Live (The Burnside Series): The Burnside Series

by Rivers, Mary Ann

  She could press into his hard-on with the heel of her hand and listen to his heart speed up under her ear.

  She could hold on to his hands and push them under her skirt.

  She could hold herself, where the ache was sweet, push herself into his thigh, move against the pleasure as it traded between them. His kiss. Her kiss. His hand. Now hers.

  She didn’t bother to protect her own heart from breaking. She could feel it cracking everywhere except the places it had mended before. The old cracks always hold. But there is always a brand-new way to break your heart.

  * * *

  She tripped over something in the dark and giggled.

  “Jesus, Destiny,” Hefin near whispered, “be careful.”

  She fiddled with her dad’s old lantern and finally figured out how to get the wick to move up. She hoped the bottle of kerosene she found with it was still good.

  “Where are you?” she whispered.

  “Light your lantern, first.”

  They’d made love on the couch, slow and easy, then moved to her bedroom to sleep. She’d woken up, a couple of hours later, to his penis hard against the crack of her ass, his hand low on her belly, and his lips on her neck.

  Something about how he’d held her hip and slid into her, in one upward thrust from behind, like he’d been lying there, thinking of it, thinking of how he’d fill her, move into her, in just that way, made her sleepless, after. Every thrust had been slow, the slowest at that last little bit before he was all the way in, and that’s when he’d press against her clit and hold his finger there, while pushing himself inside, before sliding away.

  She’d had nothing to hold on to but the sheet underneath her and his hip where the muscle hollowed and bunched with those slow, deep, hard thrusts.

  It had taken forever and ever, and she hadn’t even known she was coming until those thrusts had gotten even slower, more forceful, and he had to tell her, in a voice that had sounded far away because she was lost in her own pleasure, to let go of his hip and touch herself so he could move his hand by her shoulder and brace himself over her.

  She came, and came, her belly against the mattress, her clitoris against her middle fingers. He kept her full of him with shorter penetrations that never completely slid away from her body, all through it, whispering her name against her neck.

  It had left her giddy, and feeling something like an echo of fullness and love all through her.

  After, she had turned around and wrapped herself around him, their pointy elbows and knees everywhere, and kissed whatever came near her mouth as they laughed. He eventually got serious and held her hands over her head, all her fingers woven through one hand of his, and he kissed her slowly, softly, barely tasting her.

  She was glad he had made love like that to her in her own bed. That the phantoms of Des and Hefin loving each other like that would haunt the place that she slept. It would be easier to revisit them in her imagination, later, in the unimaginable future when he left.

  He hadn’t wanted to sleep either, so she’d said they should work on her dome.

  She couldn’t turn on the back porch light, or Betty’d be onto them, so she dug out her dad’s lantern, the one he used to light during blackouts in the winter, when the lines would ice over where they twisted like crazy from house to house in their chaotic neighborhood.

  She lit the wick and placed the glass back over the flame. It gave off just enough light to pool the yard with something transparent and golden and glittery, like instead of light, the yard was thick with stardust that was bouncing around in light from the moon, from the single streetlight at the end of the alley.

  Hefin was crouched in the middle of her dome. She’d been working on it here and there, the process addictive once Hefin had showed her how to weave the twigs. The walls were almost eighteen inches high, now, and she had been wondering how and when to start make the slow slope of the walls so that the structure was a dome, and not just a tube. She had pulled the twigs out of a space to make a way to walk in, and wasn’t sure how that would eventually be the door, exactly.

  The light revealed that Hefin had been working on it, even in the dark. He was in his jeans, shirtless, barefoot, and he had dismantled her last row and was reworking it. He looked up at her in the light.

  She had opted for a shirt, his shirt, and no pants. So they kinda matched.

  He grinned.

  She left the lantern on the back stoop and joined him inside her dome.

  “Now’s when you best start countin’ a little,” he whispered. “Keep track of how many joins you do all the way around. Do that many for two maybe three rows, then reduce the joins for the next row by however many rows underneath. So if you do two rows with twenty joins, do eighteen joins for the next row. It will start to tip in. When you’ve got enough of an angle you can eyeball, start addin’ a vertical twig every other join or so, like this.” He showed her how he wove it in. “Those will support the angle. At the end of each row where your little door is, do one like that, too.”

  She reached over the wall to the pile of twigs she gathered almost every day, dropping from the huge tree. He looked at the stack she made for them to work with, then squinted up at the tree.

  “I know,” she said. “It can’t be good.”

  “It’s so close to your house, Destiny.”

  “I guess Betty’s friend, who’s a gardener, said it was sturdy, it’s just the top new growth that’s failing and falling down.”

  He squinted up into the dark branches again. Then looked back down at their work. “You have it, then?”

  “Yeah. It’s time to start counting down.”

  She shivered, a bit at that. Wondered if Hefin would be around to see her dome all finished. She had joked about them making love inside of it, and now she wanted to. She wanted to have another place where they haunted around. Maybe she would plant sweet peas all around the base so that this summer, it was covered in pretty vines and flowers. She wanted to see it all heaped over with snow this winter.

  They wove twigs together, back-to-back, until they’d get to the door, and have a little kissing break and start again. The night was quiet, and as her eyes adjusted to the dark, she looked around her yard in the night—the dark thatches of weeds by the fence where her little rotary push mower didn’t go, the fat kettle of the Weber grill she never used, the initials M+B inside a heart in the concrete pad under the stoop. Shiny green eyes looked back at her from the alley. Opossum? Raccoon?

  She wondered how many times she’d seen all these details, over her whole life. If she’d ever seen them in the dark, like this. She didn’t think so. She liked it. Liked the pretty halo of lantern light and the beautiful man beside her that made everything familiar feel new.

  She counted joins. Snapped twigs into equal lengths. Watched Hefin crouch and weave. Kissed him when they reached the doorway together.

  He stopped suddenly, and leaned toward the house. “Destiny? Is that your mobile?”

  She arrested, too. Her heartbeat suddenly in her throat. She heard it, too, through the screen door, vibrating brokenly against the kitchen counter.

  She raced in, tripping over a corner of the dome, feeling twigs unweave and snap under her foot.

  Remembered that the last time she’d seen this yard at night was when Betty had her and PJ here, watching them while her mom was in the hospital. She’d sat on that back stoop, unable to sleep, waiting for her dad. He’d come, eventually, and sat next her, then picked her up and put her in his lap while he wept.

  That had scared her more than her mom’s dying. Her dad’s broken sobs into her hair.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Hefin had never been to a hospital, actually. He’d never been more ill than his village surgery had trouble managing, and growing up he had been a cautious and watchful child—not the sort to get up to things requiring stitches or plasters.

  Hospitals were awful.

  He couldn’t work out how it had been designed to seem quite
reasonable-looking on the outside yet nothing but an unintuitive warren of hallways, doorways, and wide-open areas filled with chairs on the inside.

  No one walked normally inside this building. They either walked too fast, swinging open inexplicable double doorways placed at random intervals, or wandered confusedly, trying to stop the people walking too fast for assistance.

  The colors were dreadful and also without explanation. One area would be a horror of brights in large geometric swaths, and another would be endless expanses of dirty-looking pastels. Finish materials were of the type purchased by contractors in bales and rolls.

  There was no accounting for the smells, which alternated between repulsive odors and food aromas so quickly and so without warning that he was starting to form an association.

  It was overbright.

  It was loud.

  It was where Destiny needed to be.

  So he was here, sitting in one of the wide-open areas filled with ugly chairs, holding Destiny’s tense and overly warm body against his side and coming up with anagrams using the letters from the unexplainable words INTERVENTIONIST RADIOLOGY stenciled over one set of double doors.

  Introvert.

  Yoga.

  Veneration.

  Groin.

  Togas—goats, for that matter.

  For a moment, they’d seen Sarah, a dark head on one end of a rolling gurney, two pale feet on the other, a wreck of tubes and equipment piled in between.

  It had been steered by a set of the walking-too-fast people, one of whom was Sam, who was yelling at all the other walking-too-fast people in a hoarse and angry voice.

  Hefin wished he had a good excuse to use a hoarse and angry voice.

  It was already eight in the morning, four hours since Destiny received a call from PJ, Paul, he’d introduced himself as, telling him he was following the ambulance he’d called for Sarah when he found her looking blue and gasping for air after Sam called him to see her because he was stuck at work.

  After Destiny had called Sam, and told him to be with Sarah so Destiny could spend time with Hefin.

  He squeezed Destiny a little tighter to his side.

  Destiny’s friend Lacey was somewhere behind the double doors, too. Not even family was allowed unless they happened to be angry doctors, but Lacey was a nurse and received permission since she “floated,” whatever that meant, at this hospital.

  There wasn’t a single place alongside his body where he couldn’t feel Destiny, but she felt miles away. Her mouth had been set in the same position for hours. She hadn’t cried even while her eyes had gotten more and more red. She refused coffee, refused a packet of biscuits he bought from a machine for her, refused even water.

  She just stared at the double doors and passively let him hold her against his side.

  Paul was in a chair across from them.

  Paul was built a bit like Hefin, actually, tall enough, a bit skinny, but where Hefin often felt that he looked like the shore rat he was, raggedy, Paul looked like a film actor.

  Paul was even wearing sunglasses indoors and made it look somehow normal.

  One might say that both Paul and Hefin had curly brown hair, for example, in the same way one might say that a turned-over packing crate and an Eames were both something to sit on.

  If possible, Paul was more quiet than Destiny. Neither had truly said a word, but Paul’s quiet was of the sort that created an atmosphere around him that quieted everything within several paces of where he sat. Also, the man did not move. Not a flicker.

  He recalled Destiny in his posture, straight and formal. He could be a man anywhere between twenty and a well-preserved sixty, but Hefin knew him to be younger than Destiny, who was ten years younger than he.

  Enigmatic was an understated observation about these Burnsides.

  “PJ?” At Destiny’s whisper, Paul suddenly moved—pushed his sunglasses into his curls and leaned forward—both of his were the same blue as Sarah’s one blue eye.

  “Can you check your phone? Just in case Lacey or Sam managed to text?”

  “I have the chime volume all the way up, Desbaby.”

  “I know. But sometimes the hospital kind of messes everything up? Could you just check?”

  “Sure.” He pulled a huge smartphone from his jeans’ pocket and slid it on, shook his head. Destiny tightened beside him even more.

  “How long has she been in there?”

  Paul shrugged and turned to look at the double doors. “A couple of hours?”

  The doors began to push open from the inside and both Paul and Destiny started to stand up. Hefin put his arm around her waist—he was worried that fatigue and lack of food would buckle her knees.

  Thank Christ, it was Lacey.

  She walked toward them, a pretty woman he’d hardly met with big navy eyes that tipped down at the corners and a mouth whose corners tipped up so that she seemed wry and knowing.

  He liked best how she loved Destiny, how she fussed over her. In the middle of all the chaos when everyone had arrived in the Emergency Department, it was Lacey who stopped and checked in on Destiny, held her hands, talked to her softly, gave her a little packet of tissues.

  He liked this Lacey with her messy hair and easy laugh.

  Paul liked her too, a great deal it seemed, and he wondered if everyone had noticed that or if it was just that Hefin could pick another sad bastard out of the crowd.

  Paul approached Lacey first and wrapped his arm around her elbow to lead her to a chair like she was the Queen of England. Lacey smiled, but made a cross-eyed face at Destiny.

  Everyone had noticed.

  As Lacey pulled a notepad out of the pocket on her scrubs, Hefin watched a blush spread from her neck.

  Hmm. Maybe Paul would not be a sad bastard forever.

  He caught Paul’s eyes and raised his eyebrows. Paul looked away, but there was something like a smile of acknowledgment that emerged, first. He thought he’d like to have a pint with Paul, and the thought surprised him.

  The last pint he’d had with anyone was an awkward round with his crew at the library. They’d done their best to include him in their banter, but he’d had a hard time mustering it. It wasn’t that he didn’t enjoy their company. He did. His crew was talented and funny. But by the time he’d assembled his crew, he knew he was leaving Ohio, and it’s hard to make friends with one foot out the door.

  Everyone always told Hefin he was the duplicate of his dad. Amazing, really, as Hefin was adopted, and mixed-race, though it was as if those in his small town forgot that more and more over the years. Hefin and his dad had always shared odd similarities. Like the social reluctance. Left-handedness. Sweet tooth. A preference for ebullient women.

  When he’d brought Jessica around, already falling, he’d thought his dad would understand, and he had, he truly did, and Jessica and his mum had got on so well. But something never completely cleared from his dad’s eyes. He didn’t ask what it was then.

  He wanted to know, now.

  He wanted to sit in his dad’s workshop and show him what he’d learned. His dad would love that. He was already over the moon that Hefin had found a way back to carving, and his dad had spent more time on the phone with him, sent longer emails, than he ever had. True, they were mostly about carving, but Hefin knew what his dad was trying to say.

  Come home.

  He wanted this, what he saw here in the waiting room, the instinctive closing of ranks and clasping of hands.

  He also wanted Destiny’s hand in his, their fingers woven together, when he went.

  He had been so close to answering her differently when she asked him, almost asked him, if he would consider staying. But then he thought of how he had grown so ugly, resenting Jessica. He thought about his mum and dad, who hadn’t seen him, really seen him—video chatting didn’t count—in years. He missed them. He missed home. He missed the sea. He missed sticky toffee pudding at the Harbourmaster Hotel and taking the sailboat out and sleeping with the window open to the
sounds of the sea. There was something he needed from home.

  And then, once he’d scrubbed away the rot in Wales, the world was ready to make a home, to make work, just for him.

  Yet, he had been so close to answering her differently because there was something that was home inside of Destiny.

  If only all of Destiny’s home weren’t here.

  If only he didn’t know precisely what it was to walk away from home.

  If only a dome made of twigs could be the whole world and all of home for both of them.

  If only Sarah could be well, really well, and erase the terrified worry from her family’s eyes.

  If only tea and biscuits fixed everything.

  If only he weren’t a goose person.

  Because though his heart had been reduced to a motor, it was enough to power it in the direction of the light shining from Destiny Burnside.

  His heart had been greedy, too, falling in love with a woman like this. A woman who could somehow give him back what he had lost, his percent, she’d said. Of course, the exchange was to lose her. Terrible rate of exchange. Terrible love.

  He held her about the waist. He could feel her heart beating everywhere, her muscles stiff, and it scared him. In bed, in the wee hours this morning, he’d awoken because she had been so soft and still in his arms. It had been so long since he had fallen asleep with a woman against him he had actually been unable to sleep from the comfort of it. Her heart had been slow and steady, her skin almost overwarm against his under the covers.

  He’d wanted her again, felt wretched for wanting her again, but then she’d relaxed against him so completely, it had ached. It had taken ages, it seemed, of softly touching her, hands over her arms and belly and hip. Her breasts. But then she was right with him, so suddenly and so utterly.

  Over her, his face in the back of her neck, her hair, he’d be overcome with that feeling that he was fully present. He hadn’t been reworking his past trying to find the spot where he could have made it come out right. He hadn’t been flying away to some moment with the sea in front of him and everything else behind him.