Unforgiven

by Anne Calhoun

  “Are the books you checked out proving adequate?”

  The town’s contract librarian, her brown wool coat buttoned to her chin, a summer sky-blue scarf trapping her loose hair, leaned against the next stool over. “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Thanks for your help.”

  “It’s my pleas—”

  Marissa’s name and a low laugh drowned out the rest of Alana’s sentence. Her gaze sharpened. “Yesterday I taught a class on computer research at the high school,” she said, her voice just a little louder than before. “While I was there I picked up several of their better books on public speaking and rhetoric. Unfortunately I don’t have them with me, but please stop by the library later today, if you’re interested.”

  Whether he needed the books or not, he’d get them and at least skim them. “I appreciate that, ma’am. Thank you,” he said.

  “—good at finding a man to teach her what she needs to know.”

  The words, spoken by an older man at a table behind Adam and to his left, dropped into that sudden hush that falls over crowded spaces at odd intervals. They so closely mirrored what Keith said to him a few days ago that Adam knew Keith was the one to frame Marissa in that particularly unflattering light. The characterization stank of his particular wit, stinging and smarmy and accurate all at once.

  Adam exhaled sulfur, long and slow, as he lifted the lid off one of the to-go cups and stirred cream into Marissa’s coffee. Something hot, leathery, and dangerous shifted inside him, testing the chains holding it inside. He looked at Alana, twin red flags staining her pale cheeks as she fit the lid on her oatmeal with brown sugar and raisins. Her precise movements and high color told him he couldn’t have asked for a better straight man. “You know what we’re taught in the Marines?” he asked.

  “I know very little about military service,” she admitted.

  The conversations at the periphery of the dropped stone of gossip now halted as most of the heads in the restaurant turned to stare unabashedly at Adam and Alana. He ignored them all, just stood ramrod straight, arms folded across his chest. Projecting command presence into the space around him. “We’re trained to fight in pairs. A Marine alone is hard to kill. Two Marines together are nearly impossible to kill. Three or more, with thirty seconds to plan and weapons made from things you can find on this counter and we will wreak havoc.”

  Fuck you up is what he meant. Wreak havoc came out at the last minute as he remembered where he was. “A Marine who learns everything he can from someone who knows more about a weapon or a terrain or a situation is a smart Marine. Resourceful. Adaptable. Someone you want in your platoon.” He swallowed a mouthful of his own coffee, noted with intense satisfaction the absolute silence in the restaurant. Still moving with a precision totally at odds with the fierce creature seething inside him, he snapped the lid back on Marissa’s coffee.

  “How interesting,” Alana said. She extracted her wallet from her leather bag and withdrew a bill, then tucked it under her oatmeal. “Allow me to buy your coffees this morning, Adam.”

  “That’s not necessary, ma’am,” he said. Something about her formal cadence had him braced like he would for a conversation with a visiting general or dignitary.

  “It would be my honor,” she said.

  “Thank you.” He balanced both cups in his palm and followed her through the still-silent dining room. She pulled on gloves and gathered her breakfast, then he opened the door for her.

  “And say hello to Marissa for me,” she said as she swept through.

  Despite the fury boiling inside him, he had to smile. “I will, ma’am.”

  Outside she ducked her chin into her scarf and gave him a mischievous grin. “That was fun.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Damn this place. Damn it for labeling Marissa, defining who she was, how her life should look when she wanted so much more. Could be so free. Thoughts were flying thick and fast now, with emotion hard on their heels.

  “Stop calling me ‘ma’am.’”

  “Sorry,” he said, barely cutting off the automatic ma’am her imperious tone inspired. “Old habits die hard.”

  “I understand,” she said. “Do you want to stop by the library now? I was heading home, but I can open the building for you.”

  “Maybe later this afternoon,” he said, remembering the library’s official afternoon hours. “I don’t want this coffee to get cold.”

  He put the coffees in the Charger’s cupholders and drove across Main Street to the older part of town. The wide streets were lined with small houses on good-sized lots. Marissa’s red diesel dualie made it easy to identify Mrs. Carson’s house.

  For a moment he watched her unload siding board by board from the truck bed to a location alongside the garage. She wore paint – and caulk-stained overalls, and her red fleece zipped to her chin underneath. Her hair lay in brown braids over her shoulders, topped with a red fleece watch cap. Her cheeks were pink either from the cool air or the exertion.

  Nothing about what she did, the way she moved, was calculating. She was just being Marissa, but she had to know what people thought of her and she wasn’t even trying to deflect attention.

  He got out, reached back in for the coffees, closed the door, and joined her by the tailgate. He handed her the fuller cup then hefted a piece of siding, a movement that exerted more effort than he’d expected. “What is this stuff?”

  She looked at it. “Fiber cement. Best siding on the market. When I’m at the auctions I look for construction overbuys and leftovers and pick them up. I found it at an auction when Mrs. Carson said she wanted to re-side her house. The color’s neutral. I’ll put it on now and if she doesn’t like it, I’ll paint it in the spring. It’s heavy, though.”

  “Who helped you load it?”

  “At the auction or today?” she asked over the rim of the coffee cup.

  “Either.”

  “The guy running the auction had a forklift, so he put both pallets in the back of the truck for me. I unloaded it into the barn piece by piece back in July, then reloaded it to bring it over.”

  The single piece of siding still straining his biceps, he looked at her, long and hard enough to get her attention. “I can barely afford to pay myself, Adam. I don’t have the money to hire a second set of hands, and there’s a limit to what I can trade.”

  The concept of bartering brought back the way Walkers Ford’s citizens cut her down to their size at the Heirloom. He looked at the house. The old, vertical siding was still on it. The house wasn’t big, maybe a thousand-square-foot ranch style with a single-car attached garage, but there’d be ladder work. Remove the old siding and heft it into the back of her truck to take to the dump. Unload it. At least she could just back up and shove it off. Tack on the new weather guard/rain barrier. Measure, cut, hang, and nail on the new siding, piece by piece, in the damp fall rain.

  “Why are you working in construction?”

  “That’s what Chris did, remember?”

  He did. Vaguely. Chris’s father was a handyman/jack-of-all-trades, doing whatever didn’t require a building permit from the county. No electrical work, but a little plumbing. His father hurt his back young and Chris picked up his tools, and his drinking habit.

  She held the cup in both hands, inhaling the coffee-scented steam. “I had a couple other jobs after high school. I waitressed at Saddles and Spurs, worked as a checkout clerk at the convenience store, but I didn’t like being inside all day, or standing in one place all the time. I just started going to work with him. I figured if I could help, he’d get through a job faster and could take more work. When the opportunity to buy Brookhaven came up, we thought we’d renovate it, get experience, then sell it.”

  He lifted an eyebrow. “And he bought that?”

  Her gaze flicked to his face, then off into the distance. “Yes,” she admitted. “I sold it pretty convincingly.”

  He wasn’t ready to go there yet. “Did you get the panic attacks when you worked on the house with him?”

 
“They’re not panic attacks,” she protested. “It was different work. Before he died we rewired the house with the help of an electrician friend of his, and were most of the way through the plumbing. That next fall, when the paying work slowed down, I started on the ceilings and walls. Come summer, Brian helped me with the windows. Then I tackled the floors.”

  From a construction-plan standpoint, her strategy made perfectly logical sense. There was no point in replacing the mantel and woodwork only to have to remove it or cover it while she was rewiring, plastering, painting. But that wasn’t why she couldn’t drive up Mrs. Edmunds’s driveway. “So the panic attacks are about the mantel.”

  “They’re not your fault,” she said.

  “Sure they’re not,” he scoffed, then pinned her with his gaze. “I destroyed it. You’d be done by now. That’s on me.”

  “The physical damage is your fault,” she said quietly, “but you’re not responsible for me.”

  Because you left. The words vibrated in the air as surely as if she’d spoken them, and therein lay the rub, as they said. He’d left, forfeited any right or claim to Marissa Brooks, and no matter who did the asking, she wasn’t ready to give him a second chance.

  He couldn’t blame her, but that didn’t make hearing the gossip any easier. She didn’t need a knight in dress A’s to sweep her off her feet. She needed a second set of hands to finish this siding job, and a friend at her back when she went to do what she had to do.

  She set her coffee cup beside the wheel well and pulled on her work gloves. “Let’s get the siding off the side of the garage.”

  He’d brought some tools from his mother’s garage. She wedged the split end of her pry bar under the nail head and tapped on the opposite end to pop the nail out, then lifted her eyebrow at him to check his understanding. When he nodded, she asked, “Low or high? Low’s hard on your knees. High’s hard on your shoulders because you’ve got your arms over your head.”

  “High,” he said. He had more upper-body strength than she did.

  She went to her knees in the grass and efficiently popped the nails. He watched her technique for a second to get his bearings, then went to work where the siding met the soffit under the gutter. For a few minutes the only sound was the screech and jerk of nails tearing free from wood and the thud of the hammer against the pry bar. When the sheet of siding sagged away from the framing, Marissa stood up. He popped the last nails loose, then they took down the sheet of siding, rotted and crumbling at the bottom, and carried it to Marissa’s truck and slid it into the bed.

  “I’ve been to the Architecture school at SDSU,” she said as they walked back to the house.

  He hefted his pry bar and hammer. “Yeah?”

  “They have a collection of photos and newspaper articles about old houses in the upper Midwest. Original plans and elevations. That kind of thing. It’s kind of interesting.”

  “If you could do anything for work,” he said, putting his full weight into a stubborn nail, “what would you do?”

  Screech. Pop. “Truth?”

  “Always.”

  “This,” she said.

  He looked down at her. “Really?”

  Her blue eyes were wide, challenging. “Why is that so surprising? I couldn’t handle a desk job. I like the challenge of redesigning a space, making it reflect a person’s character or personality. Your mom and I had a blast working out her bathroom reno. It’s not buildings, but it’s satisfying, and I’m good at it.”

  “Even after going out on the Resolute?”

  “That’s not reality, Adam. It’s a dream. That’s all.”

  “I thought it was a tangent.”

  Screech. Pop. Then she cut him a glance. They worked in silence for the next few minutes. “What had you so pissed off when you drove up?”

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “Give me three guesses,” she said but continued before he could agree. “You heard some gossip about you and me down at the Heirloom.”

  He put a little extra force behind the hammer swing. “Close enough. It was just about you.”

  Bitterly amused laughter huffed from her as she gripped the bottom edge of the siding in her work gloves. “They’re just too intimidated to talk about you so openly,” she said.

  “They should be,” he said with a grunt. He hoisted the rotting sheet of siding himself and dropped it into the truck bed.

  She finished the rest of the coffee. Her breath condensed in the cool air. “The merry widow of Chatham County. That’s what Keith used to call me when I did start going to Saddles and Spurs after Chris died. He was home from law school by then.”

  “Because you were so fucking merry?”

  “I was the life of the party,” she said, so blandly he couldn’t tell whether she meant she’d gotten drunk and danced topless on the tables, or she was as reserved and remote as she was now.

  Did it matter?

  “Why did you do it?” he asked. “You know how this town talks. Why carry on like you did?”

  “Like I do,” she interrupted, lifting her cup.

  A hot flush of anger replaced the cold-air flush on his cheekbones at the thought of being the latest in a long string of men teaching Marissa something she wanted to know.

  What exactly are you teaching her anyway?

  “When you know what they’ll say,” he finished. “What they’ll think.”

  She shrugged. “I’ve liked every man I’ve had sex with. He’s liked me. I have a hard time getting worked up about that.”

  After what I’ve been through was the unspoken end to that sentence. It sounded very friends-with-benefits, except she still used that casual, half-mocking tone that removed all emotion from the argument. He waited a minute. He was a slow learner when it came to Marissa Brooks, but he was learning. If he gave her time and space, she’d talk.

  “It’s hard to be alone,” she said finally. “I got lonely. I wanted someone to touch me but I didn’t want to have to promise undying love or link the rest of my life to his just to be touched.”

  She’d lived up to everyone’s expectations of the wild, vibrant girl who’d go anywhere, do anything with anyone because she’d been going everywhere and doing everything with him.

  Almost everything. Not sex. She’d been more than willing. As desperately as he’d wanted to have her in every way he could, he’d refused, settled for the motorcycle, drinking, partying. He’d lived for those nights at Brookhaven.

  It never occurred to him that she’d lived for them, too.

  “You taught me that,” she added. “You taught me how much touch can mean, even without sex. I kept looking after you left.”

  A steel spike, thin, flexible, razor sharp, slid between his ribs, into his chest cavity. Cutting off his air, his ability to speak. Because he was still silent, she went on. “Good girls make the trade or keep their legs closed. I didn’t do either. That makes me a slut.”

  Physical intimacy was impossible to avoid in the Corps. He’d spent the night in foxholes with three other guys, sharing body heat to stay warm, lived in tents with other members of his platoon where his personal space was his cot and his footlocker. He’d held guys when they cried, carried wounded men down trails and up ravines.

  He’d been in fistfights that were as intimate as any sex he’d ever had. Until Marissa.

  “Needing touch makes you human,” he said before she could say anything else. “That’s all.”

  They worked the rest of the day in a silence broken only by brief discussions about measurements, techniques, and a good stopping point. He sent Marissa to get lunch, and while she was gone removed the rest of the rotting siding. They had the sides wrapped when twilight fell. He packed his meager tools back in his truck. Marissa hoisted her tools into her truck bed, then stood by her door for a moment.

  “Coming back for more tomorrow?” she asked.

  Her eyes were bottomless dark pools in her face. “Yes,” he said. “What are you doing tonight?”

&nb
sp; “Get some food in my stomach, take a hot bath, go to bed. It’s a work night,” she said.

  “Got it,” he said, still studying her.

  She got in her truck and turned the engine over. “See you tomorrow,” she said over the diesel’s rumble.

  A train of thought chugged through his mind as he drove back into town. Her father taught her to dream. He taught her to need, then left. Consequently, he’d taught her to endure. Neither one of them taught her anything about fulfillment, or dependability. If she knew anything about that, it was thanks to Chris. Now Adam was back, and according to Keith, taking his place at the end of a line of men teaching Marissa something she needed to know.

  He didn’t want to teach her anything. He wanted to give her everything.

  None of this was supposed to happen. None of it was part of the plan. But sometimes a mission objective shifted, encompassed more than was originally thought possible. In that case, actions spoke louder than words.

  She needed touch. He could give her touch.

  17

  MARISSA KICKED THE door closed behind her and slumped into one of the two chairs at her narrow kitchen table. She sat there for a few moments, eyes closed, hands loose on her lap, and catalogued her aches. Hands, shoulders, back, thighs were all beacons of pain, flashing intermittently every few seconds, never at the same time. Adam had been a huge help, a capable assistant who didn’t feel the need to tell her how to do something correctly, but his help meant they did more work in eight hours than she usually did in sixteen, so she was just as tired. Sitting for too long wouldn’t help the situation, and the only way to stave off muscle tears was heat. She needed to eat enough that she didn’t get lightheaded in the bathtub, then have a long soak. But first she had to take off her boots.