by Christa Wick
The two hundred dollars had been for Laurie, and the time in my chair had as much a chance as being aimed at rubbing our past in my face than any attempt at reconciliation. Felix, circling the two of us as I worked, said he saw something other than loathing. Not just in Dare's face, but in mine as well.
The bus doors closed behind me just as I released a derisive laugh. Of course Felix had seen something positive in my face. I had never stopped caring for Dare, had never felt attracted to any male I met after that very first kiss my senior year. I couldn't remember feeling attracted to any man other than Dare before that kiss, if I wanted to be honest with myself.
And the man hadn't stopped looking like a god. I counted five women who had stopped near my table to look at his body while I painted him. A lot of other women had stared at him as they passed despite the male companions that walked with them. Felix had seen me horny because of Dare's proximity and the intimate contact required for the painting. But me horny was all he had seen.
I stopped at the small building at the center of the complex that housed all of the mailboxes and checked mine. I sorted through the contents, tossing everything that was junk mail and finding myself empty handed when I finished.
With nothing left to delay me, I crossed the lawn and stepped onto the parking lot in front of my building. Every unit had an assigned space. I didn't have a car and my neighbors knew it. Most of the time, I came home to find one of their guests had parked in my spot. Tonight, the guest was mine -- but he wasn't invited or welcomed.
We noticed one another's presence at the same moment. He had remained in the cab of his truck and he opened the door. After he stepped out, he reached behind his seat and removed two items. Both were covered in plain brown wrapping paper. One was clearly a box, the other was sort of like a box but not every tall. I couldn't imagine he would be so stupid as to bring me presents, especially after wasting all that money earlier.
Not wasted, I reminded myself. It all went to his dead fiancée.
I contemplated passing him by without a single word. Every time I ran into him at work, I had offered nothing more than a remote politeness. I told myself I only did that because I didn't want to develop a reputation with my co-workers that I was some kind of icy bitch.
No matter how cold I felt inside.
Dare didn't give me the option of avoiding him. He intersected with my path and stopped in front of me. He picked a spot where I could have walked around, but my pride wouldn't let me.
"I know you don't want anything from me." Bending, he placed the box on the ground in front of his feet. As he straightened, he tore at the wrapping paper of the second item. "But you should know what you're refusing."
Was he talking about the gift or himself?
I shook my head. "I don't care if you brought me bars of gold, I--"
The rest of the paper fell away to reveal a picture frame. The sun hugged the horizon, the last of the daylight only minutes from disappearing. What illumination remained was more than enough for me to see a picture of me and Michael Burke. We were sitting on the tailgate of Frank O'Donnell's truck. Michael had his fingers in a V behind my head and wore a huge grin. I vaguely remembered the picnic at Frank's house and Dare snapping the shot.
"Thank you," I said, my throat clogging with the need to cry as I took the frame from him.
"I had the negatives in storage when you were staying with me," he explained and bent to retrieve the second box. "I knew they were in there but I didn't want to get your hopes up in case there had been any damage."
"This means a lot." I kept my eyes on the picture, my head bobbing with emotion. As much as it meant to me, however, it didn't mean I could get past what he had said to me after Laurie's death. Felix had been right that night. It didn't matter that Dare was drunk when he said it. Alcohol was a filter for what people thought but usually were too chickenshit to say.
His thumb tapped nervously against the second package. My gaze darted up to his then dropped to the box. Instead of extending it in my direction, he pulled it closer to his stomach.
"I suppose you don't want to give that to me in the parking lot," I whispered. The box was a bribe to invite him upstairs. It could be filled with Legos for all I knew.
"No, but I will," he answered, his voice just as soft, each word but the first preceded by a hesitant pause.
The package could be a whole lot of nothing or it could be more memories of my stepfather. He could have refused and I would have caved because I wasn't willing to take the risk. Holding the picture frame against my chest, I extended my hand.
He looked down, his head giving a small shake of denial, but he offered me the box. I grabbed it, tested its weight and whether the contents shifted. Whatever was inside was heavy and solidly packed.
When my gaze returned to Dare, he was staring at me, his expression neutral except for the tension I could see around his mouth and eyes.
If I refused to let him come upstairs and talk for a while, I would find myself in the same situation with him again. I flashed back to my showdown with Mary Ivers in Dare's house. My gut had told me to kick her out, but instead I had listened to her. This time, my gut told me to let Dare in. Was it time to trust my instincts?
"Please, Eden, just for a few minutes."
I nodded, the unexpected pain in his voice making me stare off to the side. I passed him and started up the stairs. When we got to my door, he held the box and frame while I fished out my key.
Inside, he placed the box and picture on my kitchen counter. Drawing a deep breath, I tore open the wrapping paper then carefully sliced through the tape with which he had sealed the package. When I had everything open and the balled packing paper cleared, I pulled out a thick scrapbook.
Opening to the first page, I found one of the very first drawings I had done after becoming Michael's stepdaughter. At twelve, with no one to encourage my talents before him, the fire truck was more than a little crude in its lines. The handwriting at the bottom was a little tidier.
My daddy, Michael Burke -- by Eden Burke.
I could still remember Michael hoisting me up on his shoulders at the Hagersburg firehouse so I could tape it on their family wall more than a decade ago.
"The station keeps these?" I asked with disbelief.
"For a time," he answered. "Then they get boxed up for storage for a while longer so the wall still has space for the next generation. Usually, when one of the kids graduates or has a kid of their own, they get pulled out of storage and returned as a gift."
My head was stuck in a constant bobbing motion as I tried to keep from crying in front of Dare. If I let the tears out, he might do something stupid like try to comfort me. I didn't know where that would lead. I had an idea, but letting Dare back into my bed, even once, would probably be the biggest mistake of my life.
There was too much emotional baggage between us. He still had a mother who hated me and would try to turn him against me. And if that didn't work, she would target any children Dare and I had with her poison.
Did you know your mother was a whore once? Well, at least once. She probably still is.
I flipped to the next page, my joy and sadness increasing exponentially. He had found a copy of the essay I had composed when I was a junior in high school. I had written it for a competition, a thousand dollar scholarship for an in-state university. The required topic was community service and I had written about Michael.
Was Dare trying to make my heart stop?
Unable to bear the weight of the memories it enclosed, I shut the scrapbook. I looked at Dare, but only from the corner of one eye. I didn't want to see him well enough to guess at his thoughts or for him to see how deeply affected I was by his gifts.
"Why did you keep these?" I managed to croak.
"Some part of me always knew I would see you again," he answered, his hand coming up to rest against the small of my back. "Even after you left the second time."
It must have been a very small part, I thou
ght, moving away from him. How else could he have gotten engaged, especially to a woman who was Molly Quade's sister? If I had just been faced with Mary's wrath, I might have lasted long enough to become the old Eden, the optimistic, confident girl Michael Burke had raised. Even there in Tucson, more than three years on, employed, independent, with one great friend and several good acquaintances, I wasn't quite healed.
"I have something for you, too," I said, escaping his touch. I still didn't know how I wanted our conversation to end, but I knew there were necessary components to its completion. I reached into the drawer next to the refrigerator and pulled out the recipe card and three sheets of paper.
Handing him the card, I asked, "Is this how you still feel?"
It should have been you.
Dare nodded, the short motion a stab through the chest.
"How..." I sucked air in, ready to kick him out, to scream, to pull at my own hair until it covered the floor and my scalp bled. I pushed at his chest, the shove unanticipated and hard enough to knock him back a few inches. "How can you bring me these things and still wish that I was the one who died?"
His face twisted around its center, his mouth making several attempts to talk but not succeeding. He tried to hand the card back but I slapped it away.
"Leave," I sobbed. "Don't come back. Ever!"
He grabbed me, forced me close. "I will always believe that you should have been the one wearing my engagement ring."
My brain couldn't process the words. I shook my head, clawed at his arms to free myself from his tight grip.
"You said something about me putting a ring on her finger," he persisted, his skin starting to bleed from my scratches. "Don't you remember?"
"Right, you were babbling on about how she would have been the best wife a man could ask for." No longer struggling, I glared at him, my gaze daring him to lie to me again.
"And you said, I guess that's why you put a ring on it," he repeated, shaking me hard. "That's when I said that it should have been you. You are the one I love, the only one I can remember ever loving. The one I still love even after you ran away from me a second time."
I shook my head, refusing to believe him. The few weeks I had lived with him, he never told me he loved me. If he had, I might have braved the entire hate-filled population of Hagersburg. But all he had said was that he had thought he loved me before he found his father fingering my mother. And when I asked him how he felt then, during my return, he said he wanted time to decide.
"There's more," I said, squirming out of his grip. I had dropped the three sheets of paper as we wrestled. I scooped them up, angry that I had to show them to him and angry that I had only gotten the material after paying a private detective three hundred dollars I really didn't have to spare.
"Your mother showed up at your house with these -- along with your perfect Laurie." I slammed them down on the counter, hating myself for being jealous of a dead woman.
For a few seconds, Dare didn't even glance at them. Breathing deeply, he drummed his fingers near their edge, his mouth once again going through the motions of speech without producing any sound.
I tilted my head, my voice sarcastic. "Let me guess. You didn't know?"
He shook his head, his gaze hardening.
"I'm sure you were never supposed to know." I gave the pages a little push so that his dancing fingertips landed on top of them. "After Laurie left because I said I didn't want any money from For The Fallen, your mom stayed behind -- to convince me."
When I gave the papers another push, Dare picked them up.
I hadn't highlighted my name on the incident report as Mary had or the charges of pandering on the rap sheet. Dare had to read through each page thoroughly. When he was done, he leaned to one side, tapped the release catch on the garbage can lid and tossed the reports inside.
"I don't care what you did to survive after Helen betrayed..." He trailed off, my face likely communicating that he had said one of the worst things he possibly could.
"So you read that and automatically figure I was one of his whores, that I sold myself for money -- or maybe I sold his drugs for him." I pulled in a fresh lungful of air, my outburst far from over. "That's what your mom was going to push out to everyone at the station because of O'Rourke's death. So even if you didn't jump to the conclusion I sold my body, you would have become a pariah at work, maybe even die because of your so-called friends thinking you were better off dead than with me."
Slowly, Dare advanced on me. "I would never think that you had sold yourself, Eden."
I retreated across the kitchen, his longer strides closing the distance between us with each step. When I had my back against the wall, he stopped and gently placed his hands on my shoulders. "I know who you are, Eden. You should have trusted me."
His arms folded as he took another step, his hands still on me but our bodies no longer separated. His hard chest pressed against my breasts. "You should have trusted that I would have cut out anyone in my life who couldn't see you as I see you."
Mary Ivers would never see me as Dare did. I didn't need her to love or even like me. But every day she was around would have been another day I risked losing Dare again. Any children...
My hands jerked up and pushed at his chest. "Get out!"
I choked on the command.
He grabbed my wrists, pulled my arms high above my head so that I had to stand on my tiptoes. Bringing his face level with mine, he stared at me for a few seconds. I stared back, dropping my shield so that he could see all the pain clawing at me.
"Is that what you want?" he asked, his voice dangerously low, the words evenly spoken.
I couldn't force the lie out of my mouth, so I just glared at him, willed him to see that we had no future together.
Releasing me, Dare stepped back, spun on one heel and marched to the door. He gripped the knob hard and jerked it open. But after he crossed the threshold, he closed it no more loudly than a whisper.
Numb and mute, I extended my hands toward the door, my fingers searching for the string that would pull Dare back. There was no string, of course. He was gone and he had left -- easily.
Bolting toward the sink, I spilled my guts down the drain. When I lifted my head, I screamed. My vision closed in at the edges as I panted for air. I started sliding toward the ground, reached out to catch myself. The picture frame fell, the glass breaking on impact.
My knees gave out. My body plummeted.
Arms slid around my stomach to hold me up. "I've got you, baby."
Dare.
I started to sob. Gathering me up into his arms, Dare carried me to the couch. Leaving me for a few seconds, he came back with a glass of water and a cold, wet hand towel.
He encouraged me to take a few sips then draped the towel across my forehead and pushed me onto the pillows.
"You left," I accused even though he had only been complying with my order.
"I stepped outside," he countered. "You couldn't decide how you felt, so I let you find out."
"That was a shitty thing to do," I whispered, ignoring the fact that what I had done in ordering him out was worse.
Pressing a kiss against my temple, he didn't argue with my assessment. After several minutes like that, he pulled back and tugged on my chin until I looked at him.
"Why did you send me away?"
I disclosed only part of the truth. "Your mother loves you. A child should never lose a parent's love."
I was also terrified that he didn't really love me back, that he had fixated on me after Laurie's death and for a handful of other reasons.
"My mother loves what she can control," Dare corrected. "If she really loved me, she would see that I cease to exist without you. I'm not a man I can respect when you're away. That was true the first time you left and afterwards..."
He dipped his head, his cheeks coloring a dark red. "I was going to marry a woman I didn't love, not even the tiniest bit. I was going to put both of us in a prison, my heart locked away and hers bou
nd to me by a license on a piece of paper that would have meant nothing to me when I signed it or any day after."
I didn't want him to feel any worse than he clearly felt, but his explanation confused me.
"You said that she died because of me," I ventured softly. I had twisted his note to mean he wished I had died, in part, because he had placed the blame on me for her death earlier.
"You were the cause of our trip," he answered, his head coming up to meet my gaze. "Her death was the effect."
I rolled onto my side and tossed the wet cloth onto the coffee table. Cupping one side of his face, I caressed his cheek with my thumb. "But you didn't even know I was here."
He offered me a sad, but convinced smile. "The universe knew. She wanted to set a date. I was pulling back at the reins. I booked a random location, the distance from our families the only criterion. It was a trial run of our being alone and I was either going to set a date at the end or call it off."
Leaning closer to Dare, I touched my forehead against his. "You hadn't decided yet when she died?"
I needed to believe that he had decided, that he had already told her it was over or was determined to tell her once they returned to Hagersburg.
His hand came up to pluck at the fabric of my couch. I read guilt into the gesture but didn't pull back. For once, I would wait for his answer instead of assuming the opposite.
"As soon as she left the hotel room for the run," he started, drawing his hand to his lap. "I pulled out my laptop and opened a folder I had on you."
I forced myself to remain silent. I really didn't need to know what he had in that file. I wanted to because its existence seemed unusual, but wanting wasn't needing.
"I had made lists of everything I knew about you that might help me find you. I had what few images were available. I had bookmarks for all the sites and related search words..."
He shook his head, laughed once then sobered. "I was going to delete the folder and set a date, but I couldn't. Even the idea of deleting it threatened to suffocate me. So I made a deal -- with the universe or fate or stupid coincidence. One last search. If I didn't find you, then I would delete the folder and set the date and try to never think of you again."
