by Cole McCade
“Thank you.” Leigh gripped Elijah’s hand tight and headed for the stairs, but paused. “I…do you have a car?”
“I have not, for many a year.” Wally smiled regretfully. “But I’ll walk with you, if you’d like.”
“No…that’s okay. The more of us there are, the more attention we’ll draw.” Leigh lingered, taking Wally in—then let go of Elijah’s hand long enough to pull the old man into a tight hug. He made a startled sound. “Thank you, Wally. You don’t even know me. You had no reason to help.”
“Not knowing someone is no reason not to help.” He patted her back, then hugged her close. “It doesn’t kill anyone to put out a little kindness without expecting anything in return.”
Leigh pulled back and swung her backpack around to fumble with the zipper. “I can still—”
“Keep your money.” His thin hand covered hers, halting her. “Repay me by finding what you’re looking for. By being safe.” He bent toward Elijah. With a flick of his wrist, he produced a brightly pink tissue paper flower from his sleeve and offered it to her son; giggling, Elijah reached up with both hands to take it. “And by taking care of this little darling.”
With Elijah holding his paper flower close, Leigh lifted him into her arms. “I will. I promise.” She stood for a moment longer, imprinting Wally on her memory, then smiled. “Take care.”
She headed downstairs, moving stealthily through the dresses, peering through the front window and half expecting to see a cordon of police cars and armed men ringing the shop front. But there was only the empty street, and a man in an apron in front of a café across the street, putting out a chalked-up sandwich board and sweeping the leaves off the sidewalk. She waited until he went back inside, then ducked out into the rising morning.
She took the walk to The Upper Nests slowly, letting Elijah look around with his eyes so wide and curious. She doubted he’d ever seen this area of the city. Doubted he’d ever walked the gutters where the lost found each other, and listened to the birds cry as they flew over the buildings in the sunrise sky. She wanted her son to see it. To know it. To recognize part of himself in the graffiti-streaked concrete walls, the cracked sidewalks, the run-down buildings with their windows shattered out and boarded up.
To see that not everything broken was hideous, and to feel the beauty in the poison that ran in this city’s veins.
The sun was high and bright, the sky as blue as a glass marble, by the time they reached the outskirts of the tent cities and the Upper Nests. The river gleamed under the morning light, shimmering in white-fire spangles and whispering against the banks, and Leigh leaned down close to Elijah and pointed. “Look,” she said. “Look at the water. How pretty it is. Someone very important to me once told me there’s magic in Crow City, if you know where to look. That’s magic right there, baby. Can you see it?”
Elijah studied the river with those quiet, solemn eyes, before he smiled his subtle smile and nodded. “Yeah.”
The walk to the docks wasn’t far, but she found herself dragging her feet the closer she drew, her legs heavy, her soles sore enough to leave her limping. That hard ugly voice in the back of her mind, that voice put there by her mother, by Jacob, by Steve, told her Gabriel wouldn’t be there. That he’d weighed anchor the moment she’d abandoned him, and left her in his wake. Because she wasn’t worth waiting for. Because he knew she wasn’t coming back.
Because she’d been too proud to tell him how she felt, and too intent on running away.
But he would be there. He had no reason to leave. That voice inside her head was wrong. Not everyone she trusted, everyone she loved, would use her and throw her away.
Gary had proven that. And Wally. And so many others who’d tried to love her, no matter how she’d brushed them off and pushed them aside.
Yet when she found Gabriel’s slip, the Firebird wasn’t there. The houseboat wasn’t there, the waves slapping against the dock with not even a rope left behind. Nothing but a toolbox at the end of the quay—and that probably wasn’t even his.
Leigh stared at the flickering waves. The color went out of her heart to leave it gray and dull and crumpled as a piece of litter. She’d…she’d just wanted to be happy. To take her son and run away with Gabriel. It was what she’d been dreaming of since the moment Jacob had practically pushed her into his car, and back into the prison of that life.
It didn’t matter, she told herself—even as her throat closed and her lips trembled. She tightened her grip on Elijah’s hand. She still had her son, and they’d find their way.
“Mama?” Elijah asked. “Are you sad?”
“A little bit, baby. A little bit.” She curled her arm around his shoulders and gathered him close. “It’s okay, though. We’ll be okay.”
“I moved it,” a deep, gritty voice drawled at her back.
Leigh whirled, drawing Elijah protectively close, her insides constricting into a knot of fear and hope and disbelief. That voice…that voice.
Gabriel Hart looked down at her, the morning sun pouring over his tawny body and highlighting the streaks of grease and dirt covering sweaty skin that said he’d been up and working for hours.
“The boat,” he clarified, while she just stared at him, her tongue dried to the roof of her mouth. “Some kids decided to graffiti it. Had to dock where I could clean it.”
“Gabriel,” she breathed.
She’d imagined this moment so many ways, as she’d walked across the city. Imagined everything she’d say to him. Imagined he’d look down at her and smile, and kiss her, and maybe she wouldn’t have to say a thing. But instead she stood frozen with Elijah hiding behind her legs while Gabriel watched her with a coolly forbidding gaze, his face as closed and impenetrable as it had been the day she’d walked into his shop to pick up Gary’s car.
And all she could say was “Gabriel,” and silently plead with him to understand.
He flicked a brief, unreadable look over her, over Elijah, then turned away, giving her his back. He tugged his work gloves off as he strode out onto the quay and bent to pick up his toolbox.
“Something I can do for you?” drifted back.
Leigh closed her eyes. She’d rather have thought he’d left than face this: this cold aloofness, this quiet dismissal. She might as well just…go.
No. No, she hadn’t come this far for nothing.
“I get it,” she said, starting forward. “I hurt you.”
Gabriel stopped. He set the toolbox down, straightened, and shoved his gloves into his back pocket, but didn’t look back—his shoulders rigid, his spine stiff. Leigh swallowed, struggling to loosen her tongue, and grasped on tight to Elijah’s hand for the courage to peel open her chest and bare her beating heart to a man who may have already written her off.
“Sometimes I think that’s all I’m good for. Hurting people,” she continued. “And you have every right to be angry with me for leaving. I thought I’d hurt you less by going than by staying. I thought maybe I’d get myself sorted out, figure out what I wanted, start over. But I couldn’t start over without him. Without my son. And I screwed up, trying to be with him. I screwed up and ended up right back where I started, with my husband.”
Gabriel glanced back, one sharp silver eye watching her through the fall of his hair, like a tiger in the brush. “Sounds like you had everything you needed.”
“I didn’t have you,” she ventured, but he said nothing. She closed her eyes, trembling. “He hurt me.” She shook her head, opening her blurring, burning eyes. She wouldn’t beg. She had her pride. But there was no shame in honesty; only the fear of rejection, crouching on her shoulders with its claws digging in. “He hurt me, and I couldn’t stay there. You said to find you if I wanted something real.” She tightened her hold on Elijah. “Nothing’s real for me without my son. But nothing’s real without you, either. I think I’m in love with you. And I thought I could have love or stability but not both; I’ve spent my whole life thinking I can only have one thing or the other, but i
t has to be both right now.” Still nothing. She didn’t know what he wanted from her, but she knew what she needed from him. “Say it can be both. I need it to be both. I need…I need to feel safe. I need you.”
Still Gabriel remained silent. Everything she’d learned to read in his silences was gone, leaving only a guarded blankness that completely shut her out. Everything else had vanished. The warmth she’d come to crave. The dry, sardonic humor in his voice. The way he knew just how to get under her skin. It was all walled away, leaving only a cold and wordless man who might well never have cared for her at all.
He turned—slowly, so slowly, as if he didn’t even want to look at her. But look at her he did, raking over her with a fierce and almost demanding gaze as he drew closer, one measured step at a time. She lifted her chin, looking up at him and fighting against the hot rush of emotions burning through her and threatening to shatter her to pieces. If he said no, it would crush her—but she would not let it break her. Not again.
He stopped before her, blocking out the sun, filling her vision. For just a moment she let herself drink him in, absorbing him in case this was the last time she saw him. Even if he hated her, he would always be a memory that she held close to her heart, a reminder that she deserved better than simply what she was given by people who only wanted to own her for whatever currency they thought her body was worth. His eyes met hers. She waited, struggling not to tremble and failing, while the air sucked from around her until there was nothing left to breathe.
Until he dropped to one knee in front of her and held out his hand—not to her, but to the little boy hiding behind her legs.
“You’re Elijah, then?” he rumbled. Elijah nodded mutely. Gabriel’s lips drew into one of his rare warm, gentle smiles. “I’m Gabriel. Have you ever sailed a houseboat before?”
Elijah shook his head. “No, sir.”
“Then it looks like I’ll have to teach you.” Still Gabriel offered that large, weathered hand—a hand that spoke of strength, security, safety. “But you have to promise me one thing.”
Long seconds ticked past as Elijah eyed that hand warily, then slipped his small, slim fingers into Gabriel’s, tiny against his massive palm. “What?”
“Don’t ever call me sir. Gabriel’s fine.” So very gently, Gabriel enfolded that little hand in his own—and looked up at Leigh, silver eyes softening to warm pools of glimmering mercury. “I’m rather fond of the way certain people say my name.”
In that moment Leigh realized what Gabriel wasn’t saying. Because he was Gabriel, and words weren’t his way. And in that moment she knew: he was offering her everything she wanted, everything she needed, showing her instead of telling her with words that didn’t mean nearly as much as that warm, accepting hand holding her son’s with such care.
Suddenly she could breathe again: too much, too fast, until she was nearly dizzy with it as she watched this man—the man she loved. “You mean that?”
“I’ve always meant it.” Gabriel stood, rising over her and yet never letting go of Elijah’s hand. His heat enveloped her as he stepped closer, and curled rough fingers against her chin. His thumb carefully traced the edge of the bruise on her cheek. “If you don’t know how I feel about you by now…”
“I need to hear you say it. I need to.”
“No, you don’t. You trust me.”
He tipped her face up and leaned down. His mouth touched hers and, with that one touch, illuminated the dark and secret chambers of her heart where her ugliness and her emptiness slept. And curled among them, bright in the light of his kiss and just as darkly beautiful as the ennui and the wildness and every piece of her self-destruction, was a love that would never make her whole but that could make being broken into the sweetest, most gut-wrenching art. She leaned into him and clung close and drank in everything he didn’t need to say even as his lips shaped a silent, soundless I love you against her mouth—and she breathed it in and took it into herself and shuddered with how perfectly it fit into the cracks inside her heart.
And when he let her go, when he pulled back and looked down at her with his hand cupped hot against her cheek and his lips curved in that hint of a smile that said he understood her secrets because they were his secrets too…she knew she’d made the right decision, maybe for the first time in her life.
He tossed his head, his wild dark hair drifting over one eye. “Come on.”
Stepping back toward the docks, he tugged Elijah gently along. Leigh caught her son’s other hand and, with Elijah between them, followed Gabriel down the quay toward a slip several dozen yards down. The Hiincebiit bobbed on the waves, tied up to a dock pile. Gabriel swung Elijah up onto the deck, making the boy giggle, then vaulted up himself and offered his hand to Leigh.
She curled her fingers in his, then yelped as he lifted her up, pulling her over the rail with a roller-coaster thrill that left her laughing, breathing in sharp gasps of the crisp river air. He cast off the mooring line and shoved the boat back from the dock, sending the deck rocking and swaying. Then his arm hooked hard around her waist and pulled her against him, holding her steady, and she twined her arms around his neck.
“The police will be looking for us,” she said.
“It’s a long river with many turns.” He coiled a strand of her hair around his fingertip. “We’ll find our way. I’ve always wanted to see New Orleans.”
“I’ll miss Crow City.”
“We’ll find our way back, one day. When it’s safe. It’s in our blood and in our bones, and it never really leaves us.”
“I like the sound of that.” Stretching up on her toes, she kissed the peak of his chin. Just because she could; just because it was a giddy rush to jump off this cliff wholeheartedly and accept this, accept him, accept everything they could be if she let herself fall and trusted that just this once, she could spread her wings and fly. “Remember when I said I don’t like when stories end?”
“I do.”
“I realize now that they don’t end. Not really,” she said. “They just start anew.”
“Is this the start of our story, then?”
“I hope so.” She searched his eyes, and saw a thousand possibilities there. A thousand futures in her own and Elijah’s reflections, dwelling deep in the mirrors of his irises. “Even if I have no idea where it will go.”
“It doesn’t matter where it goes. It doesn’t matter if we get lost along the way.” Gabriel bent to lift Elijah in his arms, supporting the boy on his hip—and once more drew Leigh against him, with his hand warm and possessive against the small of her back, his warmth stealing over her to mark her as his. Once more he kissed her; once more he promised without words, a whisper of I love you in every caress of his lips and every taste of his mouth.
“All that matters,” he said as the currents carried the ship from the shore and toward destinations unknown, “is that we’re lost together.”
THE END
AFTERWORD: I
AFTER THE TRIGGER WARNINGS AT the beginning of the book, it may seem strange that I’m having trouble figuring out the best way to talk about this. The best way to talk about domestic abuse, violence, emotional abuse, dysfunctional relationships, everything dark that we often don’t like to think about in our happily-ever-afters. This is something that’s ridden me throughout the book, and I’ve been trying to work out what to say about it, and how to address the dichotomy between what I write for titillation purposes and what I believe in real life, especially when you consider that what inspired this story was a realization that moved me to tears:
The fact that nearly all of my female friends have been the victim of sexual predators—often family or other trusted adults who targeted them at a young age, hurt them, took away their ownership of their bodies and their agency, and changed the way they see themselves forever.
Still more have been victims of domestic abuse, and felt as if they had nowhere to turn because they’d been taught this was normal, and conditioned not to talk about their problems
.
You may know that I wrote a short story, Sometimes It Storms, in the award-winning Winter Rain charity anthology—a story about a male survivor of child sexual abuse. Proceeds benefited RAINN, the leading national provider of support and resources for survivors of rape, incest, and abuse. There was nothing titillating about the abuse in Sometimes It Storms. It was painful. It was ugly. It was traumatizing. I saw one reader say it was so dark mine was the only story in the anthology that she had to put down (and I’m sorry for that). This is a thing I tend to treat with gravity, not to mention I talk about the psychology of abusive relationships rather often. I condemn all forms of abuse.
And yet here I am writing a book that needs a trigger warning before you even get to the first page, with multiple potentially damaging and disturbing things described in a sexualized fashion.
We all know that fantasy is not reality. We know that enjoying Leigh’s fixation on a bruising touch, her Daddy issues, and her need for borderline non-consent does not mean we condone the man who beats his wife. Or the husband who thinks “I do” means “yes into perpetuity” no matter if she says no or how much she resists. Or the father who looks at his budding teenage daughter just a little too long. Or the boyfriend who uses cutting little comments to reel a woman in and keep her always guessing, always doubting herself, always under his control. When it comes to our fantasies, we know very well where the dividing line is between that and something imaginary concocted for pleasure’s sake.
But at the same time, we run the risk of normalizing some very damaging things when we dismiss it as just fantasy. We risk trivializing; risk minimizing; risk discarding people for whom this isn’t a story, but a painful and traumatic reality with nothing pleasurable about it—and walking away from that kind of situation isn’t as easy as people so often think. We live in a culture that takes delight in painting girls as knowing, seductive adult women who knew exactly what they were doing, and uses the Lolita myth as an excuse to both objectify young girls and to make that objectification their fault. It’s a pervasive mindset, and it’s difficult to even recognize, let alone escape, before we even get into the difficulty of recognizing and escaping abusive relationships.
