And the man was beautiful, but there was just something about seeing a smile on his face that made me weak in the knees. He tugged his bottom lip between his teeth, obviously trying to hide something behind his grin. He ran his thumb over the back of my hand that he had tucked on his lap.
Warmth spread over my skin, igniting the exhilaration I felt simmering in my blood.
“Are you going to tell me where we’re going?” I asked for about the twentieth time, my penetrating gaze burning into the side of his playful expresssion.
He freed his grin, letting it spread. One side of his mouth twisted up with the secret. His big hand tightened on mine. “Nope. I already told you, it’s a surprise.”
I huffed. “This isn’t fair, Jared. We’re not supposed to keep secrets from each other,” I said, making a last-ditch effort to get it out of him.
He slanted a knowing eye in my direction and released my hand long enough to tug on a piece of my hair. “Ha… nice try, Aly Cat. This is not a secret. It’s a surprise. There’s a big difference.” He cocked his head with a smirk.
I shifted in my seat, trying not to fidget but unable to stop the rush of nerves firing in my system. The truth was, I had a pretty good idea of what his surprise would be. We’d been online, looking at apartments for a little place of our own, someplace to start our family together.
Judging by the direction Jared was taking us, I thought that was what it had to be.
But I pushed it down, not wanting to get my hopes up.
More than two weeks had passed since he came back to me. We’d settled into some kind of routine. Every morning he’d get up early for work, off to his job with the same construction company he’d been working with before. Only now, his duties had changed. He was giving orders rather than taking them.
Instead of leaving me with a tattered note like he’d done all those months before, he’d whisper the sweetest words to my temple as I traveled just on the cusp of sleep, feelings he’d been too fearful to say aloud before, these beautiful words that breathed our love into my ear every morning and pumped the deepest joy into my spirit.
After he left, I got up and went to class, and I’d done a few short shifts at the restaurant, even though Jared kept telling me it wasn’t necessary.
He wanted to take care of me.
I knew he was making good money at his job. But I knew his meaning went deeper than just possessions. Jared wanted to provide and support.
Trying to contain my grin, I snuck a peek at him, my eyes caressing along his sharp jaw, his pouty lips pronounced in his strong profile as he focused his attention on the road in front of us.
I squirmed a little, thinking of the nights… the nights Jared and I were just a tangle of limbs, neither of us able to get enough of the other. Our hands constantly searched and our mouths sought, desperate to make up for that tortuous time when we’d been apart.
But we would never make up for that time because neither of us would ever get enough.
Still, Jared seemed perfectly content with giving it a try.
He looked over at me. One eyebrow lifted as his eyes narrowed, his interest piqued, as if he’d caught the blatant desire on my face. Heat pooled in my stomach. Guess I didn’t mind it so much, either.
Chuckling, he turned his focus back to the road and lifted our entwined hands to his mouth. He brushed his lips over the back of my hand, didn’t say anything, just let this joy radiate from him as he carefully wound his way off the freeway.
Happiness had taken us whole, our days spent together like a normal couple that I’d never been brave enough to hope for.
But I also understood the truth in what I’d told my mother on Thanksgiving. Things would not always be easy with him.
Nightmares continued to plague Jared. Not one night had passed without panic and fear sucking all the air from my room. Jared would jerk to sitting, drenched in sweat and gasping for the breath the night had stolen from his lungs, his eyes wild and speaking of more pain than any one person should ever have to bear. Almost frantic, he’d gather me up in his arms and lay us back down, exhaling his relief into my hair when he realized he was in bed with me and not still stuck in the nightmare of a past he would never be able to change.
I’d tried to talk with him about it, to get him to open up to what he kept buried inside, but he would always force a smile, murmur against my cheek, Don’t worry, promising he was sleeping better than he had in years.
I’d nod, even though the show of acceptance was nothing but a lie.
How could I not worry? It was impossible. I loved him so much, and all I wanted was for him to find a way to heal, to be whole. No, I didn’t want him to forget. Forgetting Helene would be a tragedy in itself. I just wanted him to find peace.
But I knew for now I had to let it go and accept he wasn’t ready.
Or maybe it was my own nightmare coming into play, my greatest fear that one day I would push him too far and push him away. It was like clinging to a quickly fraying rope. One day the burdened weight Jared carried on his shoulders would cause it to snap and both of us would fall.
I just didn’t know where we would land.
Secure and whole and in each other’s arms.
Or shattered.
I knew in my heart the impact would crush us both and neither of us would survive.
Jared took an exit in Chandler, one of the areas in Phoenix that had been built up over the past handful of years.
I made a vain attempt at sitting still while he made a couple of turns, one off the main road and then down a street that ran alongside a small neighborhood. But I couldn’t. I was pretty sure everything I was feeling was fed directly from Jared. Because his excitement had shifted. It was still there, but a thread of disquiet had woven into his demeanor, restless and unsure.
He kept stealing glances at me, searching, reading, as if he were again trying to latch onto my thoughts. But my own thoughts were obscured because I was so unsure of where we were heading myself.
Jared turned right onto a narrow neighborhood street. He flashed me a nervous smile and ran his hand over his short hair. “So… uh… you don’t have to take this, Aly. It’s a complete disaster and it’s going to take a ton of work to get it in shape.”
Instead of taking me to an apartment complex like I’d anticipated, Jared pulled to the curb and came to a stop in front of a small house.
It was a typical newer tract home, a cookie-cutter frame with tan stucco walls and an arched roof, fronted by a two-car garage. A concrete sidewalk led up to the little overhang that protected the front door.
A For Sale sign had been yanked from the ground and tossed onto the sparse brown lawn. The place was obviously run-down from neglect. It appeared to have been sitting vacant for years.
But it was cute. Homey.
That stirring of excitement inside me whipped into a fury.
“Jared, is this…” I glanced toward him, my words trailing off as I looked back to the house.
I was so thrilled by the idea of Jared and me finding our own place, something that just belonged to us, where we could build memories and our future. But I never thought of it as being anything more than a stepping-stone. Maybe a little one-bedroom apartment that one day we could move up from, expand and grow as our lives stabilized.
I was almost scared to voice it… to hope for this.
Jared climbed from the car and came around and opened my door. Taking me by the hand, he helped me out, his eyes intense as he steadied me on my unsure feet. Doubt riddled his face, although there was no mistaking the underlying hope. His voice was soft, full of question. “It is if you want it to be.”
I swallowed, peeking over his shoulder at the little house, my imagination running wild, too far and too fast into our future.
“Just don’t say anything yet, okay?” Jared shook his head, shutting down the questions fighting for release on my tongue. “I wasn’t joking when I said it’s a mess.” He glanced behind him, before he turned b
ack to me. “Actually, saying it’s a mess doesn’t come close to doing justice to what’s going on in that house. It’s a fucking disaster, Aly, so be prepared.”
He tugged at my hand and started us up through the unkempt lawn, if it could even be considered a lawn. I stumbled a little over the uneven ground, trying to keep up with Jared’s long, impatient strides. “We need to get inside before it starts to get dark. The electricity is off.”
He dug into his pocket and drew out a key ring that held a single bronze key. At the door, he looked back at me with a fading trace of hesitation before he turned to press the key into the lock. Metal scraped as he slipped it in, and the knob rattled as he twisted it free. He pushed on the door. It creaked from disuse as it swung open to reveal what was hidden within.
Jared released my hand and moved behind me. He placed his hand at the small of my back, his warm breath at my neck as he nudged me to enter ahead of him. “Go on in, baby.”
Tentatively, I stepped inside the torn-up little house.
I stood in the entryway to an open living room that extended off to the right of the front door, facing the street. It wasn’t huge, but it was plenty large enough for a comfortable couch, and a fireplace was tucked up against the right wall. The living room opened to the dining area and kitchen that took up the entire back portion of the room, the dining nook on the left and the kitchen to the right. Between the two was a large sliding glass door that led out to the backyard.
And Jared wasn’t kidding.
The place was trashed.
All the carpet had been ripped up, concrete exposed, and the kitchen had been gutted. The only things left in it were cheap cabinets with half the doors hanging from their hinges and dingy Formica countertops. A few holes had been knocked in the walls and everything had about five months’ worth of dust coating it.
But none of that was what I really saw.
My eyes slipped along the living area, up to the high ceilings and across to the large windows that allowed the late-afternoon sun to filter inside. The house was open and warm and inside it had to be about the cutest little place I’d ever seen.
Jared fidgeted behind me. “Like I said, it’s a total mess. It’s going to take a lot of work to get this place into shape.”
He stepped around me, facing me as he walked backward toward the kitchen. The apprehension he’d been wearing before evaporated, the excitement back in his eyes. “Baby, I don’t know if you can picture it finished, but I think this place has a ton of potential.” He turned and gestured to the run-down kitchen. “Obviously, all of these cupboards have to go. They gutted just about everything anyway, so we’ll just rip all this shit out. I can do all that. It’s what I do at work.” He shook his head, seeming to get lost to the plans, to the ideas in his mind, mostly mumbling to himself. “Don’t think there’s much of anything to salvage here.”
He pointed to the cupboards lining the back of the kitchen wall. “We’ll replace all of these with new…” He lowered his hand, held his palm about an inch above the countertops that jutted out from the back wall and blocked the kitchen from the rest of the open room. He ran his hand over the length. “Thinking we tear out this countertop and put in an island with some stools right in the middle?” he said, seeming to test the idea out in his head, to see the way it tasted as it left his mouth.
He looked up to the cupboards attached to the ceiling directly above the countertops he was already tearing out in his mind. “We knock all of this out… open the whole thing up… make it one big room.”
He finally turned to look at me where I’d edged into the middle of the room. “There’s some granite at my job. It was supposed to be used for one of our rehabs, but it was cut wrong… think I can get it to work for the kitchen. It’s really pretty, too, mostly black with some flecks of gold and silver in it. Think you’d like it.”
I nodded, trying to keep up with the flood of ideas pouring from Jared, trying to picture all of this through his eyes, where this passion I’d never witnessed before burned.
“Jared…” I blinked in confusion. “How?”
Jared smiled a little, reading my simple question for what it was.
He shrugged. “At lunch today, I was talking with my boss about us wanting to find our own place. Told him I was looking for a good apartment in a nice area, and asked if he knew of any good places to rent. Told me he was looking to get this place off his hands.” Jared looked around. “He picked it up with the intention of flipping it, but the construction jobs have been too busy and it’s just sitting here. He tossed me the key and told me to go check it out… said he’d carry the loan for us if we wanted to buy it. And we can get the house at a great price.”
Something like pride filled Jared’s face. “He said he considered it incentive to get his best guy to stick around.”
My attention darted around the little house, unable to grasp that this could be ours. Really ours.
Jared grabbed me by the hand. “Come on, I want you to see the rest.” He tugged me down a short hall off to the left of the family room. We stepped into a room probably twice the size of my room back at the apartment. “This is the master… and there’s a bath. It needs to be updated, but it’s functional right now.”
Here too, the carpet had been ripped up, but again, the room was open with a large window running along the back, facing the yard. An arch to the left led into an en suite bathroom. For this little house, the bathroom was huge. A countertop with double sinks lined one wall. Opposite it sat a garden tub that was so large I could swim in it, and a separate shower was tucked in an alcove behind it. A walk-in closet was through a set of sliding doors at the farthest end.
I was pretty sure my mouth had to be hanging open as Jared hauled us out of this room just as fast as he pulled us into it. He towed me along, my hand wrapped snugly in his, and I held on to his wrist with my other hand, securing myself to him in an attempt to keep up with the man who had had something awakened in him.
My heart beat hard and my mind worked faster, trying to process what Jared had put in front of me.
I just want to take care of you.
He had to have said it at least a hundred times over the last two weeks, but I had no clue what that meant to him.
He rushed us back through the main room and into the hall that ran down the opposite side of the house. He ducked into the first door on the right, into a small room with a window that faced the street. “This can be the baby’s room.”
Expectation gusted through me, the fiercest squall of wind that whipped and stirred.
And I was feeling it, all that Jared imagined sinking into my consciousness.
Jared was higher than I’d ever seen him, tripping along with some kind of euphoria that overflowed with ideas and inspiration, burning with the need to create. I recognized it, because I felt it when I had the impulse to draw, the compulsion that I had to press a pencil to paper.
And there was nothing artificial about it, nothing synthetic clouding his mind, nothing destructive bounding through his veins.
This was him… something beautiful that had risen up in this beautiful man.
“Jared, this is —”
“Wait,” he interrupted, his smile wide. “You haven’t seen the best part yet.”
He led me back out, pointing out a basic bathroom across from the baby’s room as we passed. He didn’t even stop for me to explore it, just mumbled through a low chuckle, “Yep, this bathroom needs to be redone, too. No surprise there.”
He came to a stop at the end of the hall in front of a closed door. Gripping my hand a little tighter, he opened the door and led me inside a room that was larger than the baby’s, but about half the size of the master bedroom. The carpet had been torn up in here, too. One of the walls was busted in, and the sliding closet doors had been knocked from their tracks.
But to the left was a huge bay window that opened up to the backyard. Muted sunlight bled inside as twilight edged across the darkening sky. Shadows p
layed along the far wall of the room as the last rays of light were cast inside, danced and meshed with the anticipation beating from Jared’s heart.
I inched toward the window and stared out into the backyard. It wasn’t huge, but it was larger than I expected. A covered patio off the sliding door in the main room gave way to what had been a lawn long since dead in the winter, unmaintained in the many months this house had sat vacant. Just outside the window, planters sat barren where flowers had once grown.
A high block wall rose up around the entirety of the yard to guard privacy.
Right now it looked like nothing, but with Jared and me, I knew it could be beautiful, that we could care for it and nurture it and bring it to life.
“And this… this room would be yours,” Jared murmured behind me.
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