by Carian Cole
He doesn’t move away after he removes the leaf; instead, he stands there smelling of smoke, pine trees, and leather—just like his jacket, which I’m still engulfed in—and the scent transports me back to a year ago when he pulled me out of the hole and I fell against him. He smelled the same then, and it was frightening and inviting at the same time, just like it is now. Standing this close, with barely three inches of space between us, I feel his body heat, and it makes my insides quiver.
I have to force my brain to think, calm down, and not be so obviously affected by him, to not let him invade all of my senses. With the bad man, I had to hide my feelings to avoid a reaction from him. But Dr. Reynolds said I have to learn to let people see my feelings, and I have to let them have their own feelings. She said most people are good and genuine, not menacing or manipulative. Trying to retrain myself to believe that is difficult and confusing. Trusting people is hard.
“So… How did you get up there, onto the second floor of my parent’s house?”
“I’m good at climbing.”
Hmm.
“How did you know I would be there? Or which window was mine?”
His head tilts slightly to the side. “Maybe just a lucky guess?” His voice has a slight teasing tone, but we both know there’s more to it than guessing.
I wait then realize he’s not going to say anything else about the matter. I blink up at him. “Oh. Okay…well, if you do it again…climb up to my windows…be careful.”
His eyes flash with a darker emotional intensity. “Afraid I might fall?” he asks and, again, his words seem like they might be hinting at something else entirely.
“Yes,” I whisper.
“Me too.” The rasp is deeper now, raw and scratchier. It reaches my heart and drips down to my thighs. I feel like melted butter. I feel like I’m dreaming.
Are we talking about windows anymore?
I blink at him.
“You got a cell phone?” he asks, his voice still low.
The question throws me. “No. I have no one to call. My parents don’t want me to have things like that.”
He scoffs and leans closer to me again, tilting his head down toward my ear. “Don’t be a prisoner anymore, Holly,” he says softly. His breath makes me shiver, and my hands itch to reach up, to touch his arms or clutch his shirt, but I fist them at my sides, not wanting to do anything to break the spell we seem to be caught under.
“I’m trying,” I whisper back, although I’m not exactly sure what he means.
We pull back at the same time, and our faces are so close I can almost feel his skin graze against mine. I shiver all over again, head to toe, everywhere.
“I think I should go inside.” I unzip his jacket and slowly pull it off. “Thank you for the ride.”
“Tomorrow. Noon.” His eyes lower, his chest rising and falling as he shoves his arms into the leather jacket and lifts his hair out from beneath the collar.
“Okay.” I wonder what happened to my taxi girl and why she left me. Surely she must have had a good reason. I’ll call her in the morning and give her a chance to explain before I find a new driver, which is something I’d rather not have to do.
“Thanks for the good weirdness, Holly.” Straightening, he gives me a smile, which has a glint of wickedness in its curve, and gets back on his bike.
He said my name. And he smiled. At me. I feel the way those girls look, on the TV shows I spent so much time watching, when the guy they like finally pays attention to them. I feel giddy and nauseous, scared and happy and glowy. For the first time ever, I feel like a real girl. Nothing has ever felt better.
15
Holly
The anticipation of seeing him again today, as friends, kept me awake for most of the night. I kept peeking out my window after he dropped me off, wondering if he was still out there. I wouldn’t mind if he was, to be honest. I liked his attention, fleeting as it may be.
Earlier, while I waited for Feather to get out of the shower, I called Maria, the taxi driver. She apologized frantically, telling me she had gotten a call on her cell that her two-year-old son was sick and she’d had to leave quickly. She had no way of calling me, so she had no choice except to just leave. She told me she had worried about me all night, wondering how I would get home. I could actually hear the relief in her voice when I told her I was fine and would like another ride today.
“I’m going shopping, want to come?” Feather asks, coming into our small kitchen, where I’m drinking a cup of tea and eating a blueberry muffin.
“I can’t… I’m going to see Poppy today. The driver will be here in about an hour.”
“You mean you’re going to see Tyler,” she comments with a grin, grabbing her car keys off the heart-shaped key rack on the wall. The hook next to hers is empty, mocking me and my carless life.
I shift uncomfortably at the small wooden table. “Of course he’ll be there too.”
“I saw him drop you off last night. I can’t believe you got on that bike with him.” She leans against the doorframe, her long hair flowing down her shoulder and over her chest.
“You were watching me?”
“You can hear his motorcycle a mile away, Holly. I heard it in the lot and looked out the window, and there you were, all googly-eyed, staring up at him while he played with your hair. He’s actually pretty hot from a distance. The arms on him…damn, girl.” She pops the gum in her mouth and flashes a teasing smile at me. “I can see the appeal.”
“Feather…” I shake my head at her and tuck my hair behind my ear. “He wasn’t playing with my hair. There was a leaf stuck in it. I was embarrassed having foliage on my head, I wasn’t googly-eyed.”
Or was I? I certainly felt all googly and woogly.
“It’s okay to like him. You don’t have to get all embarrassed and nervous. I’m just not sure he’s the best guy for you to be crushing on, but he’ll do as a stepping stone.”
“Stepping stone?” I repeat.”What’s that?”
She lifts her hand to inspect one of her chipped nails. “Someone you see while you’re waiting for the next one to come along. Like training wheels for dating.”
My mouth falls open. What a horrible way to treat someone. “He is not a stepping stone.” Rising, I grab my dishes and bring them over to the sink to wash later. “Is that what Steve is for you?”
She actually stares off, contemplating her answer. I’ll be disappointed in her if she says yes, and I’ll feel sorry for Steve, who seems to really care about her.
“No,” she finally replies. “I really like Steve. I always have. We have a history, and we started as friends. I suppose, in a way, I wanted him to be a stepping stone, but he turned out to be a lot more.”
“I have a history with Tyler,” I say with slight defensiveness. I get to have a past with people, too, even if it’s not quite perfect and only started a year ago. It’s still my history.
“Pulling you out of a hole isn’t quite the kind of history that’s going to lead to everlasting love, Holly.” She turns before I have a chance to reply. “I’ll see you tonight. Have fun but be careful,” she calls out just before she closes the front door behind her.
I file our conversation into the messy backroom of my mind, with the other things I don’t want to think about, and take a quick shower with what’s left of our hot water. I should know better than to let Feather shower first if I don’t want to end up with lukewarm water. As I’m toweling off, I slowly inch the towel away and reveal my reflection in the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door as the fog slowly dissipates.
I’m not used to looking at my body. I had one tiny, compact mirror while being held by the bad man, so I was only able to see two circular inches of my body at a time. He only gave it to me so I could put the awful red lipstick on, but sometimes I stared into it when I was alone and watched my lips talk to myself. Other times, I could angle it just the right way to see the cigarette burns he’d branded into my skin and the thin red slash
marks the knife had made when he threatened me.
Once I used it to look at the letters carved across my stomach, even though the reflection made the word backward. That was the first and last time I used the compact to look at the ugly letters on me.
Feather has told me numerous times how pretty I am, how she wishes she had a body like mine. Rockin’ curves were the words she used. At the time I laughed nervously and told her to shut up, not believing her, or even caring. I didn’t need or want to be pretty.
But lately, I’ve been wondering if I really am pretty. More specifically, I wonder if Tyler thinks I’m pretty. As the fog fades from the mirror, I wrap the white towel around my body to cover it all up. Even if he does think I’m pretty, he would change his mind damn fast if he ever saw what I looked like under my clothes. The pretty girls on TV don’t have scars and words carved into them.
This time, when I get out of the taxi, he’s sitting on the ground waiting for me, his back leaning against a tree, staring up at the sky with a small twig in his mouth. Poppy and the fox are sitting with him, and it’s obvious they’re very attached to him in the way they stick by his side. I think that’s a good sign because animals don’t like bad people. His subtle acts of chivalry might seem small, but to me they are huge. It’s a hint that he cares, maybe even likes me.
Or is it a sense of responsibility? I wonder what it feels like knowing you saved someone’s life. Do you feel forever responsible for them? Like feeding a stray cat that keeps coming back and you’re not sure what to do with? So you just keep feeding it out of a sense of pity and obligation?
God, don’t let me be a stray cat.
He stands as I approach and brushes debris off the back of his jeans. “They wait for you?” he asks, nodding toward the taxi.
“Yeah.”
“Tell her to go.”
“But how will I—”
He interrupts me. “I’ll get you home.”
I hesitate, leaning down to pet Poppy, not sure if I should trust Tyler so completely yet. Last night was nice, but not enough to gauge who he really is. If I tell the driver to leave, I’ll be stuck here—on the edge of town, on a back road near the woods—with a man I barely even know.
Alone.
Trapped.
“You can trust me,” he says. “I’m a good weird.”
Smiling at our inside joke, I walk back to the car to tell the driver she doesn’t have to wait for me today. She eyes Tyler suspiciously, doing nothing to hide her obvious distrust of leaving me here with him. It was clear from our conversation on the phone this morning that she feels some sort of concern for me, but she finally relents after I insist that I’ll be fine. Apprehension simmers through me as I watch her drive away. This is another big step for me, letting part of my safety net go voluntarily.
Without a word, he turns and heads down the dirt road, and I walk briskly to catch up to him, as do Poppy and the fox. “How did you come to have a fox for a pet?” I ask. “Are they common as pets?”
“No, they don’t make good pets at all. They’re destructive and hyper and hard to train.” He coughs. “I found him as a kit, stuck in a trap. He had a broken leg.”
“Oh…that’s so sad.”
“Yeah. I tried to release him back into the woods after it healed, but he kept showing up at my door, scratching and crying. He didn’t want to go. So I let him stay.”
Oh, God. He does have stray cat obligation tendencies.
“He’s in one of the Christmas tree pictures I bought at the boutique. I look at his adorable little face every morning, he almost looks like he’s grinning. What’s his name?”
“Boomer. Well, Boomerang. Since he kept coming back.”
Yikes. Just like me.
He’s a magnet, I convince myself. That’s why me and the fox keep coming back. It’s not because we’re desperate. It’s something about him.
When we get to his yard, he points to an old wrought-iron bench that appears to be in what will be a flower and rock garden when the winter season has ended, and we sit on it together. Without thinking, I put about two feet of distance between us.
He reaches into the inside pocket of his black leather jacket, pulls out a cell phone, and holds it out to me. “For you,” he says softly.
I stare at it, my brow furrowing, not sure what he means. “I’m sorry?”
“I got it for you.”
“Oh!” I exclaim. “Wow…” I hold the silver phone in my hand, not sure what to do with it or how to even say thank you for such an unexpected gift.
“I had my brother pick it up for me. I don’t do stores.”
“I-I don’t know how to use it,” I stammer. “And I don’t really have any calls to make…”
Ignoring my protests, he reaches over and presses the power button, and when his scarred fingers brush across mine, an electric tingle runs up my arm. I wonder if that feeling will ever stop. If he were to touch me every day, for the rest of my life, would I still feel it? And is it crazy if I want to find out? I don’t believe what Feather said this morning, that everlasting love can’t happen with him. My heart knows better.
“You should have one. For emergencies.”
Statements like that always make me want to burst out into insane hysterics. I had many emergencies over the past ten years that I managed to live through, yet people like Feather freak out if she’s half an hour late to meet Steve, and then she makes ten phone calls to let him know, like some terrible tragedy is happening, when it’s actually just that she can’t find the perfect shirt or can’t find her black eyeliner.
I run my finger along the smooth edge of the rectangular phone. My first cell phone. Does this mean he might call me?
As if reading my mind, he says, “It’s easier to talk. With texts. For me.”
Ohhh. I had forgotten about texting. Like Feather and Steve do all the time, with little smiley faces and three-letter codes that I don’t understand. I’ll have to ask Feather for a cheat sheet.
“If you want to,” he adds quickly. Behind the shaggy hair covering half his face, he slowly lifts his eyes to meet mine, and it feels like a visual caress, the way they change color from turquoise to sapphire and back again like a kaleidoscope. Long ago I learned how to read the eyes of a man, to use them as a meter to gauge mood and intention.
In Tyler’s eyes, I see the man behind the scars and the mask, the man he was before life tore him apart and drove him to hide in the woods. Before some tragedy made him a man who could strangle someone to death. Just like me, there’s a person hiding in there who had their very soul stolen from them, and I see him, trying to let me in.
I see him trying to get out.
“I want to.” My voice shakes, and so does my hand holding the phone. “Very much.”
He spends the next half hour showing me how to use the phone to make calls and how to text back and forth. He adds himself to my contacts and shows me how to use the camera. He takes a photo of Boomer and adds it as the photo for “Tyler” in the contact profile. I want to use a picture of him, but he refuses, agitation instantly evident in his eyes and body language at the mention of capturing him with a photograph. He does, however, take a photo of me holding Poppy and uses that for my profile in his phone.
Slowly, our walls are deteriorating.
“Let me give you some money for the phone,” I say, reaching for my backpack, where my wallet is hidden.
“No.”
“I’m sure it was expensive. I have money my father gives me.”
He grabs my hand, stopping me before I reach my wallet and, for a moment, I freeze as old demons rise to the surface. Sensing my reaction, he immediately lets go.
“Sorry. The phone’s a gift.” He coughs into his hand. “For you.”
I’ve noticed after he talks for a while, his voice becomes wheezy, cracking over certain words and shifting in odd places. Matching his mood and intention to his tone of voice must be difficult, and maybe that’s why he’d rather not talk. Thankfu
lly for me, his eyes are very expressive of his feelings, and I’m sure once I get to know him better, words won’t even be necessary for me to know what he’s thinking.
“Thank you.” I put the phone in my backpack along with my wallet. “Does it hurt?” I ask softly, treading lightly because I know all too well how much a simple question can offend. “When you talk?”
His lip twitches. “Not really. Just dry. Fatigued. It’s fucked up.”
I don’t ask how it happened, and he doesn’t tell me. I hope maybe someday our friendship will be in a place where we can share our pasts, but I have no problem waiting. Time and patience are two things I can offer in abundance.
“Will drinking help?” I ask.
“Quit drinking years ago.”
“Um…I meant water. Or tea.” I bet honey would help soothe his throat, and I make a mental note to read up on that.
He lets out a gruff laugh. “Water helps a little.” He stands up from the bench and tilts his head at me. “Want to do something with me?”
My mind spins with excitement and nervousness. Yes. No. What?
“Sure,” I answer, rising to my feet with him.
I follow him inside the large garage, where he walks to a corner with some workout equipment and weights and returns with a large plastic storage box. Lifting the lid, he reveals what’s inside. Christmas ornaments…garland…and wrapped presents with big bows.