“Of course!” I ran back around the car to his side but then just stood there, not able to do much for him as he yanked himself up and out. “Can I help you? You can lean on me,” I told him, and heard a low laugh.
“Can I? I’d crush you, munch.” But he did put his arm around me and pulled me close to his body, even if he didn’t put any weight on my shoulders as we walked inside.
Even in my distraction, I could see how much work had been done since I’d last been there—it really looked like a house and not just a construction site now. I turned toward the one remaining flight of stairs but Gunnar’s arm directed me to a room on our right. “I moved the bed down here. The stairs were hard,” he said briefly.
He was having trouble getting up and down the stairs? And yet, he had just gone and played sixty minutes of football today, and for how many games before that? Fury coursed through me, but I wasn’t sure whom I was angry at. Maybe Gunnar for doing this to himself, but mostly at the world in general.
He grunted as he sat down on the bed and stayed there, hands fisted on his thighs, not moving. “Can I help you?” I asked again.
“I think you have to,” he said, so I used all my strength to ease him back onto the pillows and strained to place his massive legs up on the mattress. “I’m sorry,” he kept telling me. “I should have asked one of the guys to help me or someone from the team.”
“You didn’t want them to know,” I said, and he nodded slightly.
“I’m sorry,” he told me again.
“I’m not. I’m glad I’m here.”
Gunnar’s bright blue eyes watched me. “Can you sit down?” He patted the bed next to his ribs, and I sat carefully, trying not to jostle him. “Thank you. Thanks for waiting for me and for helping me.”
“I’ll always help you if I can,” I told him. “I’m sorry the roads here are so terrible. If I can’t rent a grader, I’m just going to come with a wheelbarrow of dirt and a shovel.”
He laughed a little and then swallowed and closed his eyes, because it hurt.
“Gunnar…”
“I’m acting like an idiot. I know it,” he told me. “I kept trying to stand back up on the field and I couldn’t. It’s because I don’t want it to end, munch. I don’t want to let go of it.”
I nodded. “I’m sorry you have to. I’m not very good at letting go either, so I don’t have any good advice for you about how to do it.”
“I’m just glad you’re here.” He was looking at me so intently.
“Of course I am.”
He didn’t speak for a while, and played with the ends of my ponytail. “I don’t know what I am, if I’m not playing football,” he finally told me.
“You’re Gunnar. A bookstore owner, son, brother, home remodeler, soon to be Jane Austen-lover, good guy,” I told him. I couldn’t stop myself from touching him now, so I patted his chest, and let my hand linger there. “You’re more than football.”
He reached and threaded his fingers into my hair, cupping the back of my head. “You make me feel better. After the game, it was better knowing that you were waiting for me in the lounge.”
I nodded, not really able to talk at the moment. I was more focused on trying not to pant or blurt out something rude or inappropriate, but his touch and his proximity were making that difficult.
“Hallie.” My name sounded mysterious and lovely when he said it in his deep voice. He pulled on me gently, tugging me so that I bent closer, and closer, and then our lips touched just as gently, and Gunnar and I were kissing. We kissed and kissed, his mouth moving over mine, then his tongue moving over mine, too. I fisted my hands in his shirt and held on for dear life so that I didn’t float away with the pure pleasure of it. Gunnar…I didn’t think I could ever get enough.
Chapter 13
I hung up, then sat and stared at the phone. What?
“Hallie. Hallie!”
“Huh?”
Marley rolled her eyes. “I’ve been talking to you for like, ten minutes! Aren’t you supposed to be writing this paper for me?”
“No, you’re supposed to be writing the paper for yourself,” I said automatically, but my mind was elsewhere. I didn’t hear the rain pouring outside the windows or the wind whistling in along the sides of them, stirring her papers on the coffee table. I didn’t even really hear the crash that came from the kitchen as something fell hard onto the old linoleum, and even Marley looked startled by that.
“Your house is breaking,” she noted, but I just nodded, still frowning at my cell phone. It looked a lot better since Gunnar had disappeared with it and had the screen fixed again and also bought a case that looked like some kind of bomb containment system for it. He had also put a signal amplifier in the Feeney place so that everyone on the road had service now. That was all great, but the information that had just come from my particular phone—
“Hallie! What’s wrong with you?” Marley demanded. “What happened? Is it Gunnar? What did he do?” She cracked her knuckles and looked as menacing as any fifteen-year-old girl could.
“No. No, it’s not Gunnar.” He had been…amazing. We’d been spending as much time together as we could, and when we weren’t physically in the same place, we were writing or talking to each other.
“Stop the drool puddle!” she ordered. “Who called you? Why did you turn all red while you were listening?”
“Because I got mad,” I told her. “The call was from a woman I used to work with in Chicago, the assistant to my old boss at Atontado Capital Partners. I used to be an analyst in the financial services industry, covering—”
Marley waved her hand. “Ok, yeah, tell me that part later. What did the assistant woman say that made you jump up and shake your fist, and knock your laptop onto the floor?”
I picked it up gingerly. Per Gunnar’s request, the Woodsmen IT department had gotten it running again, and I wanted to keep it that way. “She was letting me know what Mr. Lomperd was doing whenever anyone called to get a reference from him for me. My former boss has been telling everyone that I was a terrible employee!”
“Were you?” She looked very skeptical. “I bet you weren’t. Why is he telling people that you were so bad?”
“I don’t know! She said he’s not mentioning anything specific, not exactly lies, so that I couldn’t sue him or anything like that. But he’s making me sound bad by default. When these companies call to ask about me, he says that he doesn’t feel comfortable discussing why I left Atontado, and that he can’t get into my personnel issues, and then he refuses to say any more.” I smacked the table with my palm.
“Fucker! I mean, jerk. How far is it to Chicago?”
“We’re not driving to Chicago,” I answered. My car had restarted after dying in the Woodsmen lot but it would never get so far. “The reason she called now is that the fund went bust and Mr. Lomperd is in trouble with the SEC. She said she felt free to tell me, since he couldn’t come after her, too, but what she said didn’t make any sense.” I shook my head. “She told he was furious last winter when I spurned him.”
“What does that mean?”
“That was one of your vocab words!” I scolded. “It means that he made a move and I turned him down. I don’t even know what she’s talking about.”
“Oooh.” Marley looked very interested. “What did he do, grab your ass?”
“No, of course not!” I thought back, shaking my head. “He didn’t…oh.” A pit formed in my stomach as I had a sudden realization. “The Christmas party.”
“What about it?” She leaned forward. “What happened? Did he go for your tits? Stick his tongue down your throat?”
“Marley! How do you know these things? And kissing isn’t sticking your tongue down anyone’s throat.” I thought of Gunnar’s tongue, and the unhappiness in my stomach morphed into gooey delight.
“Ugh, you’re doing the Gunnar face again!” She rolled her eyes. “Focus!” she ordered, just like I told her about her schoolwork. “What happened at the Christma
s party?”
“I wore my tight shirt—”
“The one tight shirt you own. Sad.”
“Do you want to hear this or not?” I demanded. “I wore my tight shirt and it seemed like Mr. Lampert had a few too many, maybe, and he said some things that I thought were weird, but it didn’t mean anything. Like, he said that he wanted to get to know me better, and then he invited me to come with him to his office because he said he’d forgotten something. And I said…” I strained to remember. I had thought it was strange, that he would need me to go with him to get something in the middle of the one party we had all year, and I had said…
Oh. I remembered.
“I said, ‘My dad’s about your age, and he forgets things in the same way.’ And I told him not to let it get him down.”
“You said that to your boss?” She laughed. “That he’s old and losing his mind? You thought I was a bitch, but I have nothing on that.”
“I didn’t mean it like that! And I didn’t think you were a witch. I didn’t,” I protested, when she made a face. “I didn’t, not after I got to know you. I wasn’t trying to insult him.” I rubbed my forehead. “Darn it.”
“You didn’t spurn him,” Marley told me. “You crushed him under your ugly old shoe.”
I nodded disconsolately. “That’s why I haven’t been getting any offers from any of the places I’ve applied, and I applied everywhere, all around the country! I would have moved anywhere, and done almost anything to get back into the business, and he poisoned them against me.” I sighed. “I don’t understand this. I never even considered that I was stomping him with my cute shoe. Was he really trying something with me? That would have been so inappropriate with him as my boss!”
“Isn’t Gunnar your boss?”
“He’s my neighbor,” I said confusedly, and quickly moved on. “Why would Mr. Lomperd have come on to me? Why?”
“You think that you’re not cute, but it’s just because you don’t know what to do with your hair and you dress like you’re cleaning out your basement,” Marley stated. “He was probably after you since he hired you, and then he couldn’t hold himself back when he got a look at those in your one tight shirt.” She pointed to my breasts.
“You’re fifteen. Fifteen!” I reminded her, but she just shrugged.
“All my mom tried to do after my dad left was try to catch another man. I learned a lot.” She put her stony face back on when she saw that I was upset by the idea of what she’d been learning from that. “You don’t need to worry about it,” she informed me. Something else clunked onto the kitchen floor. “What was that?”
I barely heard it. “I worry a lot about you, Marley.”
“Well, now that you figured out why you’re not getting another big-time job, you can go. Go move somewhere else,” she told me.
“I’m not moving anywhere else. I want you to move in here, with me.”
Her blank, bored expression dissolved away, leaving her looking so young, and also suddenly full of hope. “What?” she asked.
“I wasn’t going to tell you until I knew if it was going to work, but Linda’s feeling very positive about it. I hope that would be ok with you, even if my house—”
“Are you serious?”
“I don’t know if it will work out,” I repeated. “But even if it doesn’t, you could come live with me when you’re eighteen and you get to choose where you want to go. If that was something you’d be interested in.”
“Yeah. Yeah, that’s something I would be interested in,” she said slowly. “Do you really mean it?” Her voice shook.
“I really, really mean it. I really want you to be here, with me.” I looked up at the ceiling so that the tears that filled up my eyes wouldn’t fall, but then Marely hiccupped and sobbed, and we both cried some over her rough draft. And hugged, too, and when she put her head on my shoulder and held on to me with both hands, I swore to myself that I was going to make it happen.
But I had to be cautious, just in case. “I’m still in the application process,” I warned when we had calmed to sniffing and wiping our noses. “It’s going to take a long time. And I have to get the house back together, but Gunnar is going to help with that.” My eyes flicked to the kitchen. “Speaking of, maybe I should check on those thumps.” And there were actually two cabinet doors on the floor, because the wood around the hinges had rotted away. It was the same thing that was happening around all the windows, too.
I rubbed my eyes tiredly at the thought of trying to fix it all, and I felt my contact twist and flip under my eyelid. “Ow, darn, ow!” I blinked rapidly, but it didn’t come back down. “It’s my lens,” I explained when she demanded to know what I had done now. “I have to get it out.” I felt my way toward a chair at the kitchen table with only the sight of one eye.
“Hallie, watch it!” Marly called.
But it was too late, and I stepped on a cabinet knob that had been knocked loose when the door fell down. And I went down, too, and things were always worse when you were looking up at them from the ground. It was how I saw the new water damage on the kitchen ceiling.
Gunnar grimaced when he saw me a few hours later. “What happened?”
“I had a problem with my contact,” I said grumpily as I pushed back the hood of my raincoat. I also adjusted my glasses, which had slid a little down my wet nose. They were ugly, yes, but it was a real relief to see so clearly through the eye that was working well. My contacts weren’t ever half as good, even with all the adjustments the expensive doctor in Chicago had done to them. And today, after neither Marley nor I had been able to get the lens out of the recesses my skull where it had migrated, I’d had to go to the less expensive eye doctor here. It turned out that I had managed to scratch my cornea, so now my eye was bright red and at half-mast.
“It looks like it hurts,” Gunnar said, concerned.
“It’s fine,” I told him, and walked around his kitchen to check on the new appliances that had been installed.
“And why are you limping again?”
“I’m not,” I said, and tried to stop. That knob had hurt my foot, but the real damage had been when I slipped and fell onto my hip, landing right on the edge of the cabinet door. “Wow, this looks amazing,” I told him. I thought sadly of my own kitchen, where Marley had helped me tape up the doors to close to their former positions. She had mentioned a home visit by foster care officials several times, and was clearly concerned that if it happened, my poor, rotting cottage wouldn’t be passing the inspection.
“Thank you,” he said.
I ran a finger along the top of Gunnar’s new six burner stove with the built-in griddle. “We can really use these?” I asked warily. The woman he’d hired at his friend Meredith’s suggestion was working miracles. Besides the appliances, walls were painted, furniture was placed—there were even accessories in the house. She had come to my cottage like Gunnar had wanted and not even noticed the strips of paint coming off the bedroom walls, just telling me brightly that she saw exactly why he loved my house so much and she would do her best to capture the feeling of it. His parents were coming soon and I thought they would love what she was creating, because I sure did.
“This is all mine. We can use whatever we want,” Gunnar agreed. He showed me that the refrigerator was already hooked up, and the freezer was already full of ice packs for his injuries. He was doing better, and luckily the Woodsmen had a week off in their schedule. He swore he would be ready to go, totally fine for the next game on Thanksgiving Day.
I didn’t believe him.
“As soon as I have countertops, we can get at it,” he told me. “I just have to figure out how to cook food that we want to eat.” He reached around me into the fridge, his hand briefly squeezing my waist. “In the meantime, I’m still getting the deliveries. For two,” he noted, and picked up a bag from inside his new, functioning appliance. “Let’s eat at your house.”
The woods were wet and Gunnar’s ditch was filled with rainwater, so we walke
d on the street, the bumpy, unimproved street. No one had been willing to rent me a grader, and Gunnar had convinced me that it was a good thing that I wouldn’t be driving a piece of machinery meant to flatten things. I had to agree with him. “After you,” he told me on my porch, and pulled open the front door. Then he looked down at his hand, horrified, because the door had come with it. Like, it was not attached to the house anymore, but was now in Gunnar’s grasp.
“I didn’t pull that hard,” he started to protest, but I shook my head.
“It’s fine. No, it’s really fine. A lot of pieces of the house have been coming off today, I think because it’s been so rainy and cold and damp lately. It’s just coming apart.” I looked forlornly at the door. “I guess I can tape this, too.” He propped the door before we walked in and then he automatically reached for the light switch.
“Don’t touch that!” I shrieked, and knocked his hand away. “Didn’t you see the paper covering it? And the skull and crossbones I drew on the paper?”
“It’s too dark to see in here. Why are you drawing pirate symbols?”
“No, it’s for danger! Sparks have been shooting out of that one when I try to turn it on,” I explained.
I heard Gunnar draw in a breath. “Go grab what you need and come stay at my house.”
“No, I—”
“I’m serious, munch. You can work on these problems tomorrow, but it’s better to be in a house with a door and lights in a storm like this. Especially when you can only see out of one eye.” So we trooped back through the rain to Gunnar’s house, and despite the construction remnants, I was still very glad to be there. The light switches were all new and worked great.
Gunnar set out our dinner on a piece of plywood between some sawhorses, and we sat on his new chairs to eat it. I had been thinking hard about my house. “I told Marley that I wanted to be her foster parent today,” I said. “But she’s afraid that they won’t say yes when they see my cottage. I’m going to have to totally fix it, not just taping things around like I’ve been doing. I know that houses take a beating with the weather coming in from the lake but I wish—”
The Last Whistle Page 22
