Live (The Burnside Series): The Burnside Series

by Rivers, Mary Ann

  Sam was quiet. “Remember when they brought her into the Emergency Department when she first got in her accident?”

  “Of course.”

  “I’m sorry I was so rough on you that night. It was too soon after Dad, maybe. And I gave Dad such a hard time once he started getting sick, blaming him even, for the years of smoking. His diet. Maybe I was blaming him for Mom, like it was my chance to just let him have it for not taking her in sooner, and I shouldn’t do this, blame people. Blame Sarah, because—I don’t want things to …” Sam stopped. And Des felt sick.

  “You think Sarah is in really bad shape. You want to be nice to her because you don’t know. Like, you don’t know. You’re worried. In a bad way, a really bad way. Sam, please tell me, please, please tell me what you’re thinking.”

  “I think it’s a good idea to move her in with you. For now, I think it’s a good idea because it will be easier and help you both out with expenses. And yeah, I work a lot. I’m going to try to sell it to her as something that will give her more freedom, not less.”

  Des looked down the street again. It had gotten much darker while she talked to Sam. Most of the light was coming from the houses themselves—blue and yellow light—from porch lights and room lights and televisions. The air smelled like the crabappple blossoms getting started and the cigarette smoke from after-dinner smokes in the alleys.

  All of it, as familiar as her own face.

  She looked north, up at the parish steeple. It looked black against the dusk, the tallest thing in the neighborhood. Beyond it was the bulky downtown skyline, just starting to light up.

  More freedom, not less. When they were all in it together. In the center of everything they knew.

  “I love you, Sam,” she said, and they hung up.

  She walked into the street and yanked the traffic cone away from the back tire of the limo, threw it back into the passenger bay. Pushed the garage door back up from the roof of the limo. It didn’t take long to get the borders of her neighborhood in her rearview.

  It took longer to remember how to breathe, even with all the windows open.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Hefin hadn’t cut himself in months, but his door buzzer hadn’t gone off in months, either, and digging into a small work of carving with a very sharp knife inside of a perfect silence is a good way to carve yourself when startled so completely.

  He fumbled with the call box while holding pressure on his thumb with a paper towel.

  “Yes?”

  “Hefin?”

  He held down the door lever and reached over to open his front door, waiting for her to walk up, heart throbbing in his thumb and his throat. He hadn’t seen her since he reluctantly left her bed last weekend, untangling his legs from hers, carefully brushing away her hair where it had dried to his forearm after they’d fallen asleep in each other’s arms.

  She had woken him up, actually, reminding him she wanted to visit her sister. While he had dressed, he had tried to think of some way to make the rest of their day work together. He didn’t want to get in his car and drive home and invent tasks to fit into the emptiness of the day. Not while he still had sleep marks in his side from her sheets and her smell on his body.

  He had hated walking away, not living a life familiar enough in hers to offer to stay, to do the little things he could do to create slack in her weekend, ease. The things a real lover would do, a boyfriend. Someone not occupied with the business of leaving.

  Then he hated wondering if he was bothersome, calling to say good morning nearly every day this last week, listening to the strain around the edges of her voice, unable to soothe it.

  He had felt equally exhilarated and altogether too awkward and inexperienced to manage their affair.

  It had taken speaking the litany of her name over and over, the feel of her body against his, the sounds she made into his neck, to keep him in that moment. Without her, he was tipped into something like a sensory-deprivation chamber. He wasn’t sure which end was up, if the ground would meet his feet, if the sounds he heard were noises broadcast from the world or rising up from the inside of his body.

  It was claustrophobic, nearly. But a claustrophobia with no memory of there being wide-open spaces to escape to. And nothing had been worse than calling her in the mornings, so certain he was bothering her that he knew his voice was defensively terse, then hearing her carefully polite responses in return.

  By now, he had actually accepted that perhaps the time they had already experienced together was the time they would have—a few hours somewhat beyond an introduction, an acknowledgment that if the world were different, what was between them would be, too.

  He couldn’t settle and was spending an evening carving the most complex finial his dad had ever taught him, in miniature scale, besides.

  He had been glad for his quiet work in the library, the hours of focus bringing up the designs in the panels. When even the carving couldn’t distract him from her absence, he had the panels to restore—the tedious work of cleaning, fitting small replacement pieces, patching in wood fill.

  After that, there had been only tea drinking.

  And now she was coming up.

  He gripped the doorframe, forgetting about his thumb so that just as she reached his landing, she found him cradling it and trying to stem the burst of new blood he’d opened from the cut.

  “Oh, Jesus.” She took his hand from him by the wrist, and the remains of the paper toweling. “You’re hurt. Where?”

  “My thumb. It looks bad, but it’s just a wee cut.”

  Her hair was loose and fell over her shoulders as she refolded the towel and pressed it hard into the meat of his thumb. They stood silent, watching her hold pressure.

  “I’m sorry I barged in on you.” She kept holding his thumb, but ran her free hand over the inside of his wrist. The touch made him soften all over.

  “No. Anytime, of course.”

  “I would have called, but my phone …”

  He brought her face up with his free hand so he could see her expression. She was tired, flushed. “I mean it. Anytime. You’ll never bother me.”

  She smiled a little, then pushed harder on his thumb. “How’d you cut yourself?”

  “Carving.”

  “Dangerous work.”

  “It seems.”

  She wrapped her arms around her middle and looked at him, not quite meeting his eyes. Something was obviously wrong.

  She seemed ready to collapse to the floor but also keyed up, somehow. She had on work togs, but they were wrinkled, like her day had been long and she’d never gotten a chance to change. “Come in, then.”

  He’d figure it out.

  She stepped by him, and looked around. Jessica had been quite pleased with their flat—she liked the finishes, granite and hardwood, but he always found it a bit cold. He did like the little kitchen table that they’d found at a once-a-month flea market held near Destiny’s neighborhood at an old drive-in theater. He guessed Jessica hadn’t loved it though. It was one of the few items she’d left behind.

  “Your place is nice.”

  “Thanks.”

  She gravitated to the table and sat down, looking at the set of handcarving tools he had unrolled from their leather case. She ran her pointer finger over their handles, and when she picked up his unfinished finial, looking it over, he busied himself putting the kettle on.

  “Wait.” Her gaze caught on his thumb, still bandaged in the paper towel. “We need to take care of your cut. Do you have antiseptic? Let me see it.”

  She stood up and peeled the towel back. When the towel was free, she sucked a breath in through her teeth.

  “Bad, huh?”

  “It’s pretty deep, but it’s right in the pad of your thumb. I don’t think you’d want stitches there.” She looked close. “Which one cut you?”

  She meant the tools, he supposed. He leaned over and showed her the little curved blade mounted into a wooden handle the size of a fountain pen. “Th
is one.”

  “Yikes. Sharp. Do you have super glue?”

  “Yeah, of course. In my kit, actually.” He handed her the old canvas shaving bag next to his tools, and she unzipped it and rummaged until she found the vial of glue.

  “Wash really well with soap and water.”

  He washed up and she pulled the two kitchen chairs together so that they sat knee to knee. “Don’t stick your own fingers together,” he warned her, trying to lighten the gravity between them.

  She picked up his hand again. “Don’t worry, my brother showed me how to do this when I cut open my knee cleaning up a broken glass.” She pulled the hem of her skirt up and lifted her knee. “See? Not even a scar.”

  He didn’t look at her knee so much as he looked at the shadow along the inside of her thigh.

  “I trust you.”

  She met his eyes for the first time since coming into his flat. The mica shards were stark against the irises, which were pale and silvery. She was a bit bloodshot. The last time he’d seen her eyes this way it was because she’d been crying. “Destiny?”

  She looked away. Uncapped the vial, and picked up his hand. “It will sting, though. Sorry.”

  “It’s okay. I’ll bear it manfully.”

  She looked up at him again and gave him a smile, a real one. Just like that first day in the library, it felt like winning something.

  She dropped the glue into the cut carefully, and it did sting, but watching her, her body close, was such a tenderness that the sting just brought up all of the sweet dark feelings in his chest and arranged them against his skin like salve.

  When she softly blew her breath over the sealed cut, his skin tightened into thousands of sharp prickles all over, and the resulting sensation that tugged at his cock was too gentle, yet, to be completely pleasurable. The ache of wanting her was leaning a bit too hard against him.

  “I shouldn’t blow on it, you’ll get all germy.” She put the glue down and brushed her fingers into the cup of his palm, around and around.

  “Don’t let me spook you, but may I ask why you came?”

  She looked up again. “Don’t know, actually.”

  “You seem like you’ve had a long day, and please don’t take that to mean you don’t look anything but beautiful, because you do.”

  She tipped up and her mouth was over his.

  Her hands around his face, in his hair. Her kiss was hard, but soft, and her tongue was involved right away, hot at his lips, sliding against his when he opened for her. She nudged his head into an angle and went deeper, slower. Then pulled back, his top lip in her mouth.

  “I remembered why I came over.” She whispered. Then she touched the inside of his lip with her tongue and he opened for her again. Her thumbs were moving over his jaw, her fingers pressing into his temples and it felt so wonderful.

  Her hungry mouth kissing him exactly as he had been yearning to be kissed since he last kissed her, all his life, really, the sweetness of his cock hardening in degrees every time she made that sound in her throat.

  He went to put his hands in her hair, but moved them back, remembering the glue.

  “Touch me, Hefin, put your hands on me,” she said this against his neck, pushing her own hands down over his shoulders.

  “I’m worried about the glue, your hair.” Other than a flush high on her cheekbones, into her temples, she was so pale. Her freckles were in such contrast to her complexion that they seemed to be floating above her face. He used his left hand to push the hair away from her face. “When was the last time you ate, then?”

  “What?” She squeezed her eyes shut, and the stripes of color in her cheeks faded.

  “Destiny, darling girl, come sit. Let me put the kettle on and have a pizza brought around.”

  “Not why I’m here.” But she let him stand her up and walk her to the sofa. She sat, her back straight despite the deep cushions. He knelt and pulled off her shoes, squeezed each of her insteps a few times; and then her shoulders rounded and she leaned back, pulling her legs underneath herself.

  Hefin started to ask whatever most obvious question he could come up with first. What happened today? What is making you sad? Did you really just come to me for sex? He could hardly think around that last question, but there was something needy and blind about her kissing, when all of her kisses before had leveled him with no less intensity but were more present. It wasn’t that he was unwilling to be her release, it was that he found himself wanting to know what she was trying to untie herself from.

  “What do you like on your pizza?”

  She looked over, gave him a little smile. “Do you have brothers or sisters?”

  “No. My parents thought they couldn’t follow perfection, I suppose.”

  She laughed, just a little. And his heart lifted, just a little, because his heart was determined to make a mess of things, it seemed. “Actually, I’m adopted.”

  “Yeah?” She tilted her head at him, interest chasing a little of the glaze from her eyes.

  “That’s right. By birth, I’m a London mutt, I’d guess you’d say. A whole mix-up of nationalities and races. But Mum said she named me Hefin, raised me right in the village, so I’d always know I was Welsh.”

  She smiled. “I like that.”

  “Me too.”

  “The thing is, I came over here to sleep with you.”

  He choked on his own breath. “I see.”

  “Probably not.”

  He stared out at the dark through the glass slider that led to the balcony, but he only saw his own reflection, quite rough around the edges. “Your pizza?”

  She caught his eye and held it for a long time. Then settled her head into the crook of her elbow on the back of the sofa and grinned. “Everything. Get everything on it.”

  “I’m not—” He looked up at the ceiling cursing every single year he spent in awkward adolescence. Awkward adulthood, for that matter. “Opposed, you see.”

  “To a pizza with everything on it?”

  “To making love with you.”

  She snuggled a little more into the sofa and smiled again. “Order our pizza. Make some tea.”

  “Everything?”

  “Yes, I want everything on it. Everything they’ve got.”

  So he made the call, and watched her from the corner of his eye. She pulled the quilt down that he had on the back of the sofa and curled under it, and he couldn’t tell if she was just quiet, staring into the middle distance, or asleep.

  He walked quietly over. Her eyes were closed and her face was slack in a way that suggested sleep. Her eyelids looked blue, almost, and he was betting she was exhausted. He risked waking her to secure the quilt around her and pull down one of the sofa cushions for her head.

  He scribbled a quick note and left it for her on the coffee table where she would see it if she woke up.

  The night was cool, and it was drizzling again. Her limousine was parked on the street, and when he passed it on the way to the pizza place on the corner, he made sure it was locked, a habit born of his small-town nature transplanted to a large city.

  When the pizza wasn’t ready, he started for, and retreated from, the CVS a few doors down, and finally forced himself in with his breath held and then bought the very first box of condoms that he laid his hands on that weren’t the brand he’d used with Jessica.

  When he came back with the pizza, it was well and truly raining, the box a bit soggy. He divided it onto plates and arranged their meal with heavily sugared tea on the coffee table.

  “Smells good,” she said, yawning and stretching. Her clothes were hopelessly wrinkled, her hair was clumped behind her ears. But she already looked better than she had in his doorway, drawn and far away.

  She scooted forward to eat, and for a long time, that’s all they did. He found that he was as ravenous as she seemed to be. She drank all of her tea and asked for more, and the pleasure he felt from that shook him a little.

  She scrubbed her face and hands with a paper tow
el and sank back into the cushions again, looking at him. “How’s your thumb?”

  He held it up for her inspection. “You’ve cured me.” He cleaned himself up too, and leaned back next to her.

  “Thanks for feeding me.”

  “Of course.” He picked up her hand and laced each of her fingers through his. He wished he had a stereo to put on some music. He had a radio in the kitchen, but he only listened to it in the morning to get the news. He looked up at her, and she smiled at him. Squeezed his hand. He squeezed hers back.

  “My sister isn’t well. Like, really, really not well. I want to move her in with me and she’s not exactly protesting.”

  He played with the hair at her temple where it was standing up from static from the cushions. “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m tired of looking at people and seeing nothing but their mortality. That’s what I’ve been thinking about, here on your couch while you fuss.”

  “Tell me what you mean.”

  “When my dad was in the hospital, even before that, all you could see, even in his face, was the cancer. Even when he was still basically himself. When it was at the end, and we were on the hospice floor, we looked at a lot of photo albums together. He wanted to look at pictures of us as kids, and of my mom. It was impossible to believe that he was the same person in the pictures, even, and all I could think was, ‘He’s dying. This is my dad, dying.’ And I would look at the pictures of Mom, and think ‘She’s dead, she’s already gone, and wherever she is, if she’s anywhere, that’s where he is, even right now.’ ”

  He moved closer and put the quilt over both of them.

  “Sarah, she’s—not there, but she’s not here either. And I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to bring her back and it seems like everyone has a different idea of that. But I can see where what’s in her face could change, to this other thing. Where she’s gone. There’s being alive. And then there’s living, you know?”

  She didn’t cry, but those stripes of red came back across her cheeks, into her temples. “You came here,” he said.

  “I came here because when you touch me, you pin me down. You make me feel everything, right where I’m at. And there isn’t anything in your face but me.”