Beauty and the Wolf

by Bridget Essex

  My thoughts whirl. I'm lost in thought, in panic mode, frantically trying to think of a solution.

  When I step into the dining hall, it takes me a moment to realize that the room is empty.

  Huh.

  That's weird.

  Maybe Lucile and Jordan are launching a silent protest against my cooking...

  I place the potholders on the table, with the pizzas on top of those. Surely hunger will lead people to come in here eventually. I'd hate to see these pizzas go to waste. Didn't Rex say he was “starving”?

  My mind is a million miles away. I'm not watching where I'm going...

  And that's when I realize that there is someone in the room with me.

  Grim.

  She's sitting in a large, antique-looking red chair turned toward the fireplace. It's the kind of chair you'd see at the beginning of Masterpiece Theater. Silent, she's gazing in my direction, lounging back, an ankle comfortably resting on her knee.

  Our eyes—like magnets—lock.

  She looks relaxed, but an undercurrent of tension seems to zing just beneath the surface of her skin.

  And I'm a little uneasy, but not because of her tense aura.

  We just had a pretty profound connection in the alleyway, and I'm not sure how to act with her now. This...thing happens to me whenever I'm in Grim's presence. I can feel it unfurling deep inside of me; it's unnerving as all get out. Everything else in the world, all of my surroundings, go kind of blurry. But Grim? She comes into hyper-focus. It happened minutes ago outside, and it's happening again now.

  (Okay, there's another thing that happens to me in Grim's presence, involving a hammering heart, an inability to speak coherently, and stirrings in my nether regions...but I've sort of come to terms with that. They're just the signs of physical attraction.)

  It's Grim's ability to draw me in, like a kite on a string, that disquiets me.

  As if she's the sun and I'm this measly little planet caught in her gravity, bound by it.

  Grim watches me from her seat, her brow furrowed. And then she asks something that cuts right through me: “What's wrong?”

  After so many years spent working at a diner, I know—better than most—how to hide a bad day behind a sunny smile. I had expected to find Grim's family in here, so I'd schooled my features to appear carefree, pleasant. Force of habit. People want their waiters and waitresses to be warm and cheerful, so I always portrayed myself that way at the diner, regardless of my mood. And I'm continuing the practice here, because, honestly, it's all I know.

  So I'm surprised that Grim recognized that there was something bothering me.

  Then again...I'm human. Maybe I slipped up, let an emotion show on my face. Maybe I sighed. Maybe I frowned, and I just don't remember it. Betty's current problem is huge, overwhelming; there's a possibility that my worry revealed itself externally.

  But as I stare at Grim, perplexed, I realize that those rationalizations don't feel right.

  Grim knew there was something wrong...

  She just...knew.

  I force a smile. “I'll be back in a jiff. I just have to go get the other pizzas from the kitchen,” I hear myself explaining as I back away from her, but she tilts her head, narrowing her fire-bright eyes.

  “Bella,” she says, “you can talk to me.”

  I pause, gazing at Grim in the half-light of the dining hall. Was it just my imagination or...? Hmm.

  I thought that, when she spoke my name just now, her eyes had... Well, they kind of glowed.

  Not glowed so much as flashed, like a strobe light.

  A shiver moves through my body uncontrollably, the hair on the back of my neck standing up.

  Grim straightens in the chair, her features smooth, her frown softened. “Please...tell me what's bothering you.” She inclines her head toward me genteelly, her voice businesslike. “Did our conversation upset you? I'm sorry again for shouting—”

  “No.” I shake my head. “No, it has nothing to do with that.”

  “But I am sorry.”

  “Thank you.” I find myself speaking before I have the chance to weigh the pros and cons: “I'm just upset about... It's about Betty. The woman at the diner.” My bottled-up emotions are starting to erupt, so I talk quickly. “She's in trouble. Andrew kicked her family out of their apartment, and she texted me that...she's staying in an abandoned barn in the woods outside Paris tonight. She's homeless.”

  Even as I give voice to the word, my throat chokes up, and I feel a single tear trace its way down my cheek.

  The terrible thing about tears is that they rarely travel alone. Soon, tear after tear spills off of my chin. I dash them away with an angry swipe of my hand.

  Suddenly, Grim is standing in front of me. She's about an arm's-length away, and she looks concerned, an expression flitting across her face and actually settling there for once. Again, as it did in the alley, her guardedness fades, and though she's never struck me as the touchy-feely type, she holds up her hands in an offer of an embrace.

  Sobbing, I step forward, squeezing my eyes shut, and I hug Grim tightly.

  Her arms are stiff at first, but when I begin weeping on her shoulder in earnest, she wraps her arms tentatively, gently around my waist. Then she pats my shoulder in a slow rhythm as I press my nose against her and cry.

  “I'm sorry,” I tell her over and over again. This is not a pretty, delicate sort of crying. Nope. This is the ugly, snot-coming-out-of-my-nose kind of bawling that I have experienced very, very rarely in my life. To the best of my knowledge, I've only ever done this in front of my mother and Pam.

  My mother and Pam, of course, knew exactly how to deal with me when I fell into one of these rare, all-consuming moods. They'd hug me fiercely, press their chin to the top of my head, promise me that, even if it wasn't going to be okay, the pain would, eventually, pass. You want to be told, when your heart is breaking, that it will heal again someday. You want to be told that, even though things are bad right now, someday, in the far distant future, the sun will rise again, and you'll realize that the world still has beauty in it.

  But, right now, I'm being far too vulnerable in front of someone I hardly know, someone who I am, in fact, deeply attracted to, and that realization is gutting.

  “Bella.” The word is pitched to be as soothing as possible. I'm surprised that such a gentle voice could come out of someone that my friend nicknamed the Beast, but people will always surprise you, especially with kindness. That's one of the things that makes this world bearable.

  “Bella,” she repeats, and then she's squeezing my shoulders lightly. “It'll be all right.” The halfhearted circles she was making on my back with the palm of her hand become more sure, and I sink my face against her shoulder, taking in a deep, quavering breath.

  “I didn't mean to cry,” I croak, and I clear my throat. “I'm really sorry, Grim.”

  I take a step away from her, holding the back of my hand over my runny nose, and I'm so damn embarrassed, but Grim simply takes up a box of tissues from the table beside her chair and holds the box out to me with a soft smile.

  “It'll be all right,” she says again. The words are spoken with total conviction, and as I take tissue after tissue out of the box, pressing them quickly to my nose, I risk a glance into her eyes once more. It's hard to see clearly through the tears, but I'm struck by the compassion evident on her face.

  I blow my nose, mop away my tears, and sigh, curling my shoulders forward as I stare down at the used tissues in my hands, completely mortified. “I don't usually...” I stop; I don't know what to say. “God, I'm such a mess.” Before I can think about what I'm doing, I take a quick step forward and dab a clean tissue on the collar of Grim's t-shirt, where I cried an enormous, salty puddle.

  She's staring at me with hooded eyes, and her whole body is taut as a wire, from the rise in her shoulders to her arms, close against her sides.

  The heat of her is radiating through the cloth of her shirt.

  Time seems to ha
ve slowed down...

  I glance at my hand, still pressing the tissue to her shoulder, and then I flick my gaze up to her eyes; I'm surprised that her brow is deeply furrowed, as if she's in pain. Her expression suggests discomfort...and unhappiness.

  I step away, apologize. The horror of weeping on my boss's shoulder, of soaking her shirt with my tears...it's too much. I turn around and make a beeline for the door.

  But—of course—Rex and Jordan and Lucile are coming into the dining hall as I try to leave it.

  “Pretty, what—” Rex begins.

  “I have to go get the other pizzas!” I cut him off, and then I'm half-walking, half-running toward the basement stairs.

  Chapter 11: The Woods at Night

  I never deliver the other pizzas. I leave them sitting on the counter in the kitchen and hope that, if the two pizzas I took up aren't enough, they'll come down to fetch the other ones themselves.

  I have to go help Betty.

  Of course, I have no idea how I'm going to help her. Then I remember that I have a twenty-dollar bill, a Christmas tip from one of the diner's best customers, hidden in the secret compartment in my wallet—“secret” because the lining of the cheap wallet peeled away. It's not much, but it's something that I can offer her.

  I don't have a car, but Paris isn't that big, and Mill Drive isn't too far away—maybe four or five miles out. Normally, I don't mind walking, but it's pitch black outside right now...

  Well, it wouldn't be the first time I've hitchhiked, and it probably won't be the last.

  I know, I know... Hitchhiking when you're a single lady isn't the safest way to spend an evening, but this is Paris, Vermont. I'm not saying it's the safest town in America, but it's pretty damn close. Everyone knows everyone else, and we don't have much cause for out-of-towners to cruise through.

  I missed the last bus, so it takes me about half an hour to reach Main Street on foot; I don't see a single car until I get there. Then I lift my thumb against the flow of traffic—and by “traffic,” I mean one car every few minutes. Finally, Old Jeb pulls over to the side of the road in his truck.

  Granted, truck is a kind word for that bucket of bolts sitting on four bald tires. But somehow, he keeps the ancient thing running, year after year.

  Old Jeb isn't a talker. At the diner, he communicates by stabbing a dirty finger at a menu, or by grunting and nodding toward the dessert case. So when he draws his truck beside me, I'm surprised that he actually speaks.

  “Bella,” he wheezes. “Where ya headed?”

  “Mill Drive, Jeb. Are you going that way?”

  He wrinkles his nose while staring through the windshield. Eventually, he nods, almost as if to himself. “Yeah. It's not far. Hop in.”

  I step into the cab of the truck, slamming the passenger-side door.

  The truck sputters, pumping out black fumes behind us. It doesn't seem capable of accelerating past twenty miles an hour. Great. This is going to be a long ride...

  Old Jeb clears his throat about a mile down the road. The clearing of his throat is, I find out, a process. His lungs don't sound healthy at all. Maybe that's why he rarely talks... When he's finally done coughing and wheezing, he mutters, “That Andrew's been an asshole, hasn't he?”

  If Old Jeb had said, “I've given all my guns to charity,” I don't think he could have surprised me more. I stare at him, my eyebrows raised sky high.

  Jeb draws in a deep breath and spits something out of his open window. “Ain't right. What he did to Betty and her kids. It just ain't right.”

  News—and gossip—spreads like a wildfire through a drought-ridden forest in this tiny town. Of course people would already know that Betty and her family are homeless. I lean hard against the passenger-side door, stare up at the sky and the millions of stars overhead, hope rising in me for the first time this evening.

  It's a beautiful night for stargazing.

  And it's sure as hell a beautiful night for hope.

  I wrack my brains trying to come up with the most nonchalant way to ask this question, but Jeb's not a nonchalant kind of guy. So I aim for the straightforward approach.

  “Is anyone in town going to do anything about it? About Betty's...predicament, I mean?” I glance away from the stars, unable to push down my rising spirits. If Old Jeb thinks that Andrew's out of line, that means something. He's a patriarch in Paris. His opinion holds sway.

  But my spirits come crashing when Jeb shakes his head emphatically. “Naw.” He sniffs, lifts his chin. “Naw, you know we can't do nothin', Bella.”

  My face falls with crushing disappointment.

  Old Jeb is as constant as a mountain. He makes up his mind about something, and it stays made up his entire life. He's honorable. He's the kind of guy that, if he owed you a favor, he'd remember it forever, until he finally paid you back.

  I stare at him now, and I realize that I guess I don't know him as well as I thought I did.

  “Is it because of Andrew? Is that why no one will help?” I can hear the tension in my voice, anger boiling under the surface, and I'm fairly certain that Jeb can hear it, too. But if he does, he doesn't make mention of it.

  He nods once, twice, gazing out at the road ahead. “You know how Andrew gets.” He sniffs again. “And it's a poor thing, what he's done to Betty. But—Andrew, he owns the town now. He's done good by our town.”

  And there's the crux of the matter, truthful and terrible, all at once.

  Andrew owns Paris. So if townsfolk dislike something he's done, they're going to keep their mouths shut about it.

  Fury races through me.

  I remember Old Jeb and my father, hanging out together on the back porch behind the diner. I remember Jeb telling my mother she looked pretty with genuine affection in his eyes, remember him giving me a doll when I was really little, an indulgent expression on his face—which was already ancient-looking to me, way back then.

  Old Jeb has been in my life every day since I was born.

  He's always been a really good guy.

  But really good men sometimes make poor decisions. They can—sometimes—be casually cruel, do something so wrong that nothing will ever make it right again.

  Betty and her children are homeless because of Andrew's temper tantrums. And if you had asked me a week ago whether Old Jeb would be angry enough to do something about it, I would have said yes—of course.

  So it feels, in this moment, as if the whole planet has been turned upside-down. I'm reeling, and there's no safe place for me to stand. The sensation of losing my balance, of falling, is all too real. I grapple with Old Jeb's words.

  But I don't grapple for long.

  “Jeb, you know that's wrong.” My voice shakes, but I have to speak the truth. He needs to hear the truth. He—and anyone who thinks like him—is one hundred percent wrong.

  I understand that not every choice is simple.

  But this one is. There are no shades of gray.

  Betty was fired unfairly, and as a result of that, she's lost her home.

  Jeb just admitted that Andrew's an asshole, and yet he's still siding with him.

  “Let me off here, please.” My voice is rough as I wave my hand toward the side of the road. Old Jeb doesn't make an argument, doesn't say a thing. He veers off the road, grinding down on the brake until the truck comes to a slow halt. I don't thank him for the lift, because I'm not sure that I could force the words out of my mouth without sounding angry. I just hop out of the truck, shut the door firmly, and set off walking down the road, the headlights making my shadow dance in front of me.

  Jeb doesn't follow. The light from his truck turns away sharply as he makes a u-turn on the wide country road. The truck rumbles away, back toward town.

  And I'm left alone.

  Jeb had already driven beyond town limits, and this far outside of Paris—about half a mile away—there aren't that many houses. And there are no streetlights. So what I have is forest on either side of me, a bright spangling of stars overhead, and
absolute darkness all around.

  But as lonely as I feel, I know I'm not truly by myself out here. There are a hundred sounds emanating from the woods, comforting sounds. An owl hoots a mournful song, and I can hear the yipping of a fox as it sets out on its nightly hunt. Two mourning doves flit away from the telephone wires as I walk beneath them, their feathers rustling in the stillness, and a million crickets sing warmly. It's a nice enough night for early spring; I didn't even bring my jacket with me.

  Besides, I have my anger to keep me warm.

  I guess most people find the woods at night to be a little unnerving. And I'm not saying that the forest can't be creepy, especially when it's so dark out. Tonight's the new moon, or close to it: there's a slim crescent dancing above the horizon, ready to sink, hardly enough to light up the sky. But the darkness of the woods has never bothered me. I took thousands of night walks on roads just like this one when I was growing up. If I wanted to go somewhere, my mother and father were often too busy to take me, so my own two feet got me where I needed to be.

  The woods have never scared me. It's my town that scares me. Or, at least, what my town's become under Andrew's influence.

  I think these dark thoughts as I stomp down the dark road.

  It's been years since I came this way, and some of the familiar landmarks are gone. The big oak tree near the crossing of Mill and Edwards fell down, so its shadow isn't etched against the sky where I expect it to be. Instead, there's a stump on the side of the road, wide and white, even in the dark. It seems to glow.

  I've been walking for a long while now; the abandoned barn should be just ahead... I pause by the stump, getting my bearings. I can see the sharp peak of the barn's roof through the trees. After drawing in a few deep breaths, I set off in the barn's direction.

  You have to leave the road to get to the barn; it's situated back in the woods. And that's damned hard to navigate when it's pitch black outside. I manage by keeping my hands in front of my face. That saves me from getting whacked in the head by tree branches. Still, bushes tug at my clothes, roots try to trip me, and I almost forget about the downed fencing that borders the property. We slid under the fencing when we were kids, but time caused the fence posts to fall, barbed wire and all. Some of the fencing is still ankle-height, so when my fingertips brush a fence post, I go on high alert. I could get a pretty nasty scratch if I don't pay attention. As it is, a bit of the barbed wire nicks my right thumb, and I rub it against my sleeve distractedly as I step over the grounded fence.