Random Acts of Hope

by Julia Kent

  His words cut to the bone. “It’s 6 a.m. and I’ve just spent the last few hours trying to find an escaped six-foot snake in one of the halls. Did you come here to finally talk to me after five years of silence and pick a fight? Because that’s not going to happen.”

  My hands were shaking. My torso shook. The ground, the walls, the ceiling, the sky—it all tremored. Some deep vibration of all the cries and fears and confusions of five years decided to be unleashed in this moment, and even Liam himself seemed to be shaking.

  “I’m here, aren’t I?”

  But what does that mean? The words were right there on my tongue, queued up and ready to pour out, but something in me held back. Once they were out I couldn’t put them back in and we were both on edge. Hell, we were both clinging to the edge by our fingernails. I could see something uncaged in Liam, unbound and free—and not in a good way. He was dangerous, and five years pushed through, unleashed and flowing. Boundaries were gone.

  “Yes, you are.” Safe words. Those were the safest words I could think of. The only ones that came out.

  We couldn’t stop looking at each other. He kept blinking, hard, and if I weren’t shaking so hard I’d have laughed. The blinking. I’d forgotten about that—how his eyes would dry out and his contacts would bother him. Did he have his glasses in his back pocket, like he so often did for emergencies? In bed we would joke that he could only see things within a few inches of his face without contacts or glasses, and he’d comment on the intimacies of my skin, tell me about scars and birthmarks and my own terrain, a lesson he would teach with added tactile nuances.

  His jeans hung on his hips like a muscled man, not tight across a bony teen’s pelvis but snug, molding to a built, mature ass, thickly honed thighs leading down to tall, long calves. He was most certainly cataloguing me, too. My body was so different. Five years had changed both of our landscapes, but not the heart of who we were.

  And he wasn’t who I’d thought he was, which made him a stranger. An achingly familiar stranger whom I still missed so deeply the craving lived with me like a scar.

  When I’d bled and bled and bled during my miscarriage, after a while I’d felt faint. So faint it was like I started to fade out. One part of me at a time, until it seemed I’d slip away and no longer exist. The rush to the ER, the confirmation that the heartbeat I’d heard weeks ago was gone, the kind RA who held my hand during the D&C to clean out my uterus and make the bleeding stop—it all happened as I slid between two worlds. Baby and No Baby, I called them.

  At one point one of the nurses went over my chart and explained that I would be fine going forward and have no problem conceiving again, and that “someday” I would be able to have children if I wanted to.

  “So no complications?” I’d whispered, pulled back into existence by the cold scrape of steel against my womb’s walls. The clearing of the tissue that had once held promise but that had—unlike me—made the full passage out of existence.

  “That’s right.” Her hand had been so warm against my ice-block skin. “Everything’s back as it was before.”

  Everything’s back as it was before. That was what I wanted so badly it tasted like blood sometimes. I stared now at Liam, at the father of my baby, and I just couldn’t stop shaking. Tears filled the bridge of my nose, spreading to the tip, the inside flaring and flaming as though wet napalm invaded my sinuses, and then he was kissing me, softly and tenderly, his hands around my waist as I walked backward through my apartment door and invited him to join me.

  Because somehow I had to live with an ache like a scar and to try to get everything back as it was before. I had no idea how, exactly, to do that, but I knew this:

  Liam was here.

  And that was more than I’d had in five years.

  Chapter Eight

  Liam

  I touched her. I kissed her. I held her in my arms and something in me fused with her, even for a few brief seconds. All I wanted was to go back in time and for her not to make that phone call telling me she was pregnant, not tell me what she said, make it untrue and unsaid, so I could have my damn five years with her and not feel this hot rush of confusion that boiled my blood.

  She looked at me with that arched eyebrow and those big eyes that were the size of a clock. Two clocks, counting time, counting the years. The pain on her face must have mirrored my own.

  How could all this pain be mixed so easily with so much pleasure, like finely-ground glass in chocolate mousse? The danger wasn’t the passion. It was what hid within it.

  Charlotte hid a disgusting secret from me all those years ago and I shut her out. Walked away. Closed off. Bam! Done. There was no dialogue, no “what if,” no talking about what had happened, because you can’t argue with biology.

  Now she was in my arms, shaking like everything between us made an earthquake, and her warm skin felt like home.

  She smelled like Charlotte, the same mix of perfume and musk and home-baked cookies I loved. Even during sex she carried that scent, and when I was between her legs and drove her to frenzied declarations of love, that was the scent I carried all day.

  Breathing it in right now was unreal. Fucking unreal.

  “Why now?” she whispered as I settled her on the couch, pressing my lips to her cheeks.

  My chest tightened. “Because we saw each other. I couldn’t stop seeing you after that. I can’t stop seeing you now. You’re burned into my mind.”

  “So you’re chasing me down and stalking me? At 6 a.m.?” She sniffled. “Didn’t you have to work last night? Gig or…” She laughed. “Gig?”

  “I did. Took a long shower to wash the stink of cougar money off my…hips.” I almost said “cock” but held back.

  “What else on your body smells like cougar money?” she asked, and I burst into a deep laugh that rumbled through my chest. Why be prim around Charlotte? She’s the one who could tell jokes so dirty she made me blush.

  That was one of the many reasons why I love her.

  Loved her. Loved. Past tense. My heart felt like one of Sam’s drums during a long solo, pounding with emotion but without sheet music, just moving through time and space and imagination. Except I didn’t have to imagine. For the first time in five years, Charlotte was very real and here in front of me with those big eyes that looked at me now like she, too, couldn’t quite believe we were together.

  A prickly feeling took over suddenly and I became a stuttering teen boy. What was I supposed to say? Why I had come here—because I had no choice. Nothing else made sense, and all I knew was that an hour ago I’d been at the gym and then suddenly I was driving to her college where I knew she lived and worked. A quick check on my phone told me which dorm she was in charge of.

  And that was that.

  Why are you here? her eyes asked, though her lips stayed silent. It was easier to say nothing, so I did, just staring. Five years had changed me. It had changed her, too. Those hips were wider, her ass shapely and fine. Her face was thinner and more sophisticated, with eyes that were calm and focused. Neither of us was a nervous kid anymore.

  “I don’t know what to say,” Charlotte said. In any other tone of voice that would come out as a confession or an accusation, but for some reason she managed to make the words seem neutral. Open. Searching.

  My stomach seized and my breath caught in my throat. “Me either,” I replied. I stifled a sigh. I wanted to stop the talking with another kiss but something held me back. In the intervening years I’d been with so many women, spent so many nights trying to erase Charlotte's imprint from me, but these minutes were a kick in the gut.

  She had me all these years and I stupidly didn’t realize it.

  “We probably have a lot we need to say,” she added.

  All I could do was blink. I’d imagined this moment a million times, and every scenario involved having her beg me for forgiveness, plead with me to get over her betrayal, and have some explanation—any explanation—that made sense. I invented so many ideas it became comical,
but not funny.

  Never funny.

  “We probably do,” I said evenly, dying inside but only giving back what she let loose. Like playing a polite game of tennis for the sake of killing time. The goal is to keep the ball in play, but not to stop the back-and-forth.

  My arms tingled with the pressure of her skin against mine, her head bending down to tuck into the soft spot between my shoulder and my collarbone. Her hair smelled like cinnamon and coconut and that fresh scent that Charlotte always smelled like. She breathed steadily, in and out, like a metronome. I couldn’t tell if it came naturally to her or if she was working as hard to control herself as I was.

  Inside I might have been dying, but on the outside my body was alive in so many different ways, stirring beneath my clothes, straining to erase the years by sinking into her until my mind just melted and all we were was warmth and moans and friction, all heated flesh and frenzied touch.

  And then her body, tense but pressed into mine, relaxed. She was like a series of layers of tension, and somehow just holding her made one of those layers yield.

  It gave me permission to just be. No one had given me that in…ever. Following her lead, I hugged her tight and just breathed in and out. In and out. Without a word, we stood and connected. What should have felt weird and uncomfortable, charged and tense, felt like coming home.

  And then she yawned.

  “That’s a new reaction from a woman I’m holding in my arms,” I said, feeling my own words rumble low in my throat.

  She laughed, but yawned again. “It’s not an insult. In fact, it’s a compliment.” She looked at the clock on her desk. It read 7:02 a.m.

  “Are you expiring?”

  Another yawn. “I’m off duty now, technically.”

  My pulse burst into applause. I could feel the thready pull of it in my throat, and she jumped a bit, stretching back from me, as if she felt my skin jerk under the blood’s pressure. Having her startle in my arms made a rush of uncertainty return. What was I doing?

  “What does that mean?” I asked, sounding and feeling stupid.

  Yawn. “It means I can go to bed.”

  The air changed in an instant. My body reacted damn fast to that comment, and she felt me go hard. Her hips shifted against mine and then settled back in place, eyes intense and fierce.

  Is that an offer? I almost asked. Almost.

  Her long, slow out-breath that wasn’t quite a sigh helped to ground me. Charlotte was in my arms, her head nestled against the crook of my neck, and she smelled like everything I’d missed for years. The distance between us, the gaping, fanned-out past, collapsed into a thin layer of nothing, almost imaginary, as the bare skin of her arm touched my own forearm.

  “I know this seems rude, Liam, but I’m exhausted. In so many more ways than one. Work, the snake, you…”

  “I exhaust you?” I tried to make a joke of it but couldn’t.

  “This exhausts me.” She shifted and went tense. Her crappy top was for a band I hadn’t thought of in six years, one that was popular when Random Acts of Crazy got its start, but disbanded a few years ago. My mind migrated to stupid details like that, lured away because the magnitude of Holy shit, Charlotte’s in my arms was so great it felt like a supernova. And not just in my pants.

  “Sorry,” was my lameass response. Molecules on my skin rubbed together to produce the kind of heat you only feel in the presence of one person. Ever.

  “I missed you,” she whispered.

  I leaned my head against the back of her couch and stared up at the ceiling, eyes wide and unblinking, my thumb gently rubbing her arm. Zoning out wasn’t my plan, but some message from the universe gave me a few minutes to just do nothing. Say nothing. Be…nothing. No movement, no apologies, no explanations, no demands, no outrage.

  Just pure existence.

  While I was pure existencing myself, though, Charlotte fell asleep.

  God damn Charlotte.

  Charlotte

  The sunlight streamed through the slats in the blinds, its gentle nudge a bit more urgent than usual. The rays of heat from the window were not what actually woke me up, though.

  It was the strange man’s hot palm on my hip.

  The slide of the sheets against my clothed body felt like sandpaper, my hands rushing to my hair, fingers interweaved with a giant rat’s nest of bedhead as I sat up and stared at the six-foot-plus being in bed.

  Not a snake. Sooooo not a snake.

  Liam. Long and muscled, hard and tanned, his shirt off and pants on, feet bare. The sheets were a tangled mess between us, his golden locks as rumpled as I imagined mine were, and his arm was outstretched, fingers twitching as if searching for my body.

  His eyelids fluttered. He looked like a little boy again, like the eleven year old I’d met more than half a life ago. Under those lids were the cynical ocean eyes that still made my breath pause. When he smiled those eyes could anchor my world, the grin of straight white teeth and pleasure and connection all mixed in with his hands, his heart, his—

  Wham.

  Air jammed in my throat. Five years. Five years of wishing for this moment, of wanting to reconcile, of needing it so badly it was a part of my DNA, some sequence that needed to be mapped and understood as part of the genome. The genome of love, of pain, of heartache.

  A deep sigh from him, then he turned over, his tight ass toward me, the waistband of well-worn jeans pulled down enough to show those two dimples, on either side of his spine, far down enough to make that air in my throat stay stuck for a little longer.

  My hungry eyes took him in, starved for the sight of him, the scent of sweat and musk and Liam—the same laundry detergent his mom used all those years, the same cologne he’d worn since his freshman year of high school, the same biochemical pheromone combination that my nose sought out like a golden retriever in a dorm full of women all on their periods at the same time.

  “Hey,” he mumbled from across the bed. “You awake?”

  “Yes.” Was I ever. Liam McCarthy was in my bed. We’d fallen asleep last night, too overwhelmed to talk. Touch—affection, really—was the comfort we’d both asked of each other and received.

  Not forgiveness. Not sex. Not even intimacy, per se.

  Just…touch.

  It was a start.

  Liam

  My boner was so big it was going to burst out of my fly and go strangle some small contraband pet in one of the dorm rooms.

  Bed. Charlotte. Bed. Charlotte. We’d slept together without sex, her ass cradled up against my raging erection for hours, her breathing slowing until her body had relaxed against mine, the ultimate subconscious trust.

  And then I’d spent the last few hours with eyes wide open, reveling in the scent and the lush touch of her, that sweet heat against my body, in my arms.

  A man could starve without the love of a good woman.

  I felt like I was ninety-eight pounds and on the verge of death but didn’t know it. All these years.

  Stupid, stupid, stupid. Why hadn’t I even tried?

  Because she fucked some other guy and tried to pass his baby off as yours.

  The thought made me turn away. I pretended to be asleep as Charlotte sat bolt upright in bed and made cute little mewling sounds like she was having morning-after regrets. Except there was nothing to regret but the hours of hugging and cuddling.

  If anyone had a right to regrets, it was me. My blue balls were bigger than that kid’s in We’re the Millers, and I hadn’t had my nads chomped on by a tarantula.

  “Hey,” I said.

  Something gurgled in the distance.

  “Hi,” she said shyly, running her hands through her hair, then wiping her eyes with that funny way chicks do it, with the pads of their fingers.

  “What’s that sound?”

  “It’s my—”

  Beep beep beep.

  She jumped up and shut off her phone alarm. “It’s my coffeemaker. I set it every morning for ten a.m. after I’ve pulled weekend-night dut
y. That way I can get up, check logs, and really be done when my shift ends.”

  Duty. Log. Shift. I looked around the room and it felt familiar and foreign at the same time. Charlotte was a fucking grown-up. I was in her apartment—in a dorm, yes, but not a coed’s dorm room—and she had a real job, with a salary and benefits and the whole nine yards.

  Instant uncertainty slammed into me. It was not a good feeling. I stripped for money and played rock star on the weekends when we could get a gig. When did she become so mature? I’ll bet she had a 401(k) and everything.

  “Do you have a retirement plan?” I asked as she started to walk out of her bedroom.

  She halted.

  “Huh?”

  “Never mind. Where’s the coffee?” I sat up and rubbed my neck. Shirtless. When had I taken off my shirt? She was still dressed completely, except for shoes. My pile of belongings was on the floor. I stepped in it as I stood.

  Nothing carnal had taken place. My poor, throbbing crotch snake told me that. Rubbing one off in her bathroom would take about three seconds, but that was kind of rude, right?

  Shit. What are the rules when you finally break five years of assholedom with the woman who owns your heart like it’s an appreciable asset but cheated on you and now you’re in her bedroom with a hard-on that extends into the next county?

  No rules. I’d have to make it all up as I went along. Which was my life rule, actually.

  “Coffee?” she called out from the other room. It was a combo living/kitchen area about the size of my entire shithole apartment.

  “Yeah—thanks!” I hollered back, fishing around for my shirt and pulling it on. Aside from the tousled bed, her bedroom was neat as a pin, with makeup and bottles of girl creams and crap like that on a little desk, some mirrors, a bunch of books stacked on their sides on her end table, and an e-reader tablet on top.

  I threw my shoes on and wandered out. The furniture looked like someone in the Soviet army had issued it, but you could tell Charlotte had tried to personalize it.

  She handed me a steaming mug with coffee the color of caramel in it.