by Lindy Zart
She tipped her head back and looked up at the lights strewn from streetlamp to streetlamp, white blinking in black. Beth felt something she hadn’t in a long time. Confident. Shifting her gaze to the businesses with their doors and windows aglow, Beth pushed her hands in the pockets of her winter coat and crossed the street to The Lucky Coin.
It was her final shift as a bartender for The Lucky Coin, a fact that exhilarated her, and in the farthest setting of her heart, made it twinge, just a bit. Just enough to let her know it hadn’t all been bad. It was a parting that should have taken place a while ago, but Beth had worked at the bar since she was eighteen. Eight years of her life were spent there. It wasn’t easy to go. There were times when knowing the right thing to do, and actually doing it, were not necessarily a packaged deal.
With it being a Wednesday, most of the regulars were at the bowling alley across town for league night. Because of that, Beth was hoping for an uneventful night to end her employment with the Peck family. When she walked through the door and saw only a handful of people lined up at the bar, she hid a sigh of relief. There was an instant of a flyaway heartrate when she wondered if Ozzy would be at the bar, but it was clear he was not. She hadn’t seen him since Thanksgiving night. That was good, but also suspicious.
Loving all fried foods, the smell of French fries that welcomed Beth was one she would miss. Beth hung up her jacket and hat in the hallway in the back of the building before meeting Deb behind the bar. Deb’s greeting was cooler than Beth expected, but she pretended not to notice, effortlessly getting into her routine of serving customers, restocking what needed to be, and keeping the area clean.
“The bathrooms need paper toweling and toilet paper,” Deb said in passing.
Beth set down the beer she’d gotten for one of the customers and frowned at Deb’s taut back as she took the man’s money and put it in the cash register. The shutting of the drawer was sharp, her hurt showing forth. The fall colors and homey atmosphere deadened somehow, turning from cheery to ominous. Beth was not welcome anymore. She felt the brittleness of exclusion in her bones. As she walked to the room that was loosely used as the owners’ office, Beth wondered if Deb was upset that she was leaving, or if it was more—if Ozzy had said something. She didn’t trust him to tell the truth. He couldn’t even tell himself the truth.
It doesn’t matter. You have four hours left, and then you don’t ever have to step foot in this place again—or talk to any members of the Peck family, if you’re lucky.
With toilet paper and paper towels in hand, Beth marched to the bathrooms. Her nose crinkled as she stepped into the men’s. It smelled like urine and chemicals in the tan-walled room. She knew Deb cleaned them at least twice a week, but it appeared to be due. After she refilled the paper products, as a peace offering to whatever battle was unknowingly being waged between her and her employer, Beth asked Deb if she wanted her to take care of the restrooms.
Deb looked at Beth like she didn’t know her, and didn’t like what she saw. “You broke Ozzy’s heart, Beth.”
Beth felt her nerve-endings tauten. Golden eyes delved into blue, challenging her to deny it. Telling her not to bother. “He broke mine first.”
Her stiff shoulders went limp, and Deb rubbed a hand against her short dark hair. “I understand how needy and controlling Ozzy can be. I know you can’t be together, but I see how the breakup is hurting my son. I also know it’s illogical to blame you, and I selfishly wish you were still together. For my benefit, and my son’s.”
You don’t know your son, whispered across her lips, but she closed her mouth against it.
Deb sighed and wiped at the counter with a rag. “Maybe you quitting is the best thing that can happen. Yes. Please clean the bathrooms. It’s a slow night. You can go home early. You’ll still get paid for the hours you aren’t here. Consider it a parting gift.”
“Thank you,” she said in a wooden voice, her limbs as stilted as her words as Beth left the bar area.
She blinked her eyes against the stinging burn as she went about sanitizing the bathrooms. Beth heard the door to the bar open, caught Ozzy’s voice, and bristled. It wasn’t her fault he couldn’t move on, that he refused to let their relationship go. It wasn’t her fault his mom didn’t like that they’d broken up. So much guilt was shoved onto her, all because Beth made choices that others did not want her to make. The guilt was thick and heavy, an unwanted blanket. Her life didn’t feel like hers.
Beth told herself it was.
She told herself to not let others make her feel bad, and when she strode out the door of The Lucky Coin for the last time, making sure to avoid Ozzy’s stare, she told herself it was the best decision for her to make. One more shackle unlocked. One step closer to being who she wanted to be. She would prove to herself, and everyone else, that she could do whatever she wanted. She could decide to write, and she could decide to be happy, and she could decide to fall in love with a sick man.
Finally, Beth was seeing. Everything was up to her.
As she reached the Blazer, the air turned frigid, gusts of it snatching at her hair and pushing against her. The barely perceptible sound of boots moving over packed snow touched her ears. Beth would have missed it if she hadn’t been listening for it. No one else was out, not even the headlights of vehicles shone on the street. The sudden temperature drop was an announcement, a signal of an unwanted guest, as if nature thought to caution Beth. She knew before she looked that she wasn’t alone. She knew who was behind her without facing him, and she wasn’t even surprised.
“Just tell me one thing.”
Beth closed her eyes and counted three breaths. The quivering in her frame belied the calmness she fought to find. She wasn’t scared of him, but Beth was wary. She set her shoulders to bravery and faced the dark stain that would not leave her white world. Thinking of Harrison helped, and she pictured his determined chin, his eyes as bottomless as a well.
Her voice was surprisingly firm as she told him, “I will get a restraining order against you if you put a single finger on me.”
Ozzy held up his hands. “I’m not going to touch you.”
“What do you want?”
Weariness had grooved creases beneath his eyes. With his faded jean jacket, red-tipped nose and cheeks, he looked cold, but his body remained immobile. His eyes were clear and bright, like a sunset on fire. When he took a step closer and Beth pushed her back hard into the vehicle, wishing she could sink through the metal and into it, Ozzy’s brows pinched together. He dropped his hands. The vehicle was frozen, searing through her coat with icy heat.
“You’re afraid of me.”
This was the alternate Ozzy. The side that cared, and felt deeply, and had childlike sweetness. The one who had big ideas and a disarming smile. The Ozzy who wouldn’t hurt her. This Ozzy was fleeting, and she saw less of him more and more. His personalities were making her dizzy. How many minds could live inside one man?
“You say it like you can’t understand how that could happen. I don’t know you anymore. I don’t know who you are, but you aren’t Ozzy. How could I not be leery of you? You’re a stranger.” Beth clutched the keys inside one palm, careful to keep the sharp part pointed out, a small weapon that would buy her time if she needed it.
Ozzy gripped his shaggy hair and flexed his fingers. “I don’t know—I’ve just, I’ve felt insane the last few months. You’re gone. You’re really gone, and I don’t know how to deal with that. I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” he mumbled, turning to the side and staring into the night. His arms fell to his sides.
“Harrison Caldwell.”
That name passing his lips made her stomach fall, all the way to the ground. It pooled there, disbelief and dismay churnings its contents. Her fingers curled, wanting to scratch the name from his throat, his thoughts. One of her numb fingers scraped against the sharp edge of the key and pain pulsed there. It reminded her that she could feel even when she’d rather not.
“What?” She didn�
�t understand how she was able to produce the word, or even the air that entered and left her lungs.
Ozzy turned to her, his eyes two golden ponds. They weaved and waved, a storm brewing from within. It would be destructive, and deadly, once it hit. “Harrison Caldwell. That’s whose house you’ve been going to.”
“How do you—why?” Beth wouldn’t confirm his words, and denying them would do exactly that. She swallowed, felt her throat contract. Not saying anything was best. She turned her shocked eyes to the horizon, unconsciously looking in the direction of Harrison’s house. Beth wanted to go there, and never come back to this town, this existence.
“That’s who you’ve been seeing, that’s the person who hired you. Are you even really working for him, or was that a lie too?”
Beth shifted her gaze to his, and stared.
“Beth.”
She pressed her lips together, refusing to warrant his words with an answer. Beth owed him nothing. Placing a hand to the icy glass of the window, she steadied herself and put the key in the lock. “I’m going home. Don’t try to stop me.”
“Do you have any idea who he is, what he has?”
Her back stiffened, anger heating the cold from her body. Stealing the tremble from her voice. Disintegrating the trepidation from her eyes. Beth looked over her shoulder, met firestorm eyes with blue titanium ones, as indestructible as her faith in Harrison. She turned back to the Blazer. “I know everything.”
“And you still chose him over me.” His tone was derisive, disbelieving.
“I would choose him every time, over you and anyone else.”
“He came to see me.”
She froze with her back to him. Even the ice-covered landscape wasn’t as motionless as her.
“Yeah. About a week ago. Showed up at my place in the middle of the night. He told me to stay away from you, said that if he ever heard I touched you again it would be the last time I touched anything.”
Ozzy made a sound of incredulity. “At first, I couldn’t believe who was talking to me, then what it meant sunk in. Harrison Caldwell wouldn’t have warned me away from you unless he was involved with you in some way. After that, it all clicked into place.”
A piece of snow skidded past her feet, and she knew Ozzy had kicked it. “So there you have it. I know your secret. It’s sick, Beth. You’re sick.”
Her eyes glazed over with tears of fury. It wasn’t sick. People would think that. They would criticize, and be disgusted. Because they didn’t understand. And they couldn’t. That was fine. That was life. But it wasn’t her problem that others could discredit something they didn’t comprehend.
“You say I’ve changed,” he said from behind, his fading footsteps signaling his retreat. “Look at you. You’ve changed more.”
“I have,” she agreed, opening the car door. “And I like the changes.”
She climbed in and slammed the door. Beth hit the locks, waiting until Ozzy left in his truck. She set her forehead on the cool steering wheel and tried to breathe. Beth had recently realized that she could miss something, but not want it back. She had been too busy looking behind her when she should have been looking ahead. That was the only way she’d allow herself to look from now on. Straight ahead. Like Harrison. With Harrison.
Harrison.
Chills swept over her body, up and down and crisscrossing over her. He’d confronted Ozzy. He’d stood up for her. He’d let his identity be known to someone, for her. Her hands shook with emotion for what he’d sacrificed. Harrison with his own nemesis living, growing, and inflicting havoc in his veins, fighting her battles. Overcome, she sat quietly in the cold as she breathed to steady her pulse before she attempted to go home.
Believing she was worth more than what Ozzy wanted to give her was the hardest thing she ever did.
Falling in love with Harrison was the easiest.
CONVULSIONS TOOK OVER her frame when she set eyes on Harrison the next day. He was the dark sun, fiery and consuming, and he lit her up. Burned her. She had to force her feet to stop, or Beth feared she never would. She’d walked right up to him, right into his arms, and she’d stay there, live there, breathe there. Beth would never go, not even when he told her to. Not even when he couldn’t tell her to.
“How was your last day at The Lucky Coin? Did everything go okay?”
Beth inhaled.
Beth exhaled.
His copper eyebrows lowered over black, black eyes. He stood in the entryway, like he had been waiting for her. Like he was anxious to see her. Like he got up every morning hoping he would see her, that that was enough of a reason to meet another day, the same as it was for her. “What is it? Why are you looking at me like that?”
She curled the fingers of her free hand and shook her head, the erratic beat of her heart saying all the words she wouldn’t.
“Beth. Tell me what’s wrong.”
Beth wanted to tell him so many things, but all she said was, “Thank you.” Her voice was quiet and unsteady, and her fingers tightened around the handle of the laptop case.
“For?” He inclined his fire-kissed head of hair.
“You talked to Ozzy. Thank you. You didn’t have to do that, but you did.”
He gave a brief nod, looking away from her. “I did have to.”
Her lips tugged down.
Harrison lifted his gaze to hers, the space from him to her disintegrated by the flames in his expression. So pale, so much strength overtaken by fragility. Harrison’s body was imposingly tall, stiff with soreness. She knew he hurt, in his bones, in his muscles, in his soul. Her arms ached to hold him, to erase the pain, to take it away.
“I did have to, because if I learned that he touched you again, I would have hurt him.” His hands opened and closed, opened and closed. “I wanted to hurt him. Every time I think of him hurting you, I want to hurt him a million times worse.”
Beth set down the laptop case and moved for him, stopping only when the time it took to take a breath was all that was between them. Harrison’s lips were carved from rock, his jaw from the same. But his eyes were alive, and they felt. Sometimes sadness, sometimes grief and hopelessness, and other times, like now, they were ignited with emotion.
Swallowing around the beat of her heart, and the strumming of her pulse, and her tightly wound body that wanted to know the feel of his, Beth lifted her hand. Harrison turned her into music. And she wanted to dance within the song of his life. Feel him, kiss him, love him, burn with him, live in him. Be with him.
“Stop,” he rasped when her fingers were an instant from touching the hard plane of his cheekbone. He closed his eyes, the emotion draining from them into his skin, straining his features. Harrison opened his eyes and showed her nothing. “This—this has to stop. Whatever this is, it can’t end well. I need you to go, and not come back. This was a bad idea, and I’m ending it.”
Beth’s heart sputtered, faltered, thought about stopping altogether. She shook her head, denying his words, denying his right to tell her such a thing. “It’s too late for that.”
The skin around his eyes tightened. “This is an illusion, Beth.”
“Why do you keep pushing me away?”
“I’m trying to protect you.”
“Don’t.”
A muscle bunched in his jaw. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”
“I do. I want you to stop. I know what can and can’t be done. I know the risks. I know what it involves. Stop trying to protect me and just…just let us be.” Beth touched the shell of his ear and he flinched, careful not to move. “I care for you. Don’t make me feel bad about it, and you don’t feel bad about it either.”
“And in the end, should it come to that?” Harrison’s voice sounded like broken glass, cutting her skin with his words. “When you have to watch my body and mind fail? When the disease grows, and I finally lose. When I’m covered in sores and my body is emaciated, and every breath hurts. When you can count the bones in my body through my skin. Do you think I want you t
o see that?”
Her eyes filled with tears. She didn’t want to think about how the disease could ravage his mind and body before it was done with him. But she had. Over and over Beth forced herself to imagine all the possible scenarios. And none of it was enough to keep her away, or change her mind. Whatever decisions were made, whatever happened, Beth would know exactly what she was doing, as she was doing it.
“But if I choose to stay, if I want to be with you, let me. Please. Please, don’t make me leave you.”
“How can you say that?” Harrison’s voice cracked.
“You inspire me. Everything about you inspires me. I wouldn’t be able to write the way I have been without you.” Beth looked into his eyes and saw emotions not put to names in them. “Your story thrums inside of me, in time with my heartbeat. I am better for knowing you, and I will not be the one to write the final word.”
Harrison looked down. His voice was just a whisper as he asked, “Why would you choose this, choose me?”
“You make me want to dance.” When he looked up with a furrowed brow, she added, “I haven’t danced in years, not until recently.”
Harrison blinked as if he didn’t know how to process her words.
“And you make me want to write. There are so many things you bring out in me that were missing, that I didn’t even know were missing until I got them back. I was lost. Learning about you helped me remember who I am.
“I’ll never stop writing your story, Harrison. I’ll write and write; until my fingers cramp up, and my heart overflows, and my mind goes numb, and I’ll still write. I’ll write you into every day of my life.” It was a promise. An oath, and a confession.
He took a breath, and it divided halfway through. Beth wanted to take both halves and press them into one. Mend the fissures that constructed the man.
