Take Me Home

by Inez Kelley

  A place deep under her ribs ached. He hadn’t even argued. So that was how this was going to play out. He’d play teacher and what? She’d be so caught up she’d forget he lied? Would the heartache simply fade like steam? Water blurred her eyes and she blinked the sting away. She wanted this to go away, the pain, the gnawing emptiness, the longing for what they’d had. For what he’d destroyed. For what they’d lost.

  A hard hand encased in cotton work gloves cupped her elbow. “You’re asleep on your feet. When’s the last time you slept?”

  “What day is it?”

  “Just sit and wait. I’m almost finished with loading. Your ride’ll be fine here overnight. You can go back with me.”

  Fifteen minutes later, the tank was full and he climbed onto the seat. Kayla climbed behind him, wrapping her thighs around his and lacing her fingers around his waist. She wasn’t whimsical enough to imagine she could feel his skin through both their clothes but the strength in his muscles couldn’t be denied. She laid her head on his shoulder and simply hung on while he headed toward the sugarhouse. The bumps and dips kept her from sleeping but the motor and his support lulled her into a type of stupor. She had to force her mind to work when the engine shut off.

  “You’re half dead. Why don’t you go home and sleep? Let me handle the boiling tonight.”

  She shook her head. “No, this is my place. I’ll boil. But I do need to go home and feed Four. I started a stew in the Crock-Pot this morning so I’ll bring us some dinner back.”

  “Whatever you say. You’re the boss.”

  * * *

  They fell into a routine right away. The sap had to be treated like milk, kept above freezing but below forty degrees so it didn’t turn rancid. Every day at noon Matt checked the temperature, then they headed into the forest to collect the maple sap. They hauled straight until dusk. Kayla would then go back to the house to feed Four, shower and gather whatever she’d started for their dinner. Matt would start the boil while she was gone then she’d take over while he went to her place to clean up. By 8:00 p.m. Kayla crawled into bed at the sugarhouse, pulling the curtained divider shut around her. Matt worked the boil until 2 a.m., then they traded places.

  Almost a full week later, Kayla checked the temperature gauges and the drip flow, moving as quietly as possible. She settled into the crook of the old couch she’d put along the free wall. Matt snored softly behind the curtain. The curtain was open about four inches, and the low lamp sent a soft glow across his cheeks. One hand lay open on the mattress, fingers half-curled.

  She’d kissed every part of his body, knew it intimately, and still his hands were her favorite. They were large and hardened but could be loving and gentle. They’d made her feel safe, feel sexy, feel cherished.

  He hadn’t uttered one word that hadn’t been about production, cooking or packing. He’d made sure he hadn’t touched her as they worked in tandem. He’d never looked at her with anything other than professionalism. She was both grateful and frustrated. The shelves were empty, buckets and spiles doing their job. Her containers sat beside the sink, the labels printed and waiting. The entire place hummed, turning sap to syrup and sweat into cash. It was a challenge and a tie with an age-old tradition.

  Cotton whispered as he shifted, and her gaze traced his profile. The heavy sweet aroma of maple syrup permeated every pore, flavored every breath. But she could still smell the unique scent that was Matt embedded on the sheets whenever she crawled into the bed. It was torture and heaven in the same breath.

  Her nerves were stretched taut. For six long days, they’d done this elaborately simplistic dance without a single misstep. She was ready to scream at the top of her lungs just to see if he’d crack. She stirred the thickening syrup and wondered what she’d do if he did crack.

  Say something? Do something? Throw something?

  As if he could feel her scrutiny, his eyes opened. Less than six feet separated them but it might as well have been six thousand miles. It was too far a distance for any bridge to span.

  “Morning, coffee’s fresh.”

  “Sounds good.” He wore his long johns and T-shirt as sleepwear, so all he had to do was pull on his jeans and he was ready for the day. Kayla shook her head. Men had it easy.

  “Be right back,” he murmured, stepping into his boots and heading outside.

  Plain white, his shirt sucked the sunshine and seemed to glow with a holy radiance. It skimmed his wide shoulders, molded to the rigid planes of his chest and hugged those magnificently hard biceps. His jeans should be renamed a work of art. Or maybe of architecture. They sculpted his ass in the most delicious way. His stride was confident, as if he belonged here.

  “Kayla.”

  A warning note in his voice had her scrambling for the door. His spine was rigid and his eyes were locked on the thermometer hanging on the side of the building. Kayla looked and then understood his stance.

  Forty-one degrees at nine o’clock in the morning.

  “I’ll go check the taps. You stay here and keep boiling.”

  “Okay.” There was no reason to argue. Mother Nature dictated the sap run, and if spring had finally arrived, the run was over. Kayla’s stomach clenched. Her time with Matt was almost over.

  He didn’t take time for coffee. He finished dressing, laced his boots then drove straight into the forest. Kayla boiled and paced and paced and boiled. Her mind whirled. This should have thrilled her. With his help, she’d had an excellent run, the storage tank filling three times. She’d lost very little sap and had an entire wall of five-gallon food-grade buckets brimming with freshly boiled organic maple syrup. Cash registers should have been cha-chinging in her ears.

  The rumbling of the four-wheeler had her racing to the door. He hadn’t been gone long enough to have filled his portable tank. Her belly sank. This was it. It was over.

  Matt climbed from the machine with an oddly erratic movement. “The spiles are clogging. It’s not worth the risk of bacterial contamination to pull the sap now. I’ll gather all the pails today. We need to keep boiling around the clock before the tank spoils.”

  Tick tick tick tick tick

  The remainder of the day passed in a surreal fog. Matt hauled back empty buckets and lids while golden brown syrup thickened in a slow cycle. They took turns scrubbing and disinfecting the metal pails, putting them in the sun to air-dry before storing them until next year. Kayla was afraid to leave, afraid to go start some supper or feed Four. The strange feeling that if she left now, she’d never see Matt again nearly paralyzed her.

  And that feeling irritated her. Every minute she spent with him drove home that he’d broken her trust and her heart, but still he tempted her simply by being near. She needed this sap run to end before she broke completely. She ran her fingers through her hair, pushing the sweaty bits off her forehead.

  She’d broken her arm skiing as a child. She’d been terrified and in pain, waiting for her mother to get to the hospital. A kind nurse had rocked her and talked in a soothing tone, explaining everything the doctors were going to do. She said the bone would heal stronger than before and Kayla would be good as new. The nurse had been right. She had healed then and she would heal again. She would be stronger than before and never again let someone hurt her.

  She had no choice. Time wasn’t standing still and this little stone sugarhouse wasn’t some fairy castle. There were no knights in shining armor and she had never been a princess. She could rescue herself just fine. In the end, she went home to feed the cat, get their supper and refortify her resolve. She deserved better than to be lied to.

  The sun was a mere orange sliver atop the mountain peaks when she returned. The air was thick with maple, the sweetness coating her tongue just by breathing. They’d keep boiling through the night if necessary but this was the last night they’d be together. She told herself she’d made his favorite as
a thank-you for his help but that excuse was flimsy. Still, she forced a smile to her mouth as she breezed into the sugarhouse.

  “Lasagna.” She hefted the square pan. “And garlic bread in the basket, if you can grab it out of the van.”

  “You didn’t have to go all that trouble.”

  Yes, I did. I wanted to. I needed to. “No trouble.”

  He retrieved the bread then went back to monitoring the syrup, as if being too close to her was toxic. She dished out two plates and handed one to him. He took it but never dropped the invisible tether that locked their eyes. The weight of his stare blanketed her, stole into her chest and made breathing hard. “Thank you.”

  She had to step back, to put an additional foot between them before she turned into a 1930s diva and fainted straight into his arms. “How many more pans of sap do you think we have?”

  “This is it. I drained the tank while you were gone.”

  Her lips trembled but she forced them to a smile. “Wow. As frantic as the run was, it ends pretty fast, too.”

  “Yeah.” He dropped his stare and started eating.

  Dinner was consumed in silence. Tension mounted until it breathed like a dragon in the small stone room. Kayla collected the dishes and stacked them in the industrial sink but her hands shook too badly to even consider washing them. Matt opened the valve and golden syrup streamed through the filter and into the waiting bucket.

  Around midnight, the last bucket was sealed. Kayla used a hose to spray soapy water into the pan. The lingering fire in the pit would boil it, scouring the sticky sugar from every corner of the stainless steel.

  “Kayla.” Matt held out a small glass bottle shaped like a maple leaf. It was smaller than any container she’d ordered, more decorative and attractive. Amber syrup shone like liquid gold in the lamplight.

  “What’s that?”

  “The last of the year’s run.” His smile tilted one side of his mouth. “It’s a Shaw family tradition. The last of the syrup is the first used. It’s supposed to bring good luck for the next run.”

  Her hand shook as she took the bottle, careful not to touch his fingers. “Thank you...for everything.”

  “I bought a new wallet.”

  Whatever she’d expected him to say, or wanted him to say, that was the last thing on her mind.

  Matt stood staring into the evap pan, at the bubbling water that carried a sugary scent. “It was time. It’s time for a lot of things.”

  Her stomach rolled, the pasta turning to lead. The past week, every quiet moment, every weighted glance, every deliberate nonchalance had built to this moment. Kayla suddenly wanted to bury her head beneath the pillow and block out his voice. She couldn’t stand to hear another lie, a flimsy excuse or lame apology. Her hurt was too deep for that.

  “Matt, you don’t have to tell me anything anymore.” Her voice never cracked or wavered. The calm strength in it amazed her. Silence unfurled. She could hear him breathing in time with her own raging pulse.

  * * *

  “I want to. I need to.”

  “All right.”

  Kayla sat on the couch, her fingers wrapped around the syrup bottle, her eyes fixed on his face. The tenseness in her shoulders struck hard under Matt’s solar plexus. She was braced for something bad, out of fear or anger or just plain irritation. Not once in the past week had she given him more than a casual smile. Oh, she was polite enough, professional and distant, but there hadn’t been one minute of the connection they’d shared.

  For a while, he’d wondered if she still felt anything for him. But then this morning when he woke, she was watching him. Something in her eyes whisked away all doubt. Beneath the sadness, beneath the exhaustion and worry, he could see longing. If the weather had cooperated, he’d have spilled his guts this morning. Instead, they’d had to scramble to finish the sap run.

  Matt sucked in a deep breath, inhaling the sweet maple-tinged air. It was now or never. He rocked back on his heels, fingers tucked into his back pockets. After two decades of silence, he thought the words would be hard to find, but they flowed like the sap from a tree.

  “When I was fifteen, my father got pneumonia. Hazard of the coal mines, even with the breathing equipment. Makes your lungs weaker. But it didn’t matter, it was sugar season and we had work to do.” He licked his lips, his gaze locked on the frothy bubbles in the pan. “It was my fourth year helping and he let me take the lead, put me in charge of the boiling while he watched, coughing and hacking until I thought he was going to die.”

  She was so quiet he could nearly hear the phantom cough echo in his head. He couldn’t look at her and get through this. He just charged ahead.

  “I was scared shitless. This place was his pride and joy—more than his hobby, it was something he lived for. He loved sugaring and I didn’t want to disappoint him. I did okay. Sap run was bad that year, barely a full tankload, so whatever we could refine was money in the bank. Or rather, money already spoken for. He’d been laid off the fall before and things were getting tight. Tighter than normal.”

  Memory slammed into him, swift and hard, like an invisible punch. He closed his eyes and chased it away. The past was over. This was his future and to save it, he had to tell Kayla the truth. He took a swift breath.

  “We never had a lot but we had each other, had the land, had this place, had food on the table even if it was homegrown or fresh-killed. But things kept getting worse. He ended up in the hospital. By that time we didn’t have any insurance. There wasn’t any work. He did short jobs, a lot of times for cash under the table, trying to keep things going, but it caught up with him. I had just turned sixteen when the eviction notice came. The bank was taking everything.”

  His chest grew tight and his throat sore. The long-silent words spilled from his mouth but hurt, like vomiting glass. Deliberately, he locked his eyes on the evap pan. If her gaze was lined in pity, it would destroy him.

  “I didn’t want to tear down the house. It wasn’t livable.”

  He shook his head. It sounded like she was apologizing. For what? She had done nothing wrong. “I know. It was falling apart before we were forced out. We had nowhere to go. All my aunts and uncles had moved away years before, my grandparents were dead and family friends were barely scratching by themselves. One day I had a home, and the next, everything I owned was in a duffel bag in the back of the truck.”

  Her gasp was soft, nearly silent, but he heard it. His heart drummed, pounding hard against his ribs. He did look at her then, saw the raw unvarnished sympathy shimmering in her eyes. Sympathy, not pity. He swallowed a huge lump and kept talking.

  “We camped in the woods for almost a month. Showered at the school gym. My girlfriend left me, said it was so I could help out my family more, but it wasn’t that. She was ashamed of me. I saw it in her face. She’d loved me a month before, but all of a sudden I wasn’t good enough anymore.”

  The sympathy vanished beneath the flash of anger. “I’d like to go back in time and smack that bitch. She was a shallow teenager.”

  A snort burst from him. God, he loved her. But this wasn’t funny. “She wasn’t the only one. When you’re homeless, people think less of you, that you’re lazy and weak and worthless. Pity hurts more than a fist to the face. I swore I’d never let a woman look at me like that again.”

  “I don’t pity you, Matt.” Her lips thinned and fire flashed in her eyes. “I’m angry. Angry and hurt. You could’ve told me all this when we met.”

  “Right.” He raked his hand through his hair. “Yeah, that would’ve worked out great.”

  Kayla dropped her jaw. “How’d the lie work for you?”

  “I didn’t lie, not intentionally.” Frustration bubbled inside him like the soapy water in the evap pan. “Kayla, I’ve never told anyone this shit. Anyone. Not Webb. Not Jonah, no one. I was reeling from seeing th
is place again and then you knocked me flat on my ass. There has never, ever been a woman who I wanted as much as you. You looked at me and saw, what? A guy you liked, were attracted to? A man who had a future you could depend on? Someone strong who’d never have to worry about putting food on the table or paying the bills?”

  See me, please. See me as that man. See that I love you, would give anything, do anything for you. Ache spread along his sternum, spreading up and out. It squeezed his throat until he had to force the words out on a whisper. “That’s what you saw, Kayla. I wanted to be that man.”

  “You are.”

  His chest rose and fell, breath sailing audibly past his clenched teeth. “So was my father until he got kicked in the teeth. He tried but couldn’t save us. Not until he died.”

  She angled her head. “What?”

  “Cops said it was an accident. That his car hit a wet patch, slid out of the curve and over the mountainside.”

  Matt knew better.

  His father’s soul had died the day the land was taken. It had been in his family for three generations but he’d had to mortgage it to survive. When he couldn’t make the payments, he had nothing left to give but his life.

  “You don’t think it was an accident.”

  He shook his head. “He’d driven in these mountains all his life. I’d seen him haul sap until his hands bled, and glue his shoes when they split and never lose his smile. But when he lost this place, this sugarhouse especially, he gave up. Working in the mines, he always had life insurance, and that was the one thing he never let lapse. He had enough that we could pull ourselves up, but we did it without him. Kind of made it all hollow.”

  “That’s sad, tragic even, but...” Kayla straightened her shoulders. “It’s also a little cowardly. He had a family. They depended on him for more than money.”

  His jaw wobbled as he looked at the floor, hands jammed into his pockets. Damn, Kayla pulled no punches. He loved that about her but it was as hard to hear the truth as it was to tell it. “You’re right. And I hated him for it for a long time. It was easier to blame everything else—the bank, the sheriff, the mine closing, everything but him. It took me a long time, not until I came out to this place the other day alone, to make sense of it. I wasn’t mourning losing the land. I used that as an excuse to keep from mourning my father. I wasn’t lying to you, Kayla. I was lying to myself.”