Delicate

by K. L. Cottrell

  In the near-darkness, I can just make out the furrow in his brow.

  He shakes his head. “I don’t notice there are certain holes in me until you start patching them up.”

  Sweet, too, is the flutter in my veins.

  I haven’t heard many things in my life that were as deeply, sincerely lovely as this.

  I don’t even know what to say back.

  It seems to take me a full minute to land on, “No, I didn’t know that, and I’m glad I do now. I can’t begin to tell you what it feels like.”

  The new smile he sends over the dashboard-lit space between us is something of a surprise, given how earnest he was before.

  But of course it’s welcome, as is his lighter tone. “I really can’t either, so I guess we’re even.”

  So, so sweet.

  Chuckling, I agree, “Okay. Even.”

  He gives a little laugh of his own, followed by a contented sigh. “Well, what now? Where you wanna go? Whatcha wanna do?”

  “Hmm….” I experience a moment of weird shyness before I tell him, “Whatever you want is fine. I really just wanna hang out with you.”

  That earns me a grin. “Same here.” He hands me his phone. “Start with listening to some music?”

  Easy yes right there. Easy and enthusiastic.

  After some scrolling through his song library, I turn on the Hands Like Houses cover of “Torn.” Always a good choice. Beckett says as much, and we exchange a high-five before we start singing along.

  And I don’t feel yawny anymore, I notice.

  What should we do with our evening?

  Well, all I accomplish is remembering that I need to give him those caramels. Enjoying the song doesn’t leave much room for sinking into deeper thought.

  When it ends, one I’m unfamiliar with shuffles up next, and I’m freed up to also remember that he wants to find simple woodworking ideas. Going to the movies sounded interesting, but maybe we should just go to my house.

  Plus, it’d be a good idea to plan what we want to take on tomorrow’s picnic. We threw around a few suggestions at work over texts, but we—

  “SHIT!”

  His shout hits me along with the force of his foot on the brake, and we’re enveloped in noise: the screeching tires, my startled scream, more of Beckett’s cussing, the music, the juddering thud of us smashing into the back half of the deer I have just glimpsed trying to cross the dark road.

  It’s all as sudden as lightning.

  Just like before.

  Just like last time.

  I wait for shattering glass and crumpling metal, and I lose a few seconds as dizzying panic sears through me.

  The car jolting to a stop brings me back.

  My ears are ringing.

  My muscles are aching from bracing myself.

  My heart is hammering hotly in my chest, my pulse having rocketed skyward and taken my body temperature with it.

  Outside of me, the chaos has stopped.

  No screeching tires. No screams and shouts. No thuds.

  No shattered glass, I realize. No crumpled metal.

  Just the music still going.

  And gasping.

  Me gasping—I’m gasping and shaking and—and—

  “Beck?” I barely hear myself cry. I shake, shake, shake as I reach over to shut the stereo up and turn to smack around for him. “Beckett!”

  My hands get caught up in frantic grabs from his. Our gazes lock through the shadows, and I register deeper gasps than mine meeting my ears.

  “Oh my God,” he huffs out. “Oh my—Noelle!”

  He’s alive.

  My eyes fall shut at the crash of a realization.

  He’s—

  He’s wrenching his hands from mine. There’s a rush of movement and noise, smacks and a rhythmic chiming. I open my eyes and then blink in the glow of the light on the ceiling.

  He’s out of the car.

  But before I can freak out about him pulling away after what’s just happened, I see he hasn’t really pulled away. He’s hurrying around to my side of the car so he can come closer.

  He’s alive. He’s moving.

  My panic fully explodes into something else as I start snatching for the door handle.

  Beckett. Beckett. Beckett. I need—I need—

  He gets the door yanked open before I manage it. My body heaves toward him only to be stopped short by my seatbelt—whimpering, I hurriedly reach for the buckle, and so does he because he’s leaning across me, and our fingers are tangling, and we get the buckle freed, and he grabs the strap and impatiently flings it away. And I don’t climb out so much as I tumble out, and he doesn’t help me so much as he hauls me, and then we’re upright and staggering into a gripping hug, his arms banding strongly around my back and shoulders, mine going tight around his middle.

  He’s in my arms. He’s alive.

  “Oh my fucking God,” is hot and hoarse against my hair. We steady our stumble through the grass on the side of the road, and he tries to gather me in even closer to him. “Fuck. Fuck.”

  “Are you okay?” I nearly sob as I clutch him just as desperately. “Are you hurt? Did you get hurt?”

  Gasping anew at the thought, I clumsily feel his back, his sides; he quickly does the same to me. We find each other whole in those places, and then the hug is entirely unraveled and his hands are patting at my head and mine are moving over our chests and stomachs.

  Not bleeding.

  Not broken.

  “I’m okay,” he shudders out before stamping his lips to my forehead once, twice. “I’m not hurt,” rushes over my skin.

  I’m not hurt. I’m okay. My mouth doesn’t hurt, and neither do my bones—I don’t have another busted lip or another fractured wrist.

  My grateful fingers clutch his waist, and instead of kissing his cheek like so much of me wants to, I tip back a few inches, just enough to see his face because I have to see his face.

  There’s no blood on it anywhere. There isn’t another gash from him hitting his head during the crash.

  With my head still in his hands, his eyes find mine through what light is coming from the car, brows deeply knitted.

  We hold each other in an earnest look. A haven of a look. A, ‘We’re safe,’ look.

  We’re safe.

  We are.

  We’re safe.

  Our tension is uncoiling, our lungs being hit hard by relief.

  And he’s even closer now, dropping his forehead against mine. His hands are lowering, thumbs leaving my temples…

  …dragging down to my lips and stopping there.

  I can just make out that his eyes have left mine to do the same thing.

  I become acutely aware of his uneven breaths being there too.

  Beckett is on my lips—his thumbs, his eyes, his breaths.

  The thoughts tingle to life through my mess of emotions, and so do the crazy heated chills from earlier.

  And my eyes and uneven breaths are getting hung on his lips because they’re so…because he’s so…much closer than I even….

  He’s alive and okay and so beautiful and so close to me.

  I can’t help swaying toward that magnetic truth just a little bit.

  His nose nudges mine just slightly.

  A shaky sigh escapes me, and he whispers into it, “You aren’t hurt either?”

  “No,” I whisper back.

  My hands on his waist feel how deeply he inhales.

  I’m inhaling with him, and I don’t know why that feels good, but it does.

  We exhale at almost the same time, too, our breaths mingling from this so-close slant of our faces—

  —and in the next second, my heartbeat is stuttering hard because his thumb is gently drifting along my bottom lip.

  The heated chills spill all over me now.

  They don’t creep along or tingle in that one spot—they spill over every single inch of me, draw up my shoulders, take my breath away.

  I don’t know why that is either.


  How.

  Why.

  Why.

  There’s a pause between us. A thinning and thickening of the air.

  Then his face is edging back from mine. His thumb doesn’t leave my lip, and the place burns hotter as our eyes make a slow reconnection.

  My heartbeat is wild.

  I don’t know what to….

  And I don’t figure it out before the left side of my world starts growing brighter with white light, including the side of his face.

  Another car is driving up.

  We blink about it, our fingers flexing out tiny rippling touches. Under my hands, I can feel how it’s now a struggle for him to take a strong breath, just like it is for me.

  We reluctantly release each other.

  Our hands do, anyway. Not our eyes. A holding look has stretched out between us and gripped us like—like I don’t even know what.

  But it’s forced into slacking when a friendly male voice calls out from the other car, which has slowed down near Beckett’s.

  “Hey, everything all right? Front corner of your ride is busted up! Y’all hit something?”

  Well, only a few seconds have passed without us touching each other, but this reminder of what happened has me going right back to it—I’m not okay to not be close to Beckett after all.

  He must feel the same way, because my fingers have barely found secure purchase around his elbow before he’s lifting his hand to grasp mine in return. As we face the car, we keep holding on.

  “Okay, wow, we gotta….” He tries to clear away the weakness in his voice, then starts walking, not needing to pull me with him because I’m instantly following. “What do we do? We should call the police or something, right?”

  I nod. “Yeah, pro-probably.”

  As we approach the other car, I see the driver peering a little way down the road through his lowered window, now looking concerned. When I follow his gaze, I see the deer we hit.

  It isn’t far from us, lying halfway in the shoulder and halfway in the grass, gory even from here.

  Gone even from here.

  My stomach bunches up into a horrible knot.

  That animal ran out of the dark night, ran in front of our car, and we hit it just the right way to kill it but not us.

  No shattered glass.

  No crumpled metal.

  No blood on Beckett.

  No blood on me.

  We survived another car accident.

  The thought bangs around loudly in my head, leaves no room for any other sound—not even the sounds that match the years-old memories coming back for an unwelcome visit.

  My throat constricts without mercy.

  My tear ducts decide to start working now.

  But even as I cover my mouth with my palm and shakily exhale into tears, I keep my other hand firmly around Beckett’s elbow.

  Because with each passing second, I feel more and more, sharper and sharper, deeper and deeper that letting go of him is the last thing on earth I want to do.

  —

  Although it takes a while to get back to my house, we’re only slightly calmer walking through the door than we were at the time of the accident.

  We’re beyond relieved and thankful that we’re okay. So are my parents, whom I called while Beckett reported what happened to the police—I needed to hear their and Theo’s voices as desperately as I needed to keep one hand on Beckett. And it feels rather like a miracle that his car wasn’t too damaged to drive.

  But those remarkable moments we shared have dug into me in a way I can’t completely ignore anymore. My mind is a different jumble now that everything is on its way to settling down.

  I can tell just by looking at him that the same is true for him.

  We didn’t say anything about the side of the road before now, but we face each other as soon as we’re shut into my house, taking breaths that don’t go deep at all. And I know it’s coming.

  “I’m sorry,” he huffs out, eyes roving over my face in the soft light above our heads. “I’m sorry I touched you like that. I was so—it just scared me so. Bad. To think something had happened to you, so when you turned out to be okay…. You mean the—the entire fucking world to me, Noelle, and I just…um…panicked and….”

  I’m a living, barely breathing tangle of confusion, feeling the twist of disappointment over him not meaning to do those things, and wondering what the hell is wrong with me, and listening to myself assure him, “I know. It’s okay. I was scared, too, and—and so it’s okay that you did it, ‘cause it meant nothing had happened to you. And I’m sorry, too, that I….”

  Couldn’t help reacting like I did.

  I slip a reminiscing look over him.

  Too many nods from him. One of his hands shoving back through his hair. His eyes still going all over my face, hitting my lips again and again and again.

  Each new time tangles me up worse, makes my breathlessness worse.

  I get out, “You mean the world to me too. It’s okay.” After a beat: “Take that to the bonk.”

  No laughs. No smiles. From either of us.

  More nods, though, from him and now from me.

  And even more disappointment in my chest, because—

  No, I cut myself off. Nothing to be disappointed about. There was nothing there. Nothing.

  Except I remember how deliberate and tender his touches were.

  I remember how good they felt to me.

  I remember the look we shared before we had to pry ourselves from each other and rejoin the rest of the world; I still can’t wrap my mind around everything it held.

  How—how am I supposed to brush things like those off? They make me feel shaky, as if there are fault lines throughout me instead of veins and I never knew it because they lay dormant before tonight.

  And can he really brush those things off? He’s the one who woke the fault lines up, and it was…it was so different. So different for us. Different from anything we’ve ever…even in our closest moments….

  But with something much harsher than a twist and much darker than disappointment, I also remember Cliff.

  Cliff Cavill.

  My beloved fiancé.

  Beckett’s truest friend.

  The valued piece of us that was torn away in so similar a fashion to earlier that it almost makes me feel sick.

  Finally halting his anxious study of me, Beckett catches my eye. He looks at me, and I look at him.

  Cliff’s memory is how I’m supposed to brush all this off.

  I loved him—we loved him. And he loved us.

  Something Cliff said to me years ago rings in my mind. Something about Beckett being the first person he knew would never let him down, the first person he knew he could trust.

  I swallow hard.

  Whatever happened tonight isn’t bigger than what each of us had with him. Those kinds of bonds are forever. They can’t be betrayed. That would be so wrong.

  I don’t know which of us I say it to, but I say it: “We were just caught up in a—in a stressful situation.”

  The words are weird even to my own ears.

  Probably because we never expected to have a conversation like this.

  I’m nodding again, I notice.

  After another second, he’s doing the same.

  “Yeah,” he barely whispers.

  It isn’t unusual for me to suddenly want a hug from him, but something like nervousness touches me at the thought of asking for one now.

  Only fleetingly, though, because I refuse to let it take root in me. Nothing can stand in the way of us being each other’s safe place, and I’d be willing to bet he wants a hug from me, too, after how upset we’ve been.

  I open my arms to him and take a step forward. And I’m right: two swift steps put him in front of me, and then we’re wrapped up together.

  Wrapped up in a tight hug that we both have trouble breathing through but that neither of us pulls out of.

  It makes my heart beat faster. His, too, I c
an tell.

  Thank you, God, for this, I think. Thank you for the blessing of us being unharmed in each other’s arms right now.

  Out loud, I ask in a hush, “We’re good?”

  Another fervent nod.

  Glad to hear it—though, honestly, I would have begged for this next thing no matter what his answer was. “Sleep on my couch tonight. Please. Don’t drive home.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” is breathy and balmy between my neck and shoulder.

  The heated chills try to come back.

  It’s a struggle to fight them off.

  That’s enough of that. Time to calm down now. Time to unwind from the stress and the emotional stuff and just go back to normal.

  I think it again and again, but I don’t let go of him. I still don’t want to. His chest against mine is warm and solid, and I don’t want away from it.

  Judging by how he only moves to send one hand up to the back of my head, he doesn’t want to let go of me either.

  And I can’t keep from thinking about earlier at my parents’ house, when we held hands for those few seconds and didn’t want to stop.

  I think about the ocean eyes he turned on me—ocean and sunshine.

  His fingertips maybe being on my shoulder blade.

  Me patching up holes in him that we didn’t know were there.

  And our foreheads pressing together after our muscles loosened with post-panic relief, his touch on my lips and me not protesting, like inching even closer to each other was what felt right to us, not moving back.

  On the heels of that one, I realize I was wrong a second ago: now it’s a struggle to not be chilled in that strangely warm way.

  Takes every ounce of willpower I have plus recalling him saying he didn’t mean for those things to happen plus thinking about Cliff again.

  All of that together clears my head like a strong hand clearing a dusting of snow from a window.

  It was just stress.

  Just emotions running high.

  Just wild thankfulness that we were safe.

  Yeah. Yeah, that’s right.