by Anne Jolin
Lifting my head, I let my hands find their way to either side of his hard jaw.
“Then let me show you the sun.” I sat up and my lips found his.
He met mine with a near decade of sorrow, and I took it.
There was no hesitation from him in this kiss, not the way he had been that evening in the kitchen.
He was sure of this kiss, and I was sure I had enough light for the both of us.
“THEN LET ME SHOW YOU the sun.”
The wounds on my heart practically bled onto her lips as we kissed.
I didn’t know if one person could have enough light for two people, but she sure gave me hope.
Hope.
It had been so long since I’d felt it that I barely recognized what it looked like. I had been missing out. Hope was such a beautiful thing, and hope with Aurora… well, it was something else entirely.
Her hands slid from my jaw up into my hair, and I pulled her closer.
The warmth of her bathed over me and instead of pain, all I felt was the heat.
She was that exact moment you open your eyes after a bad dream. She was the fraction of a second when you realize it was just a nightmare. You’re awake now, and everything will be okay.
How could one person be all of that? She’d have to be an angel.
With our bodies pressed together in that little back booth, I kissed her for all the years I lived in the shadows, because with her lips on mine, my soul no longer felt eager to return to them.
Just a little longer in the sun would do no harm.
I turned, pulling her into my lap and fisted my hands in the long, white blonde of her hair. It held as much magic for me as the wings of an angel or the halo of a saint.
“Excuse me?” Someone somewhere called out to us, but I ignored them.
Tilting her head back, I took her mouth with every demon I possessed, letting them dive to their death on her lips.
Nothing so dark could resist her, and she welcomed them.
Her light burned everything around her, including me.
“I’m sorry but…” Someone tapped my shoulder.
They’d have to drag me from this booth by my hair to get me to stop kissing her.
“Miss,” the voice scolded.
Aurora dragged her mouth from mine. She blinked her eyes open, once then twice, her breathing labored and heavy.
I let my forehead rest on hers, and the muscles in my arms tightened around her.
“Yes?” she asked the voice that had interrupted us, but she didn’t move, not even an inch.
“I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” the voice, which I now recognized was male, said in a hushed tone.
My lips turned up, and the smile that spread across them was involuntary.
“Okay,” Aurora spoke, breathy and unevenly.
Sliding a hand from her hair to the side of her neck, I lifted her chin ever so slightly and took her mouth with mine, again.
She didn’t hesitate, her arms wrapping around my neck, pulling me closer. With ease, she met my pace. Where I ebbed, she flowed, and my heart danced a riot in my chest.
To kiss a woman is something every man should wish for, but to kiss an angel, that was something most wouldn’t even dare to consider.
When our lips finally parted, I could barely breath. My head felt dizzy and my skin was on fire.
“You really have to leave,” the man hissed.
Aurora blushed crimson as she shimmied off my lap and out of the booth. Her lips were swollen from my kisses, and her hair was a mess from my hands.
“I’m sorry.” She nodded in the direction of the man while she grabbed her bag from the opposite side of the booth.
Snagging my sunglasses from the table, I pushed them onto my nose and stood to my full height above the waiter. He watched me, eyes wide. I was nearly a foot taller than him, much larger than I appeared sitting down.
My arm found its way to the small of Aurora’s back, and I guided her into my side.
“I’m not sorry,” I told him. “Not in the slightest.”
Her hands covered her face, and she hid in the side of my chest as I walked us out of the restaurant.
Now that I’d held her so close, it felt impossibly cold not to have her next to me.
“Rhys.” She laughed when I caged her against the hood of her truck.
I nodded, burying my face in her neck.
“Are you okay?” she asked, her hands running up the front of my chest.
Lifting my head, I looked down at her and frowned.
“You’re shaking,” she whispered.
I raised a hand from where it was pressed and held it between our faces. It was practically vibrating. My whole body was.
My inexperience gutted me as I watched the man I thought I was visibly quiver.
“It’s been a long time…” I didn’t know how to say it.
Her hands moved from my chest and wrapped around either side of my shaking body.
She hugged me.
“I haven’t kissed a girl since I was seventeen.” I closed my eyes when I said it. I was ashamed that this somehow made me less of a twenty-five-year-old man.
What kind of woman would want a man so tortured and naïve?
Aurora rested her chin on my chest, looking up at me with bright blue eyes. “Good.” She smiled. “I like that no other girl will have memories of kissing you, Rhys White.”
My heart soared and the taut way I carried tension in my bones eased.
I looked over her truck at the crowded town around us. “What do you say we get out of here?” I asked her.
She unwound her arms and stood up on her tiptoes, kissing me softly on the lips.
“Let me take you away.”
Her smile could stop a thousand wars and just as well start a few, too.
“Okay.” I took her hand and helped her behind the wheel of her pickup.
I rounded the hood, tapping on it twice just to watch her smile and folded into the passenger seat.
We drove through town, her singing along with the radio and me listening.
“What does your file say?” I asked, full well knowing she didn’t have one but hoping she’d tell me all her secrets anyway.
She looked over at me, smiling as she pulled out onto the highway. “Are you sure you want to know?”
I nodded. “I’m sure.”
She accelerated onto the open road. “There’s nothing much to tell, really.” She sighed. “My momma died when I was a teenager.”
“I’m sorry,” I told her, wishing suddenly that I’d driven so she didn’t have to.
Her features wore sadness gracefully. “It was cancer.”
It killed me to know she’d seen loss, but I understood why she had become who she was.
“I have an older brother, Owen.” She seemed fond of him by the tone of her voice. “He was a rodeo king, the best of the best, and London, my sister, was an Olympian.” Something about the way she listed their accomplishments seemed sad.
“And I’m, well, I’m just me.” She shrugged.
I reached an arm over, brushing some of the hair from her shoulder. “What do you mean you’re just you?” I asked.
“I have no overwhelming accomplishments.” She began to chew on her bottom lip. “I’m just a girl.”
She really had no idea how special she was.
“You have a big heart, Aurora,” I told her.
Scoffing, she rolled her eyes.
“That’s what people keep telling me.” She laughed, but it didn’t reach the rest of her face. “Do you know what people actually mean when they say I have a big heart?” she asked.
I shook my head.
“They mean it in the way you tell a child their drawing is good when in reality, it’s not.” She shook her head. “It’s not a good thing when someone tells me I have a big heart.”
How could she possibly think that?
“It means they think I’m weak,” she whispered.
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nbsp; “Pull over.” My voice came out with more growl and bite than I wanted it to.
“Wh-y-y?” she stammered.
I didn’t answer.
The pickup rolled off the pavement and onto the shoulder.
“Put it in park,” I demanded, and she obliged. “Now come here.”
She paused, just watching me from across the cab. Like she was unsure if it was somehow a trick.
Reaching over, I unbuckled her seatbelt and pulled her across the bench seat onto my lap.
“Look at me.” I cupped either side of her face.
Her blue eyes conceded, finding their way to me.
“I watch you accomplish more with your heart in a day than most people accomplish in years.” I wiped my thumb under her eyes. “You’re not afraid of anything, Aurora.” I shook my head. “Not even when you should be. Not even with me.”
Her bottom lip started to tremble.
“It takes a brave person to have a big heart.” I smiled, a feeling still as foreign to me as the places I never traveled to. “If anyone ever makes you feel weak or ashamed of that heart of yours, I’ll bury them.”
She stared at me, eyes wide and I laughed. “I’m kidding.”
Her body relaxed and she slapped my chest. “That’s not funny,” she scolded.
“I wouldn’t kill them, but I would see to it they found a better way of thinking,” I promised her.
She leaned forward and kissed me softly on the lips. “Thank you.”
I nodded, kissing her back.
“Would you read to me?” she asked.
My eyebrows pulled together. “Here?”
She nodded.
Climbing off my lap, she dug around in her purse on the floor before sitting back up with a book in her hands.
“Is that…?” She never ceased to surprise me.
“The Black Stallion,” she finished for me. “You were reading it that night in the barn when I saw you.”
I’d been so afraid of her light that night, I could barely touch her long enough to pull her out of that water.
“When you ran away…” I winced. I had run away from her so many times, and she’d still kept chasing me. “…I picked it up.”
“You’ve had it in your bag all this time?” I asked her.
It had been weeks since my hands trembled when I wrapped her in that horse blanket.
She knelt on the seat next to me, and her smile was bashful. “Yes,” she answered. “I was hoping you might read it to me someday.”
My fingers curled around the spine of the book, and I flipped it open to the page I’d been on that night in the barn.
“Okay,” I whispered.
She lay down, resting the back of her head in my lap and closed her eyes.
One of my hands sprawled out on her stomach where she placed her fingers over mine, and the other held the paperback as I read.
And I read.
And I read.
We sat there on the side of the road in the middle of summer for hours while I read. Sometimes I wondered if she’d fallen asleep. Her breathing would become so even, so still, but I never stopped reading.
I didn’t stop until the very last page was turned.
“Your voice is quite possibly my favourite sound.” She smiled, eyes still closed.
It was the first time she’d spoken since I’d begun reading.
Leaning forward, I kissed her on the forehead. “It’s time to go home, angel.”
“I know,” she whispered. “Just a few more minutes.”
I envied that so incredibly much. The way she lay soundly in her stillness. It was like the entire world was hers and the rest of us were just passing through.
It was well past dinner when we finally returned to the stable. No one had seemed to notice that we’d been gone much longer than it would have ever taken to run errands, but I imagined that was due to Aurora’s reputation and not mine.
She stood, fidgeting at the back of her tailgate. “Walk me home?” she asked.
“Of course.” I turned toward the main house and nearly jumped from my skin when her small hand slid into my much larger one.
She was holding my hand.
I stared at our interlocked hands and then at her. “Aren’t you worried that…”
It was one thing for her to kiss me in the middle of a town where no one knew what I’d done or who I was but here, everyone knew the kind of person she was with.
“Let them look.” She smiled. “I’m not ashamed of you.”
It was then I felt the growing pains in my heart. It grew so much, so quickly, that I almost tripped from the sensation.
I guess angels really do fall sometimes, and this one had fallen right into me.
We reached the back door to the main house, and I pulled her to me. “Thank you,” I said, wrapping my arms around her shoulders.
“For what?” she asked.
“Thank you for having enough light for both of us.” I kissed her forehead. “I didn’t realize how much I’d missed the sun.”
Her lips grazed mine. “I’ll be your light anytime you need it, Rhys.”
We kissed for what felt like nearly a thousand times before I watched her walk inside that house, and I missed her the moment she did.
That was the thing about the sun—you missed it when it was gone.
Grant came to The Shed later that evening to inform us that Dirt had been given a first and second strike. “This isn’t the place for fourth and fifth chances, boys.” Grant had growled. “It’s a second chance. Don’t fuck it up.”
If Dirt missed curfew again, or broke the terms of his parole in any other way, it would be the end of his time at Equine for Hearts and he would be back in jail before the sun rose on the next day.
The thought of that being me almost crippled my heart.
I could never go back to days where she didn’t exist.
I thought there was a good chance I’d die first.
THERE ARE MOMENTS WITH SOME people that turn the world, as you once knew it, on its axis.
It wasn’t one moment for us. It was a series of little moments.
The moment I saw him.
The moment I first heard his voice.
The moment he wrapped me in a dirty horse blanket.
The moment I sat listening to him breathing in my truck.
The moment I kissed him.
The moment he ran away.
You get the picture, I’m sure, but that was Rhys.
There were so many moments.
Every moment I had accumulated with him in the last two and a half months turned my world upside down in the most wonderful way.
He was raw in the same way a painting at the museum was honest. Nothing about his heart was for show. It was all real. In whatever way he chose to reveal his soul to you, you could rest easy knowing that what you saw was the real deal.
Rhys was proud of my heart, but I was in awe of his. It made for quite a beautiful recipe of getting lost in someone.
Twirling the milk into my tea, I sighed at the memory of the kisses we’d shared.
There had been so many kisses in the two weeks since that afternoon in town, and I was sure I could kiss him for the rest of my life and never tire of it.
“Josh’s going to be here any minute, Aurora.” Grant interrupted my daydream and looked at me funny as he poured coffee into his travel mug. He frowned and leaned against the counter. “Are you all right? You look flushed.”
Looking down at the time on my phone, I practically shot out of the clouds I’d been floating on and jumped off the stool to the breakfast bar.
“I’m good, great,” I mumbled, snatching my bag off the floor. “Tea was hot.”
“All right then.” He laughed as I rushed out the back door.
I wasn’t exactly sure how Grant would react to the knowledge of where my mind often wandered during the day. He was an advocate for second chances, but how would he feel about me being Rhys’s second chance?
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nbsp; I didn’t dwell on it.
When the time came, I’d hold his hand in front of them all without regret. If any of them had a problem with it, they could kiss my big, fat heart.
Rhys was not someone I would be ashamed of, not ever.
I ran more than walked to the barn, my eyes scanning the parking lot hoping to see him. It was Sunday, my last day of work before going home for three days.
There had been moments when I considered asking Grant if Rhys could come with me, but I knew he couldn’t.
Not without opening a can of worms I wasn’t sure we could close.
Those weren’t the terms of his parole, and an overnight trip would cause the system to erupt in a near meltdown—Rhys’s words not mine. It would require a home check by a parole officer of my dad’s house, among other things, and I doubted it would be worth the trouble, seeing as I planned for them to meet the following weekend anyhow.
Grant was hosting the annual Equine for Hearts fundraiser a week from yesterday, and he’d invited my entire family to help celebrate with us.
Something I hoped to discuss with Rhys today when I finished working with Josh.
Speaking of, the moody teenager was sulking next to the open barn doors with his obscenely large headphones.
“Morning, Josh.” I pretended to slug him on the shoulder the way I imagined a boxing coach would do.
Something about being deliriously happy made me do some very silly things.
He looked at me, horrified. The way children looked at their mothers when they wiped something from their faces in front of their friends.
My mistake.
“Headphones.” I gestured for him to remove them, and he rolled his eyes as he slid them so they hung around his neck. “If you spent half the amount of energy on making your Sundays with me productive as you did making fun of me, our time together would go by substantially quicker for the both of us, and you might even learn something.”
My mouth closed around the last word and Josh looked just as shocked as I did for having said it.
“Okay…” He tilted his head to the side, watching me cautiously.
Huh.
“Okay.” I jerked my head in a nod and walked into the barn.
I was full of surprises today, and it was barely eight in the morning.
