by Bethany-Kris
“Are these what Chip meant?” Charlotte asked from the end of the aisle.
The various packs of cookies she held out for him to see all looked like a sure-fire path to eventual diabetes to Malachi, so he shrugged in return. “I guess.”
She proceeded to walk forward and unceremoniously dump the packs of sweets into the cart. Right on top of the milk, bacon, cheese and bagged fruit and veggies Malachi had organized oh, so carefully.
Charlotte didn’t appear to notice his unimpressed stare as she headed back down the grocery aisle chattering on about something else Chip asked her to pick up that had entirely too much sugar. Someday, his friend’s high metabolism would level out.
He heard the forties could hit hard in that regard. Thank fuck Malachi had a few yet to go before he was also there. He wasn’t quite ready to give up his twelve-pack of beer a week.
In the rear aisle of the smalltown grocer, Malachi found the fresh cuts of meat that would make up the better part of their evening meals. Steak, hamburger—he wasn’t looking for any white meat. He’d save that kind of food for a different weekend.
By the time Malachi made it back to the front of the store where two cash registers waited without employees at the ready to help him check out, Charlotte came back around. He’d gotten everything from the cart piled onto the rolling canal—including the armful of packaged tarts, donuts, and mini cakes Charlotte found in the far side bakery section—before the woman with the red shirt and black pants stocking a display made her way around the register. A nametag with the store’s name and red swirl logo hung from a lanyard around her neck.
“All ready?” she asked.
Malachi nodded. “Yeah, that’s about—”
“Oh, pop,” Charlotte said suddenly.
As high pitch as ever.
Even the employee flinched.
Charlotte never acted aware of her voice, probably because she’d been living with it her whole life. Chip managed to bring the woman around more than twice so Malachi made a real effort to be respectful even if she did squeak like a dog’s toy when she got excited.
It was what it was.
Malachi saved the quietly blinking employee further awkwardness by telling Charlotte, “No, what Chip needs is to eat real food. I think he’s got enough junk, huh?”
He gestured at the cash register and the items beeping through as the proof. What more needed said?
Even the woman with LORA on her nametag gave a soft laugh. The amount of sugar going through really was ridiculous.
Charlotte smiled, but still shrugged. “I’m gonna get the soda.”
“Whatever, hurry up,” Malachi called at her retreating back when another customer moved in behind him in line.
“Is it always quiet?” he asked Lora.
She continued scanning and bagging items, cold with cold, veggies together, as she replied, “On the weekends, sometimes. Morning is ... boring.” Her eyes widened and rolled with playful annoyance. “Doesn’t really matter which day of the week, though.”
“I could see that.”
The sleepy town of Plaster Rock had a quarter of the population of the valley, one main road running straight through from one side to the other, and the only real source of work came from the lumber mill across the river, or the grocer and convenience stores. Besides the small elementary and middle-high schools, situated in the middle and end of town, respectively.
It was a forty-five minute—if one illegally speeded—from the tiny valley town where Malachi had grown up and called home, so he hadn’t spent much time in the neighboring, rural village. At most, he’d been inside the welcome center, a large log cabin in the middle of town, and the corresponding hockey rink just across the parking lot for tournaments between schools.
That had been a long time ago, though. One he didn’t particularly care to go back to, either.
“You’re not from around here, I guess?” Lora asked.
“Close, downriver,” he replied.
Their polite conversation continued even after Charlotte returned with three different two-liter bottles of soda.
“He needs a choice,” she’d said as an explanation.
Not that Malachi had asked.
Charlotte and Malachi took two bags per hand, and he replaced the cart in the corral at the front of the store on the way out. Holding the door for Charlotte on the way out, the woman who had begun checking out the man waiting in line behind Malachi waved to him from behind the cash register.
Politely, he waved back to Lora.
“Should have asked for her number,” Charlotte noted as they crossed the parking lot.
For a moment, he pretended like she hadn’t said it. More often than not, that was Malachi’s go-to option for situations like these.
Charlotte, unfortunately, took his blatant silence as an opportunity to continue the conversation. “Oh, are you and that Gracen woman dating? I think Chip said—”
“Chip probably didn’t say much,” Malachi interjected, knowing it was the truth without needing Charlotte’s confirmation.
Partially, because Malachi had not given his friend a lot of details about his private business with Gracen. Chip didn’t have the whole story from beginning to end, so anything he might have to say would be purely speculation. He wasn’t the type to peddle in the gossip mill, but especially not with a woman whose main purpose was to keep his bed warm.
Malachi would bet on it.
“Sorry,” Charlotte mumbled as they approached the rear of Chip’s SUV. “I wasn’t trying to be nosy.”
Malachi opened the back hatch and placed his bags inside. While she did the same, he told her, “There isn’t a lot to tell, but I probably wouldn’t even if there was, okay?”
Charlotte nodded once. “Got it. And for the record?”
“Hmm?”
“Chip just said you don’t really see a lot of women, so.”
His eyebrows lifted high. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Maybe that you must really like her?”
“Huh,” he said, unwilling to offer more about his friend’s astute observation.
“Crap,” Charlotte muttered, eyeing the store over her shoulder. “We forgot a case of water. I’ll grab it?”
“Go for it.”
Malachi didn’t have a preference, and the lodge’s well water was far better than anything he drank that came wrapped in plastic.
Once he sat alone in the Cadillac, behind the driver’s wheel, Malachi’s phone lit up with a call in the middle console. He picked up Gracen’s call with something different than his usual.
“We’re just about on the way back, babe.”
He didn’t mean to, really.
It slipped out easily.
“Are we ...” Gracen trailed off on the other end of the phone before trying again, surer in her tone when she spoke the second time. “We’re doing something, aren’t we?”
“Something?” he asked, confused.
“Us—you and me.”
Oh.
So she hadn’t missed the babe.
Or the fact they kept coming back to this mutual place. Those thoughts and ideas weren’t only in his head.
“Do you want to be?” Malachi questioned, thinking that was the safer route than a direct answer to Gracen’s question. Things weren’t black and white between them, but he’d been told before that nothing good came easy, either. Wasn’t it safer for one’s feelings to test the waters before diving right into possible heartbreak?
Shit usually went that way for him, anyway.
Gracen took a few seconds to reply.
A lot more than a few.
“I’d rather talk about it face to face,” she said. “It’s doesn’t seem fair to do it all over the phone.”
What, decide they were a thing?
Label it?
That didn’t seem hard.
Except it was entirely possible that he’d also overlooked something. A flag she put up. Some signal he missed.
Malachi tried not to overthink it. “Well, I’ll be back shortly. What do you want to eat, anyway?”
Her quick response, teasing and adorable like always, eased Malachi’s inner anxiety.
“Depends on what you got,” Gracen returned.
She was serious, though.
Even asked for a list.
Malachi ran through the items he’d picked up at the store and what he planned to make with the food. By the time he finished, Charlotte had returned with a case of water she put in the backseat before climbing into the front passenger side.
“Let’s just do breakfast tomorrow morning,” he heard Gracen try to convince Chip in the background of the call. “Haven’t you ever had portobello mushrooms on hamburgers before?”
Her sigh echoed as she came back on the call.
“We’ve made a deal, he’ll eat breakfast tomorrow in the morning,” Gracen said.
Malachi scoffed out loud but was secretly pleased that Gracen had managed to find a rapport with Chip in his absence. At least, that’s how their exchange came across to him as he listened in.
“What’s he planning to get out of it?” Malachi asked. “The deal, I mean?”
Gracen repeated the question.
Malachi didn’t need her to hear the answer.
“Well, fuck, I ain’t cooking, am I?” Chip boomed.
A very valid point, too.
Chapter 22
“So, are we gonna talk about the us thing, now?” Malachi asked the same way he might question if Gracen wanted a glass of water.
At the perfect time, too.
Her mouth, full of the best cheeseburger—-so cheesy, mushrooms for days, and seasoned meat she couldn’t get over—Gracen had ever eaten, stretched into a knowing smile. Malachi glanced her way with a chuckle, and his eyebrows bounced up and down.
“What?” he asked. “You thought I forgot about that?”
Nope.
Not for one second.
Malachi didn’t expect an answer from Gracen while her mouth was full, and instead, focused on his friend strolling down below with a fresh six-pack of his favorite beer cans in hand. He waved to Chip when the man stopped at the end of the dock to glance back toward the lodge and the two sitting on the high, rear veranda.
Charlotte, already in the back bench seat of the canoe with a picnic basket at her feet and a paddle across her legs, waited patiently for her counterpart. She seemed more interested in the still, quiet river. No doubt, Chip’s chosen location for his lodge had something to do with the river’s calmer nature in this neck of the woods.
Gracen finished her bite, and set the burger back to the plate balancing precariously on her bare knees. She used the napkin laying across her frayed jean shorts to clean her fingers and wipe her mouth. Malachi could definitely see Gracen was able to chat without showing off her chewed food, but he continued staring out at the river.
Only his profile gave her a glimpse into what might be running wild inside the beautiful man’s mind. She found his nerves in the way he chewed on the inside of his bottom lip and even his restlessness in the fast beat of his fingertips against the arm of the chair.
Did he have his walls up high like hers? She had the strangest urge to climb over every one despite being unable to say she would let him do the same. Oh, she wanted to, sure. She craved for him to climb inside the hollow walls of her heart and make a home there, but it scared her, too.
Up until the moment when he’d said those simple words over a phone call—were they something, an us?—while she was sitting beside someone else who was practically a stranger, Gracen had been fine to do what they had been doing all along together. It didn’t have to be something. That made things easier even if feelings did come into play. She could enjoy Malachi as a person and continue to understand the boundaries between them.
She didn’t consider that he’d want to change it.
Or how much she’d want to say yes.
“So, us,” Gracen said.
She meant for it to sound silly.
Playful, even.
Inside her heart, saying it was anything but those things.
Malachi still laughed under his breath, and scratched at the underside of his jaw before grinning her way. “It came out way better when I said it.”
“Maybe it sounded like that in your head,” Gracen returned with a wink.
All in good fun.
Malachi seemed to get it, but as his smile softened, and his stare swept up and down her just a couple of feet away from where he sat in a matching chair, it became clear the fun had turned serious for him. “Is that how you feel, though? Like it only sounds good to ourselves—in our heads?”
It had been a shamelessly long time since Gracen found herself enraptured with the attention of a man, and it showed when the intensity of Malachi’s stare and what his question implied forced Gracen to play with her food for something else to do. Life had stepped in the way to keep her busy and focused on other—far more important things—than relationships and sex. Really, she was grateful because maybe she wouldn’t be as independent and capable of taking care of herself had she spent the majority of her adult life depending on someone else to get her through it.
“I want to be able to do this with you without thinking—or worrying—something bad is going to happen because I’m not used to feeling like this with someone else,” Gracen said, offering part of her truth knowing it didn’t fully explain the whole picture to Malachi. She had to figure out a way to do so without unintentionally making him believe that he was the cause of her reluctance to even have a conversation about being in a relationship. It wasn’t about him. She was the broken one here. “But you should know that there’s not one part of you that makes me feel the way I do. That’s all inside of—”
“Like it’s all doomed, anyway,” he interjected.
She just stared at him, silently listing the things about herself and her life that proved the doomed theory to be true. Her parents died when she was young; distant family that never cared; a grandmother whose health didn’t recover; and the perfect relationship that had always been made of thin glass. All of it worked—or would—out the same.
None of it was good for Gracen.
“I try not to take the don’t bother route to prove myself wrong, but that’s never worked out, either.” Gracen shrugged. “I can’t help it. I look at everything that way. All I see ahead of me is nothing. I guess you should know that because I can’t promise it’ll change. You deserve to know if you want to be with someone who can’t see their life in ten or fifteen years—I mean, if you expect for it to include you. I don’t like what I don’t know, Malachi.”
It didn’t have to make sense or be rational. Gracen managed to deal with her bleak outlook for the last handful of years—what were another few, after all?
“Don’t worry,” she added to him the longer their silence stretched on, “I’m aware that’s probably something I should take to a therapist.”
Gracen had never pulled the trigger on doing so, though. How would it help to sit across from another human and spill her pain and trauma when none of it had really stopped her from succeeding or achieving? Just to say it was real? That it hurt? She could do that without paying someone two-hundred dollars or more an hour.
Oh, sure, she had weak moments of private breakdowns in her bedroom and an ingrained inability to hope for a future, but other people came out of the same situations Gracen had lived with far worse scars than hers. She considered herself lucky.
Malachi frowned. “Gracen, nobody knows the future. That’s the point. It’s what lets us make what we want of it, babe.”
She’d heard that before.
It didn’t help.
“The whole it’s yours, because it is, okay?” he asked.
She still didn’t answer.
Malachi sighed, and placed his plate with a half uneaten burger to the table on the other side of his chair. Seconds later, he reached across the space sepa
rating them and his fingers curled around hers. At her wrist, she’d started subconsciously massaging the tendons and soft tissues because it eased the heaviness that always seemed to settle down on her shoulders when she was forced to think about things that were easier ignored.
Maybe that was Gracen’s problem. The real reason why she needed therapy, or something. If not for pretending like her problems, as internalized as they were, didn’t exist then that would be all she thought about constantly. Who could live like that?
Malachi’s thumb stroked circles over the knuckle of every finger on Gracen’s hand. He said nothing, but didn’t stop grounding her with his touch until her own self-soothing gesture slowed enough that he could take her hand off her wrist and into his. Both his hands cupped hers, then, wrapping them in warmth that seemed to soak right up her arms.
But she couldn’t lift her head.
He’d see her tears.
Why bother to cry?
It also didn’t help a damn thing.
“Hey,” he whispered. Gracen pulled in a sniffled breath but managed to lift her head all the same. Malachi smiled encouragingly, his thumb still roving back and forth against her hand. “Better?”
Not a lot.
“Just enough,” she said.
Sometimes, enough was all she needed to get through it. Wasn’t that what counted?
He laughed, and it made happiness explode in her chest, but sadness chased it. Here she was in this amazing place with an equally special man who smiled at her like it was as easy as breathing, but she couldn’t help the hurt, too.
Gracen drew in a shaky breath, finding the will to ask Malachi, “Have you ever hated being human?”
“Yeah,” he said, “because sometimes it fucking sucks.”
Good to know she wasn’t the only one, then.
Eventually he released her hands—well, one of them—to reposition the plate with a sadly forgotten cheeseburger to the side. Hopefully, it would still be warm when she felt like going back to it. At that moment, just the man kneeling in front of her took the spotlight.
