by Susan Sey
“No.” He caught her hand, held it to his chest. “But I am sorry.”
“You’re sorry?” Her eyes went wide. “Why?”
“Because I can’t back off.” He put his free hand flat on the rough wood of the cabin wall beside her head and leaned in. “Because I’m crowding you.” He left her hand flattened on his chest and reached out to sink his fingers into the living heat of her hair. She sucked in a breath but didn’t move. Didn’t blink. She also didn’t drop her hand from his chest. Something bloomed inside him, something bloody and hopeful and alive. “Because I was a dick just now, and made you feel stupid for thinking that mouse nest was a romantic gesture.”
She gazed up at him, and the uncertainty in those giant gray eyes nearly put him on his knees. “Was it?”
“It’s the most nakedly sappy gift I’ve ever given a woman.”
“Oh.” It was more breath than sound and it turned his knees to water. He put his jaw to her temple and breathed her in. She smelled like sunscreen and competence and peace. A jittery appetite rose in him, hot and hungry. It raced through his veins, urging him to take, to hunt. But he held himself in check. He filled only his lungs with her. She’d given him so much, so generously, so willingly. He hadn’t given her enough in return, not nearly enough. She didn’t want what little he’d given her. But he could give her the truth. It was the least he could do, and it might be all she wanted from him. All she’d take, anyway. So he’d give it to her.
“Jesus, Willa, the way I want you is insane.”
She didn’t speak but that stillness, that gorgeous, heavy calm of hers intensified. It waited. She’d opened a space for him, he realized. A second chance. A test? He had no idea. But he knew that everything hung on the words he chose next. Just like he knew that all those easy, charming words he used to be so good at wouldn’t do the trick here. She didn’t want his charm or his flattery or his tricks. That much he knew. But what did she want? What did she need?
“Don’t leave me, Willa.” The words emerged reluctantly from the bloody, rusty core of him. Shocking, raw, completely unexpected. He hadn’t even known they were coming but once he heard them, he knew they were right. “You’re trying to go and I don’t want you to.”
“Why not?” Her voice was a little rusty, too.
“Because I don’t want to be alone anymore.” He fisted the hand in her hair and pulled in another rich, vibrant breath of her. The leashed need inside him growled and urged but he allowed himself only her scent. “For years, alone was all I wanted. It was all I deserved. If I was lonely, I didn’t know it. If I was tired, I didn’t feel it. If I was ashamed, I was serving my sentence, and I was okay with that. It felt like justice. That was my path. I’d earned it, and I was walking it alone. That was the plan anyway. Then you came along and I breathed.”
He pulled her into him, dropped his face to the warm curve of her neck and sucked in another trembling breath. “God, for the first time in years, I can breathe. I don’t know how you do it or why but you got into all the places I thought I’d built over, mortared up. You’re just there, like smoke or rain or those stupid mice who can get in any-damn-where. You’re just there, and God help me, I don’t want you to go. I’ve been so lonely. Can’t you just stay? Even for a little while?”
“You can’t keep giving me things.”
“Why not? You give me things.”
“I do not.”
“Then why am I on my knees here, Willa?”
“You’re not.”
“I am.” He rubbed his jaw against the delicate line of her neck. “You know I am.”
“You gave my father a job.” She made it sound like an accusation. “You invented him a job.” But her fingers were fisted in his t-shirt. He wondered if she even knew it, then decided he didn’t care. She was holding on and that was all that mattered. “You’re paying him to take walks. Don’t tell me that isn’t a gift.”
“Okay.”
“You need to stop it.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t want it to be like that!” She froze, as if startled by her own outburst. Eli froze with her, waited for a long, suspended moment for her to run. To shove him aside and make a break for it. Instead she released a long shuddering breath and dropped her forehead to his shoulder. “I don’t want us to be like that.”
“Like what?” Tenderness flooded him and he opened the fist in her hair. Slid his palm to the nape of her neck and cradled her. Savored the warm weight of her trust.
“A transaction.” Her fingers found the belt loop at his waist, hooked through it. “I don’t want you to feel like you have to pay for whatever it is you’re getting from me. I’m not paying you, am I?”
“What would you pay me for?”
“The, uh, orgasm?”
He smiled. “You melted my brain, Willa. We’re even-steven on the orgasm front.” He paused. “Except for the part where we didn’t use a condom because you’d melted my brain. Tell me that’s not going to be a problem. I’m disease-free but probably fertile.”
“I’m disease-free myself, and lucky for us both, I’m not fertile at the moment. Give it another week and we could’ve been in trouble.”
“Okay. Good to know.” He traced the tense line of her neck with gentle fingers, eased her into his shoulder again. “Tell me, then, since we’re so happily equal on the sex front, what do you think you should pay me for?”
Her response was a bad-tempered jerk of her shoulders.
“Just admit it, Willa.” He rocked her slowly, wrapped her up in his arms and his contentment. “Whatever it is you do to me? I’m doing it right back to you.” He drifted his lips to her temple, pressed them there. “I’m getting to you. Getting through your cracks the same way you’re getting through mine. We’re in this together.”
“What this? What this are you even talking about?” she asked, and that was desperation he heard. Just a tiny thread of it, bewildered and raw. It delighted him, as it matched his state of mind so precisely.
“Hell if I know.” He sighed happily. “I just know that my world looks different now. A roving band of mouse pirates makes hay with my favorite socks and instead of a mess or an inconvenience, I see beauty. I see inventiveness, I see creativity and I see necessity. I see you.” He lifted his shoulders and let them fall. “I wanted you to see it too, because you’re the only person I know — have ever known — who’d understand. Who would see what I saw.” He treated himself to the hot spill of her hair, let it run through his fingers like rough silk. “I’m not alone when there’s you. Not just when you’re with me but in general. Now that I know there’s you, I’m not alone. Ever.”
“Eli.” Her voice was an ache, sweet and impossible, deep inside him, so heavy with tenderness and understanding. He jumped in before she could say anything to shift the moment, to break that understanding.
“If I’m the same to you, then it would be a crime — it would be a goddamn sin — to walk away from it because you’re afraid of it. Or because you think you don’t deserve it, or because I don’t deserve it, or for whatever reason you have and I’m sure you have plenty. This is a gift, to us from the universe. Are we really, after all the shitty luck we’ve had, going to reject a little piece of the good?”
She was quiet for a long time. “When you put it that way, it sounds ungracious.”
Relief soared within him. “Damn ungracious.”
“You don’t understand this town yet, Eli.”
“Christ, tell me about it.”
“You don’t know who I am here.”
“I know who you are, Willa.”
“You don’t know what I am to these people.”
“I don’t care.”
“I haven’t cared either, not for years. But every story needs a villain and Devil’s Kettle made me theirs. Or the Davises made me theirs.”
“How?”
“It doesn’t matter, because I didn’t care. I refused to care. And so long as nobody cares about me, it all
works. It doesn’t hurt me.” She hesitated. “But if you care about me, Eli—”
“I do.”
“You shouldn’t. It’ll only hurt you.” She shook her head. “You should just leave.”
“I will.” He smoothed a delicate wisp of hair away from her cheek. He would, too. “I’m not asking for anything permanent here, Willa. I don’t have that to offer.”
“I know. I don’t want it.”
“I know. But you matter to me and I’m going to let you.” He paused to take his courage in hand. “I want to matter to you, too. Will you let me? Even knowing what you know about who I am, what I’ve done? Even knowing I’ll leave soon? Can we just matter to each other for now?”
She opened her fingers, laid them flat against his chest and nudged him back. Suddenly he was looking into her huge gray eyes, at the hope and resignation tangled up behind them.
“What are you doing tomorrow night?” she asked.
Eli’s heart cracked open under a flood of joy. “Why, Willa Zinc. Are you asking me out?”
“I am.” She didn’t smile. “Before we decide to…matter to each other, you need to understand who I am in the story of Devil’s Kettle.”
“Do I?” Concern tempered the joy and he laid his hand on top of hers on his chest.
“You do.” She slid her hand out from under his and took back her ball cap. Snugged it on her head and pulled her ponytail out the back with her usual efficient grace. “Addy’s doing a preview of the gallery’s Devil Days show tomorrow night for the locals. You know about Diego Davis?”
“Who doesn’t? What are they showing?”
“Couple things, some naughtier than others.” She paused. “Some with roots that go deep and dark.”
“Do they touch you?”
She shrugged. “Some. It’s not what you’ll see so much as what you’ll hear.” She stepped sideways, put a couple feet of hot, dry air between them. “Once you hear it all, then you can decide how much you want me to matter.”
“Willa, you matter.”
“Tomorrow.” She split her ponytail in two and yanked it tight. “I’ll pick you up at seven.”
CHAPTER 21
FOR THE FIRST time in weeks, the sun went out. By Thursday evening, clouds the color of old bruises were sliding across the sky, but the heat refused to relent. Stagnant, thick air spread itself along the North Shore like an old blanket, suffocating and dry, while thunder grumbled beyond the bluffs. It was itchy weather, close and inescapable, the kind that drove dogs to madness and people to murder. Certainly Willa had considered it while Georgie had played Fairy Henchmother in her closet again.
Willa had decided to let her live but as a result she now stood on Main Street wearing a high-collared, vaguely Japanese-looking dress that managed to nod at modesty while leaving no doubt as to the exact size and shape of her body. It was also light and linen, and she had to admit it was comfortable. Way more comfortable than the hour Georgie had spent trying to coax Willa’s stubborn hair into an up-do of some sort.
“Jesus, it’s like the loaves and fishes,” Georgie had muttered bitterly through a mouthful of bobby pins, as if Willa had grown acres of hair just to spite her. “It just keeps coming.”
“Ball cap,” Willa had said smugly. “Pony tail. It’s a classic for a reason.”
“I wonder what part of the brain controls speech,” Georgie mused vaguely and stabbed a bobby pin into Willa’s scalp like she was trying to penetrate the skull. She probably was, Willa realized, and shut up. Fifteen minutes later, Georgie spit out the pins, released her hair and said, “Fuck it.”
Which was how Willa had ended up in public with her arms and legs and all her hair showing. Not to mention her eyes. She felt exposed and naked, dangerously so. But she also felt undeniably…pretty. No, more than pretty. She felt sexy. Eli’s eyes had slid down her body when he’d seen her, hot as a touch, then drifted back up again, and a slow smile had spread across his face. The kind of smile that sent a hot little shimmy through a woman’s stomach. It sat there still, pulsing like an ember, and every inch of her exposed skin felt needful and hungry.
She’d let this dangerous part of her sleep for so long. She couldn’t help that Eli had woken it up, but had it really been a good idea to let Georgie put it on display like this?
Nothing for it now. There was no way through tonight but forward. She circled the hood while Eli climbed out of the passenger side. He drifted hot eyes from the hair swirling around her shoulders all the way down to the toes peeking out of sparkly sandals again, lingering at all the most sensitive places in between. The hunger leapt inside Willa even as the worry twisted tighter.
“I like your shoes,” he said, grinning at her feet.
“Shut up.” She jerked her head down Main toward the gallery. “Let’s go.”
“They sparkle.”
“I said shut up.”
He did and she managed to walk the block and a half to the gallery without tripping on the glorified leather flip flops Georgie had insisted on. Some poor child had probably bedazzled them in a Vietnamese sweatshop instead of going to school but did Georgie care? No. Georgie liked the sparkle.
Soren Buck was standing on the sidewalk in front of the Davis Gallery when they arrived, his back to the display windows, his face to the sky.
“Looks like we might finally get some rain.” He was a shaggy bear of a man, all barrel chest and lumberjack beard. He looked exactly like the kind of guy who might own a bait shop, which he did. He didn’t look like the kind of guy who’d commission a giant papier mache fish to leap through the second story of his shop where it would then hang out over the sidewalk like a bizarre awning, but he had. Bianca Davis hated that fish. Hated that nothing but Third Street separated the tacky kitsch of it from her precious gallery.
As a result, Willa loved that fish, and Soren Buck along with it.
“It sure feels that way,” Willa said. Despite the clinging heat, she rubbed her hands up and down her bare arms. “I hope it breaks this weather.”
Soren squinted out over the lake, then turned to the clouds sliding across the bluffs to their north. “It’s going to break something.”
“Yeah,” Eli said, frowning at the clouds. “I’ve got that feeling, too. I just hope it’s nothing too nearby.”
Willa blinked at him. “What does that mean?”
“Nothing.” He shrugged. “I’m itchy, that’s all. Feels like lightning.”
“It does.” Soren studied him with deep-set eyes. “You’re the Forestry guy.”
“I am. I’m also the guy Gerte tried to slap into next week.” He held out his hand.
“Heard you had a difference of opinion with Paul O’Malley, too.” Soren took his hand, gave it a considering pump. “That would be Gerte’s cousin, you know.”
Eli closed his eyes briefly. Willa wondered exactly what kind of run-in he’d had with O’Malley. “I didn’t know that. Explains why he seemed so familiar with Gerte’s slapping hand, though.”
Soren’s eyes warmed to a near-sparkle. “Woman’s got an arm on her.”
“Believe me, I know.”
Soren shifted his gaze to Willa. “Heard you told everybody you burned down Davis Place with a fancy coffee maker.”
Willa didn’t blink. “You heard right.”
He nodded slowly. “Okay by me.”
She patted his big shoulder. “You’re all right, Soren. You coming in?”
“In a minute.” His eyes went back to the clouds. “I’m going to watch the show out here for a bit yet.”
“We’ll see you inside then,” she said and reached for the door.
“I’ll see you.” Soren chuckled. “But who’ll see me when you look like that?”
Willa froze with the open door in her hand, uncertainty swamping her all over again. Oh, God. Had Georgie dressed her up like a hooker? Had she walked docilely into a social trap of that magnitude? Was she really that stupid?
Eli put a hand in the small of her back and
nudged her inside. “You look incredible,” he said, and kept his warm hand just there, just below her waist where anybody could see it. Where it sent all kinds of inappropriate signals to all kinds of inappropriate portions of her anatomy.
“I don’t want people looking at me,” she whispered desperately.
“Then you shouldn’t look amazing.” A white-draped table was set up to one side of the entry, topped with a forest of leggy champagne glasses and silver ice buckets. It also held one of the stranger sights Willa had clapped eyes on in a while.
“Oh good,” Eli said. “There’s a doughnut tree.”
She blinked. “A what?”
He laughed. “There, by the champagne. Looks like the unholy union of a Christmas tree, a porcupine and a doughnut shop?”
He pointed his chin toward the stylized spiral of iron sitting serenely among the champagne glasses. The base was circular, maybe a foot and half in diameter, tapering to a lofty point some three feet above the table top. Every inch of it was studded with needle-sharp spikes, which might’ve been forbidding if each one weren’t holding a perfectly glazed dark chocolate doughnut hole.
“That might be the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.” She considered it seriously. “Or the most dangerous.”
“My favorite kind of danger.” A smile bloomed, slow and mischievous, across that angular face, and he took her hand. “Let’s go.”
A little dazzled by that unexpected flash of the boy he must’ve been, she let him haul her toward the alcohol and chocolate. She was aware of the eyes on them — on her — as they moved through clusters of people she’d known her whole life. Eli pressed a glass of champagne into her hand, and even as she took it, she could feel the raised eyebrows and speaking glances. She saw curiosity ripple through the crowd like a school of fish, darting this way and that, shifting direction on a dime. Low murmurs passed from person to person while Eli considered his options at the doughnut tree. Gossip spread, grew, sharpened its barbs and reached for her. So she sipped her champagne and reached for the peace of her thinnie, for the serenity of its countless eons. She put it in the center of her mind and the weight of it stilled her from the inside out, polished her so smooth that nothing could catch hold. She was time, she was air, she was endless.
