Today, Tomorrow and Always

by Bailey, Tessa

  “Did you get into a lot of trouble on this street when you were young?”

  “Only the usual kind. Sneaking cigarettes and begging twentysomethings to buy us beer. Burning rubber to beat a red light. Listening to music too loud and getting dirty looks from senior citizens.” The smile on his face felt easy as a breeze, like it had been brought to him as a gift from the past. “When I was a senior, a bunch of us filled our high school principal’s car with rubber duckies while he was in the market doing his grocery shopping. Senior prank. Any graduating class worth their salt tries to pull one off. It felt pretty good to have the laughter directed at someone else for once.” He shook his head. “Anyway, we all hid across the street behind the planters and bushes, waiting for him to come out. When he saw what we did, he just laughed. We came out of our hiding places and tailgated with his groceries. Had them for dinner, right here on Main Street. It kind of turned into an unplanned block party.”

  He looked over at Mary to find her cheek leaned against the seat, a silver-blue radiance meandering slowly around her head in the darkness, a dreamlike expression on her face that set off a leapfrog contest in his chest. Lord, she was beautiful.

  In another life, maybe he was bringing home Mary to meet his pops for the first time.

  They’re coming home for Thanksgiving dinner. She’s nervous, he’s reassuring her. They’ll have to sleep in separate rooms, but they’ll sneak out in the middle of the night. Out to the porch, beyond to the fields surrounding the house where fireflies dance and crickets chirp. Hand in hand, their kisses teasing at first, but turning more and more desperate until he’d have no choice but to wrap her legs around his waist in the shadows and appease their hunger, using his kiss to keep her quiet. But it would all feel like a prelude to their future. Something they’d relive through memories for the rest of their lives. Relatives would stop by for dinner the next day and ask when he planned on marrying the girl and he’d be smug as a son-of-a-bitch, because the ring would be in his pocket.

  “When you were human, did you want to have children?”

  “Yeah.” His lips tipped up, the sound of laughing babies and barking dogs filling his head. “Hell yeah. A whole brood. I wanted the messy house and the long road trips where everyone complains. Little league games, trips to the emergency room, last-minute barbeques.”

  Mary shifted in her seat. “Is it human to want the bad things?”

  “I don’t know.” He flipped back through a file of memories and voices from the past. “No. I don’t think so. Everyone believes they’ll be better at life than their parents when they get older, but hard as they try, it’s a pattern and the pattern is going to get you. The bad things are just as unavoidable, no matter how much knowledge you consume. I loved that guaranteed repetition, though. I think I appreciated it even more later on because my father broke it. He deviated. And I wanted to keep going along the same normal route I’d been promised. I was going to reestablish the pattern.”

  “When?”

  “When?” He shrugged a shoulder and laughed. “When someone settled for my ass, I guess.”

  Damn, did he really say that out loud?

  Mary frowned. “What does that mean? Settled.”

  Wishing he’d kept his mouth shut, Tucker put the Impala in drive and left Main Street in the rearview, turning them toward the outer edge of town. “Settled?” He said it casually, like it wasn’t something that had constantly occurred to him during his human and vampire lives. “It’s kind of like, when all the other options have run out, a last resort starts looking like a decent one. Like when the diner is out of pancakes, so you opt for an omelet, even though you know the diner makes them with rubbery brown edges.”

  For a moment, her eyes locked right in with his, holding so long he started wondering if she could see him after all. “But you’re not talking about eggs, you’re talking about yourself.”

  Anxiousness crawled up the back of his neck like a prickly beetle. He was trying not to overthink the fact that he’d be seeing his father soon or he would have changed the subject. Instead, the ugliest bullshit that had been plaguing him became the only form of distraction available. No way around. No way to laugh it off. “When you have your sight, Mary, the world will teach you to see the difference between what’s beautiful and what’s not. It’s unavoidable, even for someone as pure hearted as you.”

  Her frown deepened. “It seems like this your way of telling me you’re not one of the beautiful things, Tucker. You’ve tried to tell me before, too, and—”

  “What I’m trying to say is that you are beautiful, inside and out, and when you’re able to see, the whole world is going to be new. When you have choices in front of you, your eyes will pick based on what appeals most. I want that for you.”

  “Are you assuming I’ll become shallow?” Her radiance broke into tiny specks and dimmed. “Once I can see, I’ll forsake inner beauty for things that are pleasing to the eye?”

  “You will never be shallow, honey.”

  “Then I don’t understand what you’re trying to say.”

  “You wouldn’t have chosen me if you could see,” Tucker said in a strangled rasp. “And part of me is glad I won’t be there when you can.”

  He could feel the physical blow his words delivered to her.

  Could feel it across the car.

  Even though it was him that caused the hurt, his instinct to protect Mary from pain rose swiftly, prepared to punish, his fangs protracting from his gums, spearing into his mouth. “I’m sorry,” he said, dangerously close to ripping off the steering wheel. “I didn’t mean to make it sound like any of this is your fault. It’s not. I’m just being realistic. Some things are the same in the human world as they are in ours.”

  “And in the human world, you weren’t wanted. Or sought after. So it must be the same now.” She crossed her arms over her middle. “You do want the bad parts of a pattern, don’t you? Maybe you only want the bad parts.”

  A boulder took up residence in his stomach. “Come again?”

  “You said you wanted road trips where everyone complains and a dirty house. You look forward to those things, while others focus on the good.”

  “I see the good, too,” he muttered, not sure he liked where this was headed. “I wanted it as a human and I want it now.” I want you. I need you more than anything.

  “Do you do anything to pursue it?”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’ve seen what happens when the good gets taken away, Mary. My father’s mind deteriorated over it. He became obsessed with some insane lie because the truth hurt too much. She just didn’t want us.” He cursed at the telling admission, dragging a hand down his face. “Him. I meant, she didn’t want him.”

  “Did you?” Her lower lip trembled for a beat, but she firmed it, visibly refusing to give in to the pity she was feeling for him. “Don’t tell me I wouldn’t have chosen you. You tell yourself lies about not being wanted or worthy because you’re afraid to hope for good.”

  “While my father lies to himself so he doesn’t have to acknowledge the bad.”

  The road was water-like in front of him. Wavy. Lifting and lowering.

  He’d been wearing a brown paper bag with eye holes, so he’d only been able to look straight forward, but now…now he could see that he’d been suffering from the same affliction as his father this whole time. They’d just handled the disappearance of his mother in different ways. She’d left a void and they’d filled it with a new reality of their choosing. Tucker’s father had refused to accept she left of her own free will. Tucker had accepted it, but assumed her leaving meant he was second rate. A man someone might settle for if they ran out of options.

  Tucker’s gaze came back into focus and there it was, a few hundred yards away.

  His home. The barn.

  The satellites were still mounted on top, faded letters on the roof.

  He used to feel humiliation when pulling up to this red fen
ce with the missing wooden boards. A sense of resentment that his father couldn’t be normal, like everyone else’s dad. Maybe Tucker should have expected that such an extended absence would soften his judgment of Carl Moore. He never could have expected the wave of homesickness that battered him now, along with a healthy dose of shame.

  Mary was right.

  He’d made excuses. A lot of them. Not only for himself, blaming his appearance for being alone. But also for never coming back to Buckhannon. Being wanted for questioning? It had never really been about that. It had been about facing this place where he’d been made to feel unwanted. Confronting the cause.

  How easy it had been to blame his father’s eccentricities for his isolation, the way he’d drifted, never really taking anything seriously. All along, he’d had his own unresolved hang-ups.

  When Mary unhooked her seatbelt, Tucker did the same, his movements jerky. There was a heaviness to the air, words spoken between them that couldn’t be erased, both of them clearly unsettled in the wake of their semi-argument. It caused Tucker physical pain, not being able to haul her across the console into his lap where he would apologize and hold her until the tension dissipated. It wasn’t possible, though. And it never would be.

  Tucker tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

  Mary nodded. “I want to give you the opportunity to see and hear him without revealing yourself. Unless you want to.”

  “Nah, I can’t. I…he’s already been pitched so far outside of reality with his belief in UFOs, I’m worried what seeing me would do to him. It’s a whole new can of worms.”

  “I understand,” Mary murmured, anxiously chewing her lip. “Are we mad at each other?”

  “Come on now, kid. I’m incapable of being mad at you.” He struggled against the urge to reach out and cup her soft cheek. “Thank you. For thinking of this. It never would have occurred to me and now that we’re here, yeah. Yeah, I really want to see him.” He tore his eyes off her and peered through the windshield at the house. “Make sure he’s doing all right.”

  “We can sit here a while until you’re ready.”

  “This is a town of early risers. The less time we hang around, the better.” He reached into the back seat for the folded white sheet, plus the pillow case for collecting candy and her walking stick. “He won’t see me, but I’ll be right there the whole time, okay?”

  “I know you will.”

  His stationary heart flipped over at her belief in him. If she could have seen him in that moment, there would have been no mistaking the love. It drenched his expression. Made him feel feverish and freezing cold at the same time, his eyes traveling over her delicate features and memorizing them one by one.

  “Tucker?”

  “Right. Sorry.” With one last look, he exited the driver’s side and closed the door quietly, crossing to Mary’s, helping her out. Arm in arm, they breached the gate and stepped onto his father’s property, gravel crunching under their feet. They passed his father’s old pickup, same old pile of parts, though it had a few more dings in the back bumper and a fresh, “Ships Happen,” sticker in the rear windshield.

  The windows of house were dark, but his sensitized hearing picked up the hum of the satellites on the roof. Static. The frenetic wavering of frequencies. Just like the house’s interior, the night was black, the moon only a sliver, but Tucker was able to navigate them as if it was noon on a sunny day, as opposed to one o’clock in the morning.

  “House is straight ahead. Two stories.” He spoke without thinking, filling Mary in on her surroundings. “It used to be robin’s egg blue, my mother’s favorite color, but now it looks like someone dipped a paintbrush in water and swirled the blue with white. A color…kind of what the wind sounds like. Does that make sense?”

  Her smile was soft. “Yes.”

  Reassured, he looked down at their feet. “The path we’re on used to be stone pavers. Never kept it manicured once my mother left, but it’s definitely cracked and overgrown now.”

  They’d almost reached the front porch when Tucker heard the distinct sound of a tool dropping into a chest of more tools. Male mutterings that brought the past ripping back at him through the night air and seizing him around the throat.

  “He’s awake. He’s working in the barn,” Tucker managed. “I should have known.”

  Mary squeezed his arm. “Take me there.”

  He took a moment to brace himself and changed direction, guiding Mary around the back of the house and across the dirt yard, strewn with electronics in various states of repair or assembly, his eyes fixed ahead on the open barn door where a thin line of light speared out like a blade, the fact that nothing had changed imbuing him with a sense of comfort he never expected. All this time, while Tucker had been fighting slayers and learning how to navigate an often unscrupulous underworld, his father had been right here in the barn, still searching for a way to prove his wife had been taken.

  Tucker never would have been able to understand that dedication until now.

  If Mary were his and she vanished in the middle of the night, he would be searching for her decades later—take that to the bank. He’d search until he found her, no matter how long it took. Centuries, if necessary.

  They were fifteen feet from the barn door when the muttering stopped.

  “Who’s there?” called Carl. “If it’s you kids again, I won’t give out any more warnings. I will call the police!”

  “Go,” whispered Mary, pulling her arm away from Tucker. “I’m fine.”

  “I’ll be a millisecond away.”

  “I know.”

  Tucker whipped around the corner of the barn, into the darkness cast by the overhang, his mate’s reflex blaring orders in his mind to return to Mary. To touch her and guard her. But mentally, he knew two things to be true and he reminded himself of them now. One, his father wouldn’t do anyone harm, let alone a fragile girl with a walking stick. And two, he could move like lightning to stand between Mary and harm.

  Perhaps because he was home and this place reminded him of being human more than anywhere else, Tucker took a deep—albeit unnecessary—breath. And watched the barn door roll open, his father stepping out into the light cast from inside.

  Carl drew up short upon spying Mary in the darkness and Tucker’s insides did the same at the sight of his father, thirteen years older. He’d always been a wiry man, the opposite of Tucker, but he was even thinner now, his hair verging on full gray, instead of the burnished coppery red Tucker remembered. Glasses perched on the edge of his nose and he looked through them now, his mouth poised to ask a question, but nothing coming out.

  Mary smiled broadly and held out her pillow case. “Trick or treat!”

  Chapter 14

  Mary calmed completely as soon as Tucker’s father’s footsteps thudded to a stop some distance in front of her. Not in the same way a sense of rightness and safety had clutched her by the bones when she encountered Tucker for the first time. The nature of this was more…fond. Carl’s signature was slightly chaotic, yes, but there was love woven into the disorder. Pain, too.

  Bracing herself, she tucked her walking stick under one arm and held out of her pillow case. “Trick or treat.”

  Silence passed. “It isn’t Halloween,” Tucker’s father explained slowly, then she heard a muffled clapping sounds, as if he was patting his clothing or pockets. “Is it? I tend to lose track of time when I’m working on something and I’m always working on…well, that’s boring, isn’t it? Well, now. Look at that crown sparkle. You’re dressed as a…blind ghost princess?”

  “Just a ghost princess. I’m always blind.”

  “Oh, my dear,” he muttered sympathetically. “Then I fear that you’ve veered off course. And I don’t have any candy. Unless you count peppermints.”

  “I’ve never had a peppermint.”

  “Really?” She heard some rustling and the whine of a metal box opening. Footsteps coming closer. “Hand me the pi
llow case and hold out your hand.”

  Mary liked this man.

  This whole situation bordered on absurd—even to Mary—but he’d adapted immediately. He hadn’t even acted awkward when she told him she was blind. Just accepted it as a part of her, the way Tucker had done. It put her at immediate ease.

  She smiled when he shook out a couple of mints into her waiting palm, closing her fingers around them and noting the smooth disc shapes.

  “It’s usually not a good idea to take loose candy from strangers.”

  “I’ll only do it this one time. I promise.”

  He chuckled. “Is there someone I should call to drive you home? It’s awful late to be out walking…alone.” Silence drifted by on the breeze. “You are alone, aren’t you? I don’t mean to insult you, miss, but it seems unlikely that you’d end up all the way out here unless there was a good reason. And I’ve had some problems over the years with kids…poking fun.”

  Her heart lurched. “I’m not here for that.”

  Several more beats passed, probably as he judged whether or not he could trust that she was telling the truth. “In that case,” he said finally, “it’s nice to have the company.”

  Mary wanted desperately to remove the sheet, so he could see her face and know she was genuine, but without the crown, her radiance would give her away and force Tucker out into the open when he wasn’t prepared to come face to face with his father. “You’re out awfully late, too. It sounded like you were working on something?”

  “Oh, yes. A new satellite. This one…this one is going to be the winner.” Confidence faded from his tone as he spoke, then he fell silent altogether. “I’m guessing you’re not from town or just visiting or you would probably know what I do. What this is all about. Or at least…what it used to be about. I’ve dedicated my life to contacting extra-terrestrials.”

  She nodded slowly.

  He laughed in a self-deprecating manner that reminded her of Tucker. “I bet you’re wishing about now that you’d ended up at a different house.”