“Yeah. They met. Had a kid. Now they have a life. But it just…”
“What? Seems wrong? Like they’re forcing it?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t know. He doesn’t want to marry her?”
“I’m not sure.”
“He’s your best friend. You don’t know these things?”
“Maybe I do,” he said. “And maybe it’s not your business.”
He inched toward me. I turned and faced him.
So cozy. Comfortable. But the couch… the couch… couch…
“Why don’t you tell me what’s on your mind, love. Seeing as you’re going through drinks like water… this could get interesting.”
“Don’t try anything funny, Josh.”
“The last thing I am is funny,” he said.
That comment made me shiver in all the wrong ways and wrong places.
I backed away. “I’m waiting for you to talk. That’s why I’m here. That was our deal.”
“Right,” Josh said. “Our deal. You’re going to admit something first. About that story you wrote. The one you gave me to read.”
“Okay?”
“That wasn’t just about talking animals. That was you and your mother. And she fought hard for you, love. She was stuck in that horrible world and was ashamed she could never be brave enough to walk out… but she never wanted that for you. So she pushed you to write stories and you did so as a way to honor her. And in a way to try and get her to walk out. You thought if you wrote the perfect story, she’d get up and leave. Take you with her. Start a new life somewhere else.”
I swallowed hard as my eyes filled with tears. “You really think that?”
“It’s all over the story, Amelia.”
“Yeah, well, if that’s the case, then I’m not a good writer at all. Because it didn’t work.”
Josh moved toward me. “I’m sorry it didn’t work. But that doesn’t mean you’re a bad writer.”
I swallowed hard again. “Josh… please…”
He reached out and touched my face. His thumb stroked close to my eye, waiting for a tear that I wouldn’t let fall. I was stronger than he could imagine. Even if he made me feel comfortable enough to feel weak.
“Do you want to know how I got into drawing and painting and all that shit?”
“More than anything else,” I whispered.
Josh moved away from me and walked away from the windows. I turned my head and watched the way he carried his beer bottle. In his jeans. Barefoot. A t-shirt that wasn’t afraid to hug his body and show off everything I wanted to touch.
“My grandmother raised me, love,” Josh said. “It really wasn’t fair for her to have to do it either. But there was nobody else to take me in. To take care of me. And I think I wanted to do everything possible to make her toss me out. For her sake. Not mine.”
“Where were your parents?”
Josh looked over his shoulder at me. “My father disappeared. He always did. My mother held things together. A car accident took care of that though.”
I gasped. “Josh…”
He walked to the kitchen and put his beer bottle down. He opened a cabinet and brought out something stronger.
“She worked too much and never got any sleep,” he said. “So one night she got some sleep. Behind the wheel of her car.”
My heart was already starting to ache.
But what did I expect? It wasn’t like I had met Josh at a normal place. We were both always broken and walking the streets. Maybe in a way looking for each other. But we were too young then.
Now… everything was different, yet the same.
Chapter 24
Puzzles and Pieces
NOW
(Josh)
“She had already done her life sentence,” I said with a laugh. “You know? Raising two boys basically on her own. My grandfather was an alcoholic who drank himself to death. I mean that literally too. And when he went, it just shook everything up. I wasn’t around for that though. My father and my uncle were drunks from the time they were teenagers. I don’t even know where my uncle is right now.”
“What do you mean?” Amelia asked.
“He took off after…” I cleared my throat. “He just left and was never heard from again. No idea where he is. Not that I really care. Now, about painting. Let me get back on track here. Sorry.”
“Don’t be.”
Amelia had slowly worked her way to the kitchen.
She touched my arm.
She gripped my arm.
Her hand slowly inched down toward my wrist and my hand.
I pulled away.
“My grandmother loved to paint. She loved to doodle things. Funny because a lot of her friends, they knew how to sew and stuff, you know? She couldn’t do that. But she could draw. She could paint. She could draw everything. People. Animals. Landscapes. She would paint on these pieces of canvas and then sell them at the local flea market. That’s how she paid for plenty of the legal troubles I caused.”
“Oh, Josh…”
I put up a hand. “Stop. Don’t do that. There was this one cop who got me one night. I was drinking and walking in the middle of the road. He stopped me and I ran my mouth off. I took a swing at him. I wanted to go to jail. I wanted to force my grandmother to shove me away. This cop - Duke - he punched me so hard in the stomach I thought I was dying. He slammed me against his car and held me by the throat. I look back on that moment now and I realize that he had a thing for my grandmother. He was protecting her. He knew she’d never kick me out. So, he screamed at me. He made it very clear that if I fucked up again, he’d kill me. That he’d make it look like an accident or out of necessary force.”
I took a drink from the bottle and laughed.
“That was intense. I always respected Duke for that.” I looked at Amelia. “He died of a heart attack about a year later. And he never once said a word to my grandmother. Could have been something there. He would have fiercely protected her. And she would have had the chance to feel what it’s like to be loved. But that’s life, I guess. So anyway, I went home that night and I walked from the kitchen to the back porch. It had all these windows. This ugly red carpeting. And that’s where my grandmother painted. I stood there and watched her. Just the way she moved her right hand. The way she moved her head. The way she hummed and just focused on what she was making. It just caught me off guard. So I watched her paint.”
“That’s why you started?” Amelia asked.
“Not even close, love. I went to bed that night and left her alone. When I saw her painting again, I asked her some questions. Part of me didn’t want to invade her alone time. She never got any time to herself. Not with me around. She took care of so much for so many people. The crazy part was, the second I started messing around with paints and all that, I was good. Really good. I never knew I could do that.”
“A natural.”
“Passed down from the greatest, maybe.”
“So let me just ask this… I’m trying to picture this, Josh. You and your grandmother sitting side by side, painting pictures together. Or you are drawing and she’s painting…”
“Exactly.”
I saw the look wash over Amelia’s face. A dangerous look. Her eyes wide and almost puppy dog like.
“That’s adorable,” Amelia said. “I hate that word. Shoot.”
“Stop,” I said. “It’s fine.”
“Describe it to me.”
“What?”
“I really want to picture it, Josh.”
“Why? So you can write about it?”
“No,” she said. “I swear to you. Everything you’re telling me now is for me only.”
“So, this is a private one on one, huh?” I asked.
“Of course. So I can fill in the gaps of what I don’t know about you. The stuff that’s been driving me crazy for a long time.”
“Is this you confessing that you’ve thought about me all these years?”
I stepped toward Amelia and she
was fast to put her hand out and stop me. Her hand against my chest wasn’t going to stop me. I’d do the same thing to her. My hand to her chest. Feel those curves…
“Please,” she whispered.
“She would sit in her chair and paint. I would sit on the floor with my legs stretched out. My back against the wall. The floor was hard, unforgiving. She offered to rearrange things, but I didn’t want to mess up what she had there. And we’d talk. About everything. Everything in life. I’d watch the way she would paint and sketch. I would mimic it.”
“That’s killing my heart. I didn’t realize… I mean… what a happy memory for you to have. A happy time.”
I slowly put my hand to Amelia’s and peeled it off my chest. I brought her hand to my lips and kissed the back of it. I slowly moved my fingers and put the palm of my hand flat against hers.
“Not even close, love,” I whispered.
“What?”
“It didn’t last as long as you think.”
“What are you talking about?”
My eyes met Amelia’s. On the surface, sure, the story I was telling was good. Happy. One to remember forever. One to never forget. But that moment of life only paved the way for good and bad to collide.
“Amelia… I started to draw, sketch, and paint… and that was right about the time my grandmother no longer could…”
There were a thousand days mixed into my story that I left hanging behind. Left on the shelf like a bottle of booze I swore I’d only touch on a holiday or for some kind of celebration. Those were the days that pieced together another puzzle. That was for a different time though.
I looked at my hand that had been touching Amelia’s hand.
“Answer me honestly, love,” I said. “Are you going to keep writing for that woman?”
“I don’t know. Honestly. She had an idea or two, but I don’t know. I don’t know her. Who would read it. If I would have a chance to make something out of it. It’s…”
“It takes a piece of you to do it,” I said.
“Yeah. That’s a good way of putting it.”
“I remember the first time I saw it happening to her,” I said. “Her right hand twitched. She made this extra brushstroke and didn’t mean to. The look of fear and anger on her face. She covered it up. But it kept happening. It took a month before her paintings started to look different.”
“What do you mean?”
“Parkinson’s,” I said.
“No.”
“Of everything she had and lost… it wasn’t fair. I wasn’t the greatest of help at that time either. I had gotten involved with Murph and his crew. And I had this girl on my mind…”
“Did you?” Amelia asked.
I grinned. “You have no idea, Amelia.”
You eased a lot of pain, Amelia. But before you there was Delilah. There was what my father did. The horrible things…
“So, while you were telling your friends we were having sex, you were dealing with your grandmother being sick?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Josh… why didn’t you say anything?”
“You were in your own hell. I needed to protect you first. It was dangerous where you were. And what I told Murph and the guys… I had no choice.”
“I know that. I’m not worried about that. What happened to your grandmother?”
“She got worse. By the fucking day. The only thing she wanted was to watch me though. She’d sit in another chair and watch. She pushed me to never stop. To think of new ideas. To create with my heart. I hated every second of it.”
“No, you didn’t…”
“Of course I did. She was dying. She was shaking so badly that she couldn’t eat. The one thing she had for herself she couldn’t do.”
“She had you.”
“And I…” I gritted my teeth. “Yeah. She had me. Until she was gone.”
“So that’s why you do it,” Amelia said. “That’s where it all came from.”
“I guess so,” I said. “That’s why I told you I took off. That night with you…”
“You had so much going on in your life, Josh. And I didn’t know.”
“I told you the truth then.”
“It hurt. To see you leave. And then you were really gone.”
“There was no choice. There were things running through my head. What I wanted to do…”
Amelia swallowed hard and her lips fluttered.
I knew where the conversation was going next.
So I moved at her, to stop her from asking anything else.
Enough was enough for one night.
The only way I could think of keeping her question from being asked was to steal it.
With a kiss.
I held her tight against my body. I tasted the whiskey on her lips and on her tongue. My hands ran up the sides of her body, following the natural curves that made every muscle in my body tighten as I ached for her in a way I never thought could happen. Not just an urge, but a need.
She broke the kiss and put her head back, letting out a breath and a sigh.
My lips touched her neck, my nose smelling the sweetness of her skin.
She clawed at my lower back through my t-shirt.
I kissed up to her ear and brushed my nose against her earlobe, then paused for a second, realizing where this was going.
We were using the pain of the past to try and fix the present. That was a road I had been walking for a long time and it never worked. It never fucking worked. Acting like a drug with a high that lasted a few hours, maybe all night, but by morning, it was the same.
“Josh,” Amelia whispered.
“Talk to me, love,” I whispered into her ear.
She jumped and giggled.
I pulled her closer again.
My hands were over her shirt, at her sides, my thumbs resting just under the swell of her breasts.
“I have to sleep here tonight,” she whispered.
“Already planned on it.”
“I don’t want to sleep on the couch,” she whispered.
“You’re not sleeping on the couch, Amelia.”
“Then where am I sleeping, Josh?”
“In my bed. Where I can keep you safe.”
“Josh…”
“Don’t worry, love, it’s just whiskey and sleep.”
She smiled.
We both knew that was a lie.
It would never be just whiskey and sleep.
Our last goodnight kiss was the tenth kiss.
I kept count.
Which pissed me off.
I was not the kind of guy to keep track of how many times I kissed a woman. Not to mention I was kissing Amelia that many times for that long, in my bed, and nothing else was happening. My hands were strong yet tame, respecting the way she would touch them if I started to move too far up or too far down.
She was torturing me in a way she didn’t calculate on doing, but I understood it.
Getting closer felt inevitable, but that didn’t lessen how risky it was for us.
Our last kiss was my lips to hers.
My last kiss was my lips to her forehead.
I whispered for her to get some sleep and she rolled to her left side and fell asleep.
I watched her, letting the flood of memories hit me.
It took me back… sitting on the edge of her bed so she could fall asleep when she was afraid in her own house. The way her room looked. She had tried so hard to make her bedroom look clean and normal, like a normal girl. But it had been impossible. The look and smell of her room and the entire house was just bad. Just that vibe that the people who lived there weren’t good people.
I hated that she grew up there.
I hated it even more that I couldn’t do anything for her then. My home life was just as bad, if not worse. Those pieces of the puzzle I left out of my story were big ones. Pieces that defined me. Pieces that stuck with me. Pieces that left me writing that letter to Delilah that I lost. The words she’d never see. The
words I should have never written. I should have written a letter to someone else. Or just kept my words to myself.
I looked at Amelia as she slept and gritted my teeth.
That was the bigger problem… all the words.
And all the words floated through my head all night.
Being in Amelia’s presence was soothing. But it was a dangerous soothing.
My eyes shut and opened over and over until the sun came up. The first sign of light creeping through the windows, I crept out of the bed and went to make Amelia coffee. She started to stir, so I put a hand to her shoulder.
“Sleep, love,” I whispered. “I want to bring you coffee in bed.”
She let out a purring sound and grinned. That half smile while she was half asleep was deadly for me.
I growled under my breath.
A second later and I wouldn’t have gotten out of the bed at all.
I walked across the hard floors and caught the reflection of myself in the window.
It was a new record for me.
A woman spent the night, and nothing happened. I was making her coffee instead of making plans for her to leave.
Better yet, I didn’t want her to leave.
I didn’t want to look at the clock and think about time or what needed to get done for the day. I wanted to turn the world off and just be with Amelia. Tell her everything else she didn’t know. Touch every strand of hair and every inch of her body. And when the words ran out, there was plenty more I would tell her with my mouth that didn’t require words.
As I stared at the coffeemaker spitting coffee into the pot, my hands curled tight against the counter.
I looked over my shoulder and saw the outline of Amelia’s body wrapped up in my blankets.
Wanting to stay this morning was one thing. That I could handle.
What I couldn’t handle was what raced through my mind.
Amelia was the kind of woman worth loving.
Chapter 25
The Sound You Don’t Hear
NOW
A Letter to Delilah Page 15
