by Natasha Boyd
He cleared his throat. “I know that having the medication is… comforting. That sometimes just having it nearby affords you some kind of lifeline, if you will, a means of rescue, should you need it. And that alone can be calming. Right?”
I nodded. “I guess.”
“So I was wondering, hoping actually, that you’d let me be that for you.”
I LOOKED AT Tom in shock. He wanted to be my… what?
His shoulders were tense, his shirtsleeves rolled up to reveal his strong, tanned forearms. “I want you to be able to pick up the phone whenever you want, whether you’re at work or I’m at work helping Pete, or… if I’m in Savannah and know that I will always be there. You don’t even have to call, you can just text me, send me a code or something and I will always come. As soon as I can.”
I wasn’t sure what to make of what he was saying. My head slowly shook from side to side.
“No, listen, Li—Olivia—”
“Liv,” I whispered.
He gave a single slow nod. “Liv.”
I shook my head again, not really able to articulate a response yet. Part of me felt completely humbled that he would put this albatross around his own neck. I was also insanely mad at him that he would do this to me, make me feel so indebted and guilty, and intensely terrified of giving up my control to him. Because that’s what it would be. When I had medication, it helped me feel in control of handling my attacks. He was asking me to give that up and trust him to be the one to talk me down. What was even more unsettling was that he seemed to know how much he helped me, or he never would have seen this as a viable option. It was almost too much to process.
“Liv,” he said gently. “I can see all the reasons why you’ll tell me no whirring through your head, but here’s a good reason why you should let me do this. I’m not saying I’m magic and you don’t need your medication; I’m saying until we can figure out what to do about it, please help me not worry. When I’m not home, I think about whether you are having a panic attack, and how scared you must be on your own out here, or that you might fall and hurt yourself, or leave the stove on and burn the place down while you sleep because you were too panicked to think of turning it off.”
“Careful, you’ll be the one sounding like an anxiety case soon.” I gave a small smile to cover just how precisely he’d hit on my own fears.
“I know. Trust me, it crossed my mind.”
If only he knew how much I depended on him already, he would know asking me to do this, to depend on him like this would make my enslavement complete. But for some reason I didn’t care. He already made up the largest part of my universe; why not make him the center?
The magnitude of the thought went off like a sonic boom in my chest.
“There’s more,” he added, an eyebrow raised, oblivious to the fact I’d realized that he was my sun.
“God, what?” I croaked.
“There’s a bonus in it for you, if you agree.”
“You mean in addition to getting to hear your sexy voice down the line whenever I feel like it?” I meant to sound joking, but I’d accidentally tripped over my own elephant. My cheeks instantly heated and I looked away, not wanting him to see my weirded-out reaction to what I’d said. “What? What is it?” I asked.
“I know you miss having music. I have a ton on my laptop, so I’ll do better about playing it, but you can just ask if I forget. But anyway, I loaded some of it onto the phone too.”
Uh, okay. Cool, but we probably had vastly different tastes in music. “How do you know what music I like?”
“Because you hum and sing… a lot.”
“I do?”
“Yeah, you do.” He smiled, revealing his beautiful straight white teeth.
“But only happy people hum, don’t they?” I asked sarcastically and couldn’t help my small grin.
He laughed. “Except you. You hum when you’re tired, when you’re in the shower, when you spend hours going through all the many boxes stored in the attic looking for whatever it is you’re looking for, when you’re making a sandwich. Even when you’re reading those happy little fairy tales. You actually may hum in your sleep. You hum all the freaking time.”
“God, really? I had no idea. I’m sorry.” I was mortified.
“Don’t be. I figured it was a calming thing. You’ve actually got a great voice. I like it.”
I flushed again, remembering my comment about his sexy voice. Gah.
“Anyway, I recognized some of what you sing, so I used that as a starting point.” He slid the phone across to me.
I took it gingerly, swiping the screen. “By the way,” I said, looking down at the phone, “those fairy tales are definitely not happy.”
“I thought all fairy tales had happy endings.”
“Not these.” I scrolled down through the music and with every entry felt my incredulity grow. Man, this guy paid attention. A lot of my favorite bands were there and a few singer songwriters, some of whom I’d never heard of but based on Tom’s perception of what I liked, was eager to try. Obviously, I hadn’t hummed any of my hard metal choices. Or I had and he hadn’t recognized them.
I’d been a weird, freaky bitch to him from the moment I’d arrived and he’d just kept on paying attention and figuring me out. It was humbling. I opened my mouth to thank him but words and feelings scrambled over each other and clogged my throat. Before I knew it, a tear escaped, which I swiped at frantically. “Thank you,” I finally managed.
“So you’ll do this for me?” he asked, staring at my cheek where I’d swiped at my tear.
I was under no illusions that he was doing this for me and not himself, but he was right, I needed to believe I was doing this partially for his sake rather than mine.
“Thank you for the music,” I said, hedging. “It was a nice sweetener. And I’ll use the phone. For you,” I emphasized. “At some point though, I’d like you to tell me about Abby.”
He seemed to consider my words. “Only if you tell me what your bad dreams are about.”
“Checkmate. I’m not ready.”
“That’s not a no.”
“Yours wasn’t either.”
He tilted his head in acknowledgement.
“Wannna play chess?” I asked, and he burst out laughing, his head dropping back and exposing his tanned throat where his beard stopped.
I smiled too, unable to stop myself. “Chess it is then.” And I got up to dust off the game board that obviously hadn’t been played since the last summer I’d been here with Abby. “And let’s get some tunes on, yeah?”
“Sure. But winner gets a question.”
I tensed. “Not one of the ones we’ve mentioned tonight.”
“Fair enough.”
Setting the board between us, I decided to clear the air a bit more. “I’m sorry I’ve been a burden—”
“You’re not.”
“A pain in the ass, then. I get bitchy. I’m sorry. I just… sometimes I feel…” I fingered a chess piece, trying to find a way to explain something even I didn’t understand.
“You feel?” Tom prodded when the silence continued.
“Like you see through me. Into me or something. Exposed. I feel vulnerable and exposed. I guess I respond by being… difficult, doing things that make it difficult to like me. That way it doesn’t hurt me as much when you don’t, because I know I made it happen.”
My cheeks throbbed. I couldn’t believe I was being so honest, but it was an apology that needed to happen. I snuck a quick look up to see Tom still watching me thoughtfully.
“What would you say…” He shifted, his brow furrowing as if wrangling the right words into submission. He looked away, around the comfortable cottage with its simple rustic décor, around our safe place, my safe place. “What would you say if I said I felt the same way?” His dark eyes flicked back to mine. “You make me feel the same. Threatened, kind of, even though I’m not sure quite what I mean by that.”
I swallowed against the strange butterfly
sensation beating tiny wings up my throat from my chest. The clock ticked through a full revolution as I tried to formulate a response. If he didn’t know what he meant, then how the hell was I supposed to? “I’d say… I don’t believe I’m a threat to you.”
I wasn’t sure if I expected him to say the same, that he didn’t believe he was a threat to me either. But he didn’t, and the silence that followed spoke louder than anything.
IT WAS A tough game of chess. Each one of us advanced and retreated. But he’d opened with the Sicilian defense, and so I got to anticipate most of his moves. We both suffered some severe casualties, and he threw me for some loops. But mostly I could see him sizing me up and looking at me with renewed respect.
We paused for soup and rolls.
When I finally slid my queen to G7 and whispered “Check” it was to see those golden eyes look up at me in stunned disbelief.
“Holy shit,” he said in awe. “How’d you do that?”
I shrugged. “It’s called the Stonewall Attack. You can look it up. Although I almost couldn’t make it work,” I added, throwing him a bone.
“But, I mean, how did you learn?”
“There’s an app for that.” I grinned, totally loving his surprise. At his skeptical look, I rolled my eyes. “Seriously, I was advanced placement. I’d basically finished high school and didn’t feel like doing anything additional, so I killed time doing other approved activities.”
“I thought you dropped out. Isn’t it mid year?”
“I did drop out, but I’m done with all of my requirements to graduate. Except the state test.”
“Which you’ll go back to take.”
“Wasn’t planning on it.”
“But you want to graduate, right?”
“What does it matter to you? In the meantime, it’s time for my question.”
He sighed and sat back, looking at me warily, linking his fingers behind his head.
I needed to get as much as I could into my one question as possible. I already knew I couldn’t ask him about Abby. Yet. Anyway, I’d lied earlier, I wasn’t ready to hear it. In fact, the more I got to know Tom, the less I wanted to know about his past with my sister.
I thought of the thing I wondered most on a daily basis. “What do you do when you go to Savannah?”
TOM SAT ACROSS the kitchen table observing me.
“What?” I asked as he rocked back on the hind legs of the chair. “It’s a simple question. Where do you go when you’re in Savannah?”
“It’s not that, I just didn’t expect that to be your first question. And also, there are many answers to it, and surely I only owe you one. But which one? I ask myself.”
“You owe me them all,” I countered. I wasn’t sure what real flirting was, where I actually cared about the outcome, but felt sure it had to be close to this.
“How so?”
“Well, a lie of omission is still a lie, is it not?”
“Oh, we have to be truthful?”
My eyes widened.
“Kidding.” He raised his palms. “I’m kidding.”
I scowled, and he laughed.
“What’s the point in lying?” I asked. It only complicated things. People didn’t believe the truth anyway.
“General lying or right now?”
Hmmm. “Good question. Generally.”
“Generally. Let’s see. There is no point because it’s exhausting. I don’t do it.”
“Ever?”
“I have. I try not to. You’d probably have to make up twenty more lies to keep it going.”
“Ayn Rand says lying is an act of making yourself a slave to whom you lie.” I nervously played with one of his captured white chess pieces. A pawn. “You become imprisoned in your own falsehood that they control. I can’t remember the quote, but it’s something like that.”
He looked away a moment. “Wow, you beat me at chess and now you’re quoting Ayn Rand. Who are you, and where have you been since you arrived?”
He didn’t mean anything by it, but I still took a small measure of offense. In fact, I started to feel acutely embarrassed. “Well, I’m paraphrasing, not quoting.” I dropped the chess piece and drew my hand away from the table and his flashed out and grabbed it. His hand was warm and rough. I stared at it. Tanned where mine was pale. Large where mine seemed tiny. A surge of something warm flashed through me, and I shifted in my seat.
“Don’t go,” he said.
I looked up, my eyebrows pinching together. “I’m not.”
“I mean don’t go away mentally, like you do.” He cleared his throat and released my hand, dropping my insides off a ledge. “You go off somewhere sometimes. I didn’t mean you acted dumb before.”
I pulled my hand off the table to my lap. “I didn’t think that. I just… this is new, weird, for me.”
“What is?”
“Bantering, I guess. Using my skills, things I know, to interact with someone. I… I suddenly felt relaxed and it didn’t even occur to me…” I trailed off, not really knowing what I was trying to say.
“Didn’t occur to you what?”
Occur to me I was trying to impress you, and that I really, really cared if it worked.
“Meh.” I shrugged, then raised my eyes in surprise. “That you were trying to distract me from answering the question. I almost fell for it, too. Now come on, what do you do in Savannah?”
He steepled his fingers. “Well, I shop.”
“Mmmmm. Aaaand?”
“For shampoo and other stuff.”
“For food.”
“For tampons.” He shuddered good-naturedly.
I grinned at his reaction. I was so thankful my period had waited until after I was strong enough to walk to the bathroom on my own. Then I remembered the condom incident and moved on. “And apart from shopping?”
“Help Pete get contracts with the local restaurants and distributors for his fish.”
“Oh. Cool.”
A silence ensued. His steepled fingers began to twitch and fidget and his eyes still watched me.
I waited.
“And I go somewhere I can hop onto Wi-Fi and read the news, send emails, et cetera.”
“Somewhere, liiike…” I slowly moved my head from one side to the other.
“Depends. Sometimes the library, a coffee shop, the university.”
“University?”
“Yes. This really does seem like more than one question.”
“You were the one who had to complicate it by doing all these things there. Why the University?”
He cleared his throat. “I’m studying there, and that really did count as another question.”
“You’re studying there?” Why did that not even occur to me? “How old are you? What are you studying?”
“That is definitely additional and unsanctioned questioning.”
I frowned. “They’re sub-questions.”
“Whatever. I recently started doing a BS in Criminal Justice, studying in a part-time program. Sometimes I have night school, some courses are available during the workweek, but most of the course load is online. And that is all I am answering for you.” He got up and moved our soup dishes to the sink.
I’d just learned more about Tom in the last ten minutes than I had in the last three weeks. Criminal Justice. Interesting.
“What’s your last name?” I asked.
Tom paused in his rinsing. “That is definitely for another game,” he tossed over his shoulder. “But now that I’ve seen you play chess we have to play something else.”
I got up, perused the bottom shelf that held the board games. There were a ton of puzzles, all of which Abby and I had completed at one time or another.
Why do people keep puzzles? The joy is finally realizing a piece that’s been sitting in front of your nose, that you keep passing over because the shape seems a bit off, or the smidge of red isn’t quite the same shade as the robin’s wing, is the one you’ve been looking for the last three hours. Abby would
call a side switch, and lo and behold it would be the first piece she’d snap cleanly into place. Granted, I did the same to her. But once we knew all the puzzle’s secrets, we didn’t ever do the same one again.
“Scrabble?” I asked.
“What was your favorite subject in school?”
“Uh, I think you have to play and win first.”
“Well, you read Ayn Rand, and if your favorite subject was English Lit, then I could have a problem.”
“Chicken.”
“Fine. Bring it.”
I spent most of the game in the lead until he played JAUNTY for sixty-one points on a triple word score. Which included seven extra points because he put the Y right under the B from my stunning play… BAT.
“Jaunty?” I said, my voice laced with mock disgust.
He looked ridiculously pleased and smug. “Yep. Jaunty.”
“That’s an abomination of a word.”
“It very well may be, but it’s a word.”
I huffed and proceeded to chase his score for the rest of the game until we’d boxed ourselves into one corner of the board. “That’s annoying,” I said as he managed to slide DRIP down the side with the D making SHAPED. Who the hell had whole words left at this stage of a scrabble game? Tom, that’s who.
“Now, now, don’t be a sore loser.” He cracked his knuckles and looked around. “What should I ask, what should I ask?” he mused to himself.
“We’re not done yet.”
“You have the Q, I presume. I really don’t think you have a chance. We should call it.”
I doubled my focus.
Then smiled a massive smile I really couldn’t hold back. I placed my second to last tile, my Q that Tom said I couldn’t play, right next to the I on DRIP. It wouldn’t win me the game, but damn I was pleased with myself. I vibrated with giggles.
“That’s not a word,” Tom frowned. Then he looked up and saw me and seemed momentarily frozen.
“Yeah, it is.” I snorted, my eyes watering as I lost it. It felt so good to laugh.
Tom stared, his mouth twitching. Because seriously, how could you stay straight-faced while someone in front of you lost their mind? Eventually, he chuckled along with me, shaking his head.