Ghost in His Eyes

by Carrie Aarons

  Ghost in His Eyes

  Carrie Aarons

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Carrie Aarons

  Copyright © 2017 by Carrie Aarons

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Editing done by Proofing Style.

  Cover designed by Okay Creations.

  There were ghosts in the eyes of all the boys you sent away. They haunt this dusty beach road in the skeleton frames of burned-out Chevrolets.

  Bruce Springsteen, Thunder Road

  1

  Blake

  Highways bring people in, and they keep people out. They make places accessible, and they also hide places, that don’t want to be found, away from the world.

  There is a certain rhythm to highways. People rushing in their cars to make it from one place to the next. Time ticking down, a GPS blinking an estimated time of arrival at them from the dashboard. No one aware of the journey of the other cars around them.

  These traffic-locked, road-rage producing mechanisms are things I avoid at all cost. I can’t bring myself to actually enter onto the ramp, get into a lane, and set myself to a destination.

  Maybe that’s because I live in a place that few can get to, and few want to leave once they’re here.

  The sunrise crests over the sandy, grassy hills, painting everything in its wake a beautiful orange hue. It spills into my living room, through the floor-to-ceiling windows and moves outward, towards the ocean. There are no sounds in the air, the serene quietness a staple of why I remain in this purgatory that I should have left ten years ago.

  Carova, North Carolina is a prison and a haven. With no paved roads, it is the final frontier as tour guides and lame vacationers like to call it. I just call it home.

  My tiny town, if you can call it that, lies on the outskirts of the popular vacation destination of the Outer Banks. But there are no grocery stores here, no real roads … my house doesn’t even have cable TV.

  There is just the quiet; such resounding silence that it forces me to sit in my grief and pain most days until my ears buzz. But at least I have them, the only creatures who understand why my life will always be stuck in the past, unable to move forward.

  Lucy neighs from the ground below, and I pick up the yellow ceramic coffee mug I’ve been sipping out of and take it out on the porch. Sitting in the old wooden rocking chair closest to the rail, I pick up a rhythmic pace and train my eyes on the creatures below.

  Like me, they’re isolated, wild in their nature and unfit for human contact. They roam alone so often that they forget what it’s like to have to be in the space of another being. But not Lucy though, not today. Her foal follows a few feet behind her, awkwardly clinging to its newfound life. I wasn’t lucky enough to witness the birth, but the baby can’t be but four weeks old. It is feeble but adorable in the way only babies can be, even though it’s three times the size of a human newborn.

  The foal is jet black where Lucy is a rusty chestnut, and when the older horse hears the creak of my rocking chair, she glances up. In her eyes, I can tell she was already aware of my presence. Even from two stories above the ground, they know my smell and my aura. Horses are a therapeutic breed of animal, just a glance into their eyes has you exploring depths within yourself you didn’t think were possible to reach.

  And that’s all we ever do. Look at each other. Communicate by body language. I’m not allowed to speak to them; it’s a rule laid out by the North Carolina Wild Horse Association. These horses have been here for centuries longer than human beings even existed on these shores. They’re untrained, unbridled. By even putting up homes here, we’ve already disturbed their natural habitat. That’s why I keep my chatter, my noise, to a low minimum.

  I never need to speak to them anyhow; Lucy especially can see right into the crevices and empty spaces of my soul. Spaces where love and unadulterated light used to live. She sees the shell of a person I am now, knows that the agony and grief have wrapped themselves so tightly around my heart that at any moment, the husk of an organ may just give out.

  Carova is my prison and my haven. I grew up here, I have memories from this land that could shine in the darkest of places. It is, to me, the most beautiful place on earth; a little village of people and wild horses coexisting between the bay and the sea.

  But it also holds the most painful moments of my life. Experiences that have broken me, bound me tight and sealed any possible recovery out of my body forever. I’ve resigned to stay in this place, to serve out my sentence. As if seeing the places where I used to be happy will serve as a just punishment for the half of my soul that died ten years ago.

  And the one that slices my skin, peels away the layers of my cold heart the most … it sits a hundred feet away at the top of the hill that overlooks my house. I see it every night before bed, and every morning as the sun’s rays peak over the slanted, black roof.

  The house that has sat abandoned for fifty years. The place that holds all of my firsts. And the very final, horrible last.

  2

  Blake

  It isn’t often that I venture into town. Typically, I schedule a trip once a month to get groceries, stock up on hygiene products, possibly get a hair cut, and pick up any packages at my P.O. Box.

  Getting out of Carova isn’t just mentally uneasy; it’s also an island unto itself. Surrounded by water on three sides, and sand on the other, you have to know exactly how to drive onto the beach highway as to not get stranded.

  Loading up my four-by-four all wheel drive Jeep, I deflate the tires a little so that they’re perfect to roll through the sand.

  My home, which has been passed down for generations in my family, looks much the same as the rest of the homes in Carova. Three stories, the bottom of which is on stilts and is an open-air garage, or carport. It used to be sunshine yellow, but in its old age is now a faded beige. The top two stories have wrap-around porches, and I spend a lot of my time on the one on the third floor that faces the ocean. It doesn't have the flair of the new model mansion monstrosities that have popped up all over the Outer Banks as of late. But it's got charm and history, and I love it.

  Whistling for Rhett, my black lab, I get in and buckle up
. He runs out from the back of my property, almost smiling in his glee to go for a ride in the car. Once he's locked into his own seatbelt, I back out of the carport and onto the sandy path that serves as a road between the dunes.

  The wind whips through the doorless truck, sweeping up my blond hair and tossing it everywhere. The air has a colder note now in September, but it's still mild and sunny on the coast of the Atlantic. Glancing over, Rhett is sniffing the air like it's a drug and he is high as a kite. I catch my own eyes in the mirror, guileless and such a light blue that my father used to say he could see into my skull.

  Being that it's off-season, the beach highway is deserted. And it's literally that; a series of tire tracks going north or south, marking up the beach where the wild horses come to play. The state considers it a highway, since it's the only way in or out of Carova, and during the summertime you can find tourists stuck in the sand. Opportunist locals will help tow them out, but for a steep price of one hundred and fifty dollars a save. One of my neighbors does it, and says he makes about six hundred dollars a day in peak months. The money doesn’t matter to me and my nervous system can’t take much human interaction, so I avoid these parts during June, July and August as much as I possibly can.

  The car coasts and bumps through the sand, and in about ten minutes, I maneuver the wheels up and over the dune that leads to the first paved road into Corolla. As soon as the car hits blacktop, I wish I hadn’t come. Other cars drive the same road, and although it’s only one or two vehicles I see in the off-season in rural North Carolina, my nerves rattle and the isolation that has settled into my bloodstream begins to defrost. Sure, I see the random assortment of neighbors or tourists who come and go from Carova throughout the month, but I spend almost every solitary second to myself.

  That’s how it’s been for almost the last four years. Since the last flickering light of love on the abandoned landscape of my life burnt out.

  Gritting my teeth and baring the unsettling storm moving through my bones, I give Rhett a treat and keep him buckled into the car. “I’ll be back soon, my handsome. You stay here.”

  On a Tuesday at ten a.m. in September, the Harris Teeter is nearly empty. That’s why I chose to come out today, getting all of my work done late into last night so I could pack a whole day of errands in outside of Carova.

  Making quick work, my cart is full of fresh vegetables, fruit, snacks, meat, toys and food for Rhett, shampoo, soap and all of the other things I need to get me by another month on the last frontier. I throw two paperback romance novels and three bars of Cadbury caramel filled chocolate for pleasure. I’m a simple woman, but even I have some vices, albeit very measly ones.

  An older couple smiles at me as I pass them, and my lips tip up in greeting. The gesture feels strange on my mouth, and I realize I haven’t genuinely smiled at another person in far too long. Maybe I do need to get out more, this isn’t so bad.

  Except I’ll think that, and then I’ll try to bring my laptop to a coffee shop, even one down here in the off-season, and someone will cough. And the women at the table next to me will be talking loudly about their husbands, complaining about their perfectly normal lives. And a man will be toting a toddler around, frustrated when the child doesn’t eat politely or keep his voice down. The noise and chatter will grate so harshly on my nerves that I won’t get anything done, and banish myself back to my own personal Elba.

  There was a shift in the stale air of the grocery store, just as I rounded the corner towards the guest services desk.

  When a hurricane was approaching the shore of the Outer Banks, you could feel it. The male horses sensed it, taking towards the woodsy inlands and protecting their harems, or packs full of female horses. The air tasted different, fueled with crackling electricity and pent up frustration. Hurricanes brought destruction and devastation.

  My own personal hurricane was standing mere feet from me, and I never felt him coming. The ground should have shifted; I should have felt his presence coming from miles away. But I wasn't attuned to him, not anymore. Not after tens years.

  And still, he could topple me like a sandbag wall in the face of an indomitable wave. Attacking my heart and lungs from the inside out until I was wheezing, drowning in every emotion I thought I'd tucked safely away.

  His presence had sought me out, urged me from my isolation and trapped me at the exact moment it knew I'd be near.

  Carson Cole was back. And I already wanted him gone.

  3

  Carson

  The wild horses of the Outer Banks were maybe more famous than the place itself.

  Tourists flocked from all over the United States, and even other countries, to come to North Carolina and stand on the beach near creatures that were so untamed; you couldn’t touch them or speak to them. The mere beauty of them was so breathtaking, so rawly moving that it was like watching the world paint the most astonishing landscape right in front of your eyes.

  When I was a little boy, I would wake up at the first lights of dawn to ride my bike to Carova beach and watch the wild horses prance into the water. It was my favorite place on earth, sitting on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean, watching life being lived.

  And then it became the place that shook my existence so brutally to the core; there was no remedy to the destruction that had occurred.

  She looks just like she did the last time my eyes held her in them. Broken. Haunted. So poignantly lonely that no amount of love in the world could soothe her damaged soul.

  Of course, Blake Sayer is astonishing. I could almost never look directly at her; it was like staring into the sun. The rays from her sunflower hair, the heat of her caramel-colored eyes, the way her full peach lips burned as they touched your skin, how the freckles on the bridge of her nose stayed in your retinas even when you closed your eyes.

  The clerk at Harris Teeter is trying to get my attention, saying “sir” over and over again. But I’m transported back, no longer standing on the bleach-clean grocery store tile, but kneeling on creaky floorboards the first time she gave herself to me. Her smooth skin, flushed cheeks and trusting eyes. The sweet song of her moans, the soundtrack of my entire life. Her breathless words, four letters that encapsulated and sunk my heart from any other option but drowning in her.

  “Sir, here is your money order.” The clerk pushes a paper into my hand, and my eyes snap back to the present.

  A reality that Blake is no longer in. If I didn’t hear the screeching wheels of an escaping cart, I would have thought it was a dream. But fate had always found a way to entrap us, shove us into each other’s faces and make everything a struggle. It would figure she was the first person I saw the moment I set foot back in town.

  “Thanks,” I mumble, my feet locking me to the spot.

  My brain gallops at a hundred miles per hour. When I’d made the choice to return, of course Blake had been the first thing at the front of my mind. But I hadn’t planned to even see her, at least for a while. She didn’t want to see me again in this lifetime, of that she’d been pretty clear.

  The reverberating pain of seeing her causes echoes through my skin, tiny pin pricks of agony throughout my six four frame. I’m a tall man, I always have been. But standing under the confused, feral gaze of the girl who held every memory of mine in her hands was daunting, and I’m left reeling. She’s also no longer a girl, although she didn’t possess the innocence that tags along with that word even when she was of the age she could be called it.

  Blake Sayer was as wild as the horses that owned the shores she lived in, and she’d run away with my heart the day I’d turned seven years old.

  Sucking in lungfuls through my nose, I tried to calm myself in the middle of the grocery store I’d spent many early teenage years getting kicked out of. In the off-season, there wasn’t much else to do at night other than goof off in the local stores or get into trouble on the beach. And I’d done both of them in fantastic and tragic fashion.

  In all honesty, I shouldn’t even really be out
this far on the Banks. My parents had moved south, to Rodanthe, once I’d left. Their Golden Years’ Nest, as they liked to call it, was a four-story house overlooking the almighty sea. I was due back there in an hour, the time they were expecting me to arrive from Boston.

  But I had to come, had to see those horses. I wanted to sit out on that sand again, tempt fate, open the scars of my past and let them bleed into the foamy surf.

  This place held the most quintessential pieces of my youth, and I had known for years that someday I’d be forced to return. So when I received the call that my father’s company was going to be sold if I didn’t come take the helm, I shackled the armor to my heart, took a deep breath, and bought a one-way ticket from Logan International to North Carolina.

  Picking up any other essentials I needed, I paid at the front after I figured it was safe and she’d fled the store. The Honda Pilot I’d rented was stuffed to the gills with my life’s possessions; everything I owned was loaded into that car. My exodus from Boston had been unexpected, although my return to my childhood home had always been an inevitable one.

  The drive to Rodanthe is easy, the car gliding through the empty roads as the balmy, salty breeze floated through the windows. I’d missed it here. A simpler life, no noise or pollution or masses of people. I loved Boston, too, but there was something that spoke directly to my heart about being back home. James Taylor had it right when he sang that in our minds, we are always going back to Carolina.

  The Welcome Wagon is officially pulled out when the rental car’s tires crunch over the gravel driveway of the house in Rodanthe.

  “Gus, look who’s here!” My mom talks to their four-year-old golden retriever, whose tail wags as if he fully understands what she’s saying.

  “Hey, guys.” My smile spreads to my cheeks, my heart, and sends a buzz through my body. It’s been a while since I saw my parents, and I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed them until they were standing right in front of me.