Lock & Key
Page 17
Kat swallowed, her mouth bone dry. “He thinks he fell asleep at the wheel?”
“It’s a possibility. One that wrecked him. One that caused him to quit the force even though he loved his job, even though he was good at it. It’s been following him around, the possibility that the crash was his fault, every day since Julia and Hayden died. It’s what drives him to drink. It’s what drives him to mope. It’s the reason he hasn’t done anything with his life in the three years since. But…”
Yun closed the distance between them in three long strides and grabbed Kat’s shoulders. “But then you came along, literally fell from the sky, and forcibly dragged Liam back into the thick of the action he’d refused to step foot in since the crash. And because you did that—even though you didn’t mean to—he came back to life.”
“I…”
Yun pressed a finger to Kat’s lips. “So if you do feel indebted to Liam for his help, and you do want to help him in return, then all you need to do, Kat, is stay. Stay here. Stay by his side. Not forever. But until he finishes rebuilding himself. Until he allows himself to move on. Until he finally lets Hayden and Julia go.” She took the finger away. “Are you willing to do that?”
Kat bit her lip and tried to sort through her racing thoughts. All this time she’d pegged Liam as some thirty-ish guy down on his luck, suffering from a bad divorce, who wasn’t sure what he wanted to do with his life in the aftermath of failing to keep his family intact. But in reality, he was devastated in a way that Kat could hardly fathom—she didn’t even remember her family, so how could she mourn their loss?—and the depression he’d sunk into had slowly unraveled everything he’d worked for, including his clearly beloved career as a detective.
Yet somehow, Kat’s abrupt entry into his life had shoved a loose piece of Liam’s personality back into the place it belonged, and as a result, he was changing, quickly. Even she could see that, despite hardly knowing the man. She could see how much more animated he was today than the night they’d met in the parking lot. The slight gleam of excitement and amusement in his eyes. The perpetual hint of a grin in his dimples. The slight spring in his step that spoke of ample energy.
Liam had been a dead man walking, taking pictures of cheating spouses from his beat-up old SUV while eating chicken nuggets, existing and not living, trudging along unfulfilled. And then Kat had fallen onto his head and somehow fixed…not everything, but something. Enough.
Kat knew Liam would not want her to feel obligated to stick around for his sake. Hell, if he knew Yun had asked, he’d be incensed. But she couldn’t deny Yun’s logic, nor could she deny the desperation flooding the thunder god’s face—a plea to help her friend heal a wound he’d left festering for far too long—and on a visceral level, deep down in her heart, after hearing Liam’s horrible story, Kat too felt that edge of desperation, the sense that something needed to be done.
She grasped Yun’s hands and squeezed them gently, smiled and said, “I’ll stay.”
19
Liam
Liam spent the whole drive back brooding over his pathetic showing at the precinct. Sure, it could’ve gone worse, but he’d fled in plain sight of all his old colleagues and had been forced to sit in his rental car, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel, for fifteen minutes, until the anxiety racking his mind finally calmed and the tremors in his hands settled into faint shakes. He needed to be able to act stable in front of the police, not like a nervous wreck, especially now that he had Kat hanging around. If a cop had to question him for any reason, Liam would need to play it cool.
Swearing at himself, he jammed his foot on the accelerator and sped through a yellow light, then turned sharply onto his street. As he closed in on his house, he noticed someone had let down the blinds for the bookstore windows and door, and you couldn’t see into the place. Either Kat or Yun must’ve done it, but he couldn’t imagine why they’d bother. There was nothing to do downstairs but sift through musty books he hadn’t had the time or inclination to organize over the past few months.
He pulled into the only available street-side space, right behind Yun’s truck, and then made his way down the sidewalk, rummaging around in his pockets for the key. Jumping the steps, he unlocked the door and opened it, revealing the bookstore beyond. Then he stopped mid-step, just inside the threshold, as his brain processed what he was seeing.
The entire store had been reorganized. All the boxes that had been filled with donated and cheaply purchased titles were now gone, and the shelves were tidier than they’d been even back when his father ran the place. The room had been dusted too, and the floor swept, and there was the distinct scent of some kind of furniture polish hanging in the air. Somebody had even swapped out a few dead bulbs in the ceiling lights for new ones.
I’ve only been gone for two hours though. How…?
At the sound of the door thumping closed, Yun’s head popped up from behind a shelf. “The prodigal son returns. How did lying to the police turn out?”
“Uh, fine.” He shuffled a few steps forward. “What’s going on here?”
“Spring cleaning.”
“It’s not spring, Yun.”
“Close enough.”
“Whose idea was this?”
“Mine,” another voice answered. Kat strode out of the back office a moment later, carrying the ledgers Liam used for his monthly accounting. “I did promise I’d clean the store in exchange for your generous offer of a place to crash. Plus, I wanted to find some good books to read, seeing as I haven’t had a chance to read any in two years, but the place was such a mess, I couldn’t find what I wanted.” She grinned. “So I decided to fix the problem.”
“Oh.” Liam’s cheeks grew hot. “Thanks?”
“No problem.” She dropped the ledgers on the checkout counter. “Next thing I plan to fix is this.”
“My accounting records?”
“No, your sales. They suck.”
Liam barked out a laugh. “And what do you know about running a business?”
“Based on these numbers, I’d ask you the same question.”
Yun snorted. “Now that was a solid burn.”
Liam scratched at his stubble, unable to hide his embarrassment. “Well, I never claimed to be a good salesman. I’m a detective, for god’s sake.”
“Then maybe you should do that full time.” Kat started flipping through the ledgers and came to the last page. There were marks in bright red pen that hadn’t been there before. “Maybe you should leave the bookstore business to somebody else.”
An odd feeling settled in Liam’s gut. “Oh,” he said, almost too faint to hear. “And who do you suggest?”
Kat tugged on her ponytail—he’d never seen her hair up like that—and pointedly looked away from him. “I don’t know. Maybe somebody who can’t pay the rent with money but wants to pay you back any way she can?”
“You don’t have to do that, Kat…”
“And if I want to?” Her startlingly green eyes met his again, and that odd feeling spread through his abdomen, into his chest, where it warmed his heart. “What would you say to that?”
“Well, I…” Liam coughed and broke eye contact, only to spy Yun with half her face poking above the bookshelf, her eyebrows arched in a way that implied she would electrocute him if his reply to Kat was even remotely stupid.
So he thought about it for a second, what to say to this woman who’d come into his life like a whirlwind and stirred things inside him that he’d thought were long dead. He turned back to Kat to find her still waiting, patiently, chin in one hand, her finger tapping on his messy scrawl in the ledger he’d been filling out dutifully like a zombie for the past three years, because the bookstore was his only link to the past that hadn’t yet crumbled into dust.
He thought about the way he’d felt making a deal with the devil to save Kat from an even deadlier monster roaming the earth, and his relief at finding her at just the right moment. He thought about Kat’s beautiful face, calm and peace
ful as she slept, while he carried her up the stairs and settled her into bed last night. He thought about how he wanted her to be that peaceful all the time, this woman who had been to hell and back, and how she could only be that peaceful if she had people at her side, who could help her weather the storms that Advent 9 would send charging toward her in the future. He thought about the fact that he really, really wanted Kat to stick around, for selfless reasons…and for selfish ones.
Liam thought it was time that he did something to help himself, and someone else, for the first time in three years, instead of moping aimlessly around Salem’s Gate with a heavy chip on his shoulder, and pushing away anyone who tried to get close to him for any reason, and doing nothing of value for anyone, himself included, and contributing nothing to the world except another heaping helping of sorrow.
So he looked Kat King in her strange green eyes, and he replied, “You running the bookstore in exchange for room and board? Sounds like a good deal to me.”
To Be Continued
IN ASK & ANSWER
Coming Soon!
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About Clara Coulson
Clara Coulson was born and raised in backwoods Virginia, USA. Currently in her mid-twenties, Clara holds a degree in English and Finance from the College of William & Mary and recently retired from the hustle and bustle of Washington, DC to return to the homeland and pick up the quiet writing life.
Clara spends most of her time (when she’s not writing) dreaming up new story ideas, studying Japanese, and slowly reading through the several-hundred-book backlog in her budding home library. If she’s not occupied with any of those things, then you can probably find her playing with her two cats or lurking in the shadows of various social media websites.
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