Live (The Burnside Series): The Burnside Series

by Rivers, Mary Ann

  How he had explained that in his home everyone had known him and he had known everyone and every corner down to the sound of seawater splashing on a particular rock, which he hadn’t left until he was near her age.

  His parents sounded—lovely. He talked about them like she talked about her dad, the little bit she could talk about her mom. As if they had something to say to him and could help him along the way. She couldn’t believe, actually, that he hadn’t gone to them since the divorce, and that just went to show how much he must have been hurt by the end of his marriage and how much he wanted to make a life for them here.

  She could easily imagine him falling in love. She wasn’t just teasing when she accused him of mothering—his instinct was to make others feel good and if Jessica had caught his eye so quickly, she must have been completely dazzled and mirrored that dazzlement back to him.

  She knew. She had seen how his face had lit, how he looked so seriously into her, into her face and gaze when he was on his knees and touching her. When he was kissing her. It would be so hard to ever walk away from Hefin when he looked like that, and she would have to. He was ready to go home.

  He stirred, but in such a way that brought him closer to her skin.

  “Hey,” he said. “I dozed off a bit, there.”

  She kissed his top lip again. “It’s okay.” She kissed his nose.

  He opened his eyes fully and pushed his hand back through her hair. The crease bisecting his forehead all the way to the top of his nose was back.

  She kissed the crease.

  “I should get going. I have work tomorrow, but I want to go over to Sarah’s first with some groceries.”

  Hefin sank his face into her neck and kissed her there. “You never told me what’s really bothering you, Destiny.”

  Des brushed her hand over Hefin’s nape. She didn’t want to say. He would listen, he would really listen, and what was better, he wouldn’t tell her what to do. She sucked in a silent breath through pursed lips, needing bearings. Needing to understand what it meant that right now, she didn’t want to be listened to.

  He was too much, after years of jockeying for position in a large and noisy family in a large and noisy neighborhood, his open gaze on her, the quiet intensity of his regard, was too much space to fill with just herself. Right this minute, after sex like that. That inside-each-other kind of sex.

  She slid her hand down his back, feeling the knobs of his backbone. “Hefin?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why now? Why didn’t you go back after you divorced?”

  He sat up, then, and stared over her shoulder for a long time. If any of her past boyfriends had looked like that after she asked a question, she might have retracted it, spared them feeling the way it looked like Hefin did. But they were caught up in good-byes. It didn’t matter. If he wouldn’t answer or told her to leave, it would just be one more question to pile on the pyre of their leaving. Something else that blew away as ashes.

  “It was my fault,” was how he started, and how he ended, after he told her a long middle about unmet expectations and frustration and resentment.

  “Did she know about Beijing?”

  “The internship had just ended, which was why I was in Wales. I had put in for a permanent position with the group, which wasn’t a sure thing, though the references from other members in the group to the other placements I had in for in London and Asia looked pretty good.”

  “I know, but did she know about it? Like how you felt making the sunflowers?”

  He scooped her hair into a loose ponytail, running his hands over it for a long moment.

  “Why did you tell me?” she tried.

  She thought he wasn’t going to answer, then he did. “Because we’re leaving each other before we’ve even gotten started. How I had felt before didn’t factor into the beginning of me and Jessica.”

  “You loved her so much you were willing to say good-bye to what you had just fallen in love with in Beijing?”

  “Yes, I think I did.”

  “Do you still love her?”

  He turned her around but didn’t look at her, just gently rested her head against his shoulder. It was getting a little cool, but she stayed still even as goose bumps started creeping over her arms. “I think the worst part is the flashes.”

  “Flashes?”

  “These flashes. About her. Every once in a while, always when I’m least expectin’ it, I’ll hear about her. She’ll email me a bit of news she knows I’d be interested in, or I’ll run into one of our old friends. A couple of times we’ve had a meal together. I learn just enough about her new life, without me, a little flash, to make our life apart seem unbearably real. The first year after our divorce, I right lived for the flashes. The loss of that daily intimacy was the worst side of grief.

  “Then the realizin’ that all I’d ever have was flashes, and never enough to piece together and figure out what her life is really like now. Knowin’ that years and years from now, I’d still get flashes, and for a while I tortured myself with this. How would I feel the first time I heard she’d found someone? Became a mother? What if she got ill? Who’d be with her? And then I realized her new loves would be with her. I wouldn’t be there, bedside, if she got ill. For some reason, that was a particular bit of torture for me, I’d rub that over the wound of our divorce like rough salt.”

  His accent was thick and his voice low. With her ear against his chest she could hear his voice and his heart at the same time.

  “Is that why you’ve stayed here for so long after?”

  “At first. Then, it was just like I lost all—impulse. I had done this one impulsive thing in my life and I didn’t have anything left but enough for the day in front of me. Then I started carving again. I was a freelancer on a rain roof project for Lakefield State, and the way it was organized, I had a lot of free time. The project ended, and I read what I would learn was an old article about the project at the library. There were pictures of the panels and the carving style stopped me short. Over the next weeks, I followed through on a lot of impulses, for the first time in a long time.”

  He rubbed over her body with the flats of his hands, and she couldn’t help but let it relax her. “Except for talkin’ to you, that day.”

  “When I was losing my shit in the printing carrel.”

  “Yeah. I couldn’t bear it because until then you were so determined and businesslike. Walkin’ by all straight and tall.”

  “What’s in Wales?”

  His hands stilled. “Don’t know yet. I’ve just figured out I need to start there before I ease back into engineering, maybe in Asia, maybe someplace else the group sends me.”

  “How do you know where to start, do you think, to find yourself?”

  He looked at her. “Sometimes when I pull a panel off the wall, I don’t know if I can salvage it. I start by scrubbing away the rot, to see what’s been damaged and what’s hale. If I can still see what the original carver meant the panel to look like, I’ll try to restore it, whittle the little pieces to build it back up, try to make all the joins invisible.

  “In my case, I feel like I need someone to tell me what’s rot. Maybe if I ramble with my mum, dick about with my dad, have them take a good look at me, they’ll tell me, and I can get started on makin’ up the little bits to build myself back up.”

  “So you think you can go home and just stick yourself back on?”

  He laughed. “I don’t know. I guess I do.”

  “What if you’re a great big, brand-new piece of wood?”

  “You do your best to plan, but at some point it’s got to be parted into with a sharp tool. More will be cut away than will be saved, so you just have to start.”

  “We’ve gotten all metaphorical.”

  “The risk of making time with a brooder, I suppose.”

  “We’re actually kind of losing time.”

  She almost wished she hadn’t ever seen him. That she had borrowed an old laptop of Sam’s instead of usi
ng the library’s computer.

  She didn’t want flashes.

  “I’m going to use the ladies’.” She wiggled off the sofa, careful to keep the quilt over him.

  “Oh. Of course. It’s the door at the left down the hall.”

  “Okeydoke.”

  His bathroom was very clean. Very white. She put her clothes all back together. Wondered if the washrags, folded like they do at hotels and in a little basket on the vanity, could actually be used. Since she needed one, she risked it, used the hand soap in the pump to wash her hands, her face.

  She opened one vanity drawer hoping to find a comb, and found an old-fashioned brush, with no handle. She wet her hair and braided it.

  When she finally emerged, he was sitting at the kitchen table, dressed, and he rose as soon as he saw her, like she was a lady entering a ballroom, or something. They stood there looking at each other. He looked away first, to pick up a piece of carving.

  “Do you have a couple of rubber bands?”

  His forehead wrinkle came back, but he went to a drawer in the kitchen. “Small, medium, or document bands?”

  “Do you have rubber bands organized by size in that drawer?”

  “Yes. Engineer, remember?”

  “More and more. Two small ones, please.”

  He handed them over, and she wound them around the ends of her braids. She felt like something inside her chest was going to explode. Say something, she thought. Say anything. Stop thinking. She didn’t know if she was mentally yelling at Hefin, or herself. It had been like this after the last time they were together.

  Inside each other, laughing with each other, perfection, then this extended crappiness.

  “Do you have a corner store around here?”

  He looked up, finally. “There’s a Giant Eagle two streets over.”

  “Great.” She met his eyes, and saw a little hope there. Felt herself relax all over. Good. That’s what they truly needed, just a little hope shoved up under the good-byes. Sweetness.

  “Wanna meet my sister?”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Hefin looked over at Destiny, the street lamps briefly illuminating her face each time they passed one.

  He was a little worried about what he saw in her face. It was too dark to see the full effect of her expression, but her mouth was tight in such a way that the freckles around her lips had disappeared.

  At the grocer’s, she had given him half a list to gather while she gathered the rest. At the checker’s stand, he maneuvered to pay for the bean curd and oranges, milk and a package of vegetarian “cheez,” along with the small pile of canned goods and pasta.

  He had added a rather large package of chocolate biscuits and a box of tea. She didn’t protest, the payment or his contributions.

  She’d been quiet, some part of her with her sister, already.

  She had already been with her sister, directly before she came to him. She had to be exhausted.

  She pulled into a parking lot behind a squat, brick fourplex apartment building. The kind that grew all over Lakefield and represented the architectural imagination of a shoebox outfitted as a shelter for a child’s dolls.

  “We’re here.”

  “Destiny …”

  “I don’t think I want to talk.”

  He couldn’t help it, he laughed. She looked over at him, and she seemed impossibly young wearing braids and clean skin. “What?” she huffed out on a sigh.

  “I’ve gathered you’re not interested in talking.” She hadn’t said a word since she told him what to buy at the grocer’s.

  “It’s just … This is hard. She’s not herself. I don’t even know why I asked you to come because she’s probably going to be crabby, or sleeping, or some other kind of mess and it’s not fair to her to spring you on her. Or her on you. And it’s not like you’re my … Anything, really.”

  “Ah.” As soon as he voiced that ah though, he knew it was the wrong thing, again.

  “Yes. ‘Ah.’ ” He flinched at the strong bite in her tone. “I’m just one fucked-up decision after another tonight. Telling Sarah to move in with me. Telling Sam about it, which means he’s going to take over and make it impossible and totally piss Sarah off. Hurting Betty’s feelings for no good reason. Then, of course, driving to your place in my fucking Master Fucking Symbol of unwieldy and impractical love and attachments to the past.” She looked back at him, and he didn’t let himself look away from what she might say, and anything could be possible.

  She could throw him out, make him find his own way home and he would never see her again. She could voice the unspoken possibility between them, break them open, right there in her Master Fucking Symbol, and he would have no choice but to admit that it was true, all of it, everything he was feeling.

  “I want you, Hefin.” Her words broke open as much as he thought they would. Which is to say, everything.

  There were tears running down her face, which looked blotchy and garish in the sodium lights ringing the parking lot.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, and hated himself. More than he ever had.

  She looked back out the front windshield. “Stupid. I’m stupid. You’re stupid.”

  Finally something he could agree with.

  He reached over and released her safety belt and grabbed her about the waist. Pulled her to him. And since he was stupid, and there was no helping it, he took hold of her face and kissed her. Even worse, he did it entirely for himself. He didn’t wait for her to breathe or sigh or soften, he moved his lips over hers, his tongue over her lips, his heart fumbling and fast and anxious, and when she tipped away enough to kiss over the corner of his mouth, he actually felt the burn of tears in his throat.

  “Destiny,” he whispered.

  “It’s okay,” she whispered back, and put her hand over his on her face, wove her fingers through his.

  He closed his eyes tight and drew her bottom lip into his mouth, and the taste of her was already so familiar, he got hard with a force that nearly hurt. He worried that lip with his tongue, its softness like the softness between her legs, and the thought of that made him feel even more restless and unfastened. So he let her lip go and kissed her simply, and they both drifted into a new kiss, one serious and slow.

  He kept kissing because he didn’t want anything that came after it, whatever it was. He wanted her face in his hands and that was all. He wanted her mouth against his, and the sound of their breath in his ears.

  He wanted her, too. But not what would come after.

  He didn’t want to feel the little pull, the anchor of what she needed. Particularly if what she needed was something he could give her. He didn’t want to feel, when he left, that he was forgetting something. Worse, he didn’t want to feel, when he left, that he was leaving.

  Not like when he left Wales with Jessica, kissing his mum’s temple while she made excuses for his dad not coming out of his shop to say good-bye.

  She eased back first. He looked down at their hands, which had woven together at some point during their kiss.

  She bent her knees up so he was able to wrap his arms all the way around her. The weather had turned again, and a mist of rain was watering the limousine’s windows.

  “So you know who’s really helpful?” Her voice was soft now, a little flat.

  “I can’t imagine. So few people are really helpful.”

  “Carrie.”

  “Your new boss at the library? I’m not surprised, there. Carrie’s a good one.”

  “She’s been sending me to all of these branches this week, so I can talk to different directors about their individual sites and what works and doesn’t work about them.

  “A lot of them have the same kinds of problems, really common problems that have more to do with how the page was originally designed to require certain plug-in updates. But there isn’t anyone to do that, then everything just sort of goes kablooey until they can hire an ad hoc freelancer to fix it.”

  “Lots of kablooey, got it.”
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  She looked up at him, and to his relief, she was finally smiling a little. “Is this boring?”

  He squeezed her. It wasn’t, not at all. “Not at all.”

  “So I was telling Carrie that it would be better, less expensive, if the library thought about putting the job out to bid to a single developer who all the sites could contact when these things happened, but who also could do constant maintenance to prevent the issues. Also, if the branch was ready to add new things, then those things could be dealt with by the same developer that knew them.”

  “Makes good sense.”

  “Right. So I told her about my old company, because that’s what they did, basically. Or what I did for them.”

  “And she told you, ‘why not you?’ ”

  She grinned and pressed her face into his chest. It felt good, because the pressure of her head kept his heart from leaping right out of his chest. “Yeah, she did.”

  “She is a good one.”

  “She is. I mean, it’s not a sure thing. She has to go to the library development board and present the idea with the financial sheet I made up for her, then they’ll have to bid out the job. It would mean I’d make a bid as basically my own business.”

  “Well done, Destiny.”

  “I thought so. And thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “For not letting me totally lose it in the library and introducing me to Carrie so I could dig myself out of all of this.”

  “Are you happy?”

  “With the job? The chance to go for the bid on my own?”

  “Yeah.”

  She was quiet. “I think I am. I’m excited, and it’s so much of a relief after all the months of uncertainty that it’s a little hard to tell if it’s happy happiness or happy end-of-ramen-noodles. But I am good at this thing that I do. I know it’s not fancy, not like what my brothers and sister do, not like what you do, but I like solving people’s little problems.”

  “I think it’s rather noble, actually.”

  “Yeah?”