by Erin Wright
The happy tune came pouring out of the speakers – Chumbawamba by Tubthumping.
We’ll be singin’
When we’re winnin’
We’ll be singin’
I get knocked down, but I get up again
You’re never gonna keep me down
I get knocked down, but I—
“Tennessee!”
She spun on her heel to find Levi standing in her bedroom doorway. “Oh!” she yelped, and spun back around to turn the music off. This time, she spun around, embarrassed as could be. Maybe she could dive past him and out the door and—
But he wasn’t standing there. It was a cloud of yellow roses standing there instead.
“Levi?” she said, blinking, trying to get her mind to catch up with reality. He lowered the bouquet of roses so she could see his face.
“Hi,” he said softly.
In that moment, Tenny was pretty sure that even her toes were turning red.
Chapter 44
Levi
He’d been so nervous, pulling up to Georgia’s house. Was Tenny going to throw him out on his ear? Was she going to slam the door in his face?
The one thing he didn’t expect was for her to be dancing around her room, singing Chumbawamba at the top of her lungs.
“I didn’t know you were into alternative rock,” he said into the painful silence of the room.
She shrugged. “Not usually, but that song makes me happy. When I want to cheer up, I turn it on and turn it loud.” Her face, which had been awash with panic and surprise, began to shut down again. The surprise was gone and she was back to hiding from the world. “Can I help you?” she asked politely, as if they were strangers meeting on the street for the first time.
He held the roses out. “I bought them for you,” he said, as if that wasn’t patently obvious by the fact that he was giving them to her.
But she didn’t say, “Well, I’m glad to know that you didn’t steal them from Carla at Happy Petals!” and she didn’t laugh and her face didn’t light up.
“Thank you so much,” she murmured politely, taking the roses from him and giving them a cursory glance. “They’re beautiful. Carla does a great job of bringing in the freshest flowers.”
Monotone. Pleasant. No emotion to be found. If he hadn’t just caught her dancing around her room, singing at the top of her lungs, he would’ve guessed that she’d been replaced by a robot while he wasn’t looking.
Maybe robots can sing and dance now…
She was staring politely at him, a small smile planted firmly on her lips, simply waiting for him to tell her why he’s there and then go on his way.
His eyes dropped to her hands, hoping and praying that they’d give her true thoughts away, but she was holding the roses loosely in her hands, no fluttering or twisting of her fingers.
He looked back up to her cool blue-green eyes, looking at him like she would a stranger on the street, waiting for him to speak. “Georgia came to my house,” he blurted out.
Tennessee blinked. Twice.
The slightest crack in her façade, and then it was gone again. She was back to looking at him cooly, every lash and muscle in place. Waiting for him to speak.
“She gave me a bunch of articles. Told me to read them, and then pull my head out of my ass. Your cousin…” He blew out a laugh and ran his fingers through his hair. “I really think her middle name should’ve been Blunt instead of Ruth.”
The corner of Tennessee’s mouth quirked up in acknowledgment of his joke, but the smile didn’t reach her eyes. They were still pinned on him, huge and gorgeous and somehow intimidating as hell in that moment.
“The articles were all on cutting,” he continued on, watching for a reaction – any reaction – as he spoke. “Why it is that people cut, and what they’re trying to accomplish. They’re not…you’re not trying to kill yourself when you do it.”
A bitter laugh spilled out of her at that. “I told you that. I told you that I didn’t want to die; that I wanted to feel alive. But, I’m glad that an article on the topic finally pounded the truth into your brain. Go ahead. What else did you learn?”
He’d been wanting a response out of her, but now that he got one…he wasn’t so sure he wanted it after all. Sarcastic Tennessee wasn’t a pretty sight.
He didn’t know what else to do, though, other than to keep talking and hope that he managed to break through her defenses somehow.
Tentatively, he kept going. “That more girls than boys tend to cut, although there’s a small subset of boys who do it, too. That cutting gives you a way to control the world when you don’t have control otherwise. That people often believe that cutters are trying to kill themselves and freak out over it, even when that’s not what is happening, and this freak-out doesn’t help and usually makes things worse.”
“These sound like mighty fine – and accurate – articles,” Tennessee drawled.
“As usual, your cousin was right to give them to me, and order me to read them. Not, of course, that I appreciated it at the time, but I get what she was trying to do now. If you ever feel like sharing some of your tact with her, though, I don’t think you’d go amiss.”
Tennessee let out a small laugh at that. “I’ll keep that in mind while we’re sharing personality traits over dinner one night,” she said dryly.
Levi shot her a huge grin – she’d made a joke! – and as if she knew exactly what he was thinking, she shut back down again.
She was pissed, and she was gonna make him pay for it.
Groveling was all that was left, so grovel he did. She was worth it – whatever it took.
“I screwed up, Tenny. Big time. You’d been trying so hard to hide those scars from me for such a long time; I should’ve taken a step back and realized that if it was that big, then maybe I needed to be more delicate in my approach to the topic. Instead, I just thrashed through it like a bull in a china shop, smashing your heart along the way.”
“It isn’t that I think that cutting is good,” she said softly, interrupting him. He gladly shut up and waited to hear what she had to say. “I quit cutting shortly after I moved out of my parent’s house. It’s like drugs or alcohol – it’s addictive. You have to cut deeper and more often, the longer you do it. One of the best ways to quit is to listen to loud music, and sing your heart out. It helps sidetrack you and get you to stop thinking about whatever it was that was making you contemplate cutting.”
They both looked at her laptop, then back at each other.
“I’m not going to lie and pretend that that wasn’t exactly what I was doing when you showed up,” she said baldly. “Like I said, it’s an addiction. I don’t just decide to stop one day and never have the urge again. It doesn’t work like that. Despite my reputation,” she gave him a wry smile, “I am not, in fact, a robot.”
He waited for a moment, wanting her to be able to finish saying whatever it was that she wanted to say, but when she appeared to be done, he said, “Everything I read – there was always a reason for doing this. Something going on in a person’s background to make them feel like this was their only option. Uhhh…” His face flushed a brilliant red and he felt his heart constrict in his chest, but he had to say it because he had to give her a chance to tell him the truth, no matter how hard it was. “Your father – was there…” He broke off, unable to say the words out loud.
“Oh no,” Tenny said quickly, shaking her head adamantly. “My father can be a dick, absolutely, but there was never anything inappropriate there.” Levi felt a rush of relief at her words; knowing that she hadn’t been through that made him feel a whole lot better. “It was…” She trailed off and looked around the room for a moment. “Why don’t we sit down? It feels weird to stand here like we’re business associates.” She gave him another wry smile.
They sat down on the bed together, and Levi instantly felt his dick spring to attention. Tennessee, even fully clothed and talking about cutting, was still so beautiful, it made his teeth ache.
Add a bed into the equation…
He forced himself to concentrate.
Once Tenny was snuggled up against the headboard, hugging a pillow defensively against her chest, she started talking. And soon, Levi forgot all about having sex and the state of excitement of his dick, and just listened.
“Perfect. Ask anyone. That was the word used most often to describe me. I had the perfect body and perfect teeth and perfect hair and perfect nails and perfect skin. I never said the wrong thing or laughed too loud and I could play the piano…perfectly.” She laughed sarcastically. “I know that this is virtually the definition of #FirstWorldProblems, but do you know how exhausting it is to be perfect All. The. Time? I couldn’t just throw my hair up in a ponytail and run to the store in sweatpants like everyone else. Yeah, I enjoyed doing my hair and makeup and shopping and whatever, but even I wanted to be lazy sometimes. That was never, ever an option.
“But more than being required to be perfect all the time, it was the fact that I had no control over my own life. Didn’t want to play the piano? Too bad. Didn’t want to enter into a beauty pageant? Too bad. Didn’t want to marry Moose? Too bad. Didn’t want to eat caviar? Too bad. Big and small, every decision was made for me. Cutting was the one thing I could control. It was my choice. No one could tell me no. No one could take it away from me. It was my little secret. My dirty little secret.”
She shoved her hands into her hair, looking distraught. It hit Levi then how little he’d seen her look anything but happy or at least serene. An upset Tennessee – he’d seen it a couple of times.
But not very often.
“Because of you and Georgia, I’ve finally started to stand up for myself a little bit. I mean, my God – welding. You don’t get much more lowbrow than that.” She let out a little chuckle. “Oh, and stealing my own clothes, and checking out books from the library, and reading books on how to be frugal, and then there was the time where I actually dared to move out of my parent’s house at age 26, and refused to marry Moose…
“I’m pretty sure my parents think that I’m out of control. Tennessee has really lost it now! Except, you know what’s funny? The more control I’ve taken back from my parents, the less often that I want to cut. Strange how that works.” She laughed lightly.
“So if you don’t want to cut very often,” Levi said slowly, hoping that he was doing this right – that he was asking the right questions, “then what triggered you today?”
She stared at him for a moment, silent, nothing showing on her face, and yet he knew – he knew – that she was debating what to tell him. He was sure it’d be some version of the truth, but how much she revealed…she was weighing his soul and trying to decide if he was worthy of her trust.
“You,” she whispered.
He felt like he’d been punched in the gut.
She shrugged and smiled as if it was no big deal, but it was. Her unflappable demeanor was flapped, and she was in pain, whether she’d admit to it or not.
“I missed you. I missed the person I was around you. Fearless. Brave. Believed I could take on the world, and most especially that I could take on my parents. I stood up to them for you. And then you decided that I wasn’t worth loving anymore. How could you do that?” she whispered, her voice breaking. “How could you do that?!” But this time she was yelling and she swung her pillow and caught him full in the chest with it. The surprise of it knocked him over on the bed and she whacked him again with the pillow. “I stood up for you. I told my parents how wonderful you were. I chose you over everything else in my life – all of the stability and money, I chose you. And then you just threw me away.” She hit him again with the pillow, and then yanked it up against her chest, sobbing into it, curling up into herself, wrapping herself up into a ball to protect herself from him.
Levi froze, not sure of what to do. He wanted to reach out and stroke her back and hold her while she cried, but she’d just finished telling him how angry she was with him. Maybe she didn’t want him to touch her. In her shoes, he probably wouldn’t want that either.
So he just sat there, frozen, waiting for the tears to subside and for her to tell him what she wanted him to do. Whatever she wanted, he’d do it. Anything at all.
The tears just kept coming, though, and her body was shaking and he couldn’t believe how awful he felt. He just wanted her to be happy. How had he screwed up so badly?
He reached out and patted her shoulder awkwardly. To his surprise, she didn’t turn around and deck him, or slap him, or even hit him upside the head with her pillow/Kleenex. Instead, she rolled towards him on the bed, buried her face in his lap, and really let loose.
He paused for a moment. Was this better than before? She seemed to be crying even more, so he’d be hard pressed to qualify it as better, but on the other hand, she was snuggled up against him now, so…
He took a chance and started stroking his fingers through her hair. “Shhh…” he murmured. “It’s okay…it’s gonna be all right.” He ran his fingers through her hair, rubbed her between the shoulders, stroked his hand down her arm…and she cuddled ever closer to him. She almost seemed to want to climb inside his skin. He’d never had anyone want to be as close to him as she seemed to desire in that moment.
Finally, the waterworks died down, and she pulled back with a laughing grimace. “I can’t believe…I don’t think I’ve ever cried that hard in my life. Sorry you had to see that.”
He shook his head. “More than any person in my life, Tenny, I love you. Holding you while you cry…it’s the least I can do. Especially since I was the one who caused those tears. I know you don’t have much of a reason to trust me or believe me right now, but I promise to always hold you whenever you need it, and to be the cause of your tears as little as possible.”
She laughed a little at that. “So realistic. At least you know better than to promise to never cause me to cry like that again.”
He let out a surprised laugh of his own. “If there was a way to guarantee that sort of thing, I’d be all over it. But I’m pretty sure I’m going to screw up again.”
“And I will, too,” she said firmly, staring him straight in the eye.
She’d smudged her makeup all over her face, and he reached out a thumb to wipe the black smudges away. She didn’t blink, though, or turn away. She simply stared at him until he dropped his hands and stared back, giving her forthcoming words the weight she wanted them to have.
“Levi Garrett, I want you to know right now and never forget it: I am not perfect. I do not want to be put up on a pedestal where every small mistake is something to beat me about the head with. I’ve spent my entire life trying to live up to this ideal and it slowly drove me to the point where cutting myself seemed like the only option I had left. I’m not going back there ever again. I have to be able to make mistakes.”
Levi shook his head at the irony of it all. “I’ve had the opposite problem all my life – no one expected anything out of me. I was just the son of the town drunk. I wasn’t going to go anywhere. I wasn’t going to succeed. I’m not sure which is worse.”
She took his hand and threaded her fingers through his. “It’s funny, isn’t it,” she said softly, “how different you and I are. And yet, you complete me. You’re the yin to my yang.”
He picked up their hands and pressed a kiss to the back of her hand. “Before I overreacted and screwed everything up, I had a present for you.” Reluctantly, he pulled his hand out of hers so he could dig down into his Wranglers. He pulled out a bright pink key with tiny embedded rhinestones in the top. “Tennessee Marie Rowland, will you move in with me?”
She plucked the key out of his fingers and stared at it with wonder in her eyes. “Oh Levi,” she breathed, “it’s so perfect. So absolutely perfect.”
As they kissed, Levi’s only thought was that no matter what Tennessee believed, ‘perfect’ really was the best way to describe the life he’d been blessed with.
Author’s Note
Hi, amazeballs reader
! I’m so thrilled that you made it to the end of Fire and Love – I’m guessing you finished the novel because you loved it. *crossing fingers* At least, I hope you didn’t force yourself to read it all the way to the end while secretly putting pins into voodoo dolls named Erin Wright the whole time!
Fire and Love was definitely an unusual love story because of the background of both Levi and Tennessee. As different as they are on the surface, though, they really do complete each other, or as Tenny puts it, he’s the yin to her yang.
