Kamikaze Heart

by Craze, Chelle C.

  “Balls and lady should never follow one another in a sentence,” I gently informed him, hoping he would still rent the place to me after I opened my big mouth. Beads of sweat formed on my temples and slowly dripped down the side of my face, and I was quick to wipe them off. Hopefully, he wouldn’t notice.

  “That it shouldn’t.” He laughed, shaking his head, and smiled. This time the smile reached his eyes, and I found myself mirroring his emotion. “This way.” He motioned with a shift of his head and waited for me to follow him.

  “Hang on.” I held up one hand and bent into the cab of the car to retrieve Alf. “I hope pets are allowed, because Alf and I are pretty much a package deal.” I shrank down, remembering I’d failed to mention I was bringing a cat with me. I hoped it wouldn’t be too big of an issue, because we were both here and exhausted. All I wanted was a shower. I smelled like I had been cooped up in a car, which I had, but I hoped Eli hadn’t noticed. I was sure Alf had a few things he wanted to do as well.

  “As long as he doesn’t mind living next to a hound dog.”

  “Next to?” The words naturally flowed off my tongue, and I pulled Alf a little closer to my body.

  “That’s me.” He nodded to the cottage twenty feet in the distance. “This will be you, if you take it.” He chewed on the corner of his mouth, uncertain of my answer. My attention immediately zeroed onto what his teeth did to his lower lip, and I couldn’t help but wonder how they tasted. His lips weren’t dry and chapped as I figured everything would be in this unbearable heat. They were moist and welcoming.

  “Bartholomew,” he yelled into the distance and shook his head, licking his lips. “C’mon, don’t make me. Not right now,” he begged in a pleading voice, his eyes still fixated to where his house was. “Fucking dog.” He shoved two fingers into his mouth and pushed out a loud whistle.

  Alf cringed in my arms, and now his attention was on Eli, too.

  “I’m sorry for this.” He almost laughed, but stopped himself. “Bart is not a dog, but a friend. He’s man’s best friend through and through until the end,” he yelled in a gruff, apologetic voice, and his eyes found mine.

  Without a second of hesitation, I cleared my throat, afraid if I didn’t say this now, I wouldn’t. “I’ll take it,” I forced my mouth to spit out to interrupt his strange creed and my head that spun with thoughts of pressing his body against mine. A horse of a dog ran as fast as his long legs would carry him across the grassy field, howling with excitement. He momentarily stopped in front of Eli, pressing his huge paws onto Eli’s tanned chest, and licked the side of his face. Eli pushed him down, untangling his paws from the numerous beaded necklaces he wore around his neck, and patted the dog’s head.

  “Damn dog. I’m sorry. He’s a big—” His words stopped as quickly as they came. “You haven’t even seen the inside.” He raised an eyebrow, instructing Bart to sit with a firm command of his gruff voice.

  Bart lunged at Alf, and in the same moment, Alf hissed in his direction, the black hair on his back standing at attention.

  “I don’t need to,” I replied quickly, and I didn’t need to. At this point, it didn’t matter what lay within the walls of the place. It was already more than I thought I was renting, and I needed any excuse to put some distance between Eli and me. When we had spoken on the phone, I was under the impression my future home would be an apartment. This was a house. A house I could fix and personalize. “Alf, on the other hand, may need some convincing.” I snatched Alf as he tried to crawl around my neck and onto my head to get out of Bart’s reach, thanking the universe for a much-needed intervention from myself. It was apparent I couldn’t be trusted around Eli, but I had no idea why I reacted to him in this way. I’d never been one to pine over a man. Never. What made him so special? Other than his alluring Southern drawl and his perfect body…there wasn’t much to him. Sure, he was probably treating me with more kindness than any person had in quite some time and clearly loved his dog, but none of that should be enough to make the impulsive part of my brain work in overdrive. But, it was. This was all new to me and not something I necessarily appreciated or wanted. He was only being nice and surely didn’t want my uncontrollable one-sided attraction, so I forced my gaze down onto Alf, rubbing my fingertips between his ears to fully invest myself in something other than Eli.

  Eli’s sparkling hazel eyes searched my face for a change of heart, but it wasn’t happening. Alf and I were here, and we most definitely weren’t going back to where we came from, so this was now our home. Blackwell, Louisiana. Even if Alf wasn’t happy with sharing a yard with Bart, it thrilled me to share one with Eli. No matter how wrong it was, the thought of living next door to someone as perplexing as Eli excited me. He could distract me from what I wanted to forget, or he could be the thing I had to forget. None of it mattered really. Even if Eli held the potential to destroy me, that’s all it was. Potential. He didn’t hold the power to do something that had already been done. Certain people in this life were bound for happiness, and then there were others. The ones destined to live in the shadows of the blissfully happy. I was one of the people who fell into that group. I’d basically been filed into that classification my entire life, so I was used to just barely surviving on the leftovers of others. I was content with the scantest scrap of happiness others didn’t want, because it was what had carried me for countless years. When the alternate option was emptiness, any amount of anything held importance.

  5

  Eli

  This woman was unlike anyone I had ever met. I didn’t mention the tears staining her beautiful face as I closed the space between us. I held onto my reservations that she might be crazy. There was no other logical explanation for what she was. Other than breathtaking. I recoiled with that thought, answering her and forcing my lips to smile as I introduced myself. I did not have a right to notice her, no matter how much her actions took my breath. Whatever the reason for her current heartbreak was, she didn’t run from it. She celebrated it. I’d never seen someone revel in such sadness as they found peace in that very action. Every glance exchanged between us slammed my blood into my throbbing veins double time, and no matter what I did, I craved the feeling. When I tried to look away from her, I could feel the burn of her eyes on me, asking the questions her mouth didn’t, which wasn’t many. The fact she spoke her mind was a huge turn-on. Jocelyn always kept things that stressed her out so bottled up. Especially the problems between us. I shouldn’t be comparing the two women, but it was impossible not to, when they were so undeniably different. On one end of the opposition lay Jocelyn, so prim and proper, afraid to acknowledge the slightest of problems between us. Perhaps if she had, we wouldn’t be in the predicament we were now. Trinity’s brutal honesty took me by surprise and broke through every standard Jocelyn had beaten into my head of how a woman should be in a matter of less than an hour. Now, I had no idea what to do with the information. Nothing. I shouldn’t do a thing. It shouldn’t matter.

  Three months from Tuesday I was to be married, so the fact my eyes drank in Trinity’s every movement and my heart beat erratically within my chest at the mere sight of her should not hold importance. It felt like I was betraying the promise I was about to enter. Despite the fact my soon-to-be-wife had cheated on me with my so-called best friend, Abram, I would give all of myself to honor the promise I’d made long ago. That was how things were supposed to go, right? In sickness and in health was the declaration every married person agreed to, and even though Jocelyn and I had not made it to the exchanging vows portion of our life, we’d been together so long it felt like we had. It was the reason her unfaithfulness gutted me so much, I think. I wasn’t an idiot. We had our problems long before Abram became one, but every couple had them. Right now, I couldn’t even be in the same room with her, so professing my love to her in front of God and everyone else was going to be more than problematic. I figured I would move past it. We had so much history that I didn’t want to throw it all away.

  We dated all thr
ough our high school and college years, so it only made sense to ask her for her hand in marriage. It was what she wanted, and at the time I did, too. But, that was before I’d been worn by the military and honorably discharged. Now, I honestly had no clue what it was that I needed other than a purpose. If it wasn’t an absolution before I met Trinity, it was now. Even though I didn’t know her, I envied her freedom. While dancing in the ashes of her demons, she welcomed the rare angelic whispers that crept through the limited amount the earth offered her. I had never so much as invited my uncertainties into speech. Instead, I locked them away in the darkest, untouchable portions of my brain. Not wanting to face them until I had to. The only abundantly clear answer I could form was I did not think I was what Jocelyn needed anymore. She had made that obvious when she ran into Abram’s arms, and eventually they landed into his bed. The details of how it all happened mixed in a blur. I only knew what they told me, but I held onto my suspicions that it wasn’t the entire truth. Their stories matched up for the most part, but there were intricate details of each story that lacked to align. Jocelyn swore it was only one time, and Abram agreed, but the timeline seemed off a little. At this point, Bart was the only one I could trust, myself included. It only took a short time around this woman to have me second-guessing everything. At this point, I was no better than Jocelyn or Abram. I didn’t want to think of the events that led them to one another, but mostly because I could never relate to them. It was mind-boggling to me how someone could proclaim their love for one person and then seek comfort within someone else. Love wasn’t supposed to be that unpersuasive. Quite the opposite, actually. Love was built up to be one of the most influential emotions a human had the ability to feel…or not. But maybe what Jocelyn and I shared wasn’t love anymore. It used to be, but now, as I clung to every uncommon smile to appear on Trinity’s lips, I questioned its existence. Maybe I did still have love for Jocelyn somewhere within me, but when she cheated, half of my heart felt like the side of my bed she used to occupy. Empty, with very little hope of being full again.

  Bart dove at Trinity and I hooked my fingers underneath his collar, just in case today was a day he decided to be the hardheaded bastard that he was. “Sit,” I scolded him in a stern voice for trying to jump up on her. He really could not help his actions, though. He loved cats. The only problem with that was, most cats hated dogs, including Trinity’s cat, Alf. The second issue was the factor of love. I really wasn’t sure it held much validation with me anymore. Perhaps it was just a term for those too confused to find a more suitable definition to what they were feeling. Attraction. Lust. Dependency. Or in Bart’s case, companionship.

  Alf hissed and squirmed until Trinity pulled him off her shoulders and eventually stuffed him into her long-sleeved shirt. If I didn’t know she wasn’t from around here, her sleeve length would have given it away. Today’s weather was mild, but still too hot for what she wore to be comfortable. Not that I was complaining, because it clung to her curves in all the right places. She shrugged apologetically, and her eyes fixated on Alf as she shushed him, her hand stroking his head that popped out of the top of her shirt occasionally.

  A snort left my mouth and I tried to fight the laughter that would come. If I hadn’t seen her stick the cat into her shirt, I would have sworn she was touching her breasts. In fact, I had to look twice to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating, in fear fantasy had taken over realism. My first assumption of this woman was spot-on. She was the most peculiar person I had ever met, but her rarity simply amplified my hunger to get to know her.

  She stiffened and wiggled as Alf shifted around in her shirt, and she tried to accommodate his weight with her arm. “Ah. Sh-oot. Alf, quit being a… No, stop. I swear, Alf, if you scratch me, I’m letting you fall, and if this horse eats you, this one is on you!” she bitterly wagered with him in an irritated voice.

  My tongue licked my teeth, and I turned my head, unable to keep the laughter inside. She didn’t cuss, but you could tell she wanted to. Yet, something within her kept her tongue from forming what some could consider foul language. Not me, of course. I usually cussed like a sailor, but it depended on the present company at the time.

  “He won’t eat him,” I said, trying to control my heaving sides. “Might lick him to death, though. He loves cats. You don’t have to worry about old Bart.”

  She eyed me with the similar suspicion that Alf did Bart as her full lips formed an O. “See, you little shit. We’re good,” she assured him and crossed her arms over both of their bodies, preventing him from moving as much. Immediately, my already fleeting concentration zoned onto the shape of her mouth, and my imagination ran wild with the other possibilities that would leave her perfect mouth in a similar shape. “I’m sorry. He’s always a bit of an ass, but…” She wrinkled her nose and squinted an eye, her cheeks flushing with embarrassment. “Ass, butt.” She laughed as she was lost in thought and then shook her head, covering her coy smile with her hand. “I may or may not have stuck a sticky note to him that said fuck you to break it off with my fiancé.”

  Her honesty was refreshing and shocked me every time she spoke it, but not for the reason it should. She was engaged, too. Was being the keyword. I still am and the fact I had to keep reminding myself was a humungous warning sign with flashing lights and alarms blaring.

  “What happened, if you don’t mind me asking? “I tried to sound nonchalant to hide my unwarranted excitement of her newly single status. “Other than pissing off your cat, of course.” I gave her a wry smile, testing the waters to see what if any curse words offended her and shook my head, asking Bart to go home. The fact he didn’t, but walked alongside us instead as I led the way to the home she would be renting came as no surprise. He was an obedient dog, but like me, he was a bit headstrong.

  She chewed on her bottom lip, and her shoulders rose and fell dramatically. “I caught him in bed with my best friend,” she flatly said, her cheeks flushing, and her eyes darted away from mine. She was clearly uncomfortable with the subject.

  “I’m guessing they weren’t braiding each other’s hair?” I stupidly mused, wanting to do anything to reel her back in to me and provide a much-needed distraction for us both. I was dumb. I had no right to make her smile. She was supposed to be nothing more than an added income, but every second spent with her made it harder to think of her in that manner.

  “Ha. I don’t think so.” She paused, cradling Alf in her shirt so she wouldn’t drop him as we took the steps onto her porch. “Although, that might have been the next thing they did,” she acknowledged in a weak voice. “May never know. They both were moving pretty quickly after I started throwing things.” She glanced at me to gauge my reaction, and I smirked in response, needing her to know her reaction was not something that should bring shame to her. She’d done nothing wrong. It was hard to say what I would have said or how I would have reacted if I actually found Jocelyn in bed with Abram. Scratch that, I would be in jail right now for murder, so I wasn’t judging Trinity for throwing a few things.

  I was right. She was a little crazy, but so was I. It was just the side I didn’t usually let surface. Something about her told me she didn’t either. It was in the way she carried herself. Well, when she didn’t have a cat shoved into her shirt between her plump ivory breasts.

  “Any damage?” I questioned her, momentarily closing my eyelids before she caught me staring at her tits, needing to know if she was certifiable or just someone who had acted out of unbridled pain and committed a crime of passion.

  “Probably not too much. Maybe a bruise.” She nervously laughed, following me into the rental. Her eyes eagerly wandered the inside lacking interior and trailed up the wooded staircase.

  “This is it. A couple coats of paint and some furniture and she’ll be a nice house.” I stumbled on my words, nervously gripping the back of my neck, and sighed. There was no way she had brought any furnishings with her in the small hatchback she drove. I was surprised it made the trip here without breaking down
, honestly.

  “You know what?” I contemplated aloud, feeling bad I was responsible for the frown settling onto her face. “You can stay with Bart and me.” I paused. “I’ll take the couch,” I added in an unsure voice when panic ringed her irises.

  Shit. Shit. Shit. My mouth moved quicker than my brain. Jocelyn would have a conniption over this. Of course, she would take a passive-aggressive approach of sharing her distaste with me and do it with finesse. She wouldn’t like this, and it was without question this would be a problem. Trinity would be her problem. Jocelyn glared at any woman who so much as thought about approaching me, so learning I’d just invited someone other than her to sleep in my bed, which she hadn’t done in some time now, would go over like a five-ton truck in a kiss-your-ass curve. I wanted Trinity to say yes, but I also wanted her to say no. I couldn’t stop my lips from moving again. “I promise, it’s no big deal at all. It’s big enough for the four of us,” I admitted, biting my tongue when she hesitated and entertained the idea, needing to do anything to keep my mouth from moving anymore. The more I spoke, the deeper I was digging my hole of guilt, and eventually I would have to climb out of it. I would already need a ladder as it was, so adding anything else to the conversation would be a colossal fuck up on my behalf.

  “You aren’t an ax murderer, are you?” she wondered, letting her doubts release into the air. Had I not been looking at her, I wouldn’t have taken her seriously. Nothing about her gave even the slightest hint of humor in her questioning. Her deep blue-green eyes held my gaze and flickered to my lips briefly, awaiting my answer. She didn’t trust easily; it was something that emanated strongly from her being. Which, why should she? I didn’t know how much time had passed between her catching, whom I assumed to be the love of her life, in bed with another woman and now. It destroyed a person’s trust beyond anything imaginable, and I knew it to be true firsthand, unfortunately. Only I didn’t have the front row view she did. I was up in the nosebleeds with the secondhand information I got. It was the first time in my life I was happy to be in that section.