It felt good.
And shitty.
And she didn’t know what to do about any of that.
“Hey,” he said, pausing on the steps when he saw Nora and Ryan.
“Well, hello,” Nora said, putting aside all her strange and sudden vulnerability in exchange for her familiar sarcasm. “You’re not bad-looking when you’re conscious.”
“And clean,” Harrison said, with a shy smile that nearly destroyed her.
“You want some coffee?” Nora asked.
“Badly.”
Ryan sat there like a silent bump on a log, ignoring Nora’s wide-eyed look while Nora went and poured Harrison a cup of coffee and nuked it.
“We’re out of milk. But sugar is over there,” Nora said, pointing to the square Tupperware container on the counter next to the fridge. “I’m afraid the latte machine is busted.”
Harrison ignored the sugar and all of Nora’s jabs and leaned back against the counter, drinking day-old reheated coffee like it was no big deal. Like he did it every day, when she knew for a fact that he was unnaturally devoted to his espresso machine.
“I’m afraid I didn’t get a chance to meet you properly yesterday,” he said.
“Because you were passed out cold on my couch,” Nora said with a slicing smile.
“Exactly. I’m Harrison, Ryan’s husband.”
Nora and Harrison shook hands. “Sorry to hear about the election.”
“Thank you; there will be others.”
That surprised her.
“Hopefully you won’t lose those.”
Harrison smiled. “Hopefully.”
“When are you leaving?” Ryan asked Harrison, cutting through the bullshit small talk.
“I’m not leaving,” he said.
“What?”
“I’m not leaving.” He shrugged.
“Maybe you didn’t understand me upstairs?”
“What happened upstairs?” Nora asked.
“Oh, I understood you,” Harrison said, his eyes on Ryan as if Nora weren’t even in the room. It was like that first night at the bar all over again. Nothing existed but him. “But I don’t think you understand me.” He crossed the room and leaned over the table. “You can use me like that all you want, Ryan. But I’m not leaving.”
The back door was thrown open so hard it bounced off one of the kitchen chairs, and Ryan jumped, nearly bonking heads with Harrison.
Daddy poked his head in the door, his hair wild, his grin even wilder. “Girls! We need all hands on deck!”
“Did you actually shoot something?” Ryan asked, getting to her feet and rushing with her sister to the back door.
“Bucky hit a big white-tail with his truck!” Dad lit up like he used to, that smile in the corners of his mouth. “Come on, clean up the back table. It’ll be just like the old days.”
Just like them, but somehow, painfully not.
Why didn’t you ever call me? she wondered. Why didn’t you ever reach out? I was your daughter as much as Nora and you just let me be gone for six years.
Dad vanished from the doorway and she turned to find Harrison watching her, reading her expression like he knew what she was thinking. The sweetness of being back home, tipping just a little toward bitterness.
And he probably did know what she was thinking. That was maybe the consolation prize of their marriage. Instead of happiness, they had this awkward knowledge of each other. This terrible understanding that couldn’t ever be turned into something warm. Something useful.
It just was.
The backyard was bare in the November afternoon. Their patio furniture was shoved in the corner, the trash cans had tipped over in the night, and raccoons had thrown the garbage around like it was a party. The chain-link fence in the back was rusted and falling down in places, covered in junk that had gotten stuck against it in the wind.
There was nothing lush or pampered or cared for about this lawn.
And her dad and some of his old army buddies were going to bring in some roadkill and butcher it on the patio table.
“Harrison!” she yelled. “We need you.”
“You trying to drive him away?” Nora muttered under her breath as she walked by, going out to the yard to help.
Showing him the real me, she thought.
“What’s happening?” Harrison asked, standing in the doorway with her. His shoulder brushing against hers.
“Dad’s going to butcher a deer they killed on the highway. He needs your help.”
To Harrison’s credit he only nodded, finished his terrible coffee, and handed her the cup. His hand caught hers for a moment, his fingers tracing the rings on her finger. The engagement and wedding rings he put there … what? Two months ago.
God, how quickly things could change.
“You’re still wearing them,” he said.
“I forgot to take them off.” She started to pull them off her finger, but it was difficult with this water weight that was beginning to make her fingers and feet swell.
“Leave them,” he said, taking her hand and kissing her fingers.
“Harrison—”
“I’m winning you back, Ryan,” he said with that shy smile. It was fascinating, that smile, an indicator of some side of him she’d never seen. “But first I gotta go butcher a deer.”
He said it like he knew what he was doing and then was gone, out to the old garage in his dress shirt, walking past the garbage and the weeds as if they just weren’t there.
When Harrison said for better or for worse in the Georgia Governor’s Mansion, he’d never once expected this.
Holding down the hind leg of the dead deer while his father-in-law used a hacksaw to cut the deer right down the middle of its belly. All in an attempt to win back the affection of his wife.
Harrison turned his head and gagged into his shoulder.
“You all right there?” Robert asked, still hacking his way through skin and muscle.
“Just fine,” Harrison managed to get out.
It was freezing out in the yard and he had no coat, and none of the Dwarfs or his father-in-law seemed interested in loaning him one. And he got it—it was both a test and a punishment. He’d belonged to a fraternity for a while; he knew how this worked.
Harrison wasn’t entirely sure how Robert was going to come at him or how much leeway he was going to give the father who had shunned Ryan for the last six years when it came to the hard time the man wanted to give the new son-in-law.
“How much meat you think we’re going to get off this thing?” Robert asked the guy named Bucky, who as the driver of the weapon that had felled this creature sat in a lawn chair drinking beer while the rest of them worked.
“Seventy pounds, if you’re careful,” Bucky said, draining his third bottle.
“Call some of the folks down at the hall,” Robert said over his shoulder to another one of the men. “See if we can’t put some of this meat in the freezers of families who need some help this winter.”
“That’s good of you,” Harrison said past the hideous burn of bile in his throat.
“We take care of our own around here,” Robert said.
But you didn’t, he thought, thinking of Ryan’s face as she watched her father in the kitchen. You left her in the cold.
“Ryan told me about that VetAid thing you got going,” Robert said.
“Families of vets need help, too.”
“That’s good of you.”
Harrison smiled. This was as close as they were going to get to hugging it out.
“So Robert?” one of the other hunters on the far side of the table said. “You never told us Ryan got married.”
“Again!” another guy yelled.
“You weren’t invited to the wedding?” asked Bucky.
“No, I wasn’t,” Robert said, sawing with a little extra force. Harrison moved his fingers farther out of the way.
“That’s what happens when you don’t talk to your daughter for six years. You miss out on
some stuff,” Harrison said.
“Oh ho!” Bucky cried. “He’s got you there.”
The back door opened and Ryan stood in the yellow square of light, a sweater wrapped around her body. “Anybody need anything out here?” she asked.
“Your husband needs a barf bag,” Robert said, watching him from the corner of his eye.
Ryan winced.
“I’m fine,” he lied.
“I could use another beer,” Bucky yelled, and Ryan went back inside.
For a second, the only sound in the backyard was the hideous scrape of saw through bone.
“You want to fill me in on what’s going on between you and my daughter?”
“If you wanted to know anything about her life in the last six years, I imagine you could have picked up the phone.”
Robert stopped butchering and stood, facing Harrison carrying a saw with blood dropping off its serrated edges, but Harrison wasn’t scared. He was cold, hung over, starving, nauseated, and ready to fight on behalf of a woman who hadn’t seen anyone fight for her in a long time.
“You got something to say, I figure you should just say it,” Robert demanded.
The back door opened and Ryan came out carrying beers, but she stopped on the top step as if sensing the dangerous mood in the backyard.
“For a guy who welcomed her home with open arms, you could have welcomed her home a lot sooner,” Harrison said.
“She came running here because she had nowhere else to go, which makes me think you must have made sure she didn’t feel too welcome with you,” Robert said.
“You’re right,” he agreed. “I did. I lost everything a few days ago. Everything I thought I wanted. The election, my career, my future. But I wanted to protect Ryan from how terrible my world can be. How ugly. How cold. How unforgiving. So I sent her away. And that’s the thing about losing everything,” he said, catching her eye, telling her and her father at the same time. “It makes you realize what you really want.”
“And you want my daughter?”
He nodded, and the distance between him and Ryan vanished. The men, the deer—it all fell away, and the world was revealed in stark lines. Belief or doubt. That was all that mattered.
“You think I don’t see you?” he asked her, ignoring his father-in-law and his friends. “You think I don’t understand how every time you’ve hit rock bottom people shove you away, leave you alone?”
He could hear her breathing. Over the wind. Over the pounding of his heart, he could hear her breath.
“I’m not leaving,” he said. “You can do whatever you want to me. I’m here.”
“What if I leave?”
“Then I’ll follow you.”
“You think it’s that easy?”
“Easy?” He laughed. He laughed so hard it hurt, and then he held out his arms, looking down at the dead deer on the table, her father carrying a gory hacksaw. “What part of this looks easy to you?”
Ryan handed Bucky the beer and headed back inside, the swish of her skirt like a red cape to his inner bull.
“I missed her every day for six years, almost picked up the phone a million times,” Robert said, looking suddenly older in the twilight. Suddenly weighed down by a life that had not been easy.
“Why didn’t you?” Harrison asked.
“Too proud?” Robert shrugged. “Trying to keep the peace with Nora? I don’t even know anymore. But I’d take it back. Every minute, I’d take it back.”
“You need to tell her that.”
Robert nodded and straightened his glasses, but instead of going in there and telling his daughter he loved her, he bent back over the deer.
“This is your chance,” Harrison told Robert, who only grinned and shook his head.
“I think it’s yours, son.”
Harrison stepped back. This wasn’t how he was going to prove his love.
He turned on the hose and held his hands under the ice-cold water and cleaned off the blood and the regret. He splashed the water over his head and face, and the shock of it cleared his head.
He loved her and she needed to know that.
Chapter 29
What he wasn’t expecting was a kitchen stuffed full of people making drinks and putting out food. Apparently, butchering a deer in your backyard was reason for a party around here. And when he walked in, conversations halted and they all turned to look at him.
“You Ryan’s husband?” a woman wearing a Flyers hockey sweater and carrying a casserole dish filled with what looked like Tater Tots and bacon asked.
“I am. You know where she is?”
“I’m here,” came her voice from behind him, and he turned to see her at the table. “You’re a mess.”
He spread his arms out as best he could so she could really get a good look.
“If my mother could see me now?” he joked. Across the room, Nora threw him a kitchen towel and he used it to wipe the water off his face and hands. The shirt was a lost cause, but he refused to take it as a sign of his own chances in this kitchen.
“Maybe we should go out front,” Ryan said, standing up.
“Truth in private, lies in public?” he said, and she stilled. “That hasn’t worked so well for us, has it?”
She looked at him point-blank with sad, worried eyes. “What are you doing, Harrison?” she breathed.
“Figuring it out, I guess.”
“By butchering a deer?”
“If that’s what it takes.”
“Your world—”
“Fuck that, Ryan. Your world. My world. I don’t give a shit anymore. It’s us. You and me. The baby. It’s our world and it looks like whatever we want it to look like.”
The crowd in the kitchen had gotten larger, people gathering from the dining room, and their audience watched like a good audience should, avidly, eyes wide. Food and drink forgotten.
He was embarrassed, slightly mortified, but at this point he would strip naked for her.
She still seemed dubious and he thought of how badly he’d botched it between them. After the election and then upstairs in her room. She deserved better, so with both hands he tore open the box where he kept everything he felt. All those things he’d tried to make go away because no one in his life ever valued them.
“I’ve been far from happy for so long. But you made me feel good and whole for the first time in my life. You made me feel like I was worth more than I’d ever thought I was. I want that back.”
“You made me feel that way too,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest. “I saw the person I could be with you, and that was exciting. And I wanted that. The food bank and going back to school and being a part of your team. But I can be that person without you, too.”
“Damn straight,” some audience member called out.
“That’s true,” he said, cleaved in half with pride and dread. “Is that what you want?”
She shrugged. “Maybe we should just be grateful that we’ve shown each other what’s possible and leave it at that.”
“I can’t leave it at that because I love you,” he said. “I love you. I love you more than …”
“Butchering deer?” someone asked.
He ignored the peanut gallery. “I can’t even finish that thought. Because there’s nothing in my life that comes close to you. Everything is a distant second to you.”
She was silent and dry-eyed and as the silence stretched on, their audience began to share sideways glances. He was losing her. The walls she’d retreated behind were too high.
“Why?” It was a voice from deep in the corner, by the sink. The crowd shifted and Nora appeared, holding a Yuengling bottle braced against her hip. A small blond pit bull in an apron.
“Why … what?” he asked.
“Why do you love her?” Nora said, tilting her head toward Ryan. “What’s so special about my sister?”
“Everything,” he said, caught off guard.
Nora made a buzzing sound. “Lame answer, asshole.”
&n
bsp; The crowd laughed.
“Stop,” Ryan said, coming forward, her hands out as if she were going to send both of them back to their corners. Nora shot him an “are you really this dumb” look over Ryan’s shoulder and his muddy brain finally caught on.
Nora was giving him a boost over Ryan’s high walls.
He reached for Ryan, cupping her face in his clean but cold hands. Her eyes were wide and filling with tears that she systematically blinked away.
“You don’t have to do this,” she whispered, but he could see that deep down, she wanted it.
“I love you because I’ve never had anyone by my side before. Because you inspire me to look at things differently. Because for the first time in my life I want someone to be proud of me. I love you because you make me better. You make my life better.”
“Yeah, that’s nice and all, but that’s all the shit she does for you.” It was Nora again, right over Ryan’s shoulder, like the declaration of love police. “What about her?”
“Your sister is tougher than Maynard,” he whispered to Ryan, who didn’t smile. Right. She just kept blinking away those tears, too tough to let them fall.
“You’re fierce,” he said. “Loyal. Smart. So … so smart, Ryan. Smarter, I think, than you even know. You’re a fighter who leads with her heart no matter how many times it’s been beaten up. And you’re kind, too. And that seems minor, but in my world …” He cleared his throat, but the ball of emotion didn’t go anywhere. It got worse, in fact, and he felt tears building in his own eyes. “I haven’t known a lot of kindness. You changed my life at that bar, showed me what was possible between two people when someone is brave. When someone is kind. I want to return that favor every day. For you. For our baby. Our family. I want to wake up every morning and make you happy. As happy as you’ve made me.”
“You gonna say something about how hot she is?” Nora asked.
Ryan flinched in his hands and he shook his head, looking into those brown eyes with the dark edges. “I’ve doubted my worth,” he whispered to her. “I’ve felt alone, just like you have, and if you let me in, Ryan. If you let me love you, I promise you’ll never feel that way again.”
He dropped his hands from her face and stepped back. He couldn’t force her to trust him. He couldn’t force her to do anything. A guy in the doorway to the living room clapped, and Harrison did a little bow before he shot Ryan a half-smile, trying to hide his doubt and his fear and his worry.
Indecent Proposal (Boys of Bishop) Page 30
