by A. Gorman
I don’t answer. Instead, I let the reek of whiskey on my breath and from the pores of my skin be my reply.
Ellie sighs. “You sit tight. I’m gonna get you a towel and then you’re going to come inside.” She gets to her feet and turns to leave, but I reach out and grab her ankle. It’s pathetic. I’m pathetic, but it’s the only thing I can do to get her to stop because my jaw feels wired shut and I ain’t ever been much good with words anyway. “Jake, you need to get dry.”
“Stay.”
“The rain’s coming in. Let me go get a towel, and we’ll talk.”
“I don’t wanna talk. I just want to be near you.”
“Alright,” she says softly. She reaches over and closes her front door. The wind howls against it and I curl into myself, all the while keeping a tight grip on her ankle. “Where’s Nuke, honey?”
“I had to lock him in the bathroom.”
“Why?”
“I’m having all kinds of thoughts, angel,” I whisper. “All kinds of thoughts.”
She smooths a cool hand over my fevered forehead. I flinch, but she continues to touch me, seemingly unafraid of what I might do. “About what, Jake?”
“About you and Spence. About me and how I shouldn’t be here.”
“How you shouldn’t be here in my house? Or how you shouldn’t be here at all?”
“I can’t breathe. That house is so damn quiet, and yet all I can hear are the screams. Their screams.”
Her hand stills against my hair. “Whose screams?”
“They did inhumane things to us, Elle. I could have lived through all that, I coulda never broken, but I couldn’t handle the screams or the silence that followed the gunshots. That’s the shit that eats away at me from the inside out. The torture was nothing compared to waking up every day knowing you could end it all if only you had the guts to pull the trigger.”
She shifts closer and pulls my head into her lap. “Shh. You’re safe now. You’re home.”
Tears run down her cheeks but she pays them no mind. She just continues to stroke my forehead. Her fingertips trace the creases at the corners of my eyes, over my cheeks, and along the line of my jaw. I don’t pull away from her. Instead, I close my eyes and settle into her touch, allowing her to share a little of the pain that burdens me. I know it’s selfish. She has pain enough of her own; I can see it in her eyes. It’s not fair of me to ask her to bear more. This woman isn’t even mine. I haven’t even kissed her yet. I won’t take that next step with her because she deserves better.
She deserves a real man. One who can protect her, not one who shows up at her door in the middle of the night, drunk and falling apart in front of her. Not one who’s ugly inside and out, who won’t take her and worship every inch of her beautiful body because he’s sick at the sight of his own. She deserves a man who’ll take care of her, who can give her and Spencer everything, enrich their lives and be present and supportive at the end of a long day, and I can’t be that man because I’m broken.
I gave everything I had to the Corps, and when I came back from that desert alone, scarred and forced to bear the evidence of their hatred of us upon my flesh forever, there wasn’t even a slither of the old Jake Tucker left over.
I got nothin’ left to give, and Ellie Mason, this angel who walked into my life and turned it upside down, this woman who saves me every single day and doesn’t even know it, she deserves everything.
And I am nothing.
Chapter Twelve
Ellie
“Mamma, wake up.”
I open my eyes and see Spencer’s boring into mine again. For a moment I think I’m still dreamin’ or I have a serious case of déjà vu, because I feel as if I’ve lived this moment before. “Mamma, Jake Tucker’s sleepin’ on our couch.”
Well, maybe not this exact same moment.
I shoot up out of bed and throw on my robe. I’d meant to wake Jake early so he could leave before Spencer knew he was even here. Major parenting fail, because now my eight-year-old looks like Christmas has come early this year.
“Why is Jake Tucker on our couch?” he demands, following me into the bathroom where I pee, wash my hands and brush my teeth as if a tornado’s chasing me.
“Because he came over late last night.”
“Why? That’s not the same,” Spencer says. He doesn’t get angry or annoyed about it, he’s just stating the obvious, trying to sort it in his head.
“He needed a friend to talk to.”
“Well why didn’t y’all wake me?”
I smile at my son. “I guess we just got to talkin’.”
I try and fix my hair, but it’s unruly this morning and won’t stay down without a ton of hairspray, so I pull it all up on top of my head in one of them top knot thingies, which I have to say pains me immensely. As a hairdresser who takes great pride in her work, the top knot is like the crazy cat lady equivalent of just givin’ up. It’s an offence to all my years of studying cosmetology, but then, I don’t normally have a man sleeping on my couch this early either, and I don’t know what the heck to do so to hell with fixin’ my hair.
“Is the same changing now?” Spencer asks quietly. The same is what he calls the routine; he doesn’t like words that have a “roo” sound to them, and I guess it’s the simplest way he can name the order of the motions we carry out every day.
I turn away from the mirror, recognizing that I’m being somewhere else when my child needs me to be present, and I squat down to his level. “No, Spence, the same is not changing, but would it be so bad if it did?”
He frowns. “The same wouldn’t be the same then.”
“That’s true, the same would be different, but we’d have a new same, and new isn’t bad,” I say. Spencer’s brow furrows and he fidgets with the neck of his pajama top where the tag should be, a sure sign he’s getting agitated. “New isn’t bad, Spencer. It’s just different, and it’s okay to experience different.”
I think it’s enough talk of change for one morning, so I tell him to run to the kitchen and pull out the green bowl he likes to use on Thursdays while I change into a floral print dress. I’ll have to fix myself up later because I have clients today, but for now I just really need to tackle the man sleeping on my couch.
* * *
“If you boys are about done; I can drop you off before I take Spencer to school?” I say, interrupting the male bonding session that’s going on in my living room. Despite how perfect a day it is after last night’s storms, we had an awkward start. Jake shoveled grits and bacon in his mouth—more than likely to avoid talkin’ about last night—I pretended that I wasn’t weirded out at having a man sleep over, and Spence ate his Cheerios in stunned silence as he watched a real-life Marine eat at the same table. After that, Spencer pulled out all of his toy trucks to show Jake. He about floored me when I told him that he’d miss the beach if he didn’t hurry up and he just shrugged and said, “We’d go tomorrow.”
I’m not sure if Jake knew how monumental a thing that was, but he’d raised his brow and glanced at me when Spencer had said it, so I was going to take a wild guess and say he understood.
“You don’t have to take me home,” Jake says, his eyes meeting mine. “My legs work just fine.”
“Are you crazy?” I shake my head and check Spencer’s school bag has everything he needs in it. “How many miles is that?”
“A little over two.”
I blink in surprise.
“Give or take,” he says sheepishly.
“Well, two miles or not it’s still too far after walking here in the rain last night. So as long as you don’t mind entertaining Spencer for a few minutes more while I get his lunch packed, I’m taking you home.”
“No, ma’am. I don’t mind at all.”
“Stop calling me ma’am,” I warn him.
“My mamma’s kinda bossy,” Spencer whispers, and I chuckle to myself and head into the kitchen.
“Can you keep a secret?” Jake asks, and my ears prick up. I may h
ave even stopped rummaging through the pantry in order to hear him better. “That’s what I like about her.”
I don’t catch my son’s response, because I’m too busy floating away on a cloud.
Twenty minutes later, I wave to an especially grim Mr. Williams and buckle Spencer into his seat. I’m just about to open the driver’s side door when I’m intercepted by Jake. He muscles in, closer than I thought he’d be comfortable with, and holds his hand out.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“Let me drive.”
I frown. “It’s my car.”
“Yes it is.” He leans closer. “But you drive like a crazy person.”
“I do not.”
“Yes, you do.” The corner of his mouth tips up in a grin, and it’s so hard to reconcile this playful and—if I’m not mistaken—flirty Jake with the tortured man who’d crawled through my door last night. I am glad to see him doin’ better though. “I’ve been hearin’ this clunk, clunk every time you start it up at the beach. I’d like to take a closer look at that, but first, I wanna get a feel for how she drives.”
“Jake, I don’t need you to fix my car.”
He leans closer to my ear and whispers, “Angel, just do as you’re told for once.”
God, but he is good.
I swallow hard. His gaze glued to my throat as it bobs and then travels up to my lips. Jake moves closer still, the toes of his boots meeting my ballet flats, his right side flush with mine from thigh to hip. I draw in a shallow breath and tilt my chin up as he leans in.
“Eww, gross. Are you two gonna kiss?”
And then my eight-year-old ruins it all.
I exhale too loudly and drop the keys in Jake’s palm, his face gone hard and serious as he shifts back, giving me room to move away. I walk around to the passenger side of the car and climb in as Jake folds his large frame into the driver’s side and adjusts the seat.
He slides the key into the ignition and the engine chokes to life. Jake cants his head, listening intently. He hits the gas pedal a few times and I hear it, the clunk, clunk he’d mentioned a moment ago.
“I don’t know how I didn’t notice that before,” I say, amazed that he’s managed to hear it in the past. He gives me a tight smile. His previous playfulness is gone, and I’m beginning to wonder what I did wrong.
“Can you bring this baby by my house later today? I want to take a look under the hood.” He peels out of the drive. He’s a very cautious driver, sticking to the speed limit, stopping when the light is amber and triple checking his side mirrors as he navigates the early morning traffic at the intersection.
“I can’t. I have clients all day.”
“Then I’ll come to you,” he says, as if that settles it.
“Are you a mechanic?”
“I helped Frankenstein our trucks in Afghanistan, and my granddaddy taught me how to restore old vehicles.” He never takes his eyes from the road as he tells me this. “We built a couple cars from the ground up. I know enough.”
“Frankenstein?” I ask.
“Yeah, we were pretty hard up for parts, so we’d pull them from Humvees that’d broken down and stitch ’em back together, so to speak.” His eyes glint with excitement as he talks, and I have to wonder if he hadn’t lived through the hell he did, whether he’d still be serving time in the Corps. Some men just live for war, even long after they’ve left it. I know that from Mr. Williams. “We had a couple of broke-down trucks get stranded on a goat track up in the mountains that our Sergeant Major had ordered us to go get. It’d been raining for days; the ground was just mud and slush, and that was the scariest firefight I ever found myself in. We couldn’t see a damn thing.”
I shiver and goose pimples break out all over my body. As Jake tells us this I watch Spencer’s eyes grow wider and wider, and I can see he wants to hound him with questions, but he’s likely cataloguing the information away in his mind so he can order his thoughts properly and not get tongue-tied. I’ve seen him do this a number of times when Mr. Williams has talked about his time in the Marines.
“It sounds terrifying.”
“At the time it was.” He grins at me like a madman. “But nothin’ ever made me feel more alive than bein’ shot at.”
“I’ll have to take your word for it,” I say.
Jake’s face falls, and he turns his attention back to the road as he turns the corner onto Sea Cliff Drive.
There I go putting my foot in my mouth again.
* * *
Thursdays are what I like to call Belle days, that’s when any woman who ever held the title Southern Belle likes to visit Big Bama Hair. My Thursdays are filled with the saccharine scent of hairspray and Chanel No.5, which really is a nice change from Cheerios, playdough, and poop.
Miss Maggie, one of my regulars who’s always up to no good, sits at the basin with solution on her head as her perm processes and her best friend, Miss Chelle, sits under the dryer, having her hair set. Virginia—one of my least favorite clients whom I just can’t seem to shake—sits in my chair, her hair damp fresh from washing and ready to be cut. I’m midway through fixin’ her a glass of sweet tea when Jake shows up at the salon door wearing a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled to his elbows and a pair of faded Levis that fit snugly in all the places that count. Nuke is beside him, clearly having forgiven his owner for locking him in the house last night.
I swear every pair of panties in the room just disintegrates when he opens the salon door and says, “Mornin’.”
He’s met with a chorus of, “Good morning” from the women in my salon, including Chelle, who’s eighty-two in the shade and almost completely deaf on a good day when she’s not under a dryer. I guess she’s real good at lip readin’.
He nods to the women, looking all nervous and adorable, though that seems an odd term for a man so hard and so big. Oh my, I’m gonna need to turn up the AC to full tilt.
“Elle, you mind if I take a look at that car now?”
“Knock yourself out,” I reply, almost dreamily.
He stands there a moment longer, expectantly. “The keys?”
“Oh right, sorry,” I mumble, and set my comb and scissors down on the countertop, then wipe my hands on my apron to a tune of tittering women. “Just a second and I’ll grab them for you.” I turn to my clients, singling out Chelle and Maggie. “Y’all behave.”
“Can’t hear you, dear,” Miss Chelle replies, cupping her hand to the outside of the dryer as if it were her ear.
“Hers is selective hearing,” Miss Maggie tells Jake. I roll my eyes and leave the room, grab the keys from the hall table, and bring them back to Jake. He holds his hand out, but I snatch them away at the last minute. “You take good care of my baby, Jake Tucker. She’s the only one I got, and God knows I can’t afford a new one.”
“I’ll be gentle. I promise,” he whispers, leaning in toward me so that I can smell the cologne on his skin. Memories of cutting his hair, and the tender way he’d touched me just a few nights ago make my head swim, and I swear I get slapped upside the head with the stupid stick. I literally have no words for this man. I think it’s safe to say that everyone in my salon knows I was thinking of doing a lot more than cutting Jake’s hair. Which is just embarrassing.
He heads out of the room and closes the door behind him. Nuke, who’d waited patiently on the front porch, follows him to the truck where he retrieves a set of tools from the back. I’m so thankful for the fact I work at home, and that glass paned door I had installed was really a good idea. I just love the view of my driveway.
“Ooh that boy has got it bad,” Miss Maggie says.
“Never mind the boy. Our little Ellie is smitten as a kitten,” Miss Chelle says.
“What? No. it isn’t like that with us. We’re friends,” I assure them as I pick up my scissors and comb. Another round of titters ensues.
“Oh honey, who are you foolin’?” Virginia says, meeting my gaze in the mirror. Her polished fingernails shine like bloody tal
ons against the pages of the Southern Living magazine propped on her lap. “Friends don’t sleep over at one another’s houses only to leave at the crack of dawn.”
I still with the comb in Virginia’s hair. Her smile is rapturous but her eyes are cunning.
“Ellie Mason, have you been holding out on us?” Miss Maggie crows.
I shake my head and section off Virginia’s shoulder-length bob. Combing it through, I begin cutting. “Wherever did you hear that?”
“I stopped by Josephine’s for coffee on the way here. She said that Emma Jean had spotted the two of you this morning leaving this very house. Olivia Anders just so happened to be picking up coffee at the same time, and she told us how close y’all are becoming.”
“Jake and I are friends, nothing more,” I say matter-of-factly, hoping like hell to shut this conversation down before it goes any further. I am going to kill my best friend. Right after I get done ogling the hot Marine in my driveway. Everyone knows you don’t tell Josephine and Emma Jean nothing. Neither one of them have a lick of sense between them, and they can’t keep their mouths shut if their lives depend on it. I do not need to be the talk of any more speculation.
There are single mothers enough in Fairhope—it isn’t like I’m the only one—but thanks to a few of Spencer’s ill-timed meltdowns, and a bunch of ignorance, I certainly am the most talked about. I’m not ashamed of my boy, and I’m not afraid of being seen leaving my house with Jake either. All those Belles can go kiss my little behind. I’d be proud to be the woman on Jake Tucker’s arm. Assuming he’d let me touch him, that is.
I stare out at the man in question as he bends over the hood of my car. I can’t figure him out. How is it possible for one man to go from experiencing the kind of torment I saw reflected in his eyes last night to the easy way he was with me and Spence this morning and not get whiplash? My head is still reeling from the sexy smirk he gave when we were leaning against my car earlier.
“Angel, just do as you’re told for once.”