by Amy Knupp
Cale pulled up behind Rachel’s mom’s Lexus, which sat in the open garage.
“What’s your work schedule this weekend?” he asked.
Rachel’s heart stumbled. Had she misunderstood everything he’d just said? No way was he going to ask her out...
“Um...”
“I have a favor to ask,” he said in a rush, as if realizing what she was thinking.
“I work Saturday night. I have tomorrow and Sunday off. What’s the favor?”
In the darkness, she saw him close his eyes briefly and then gaze out the driver’s-side window, away from her.
“I need to go to my condo,” he said. “To take inventory on all the work that needs to be done. It’s time for me to start moving toward living there again. Past time.”
He didn’t have to remind her that he’d been there only once since Noelle had died or how he’d reacted to it.
“You want me to go with you?” she asked.
Cale finally turned to look at her. “Would you? Maybe Saturday morning before your shift.”
“Sure. I can do that.”
From what he’d said before, there would be no physical sign of her sister in the condo, only in Cale’s memory. Worrying about someone else’s battles instead of her own for a while would be a welcome change. If going with him made it a tiny bit easier for him to handle, then she was totally up for that.
As she said good-night and got out of the vehicle, she quashed the obstinate, clueless voice in her head that quietly insisted she would have preferred that he had asked her on a date.
CHAPTER TWELVE
CALE HAD WOKEN up just over an hour ago with a gut ache and a bad feeling about this.
He’d known going to his condo was going to suck the big one, but he hadn’t realized just how much, after all this time, it would still knock him on his ass. Why he’d thought even for a second it was a good idea to have Rachel tag along to witness his own personal freak show was beyond him. He would’ve been much better off facing it alone.
All of this flashed through his mind in forty-five seconds as he stood outside the door with Rachel behind him and made himself stall. He fumbled with the keys on the black-and-gold keychain Noelle had given him, dropped the whole thing, acted as if he wasn’t sure which was the right key. He knew damn well which one it was because the thing taunted him every time he happened to notice it. He’d given thought to taking it off his keychain, but that would be a concrete sign he was a wuss. Learning to ignore it had had to suffice.
“Want me to do it?” Rachel asked from behind him in a concerned, well-meaning voice that irritated rather than soothed him.
His response was to shove the key in the hole and open the lock. He pushed open the door as if it had personally offended him.
“Welcome to our humble home,” he muttered as he walked inside, cringing at the sight that met his eyes—solid proof of just how much his last and only venture in had leveled him.
Shame burned in him as he took in the half-demolished wall between the kitchen and dining room. It’d been way too soon for him to come back to this place, and the gamut of emotional crap that had engulfed him had obviously been too much for him to handle. The wall, or what was left of it, was a testament to the rage that had eventually won out over everything else—rage that Noelle had been taken from him too soon, rage that she hadn’t had a chance to live out a full life. Rage at so many things.
He’d always intended to take out the wall between the kitchen and dining area in order to open up the space and make it more suitable for entertaining. But he hadn’t planned to do it that day over a year ago, and he hadn’t had the proper tools or state of mind to do it. Jagged edges and exposed wires jutted everywhere, lacking any sign of professionalism or even remote competence.
The air in the place had gone a little staler and there was dust everywhere. His tools were still scattered over the dining-room table, just waiting for him to pick up where he’d left off. The blinds on the window still hung six inches below the bottom sill on one side and eight or nine inches below it on the other, begging to be replaced.
Rachel stared at the partially destroyed wall in silence, her brows arched in concern. Cale didn’t even want to imagine what she must think of him.
Looking to his right toward the living room, he could see the open, year-and-a-half-old Sports Illustrated still draped, cover-side up, over the arm of the sofa, half-read. The forty-two-inch flat-screen TV had been less than a month old when Noelle had died, and there it sat now, just like new.
Unable to help himself, Cale walked slowly, apprehensively, to the living room to once again survey the other bits of his life he’d left hanging there. He was testing himself, wondering if he’d handle things any better this time.
The sumptuous brown leather sofa that once had begged him to sink into it now mocked him as he played a searing memory back in his head. The day the furniture had been delivered, he and Noelle had been in a celebratory mood as it and the television were the first pieces they’d bought for their new home. They’d been messing around on the sofa and she’d stopped him, laughing the whole time, and insisted he take her to the bedroom instead of “messing up their new couch.”
Cale had never gotten the chance to break in the sofa with his wife-to-be.
The emotional blast was there again but not as violent this time. He ground his jaw from side to side and the muscles were so tight it popped loudly. He cracked his knuckles to keep from taking everything out on the condo again.
He vaguely noticed Rachel as she walked past him, giving him a wide berth, toward the door that opened directly onto the beach.
“I can see why she was so excited,” she said, her back to him. From this angle, she could have been Noelle with a haircut. “This place was perfect for her. Her dream.”
Without a glance back at him, seemingly—and thankfully—oblivious to Cale’s internal struggle, Rachel opened the vertical blinds covering the door and let herself out the door onto the patio.
As if no time had passed and he hadn’t spent months grieving and getting closer to acceptance, it all came back to him at once. Sadness. Anger. Loss. So many other ugly feelings. He wanted to curl up in a ball in the corner and hide from it all, and that just ticked him off more.
He kicked the side of the sofa, which of course did nothing but hurt his damn foot. He grabbed the magazine, ripped it in two then threw the pages in the air. Leaves of glossy, four-color paper fluttered to the couch and the floor much too peacefully.
He strode back through the dining area and into the kitchen on the end of the condo opposite from the beach. There on the floor at the base of part of the wall that still stood intact was the hammer he’d taken to the drywall. A hammer, for God’s sake. He hadn’t had a more appropriate tool for demolition and he hadn’t cared. It was the reason for the hack job—well, that and the red fury that had driven him.
He picked up the hammer, fighting to avoid a similar meltdown even as the emotional storm inside of him intensified. Just as he’d feared.
This remodeling project was supposed to be one of joy, one to celebrate a promising future full of love and family and everything he and Noelle had dreamed of. The plan had been to open up the kitchen to the dining room, reconfiguring the cabinets on the other three walls. His fun-loving, social-butterfly fiancée had been looking forward to having parties here—a housewarming, birthdays, holidays, you name it. She’d gone on and on, bubbling over with her characteristic enthusiasm for the possibilities once the kitchen project was finished.
He had no intention of a repeat performance, but he couldn’t stifle the urge for one good swing. He twisted, wound up like a pitcher, then gave the center of the in-tact drywall everything he had. “Son of a bitch!”
“Cale!”
Shit.
He heard the sliding glass door slam shut in the distance and Rachel’s footsteps behind him on the tile floor, but he didn’t turn to face her. He used all his energy to try to ca
lm himself. He set the hammer on the table—hard—before he could take another shot.
“Cale, what are you doing?” Rachel rushed up to him and touched his arm. He shrugged her off. “No. You can’t do this. Not again.”
Something in her tone hit him like an incendiary and it was a damn good thing he’d already set the hammer aside, otherwise he might have swung at the wall again as an exclamation point.
“I set the hammer down,” he said through gritted teeth.
“Good. You know that doesn’t help.”
“Maybe you could tell me what the hell is going to help.” Caught up only in himself, he continued when he should have shut up. “What am I saying? Not exactly your area of expertise.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
He stepped farther away from her and flung open the top of the battered, metal toolbox he’d picked up secondhand. He began tossing in the tools on the table.
“Cale, what’s that supposed to mean?” Rachel came around the table to his side.
He wanted to be alone with his pain, needed her to get out of his space. “You’re no expert on dealing with your grief.”
She stared at him for several seconds—he could feel her gaze burning into the side of his face. The silence grew, and he didn’t back down because it was true and he wasn’t in the right state of mind to take it back.
“You act all high-and-mighty because you’ve got such tight control on everything,” he continued, well aware this wasn’t the time, but not giving half a shit. “But when you get down to it, one of these days, you’re going to lose it completely. One of these days, you won’t be able to hold it off anymore.”
Cale waited for her to react. To yell at him. Cry. Something. She was frozen for so long he was finally forced to look at her. Sure enough, she held on to her composure with every fiber of her being. The muscle in one of her cheeks twitched, and she blinked rapidly several times as if fighting tears. But she kept her control.
He wanted her to blow. To give him a fight. A reason to blow off some more steam. “I don’t know why you think you’re above breaking down.”
She continued to stare at him, mostly statue-still except for the involuntary twitches, but there was so much emotion in her eyes. So much hurt. He wouldn’t forget that expression anytime soon. He knew he was being a monster, and yet he couldn’t rein himself in.
“Are you done?” she finally asked so quietly he could barely hear her. “Because I am. I’m done. I’m out of here.”
He tried to make himself say something. To apologize. Stop her somehow so he could eat the awful things he’d just said to her. His mouth opened but he couldn’t form the words.
When the door shut behind her, quietly—she was fully under control and so opposite of the way he was acting—he swore to himself. Remorse washed over him. Damn near suffocated him.
He was such an asshole.
As the maelstrom drained out of him along with every ounce of energy, he gazed at the ceiling and let his heart rate gradually return to normal.
He stood there staring at the physical damage he’d done before today, shame filtering in again at his loss of control. Embarrassing. Both his destruction and the way he’d treated Rachel. It was as though he’d had to prove to himself that asking her here had been a dumb idea.
She hadn’t deserved any of that. She was the last person on earth who deserved to be the target of his grief or anger or whatever this ugliness was that seemed to grip him whenever he faced this place.
He had to go after her.
The condo, though a mess, was fixable, but he was afraid the harm he’d done to Noelle’s sister, to their tentative friendship or whatever it was they’d managed to forge since she’d been back... Yeah. That was going to take some serious damage control on his part.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
FOR THE FIRST time ever, the water of the bay was failing her.
Rachel was closer to the mainland shore than the island when she realized how hard she was struggling to clear her mind. That she’d covered so much area in such a short time—and the fatigue she felt in her shoulders already—said it all. She was paddling like a possessed woman, and her brain was attacking what had happened at Cale’s condo the same way her paddle was attacking the water. The whole reason she loved to go kayaking was because she didn’t have to struggle, mentally or otherwise. It was supposed to relax her. That her main retreat was threatened by...who knew what disconcerted her.
Oh, hell. She knew what. The stuff Cale had said to her had been cruel and totally unsettling.
It took a lot of nerve to go spouting accusations at her when he was so clearly messed up. Beating on the wall with a hammer? Slamming tools around? Really? Those were not signs of healthy grieving in her admittedly limited experience.
Yes, she did keep a tight rein on her feelings. About everything. It wasn’t just Noelle. Wasn’t just sadness. That was the kind of person she was. Just because she didn’t show something on the outside didn’t mean she wasn’t feeling things on the inside. Why didn’t people get that? Of course she was dealing with her sadness over her twin sister’s death. It was devastating. The absolute worst thing she’d ever gone through in her life. As hard as it had been when her dad had died after suffering an aneurysm when she and Noelle were eight, this was even worse. Noelle had been her other half. But she wasn’t about to go around acting pathetic and begging for sympathy. She had her ways of handling her emotions, and it just so happened that none of them involved a hammer.
What hurt more than the words Cale had spewed at her, though, was that when she’d seen the pain on his face, she’d wanted to be a comfort to him, wanted to help him cope somehow. When she’d come rushing in to try, he’d aimed the ugliness of his feelings at her.
He’d invited her to come with him—for support, she’d assumed—and when she’d tried to offer it, he’d done his best to make her feel like an idiot for ever thinking she could help.
She slowed her pace and glided close enough to the mainland that she could see the city park on the shore. The park was deserted, save a group of three. One grade-school-age girl wearing an outgrown T-shirt sat on a bench next to a plump, grandfatherly man. The girl held a hardcover book and the man a folded-in-half magazine. On the grass close to the shore, several feet in front of them, was another little girl with pigtails coming off the sides of her head. She must have been about three or four years old, and she was enthralled by a flock of ducks on the water near the shore. The grandfather glanced up at her every so often and then returned to his reading.
The pigtail girl stood stock-still, gazing at the birds, seeming transfixed, and then suddenly she ran toward them, her arms out, hollering and carrying on and, of course, causing the ducks to take flight. Stopping just before she reached the edge of the shore, she giggled, looked back at her grandpa, who gave her a stern shake of his head, and watched with glee as the birds congregated farther down the shore. As soon as her chaperone’s attention was fixed back on his reading material, she galloped forward again, intent on disrupting the ducks’ peace.
The girls reminded Rachel of her and her sister when they’d been kids. She, of course, was the one with her nose buried in a book. Noelle was the peace-wrecker.
A gentle slosh of water a few feet behind her kayak made Rachel whip around. As soon as she recognized a shirtless Cale, her peace, like that of the ducks, was shattered. She gritted her teeth, avoided gawking at his bare, very muscular chest and mostly felt annoyed at the intrusion. The little thrill inside her that pulsed faintly but incessantly was obviously just a bad habit, because she was not glad to see him.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, returning her attention to the duck-hunting girl, whose grandpa was squatting down next to her, apparently giving her a quiet, caring lecture on the wrongs of scaring the bejeezus out of wildlife.
“Looking for you,” Cale said, working to get his kayak even with hers so they were side by side. He lacked grace and skill
with the boat, but he eventually managed it.
“How’d you figure out where to track me down?” She’d hopped on a city bus two blocks from his place, lucking out that it’d been going her way at the right moment. There was no way he could have followed her here.
“The swimsuit you were wearing under your clothes and your previously mentioned love for kayaking,” he said. “Wasn’t hard.”
“Did Buck tell you I was out here?”
“If the old guy wearing the Buck’s Boat Rentals T-shirt and smoking a pipe is Buck, yeah. He rented me the boat, too.”
“What a traitor.” Rachel dipped her paddle in on the opposite side from him and maneuvered her kayak to the left and forward. Away from him.
Cale steered clumsily, but he followed her.
“Why did you track me down?” She didn’t bother to keep any unfriendliness out of her voice. She’d hate to be accused of having no emotions again.
“Oh, you know,” he said flippantly. “Kayak lesson.”
“You need one.” Curving around more so she faced the island side of the bay, she paddled a few vigorous strokes, leaving him momentarily behind. If she thought for a second that she could outpaddle him to the shore and run away before he could catch up, she would go for it, but no matter how much practice she had, he aced her on arm strength. She’d felt his arm muscles up close and personal.
“Rachel,” Cale said, all signs of irreverence gone from his tone. “Quit running away from me. I want to apologize.”
“So apologize,” she said over her shoulder.
She let up for just a few seconds, her arms and shoulders aching from the frantic trip across the bay, and he was suddenly right beside her again, his boat skimming the side of hers. When he stuck his paddle out and rested it on her boat a couple of inches in front of her abdomen, she looked down at the bottom-of-the-line equipment that Buck—bless his heart—had stuck Cale with and then at his face.