”
“I understand, Mr. Clayton.”
Then he could move on, at least in human form. He was used to hiding from the people he cared about and living multiple lives. Elizabeth knew two of them now, and he would do anything to keep her from discovering the truth behind his third—even live everyday with an emptiness he had known nothing about only days before. At least in his third form he could counteract the emptiness his human self would endure; because now, it was that atrocious third form in which he could truly be himself with her.
Chapter 18
It seemed the time in his gardens, surrounded by roses and infatuated heat, had been a turning point for Henry. Or perhaps it had been the morning after, the morning Elizabeth had questioned him about his foundation. Whatever it was, Henry—the man—had changed that day, three weeks ago. No longer did he show the slightest hint of an interest, nor the smiles Elizabeth loved. They saw each other plenty, since he came with her to Jean’s every morning. It had even become a morning ritual to walk together, rain or shine. He would sit and talk with her while she prepared the pastries and coffee, before the doors were open for business, or sometimes nothing would be said at all; but always they would come together. One time, when business had slowed and she was no longer bustling behind the counter, he’d even invited her to his corner table to have coffee with him.
But regardless of the way days had lapsed in walks and conversations over coffee, he wasn’t the same Henry she’d begun to see that day in his gardens, or even the evening he’d fixed her pipe. That man, who she’d thought possibly felt the same things she did, had disappeared, and Henry was back to being Mr. Clayton: clipped, short, professional, and not caring more for her than a man cares for his business associate. As though it was his obligation to walk with her every morning. Every once in a while, he’d even become condescending the way he’d been in the beginning.
It was strange, their relationship—outside of a definition. Whatever they were, a large bit of something was missing. Three weeks ago, she had begun to see a side of him that said she was more than a morning walk and a cup of coffee. But, like a switch, he’d flipped off that side, even the fire that had burned from within and showed through his eyes. He revealed no personal information either, other than a tidbit he’d slipped out on the morning she’d sat with him. It usually consisted of small talk, except for the times she would tell stories about her father or brother, or even Mr. Vanderzee. She didn’t mind doing this, sharing herself with him, and she was glad he didn’t seem to mind either. He always listened with respect, even appeared interested more times than not.
However, on that morning she’d sat with him, all she’d gotten from him was that Henry Street had been named after his father, because he’d been born in that very clinic on the corner. And even that wasn’t true, she knew, since Henry Senior never existed. Junior and Senior were one in the same; the careless father Henry spoke of was none other than Joseph Clayton, and the wonderful friend Arne spoke of was the very same Henry she now knew, from a past life. None of it made sense and she wanted it to. She wanted to know why the man before her felt nothing like the beast she knew at night.
Because in Henry, the beast, lay a different story. With the beast she was home, and so was he. At night she knew the real Henry, the one who waited eagerly for her. After sunset he always came, and not a day had gone by during the past three weeks that she didn’t go with him. He even provided an excellent shield on the nights it rained. Instead of walking side-by-side on those nights, they walked as one. With her body huddled against his massive frame, she took shelter between his ribs and shoulder—he on four legs and she on two.
It wasn’t that the beast told her much. Even now, as she walked with him, he rarely spoke. But they didn’t need it. All they needed was the connection of their eyes and the way their souls were in sync. Out here, in the dark, no two beings were more similar. In the real world with sunshine, Henry went out of his way to prove they were different. Sometimes she didn’t know whom to believe. Sometimes she even questioned whether Henry was the beast at all.
Tonight it rained again, just drizzled really, and as she took her place in the indentation between his shoulder and ribs, her mind continued to drift. She’d been officially living in Hemlock Veils for a month now. How quickly it had gone by. How fulfilling yet equally empty—and not to mention strange—her life was. She was tired most of the time, even the mornings after she fell asleep against him. Sometimes they would stop on the flat surface of a boulder close to a water source (she could hear it gushing) and drift. Darkness always concealed the places he took her, and she hoped someday to see them in daylight—especially the waterfall.
They’d stopped there more than a handful of times, where he would lie down, resting his jaw on his paws, and she would lie back against his side—a few times against his chest and below his head, on the nights it poured. The second time this happened, she had asked him where he usually slept, and with the thoughts that floated into her head, he had said it was right there, where they were. There was something trusting in the way he brought her to his sleeping place, something that said everything.
Drizzling transitioned to rain, and she lifted her hood over her head, inching closer to the beast. She had learned the paths they walked, and though she couldn’t see them, sometimes clinging to his fur as he led her, she knew the turns they would take, the obstacles they had to avoid. And right now they were roughly a mile northwest of Hemlock, in a particularly hilly terrain she assumed was close to Hunchback Mountain. In knowing Mt. Hood Highway was just north of them, she was reminded of the night they’d met, the first time he’d tried frightening her.
You’re tired, he said in her mind, his words shoving aside her own thoughts.
“Tonight is no different than any other.”
I’ll take you back.
“No.” He worried for her more than anyone ever had—always making sure she had enough rest, always protecting her from weather, and even protecting her from wildlife. Generally, they all kept away from him, but a few times the animals had been taken by surprise and acted on their instincts. In turn, he had too.
The first and only time she’d seen him attack, tearing his jaws through a black bear’s side, she’d been so horrified that she’d left him earlier than usual, needing a night to process the bloody image. The next night when meeting him at her porch, he had said, Sometimes I can’t ignore my instincts, Elizabeth. I told you I was vicious. I warned you.
She’d grasped the fur beneath his ear and pulled his face toward her, sliding her other hand the length of his snout. In his animal eyes the shame was unmistakable. “You’re not vicious,” she said softly. “If you were, I wouldn’t be able to do this.” She ran her thumb down the length of his long fang, from gum to tip—moist but free of blood. “Your instincts are part of you, Beast.” His breath left him in a puff and she smiled, trying to lighten the mood. “I have the best bodyguard in existence.”
Though she had accepted this side of him, she was grateful he never attacked another animal in front of her again. She’d learned by now that it was difficult for him to exercise control. Even the rare presence of mule deer set him on edge, his spine rippling with that instinct he tried to fight. One time, she’d laughed at the way he’d scared off a defenseless rabbit.
But it’d been a week since they’d come across other wildlife, and she was contemplating this when they reached a clearing, and he sat on his haunches. She took the place she usually reserved for rainstorms: against his chest, beneath his head. The rain wasn’t threatening tonight, but she was tired. Though she wouldn’t admit it to him—because he would drag her home by his teeth—she did need to close her eyes. It was sometime in the middle of the night and staying
out late was a mistake; but she needed this, needed these moments with the only soul who seemed to understand her. She rested the side of her face against the wet fur of his chest and closed her eyes. And even while standing on her feet, her mind slipped into a sleepy state. He lowered his long jaw and rested it on her head—always protecting.
As usual, while her mind drifted, Henry floated in and out of it. The man, Henry. The way he made her feel on their morning walks to Jean’s, even when he was his distant, professional self. The truth was, she hadn’t felt for anyone the way she felt for him, not ever. She cared so deeply about the man he was hiding, the man she got glimpses of on nights like tonight.
“Beast…” she said, her voice tired and eyes closed. His rapid heartbeat didn’t sound human. “Why do you come to me every night?”
The rain in the treetops was a pleasing sound. Because you accept me. I don’t have to pretend. She moved away from his chest, meeting his large animal eyes, rich with the same hue as his human ones. With you I’m not alone.
She stroked his wet fur and he lowered his face. Just barely, his moist nose nuzzled hers: his sign of affection, she’d realized last week. “I wish you never had to be alone.”
I deserve the life I live, Elizabeth. What I don’t deserve is you treating me so…human.
“But you are, aren’t you?”
Before she even realized it was gone, his face jerked away from her hand. She thought for an instant that maybe her question had upset him, but he sniffed the air and took a protective stance over her. She didn’t feel that unsettling doom in her chest—the doom she had felt before when the mysterious evil lurked somewhere close. They had sensed it while together twice during the past few weeks, and the second time it had been so close the sensation left her chest heavy and her airways tight; but he’d hoisted her onto his back and run far away. With her body hugged to his spine, her fingers grasping his fur tightly and her face buried in his neck, he ran until neither of them felt it anymore and it was safe to return her home. The next two nights, he wouldn’t take her far from her porch, staying in the forest around both their homes, but eventually, after enough persuasion on her part, they’d gotten back into the routine of nighttime walks. He hadn’t explained what the evil was, though she had her own guesses; but thankfully it hadn’t returned since last week.
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