Delicate

by K. L. Cottrell

She finally makes it to the space between Cliff’s seat and mine, where she can see him.

  And if I thought she was hysterical before, I was wrong.

  She screams so loudly it nearly destroys my head—between that pain and the deep despair exploding from her, I’m finally overtaken by scalding tears.

  My insides are being ripped out.

  I’ve never heard someone’s heart shatter before, but this has to be what it sounds like.

  I’ve never felt my own heart shatter before, but this has to be what it feels like.

  Cliff is a gory mess in the driver’s seat, and he isn’t breathing.

  The world has ground to a brutal halt.

  Right here in our faces.

  Out of nowhere.

  With the nauseating smell of blood in the air, with crushed glass and metal around us, with piercing sirens wailing up outside, with what must be the headlights of another stilled car shining in on us, illuminating every excruciating second.

  I’m going dizzy again.

  This is a dream, some part of my mind decides.

  My hot tears spill away enough for me to watch four Noelle hands grasp pleadingly at the two Cliffs’ motionless right hands. The squeezes they give don’t get returned.

  I’m dreaming, and I need to wake up. Wake the fuck up, Beckett. Come on.

  But even with my double vision blurring anew and Noelle’s heart-rending cries twisting up with my suddenly noisy breaths, I know I’m more awake than I’ve ever been.

  And I…

  …I don’t know what to do.

  My best friend isn’t moving or making any noise, just bleeding everywhere, and I don’t know what to do.

  I find myself searing the sight of his face into my mind, listening to his fiancée splinter into pieces, waiting to either go numb from the pain of it all or pass out from the pain in my head.

  That’s all I can do.

  Until one of Noelle’s hands releases Cliff to seize my arm and hold on to it with every ounce of strength she has left, which is somehow not much and also enough to hurt me.

  Then I manage to drag my free hand over to her wrist, my other fingers still busy gripping Cliff’s.

  “Please, God, don’t take him away!” she begs, her sob strained, her anguish serrated.

  But he’s already gone.

  - 12 -

  B E C K E T T

  now

  I think something is wrong with me.

  I’m lying awake in the dark on Noelle’s couch. The back of her is tucked along the front of me. She’s sleeping, evenly breathing in and out, holding my hand under her chin.

  And I can’t get it to go away: the memory of her from hours ago, when we were standing outside my car, after we discovered we were both safe from the accident with the deer.

  The memory of me wanting…wanting to….

  For a while, there were too many other things flooding my mind for me to focus much on those moments of closeness, but as the night has gone on, the flood has lessened. It isn’t gone yet, no…but slowly, surely, she has been taking over.

  The memory of her is burned into me.

  Her soft mouth under my thumbs. Her exhalations on my mouth, hitting hard and shaky. Her gaze there, too, melting from wildly anxious to hazily captivated. Her body swaying toward me, not withdrawing. Her breath being taken away by me tracing her bottom lip.

  Loved that.

  Loved.

  I loved it.

  My nerve endings have been tingling lately as it is, from one special moment we’ve shared or another; these silent confessions threaten to make them fully spark.

  And every time I recall the deep, mouthwatering urge I had out there in the darkness, the nerve endings in my lips do spark.

  Because I may have told her I was sorry, and I may have agreed that we were caught up in stress, and I was sorry and caught up in stress to a certain degree…but I also know for myself, as sure as I can feel the warmth of her right now, that I meant to touch her like I did. I straight-up ignored everything in my head that was telling me not to do it.

  I shouldn’t have, though.

  I really shouldn’t have.

  That was not okay.

  She told me it was, but she doesn’t know what was firing through me. And I shouldn’t have felt some of that stuff, much less acted on it, even a little bit. I didn’t have the right. It wasn’t appropriate of our friendship.

  I’m her friend, not…her anything else.

  I’m Beckett, not Cliff.

  He’s hers and she’s his. I’m not hers and she’s not mine. That is how it has always been and how it will always be.

  Yet she stood there and burned herself into me when she could have pulled away, and now I’m lying here sparking.

  I swallow at my dry throat. And again.

  What’s wrong with me?

  The answer is as close and quiet as Noelle’s breaths.

  No, that’s not it.

  Around and around it goes in my muddled, waterlogged mind.

  The question. The answer. The denial.

  The question. The answer. The denial.

  No, it’s not the answer. It’s an answer. And it’s the wrong one.

  Jesus….

  Sleep—I’m overwhelmed and I need some sleep.

  The upset of this evening was startling and heavy, and it derailed our plans. Our emotions have practically run the gamut. But we’re out of harm’s way and we’re together, so Noelle is getting rest and I need to do the same.

  Closing my eyes, I make myself concentrate on things that will calm me.

  Those steady breaths of hers.

  How comfortable she is.

  The knowledge that neither of us has anywhere else to be.

  Her smaller hand cradling my bigger one.

  That last one brings back how I felt when she took hold of my hand at her parents’ house: new. It made me feel like I’d never had my hand held by anyone else in my life—like anyone else’s touch had been erased from me.

  Stop, some part of me warns in a whisper.

  Swallowing again, I nod to myself.

  But general thoughts of her aren’t going anywhere. That’s just a fact.

  All I can hope for is that instead of them keeping me awake with their deep, inescapable warmth, they’ll lull me to sleep with it.

  —

  I turn out to have gotten great sleep. No nightmares or anxiety or even tossing and turning.

  So Saturday morning sees me waking into calmness…even after I realize what else I’ve woken into.

  I’m on my back now with Noelle snugly settled into my side, still sleeping. Our legs are in a comfortable tangle. The hand of the arm I have around her is loosely laced with the hand of the arm she has bent between us. Our other arms are cradling each other across my stomach.

  It takes me many moments to be certain I have woken up. That’s how good I instantly, unexpectedly feel—so good that right at first, I thought I might be dreaming.

  I have no idea how we ended up this way.

  The only thing I know—the only thing I can think—is that I don’t want to ever move.

  Although the warning part of me stirs and whispers that feeling this way isn’t right and that I should not be so calm about it, the rest of me disagrees. Noelle is the closest friend in the world to me anymore, and there isn’t anything bad about it. There can’t be.

  So I don’t move. Not a muscle. I stay right where I am, gazing up at the sunlit ceiling, allowing myself to relish this and the fact that we’re okay after last night.

  My stomach gives an unpleasant swoop as I recall what it was like to live in those first eternal seconds of my car being still on the dark road, the complete opposite of my thrashing pulse and soaring panic. My thoughts couldn’t decide between being frozen with shock and being uncontrollable like a storm. Were we okay? Or were we in the surreal stretch of time that would precede our brains registering something horrifying—the same stretch of time we experienced bef
ore the end of Cliff’s life started becoming real? Were we about to face death’s devouring shadow again?

  Feeling how hard I was breathing wasn’t enough of an answer. Hearing Noelle’s not-gargled voice wasn’t enough.

  I didn’t trust that we were okay until she was solidly in my arms, until our fingers had searched for injuries and found none, until I could clutch her face in my hands and inspect her from up close.

  Death hadn’t paid us a visit that time, no. He had passed us by.

  We weren’t on the edge of another living nightmare. We were still just living.

  I don’t know how to describe the way it felt to realize that. I was something more than relieved, something more than grateful to God.

  And Noelle was more than beautiful to me.

  She was everything to me, more vividly than she had ever been before.

  I couldn’t help losing myself in that, even for just a few moments…even if part of me knew it was wrong. Nothing felt more important than appreciating her the way I suddenly wanted to, the way only I could because I’m Beckett, after all we had been through just then and over the last two years of our lives.

  Currently, quick and unstoppable, up rush my thoughts from when I was trying to fall asleep last night. Those ones about Noelle burning herself into me, and about how I wanted her to keep—wanted us to keep….

  Before they can overrun me completely, I bring the denial back too.

  All of that was an overreaction.

  I take care not to let my sigh disturb Noelle’s slumber.

  An overreaction. Yeah.

  So even though my nerve endings are trying to spark again and my chest feels light and full at the same time, I don’t let my emotions and memories carry me too far away—including the guilt trying to nip at me. Because while I shouldn’t have reacted how I did, it was a one-time thing, so what matters more than anything now is now, right? The steadiness we spent so long trying to build up to can come back. We’re safe, and we’re together, and it’s a new day. We have fun plans for later.

  What we agreed on last night really was true: outside my car, we were swept up in a stressful situation. Swept up in intense moments that made sense in many ways but were exaggerated and knotted up in others.

  There’s no forgetting how it made me feel, but that doesn’t mean there’s anything to it. We lived in those moments, but then they passed. No big deal.

  Plain and simple, right?

  Right. Plain and simple.

  Of course there’s nothing to it.

  Of course it’s not a big deal.

  Because of course I haven’t actually developed feelings for this woman.

  I’m not allowed to have done that.

  Another uninvited, unpleasant swoop of my stomach.

  Before I can deal with it, Noelle jerks in her sleep, and then again. A soft whine leaves her. Suddenly on alert, I look down at the top of her head. Her fingers clench around mine as she’s jolted a third time by whatever she’s dreaming about. Her next little noise is a sob.

  My time as a witness is short-lived.

  “Hey,” I murmur scratchily, squeezing her fingers back, “wake up.” My other hand moves from its lazy place across my stomach and rubs along her arm, squeezing here and there too. “Come on, Noelle. Wake up.”

  She doesn’t respond. Her breathing grows heavier with distress.

  I say her name again and give her shoulder a shake. Then she finally starts coming out of it, stirring and breathing jaggedly.

  “You’re all right,” I soothe her. “Just dreaming.”

  “Beckett?” The raspy word is laced with drowsy panic.

  “Yep, it’s me.”

  Another whimper of a sob hits the front of my shirt.

  God, poor her. She was probably dreaming about losing Cliff all over again. I’m sure she wishes I weren’t the one lying—

  A startled breath gets stuck in my throat, and not just because she’s fully giving in to tears.

  “Ellie?” I barely get out as she finishes clumsily crawling on top of me.

  Over and over, my pulse skips with shock at how her face is tucking into my neck, her blanket-tangled legs bending on either side of my thighs, her hands scooping under my arms and shoulders, her weight slumping on me while she weeps.

  But startled shock aside, I still hurry to wrap my arms around her so I can hold her body safely to mine.

  A minute passes without anything else happening.

  She doesn’t try to talk about her dream and I don’t try to get her to, even though I’m really wondering what happened in it. I don’t know what would make her want to scramble this close to me—so incredibly, intimately close. We’ve never settled ourselves this close to each other.

  Had she been dreaming that something bad happened to me? Not to Cliff after all, but…to me?

  Rather than feel moved by the possibility, I feel chilled.

  I take a few long moments to hug her even tighter.

  She squeezes me, too, like she understands the need to be just a little bit closer still.

  And…this should be more uncomfortable than it is.

  I know that.

  In more than one way, this should be uncomfortable to me. To us.

  It isn’t anything but warm, though. Reassuring.

  Amazing.

  That word is what makes my next breath difficult to get ahold of, not the fact that a grown human being is settled on top of me.

  It shouldn’t feel amazing to have Noelle on me like this, yet it does.

  And I can’t move her. Don’t want to move her. What I want is to give her whatever she needs in order to feel calm and protected.

  I always want that—to be whatever she needs. Not just because Cliff asked it of me on the night we lost him, but also because it feels right to me. The desire to make Noelle happy and hear her laugh and tend to her wounds and steady her hands is as much a part of who I am as my name.

  Her lips under my thumbs, I suddenly recall. Her eyes full of hazy captivation. Her going breathless because I—

  No.

  No, no, no.

  Once again, I have trouble pulling air into my lungs.

  I’m not going there. I’m not doing that. Not now, not ever again.

  Well, although I succeed in pushing those things away, there’s no way to avoid thinking again about how good she feels right now. About how welcome her warm weight is. About how she’s softer than I ever noticed before.

  Clenching my jaw, I sigh and wonder when my reactions to her will go back to normal.

  And on the heels of that, something begins to creep into view from the very back of my mind. The truth of it dances down my spine, has my muscles twitching…

  …but I push it away, too, before it can get too big.

  Noelle sniffles, then gives a sigh of her own. It sounds like maybe she’s done crying, which is the perfect thing to focus on, rather than what it’s like to have her breaths against my neck and her heartbeats against my chest…along with some seriously soft other parts of her….

  God, no. Those are terrible things to focus on.

  Get it together, man.

  “You okay?” I finally whisper to her.

  She nods into my neck. A bit of her hair tickles my jaw.

  You’re not allowed to like that, I remind myself in the middle of me liking it.

  “Need to talk about it?” I go on.

  I think I feel her heartbeat stumble. I definitely feel her gulp.

  “No,” she whispers back, her voice thick from tears, balmy against my skin.

  It’s a good sign, I think. Still, I move a hand up to rub soothingly between her shoulder blades.

  She sniffles again, then another time, then asks, “Am I hurting you?”

  It both surprises and amuses the hell out of me.

  “What?” she asks beneath the chuckles I can’t contain.

  “No,” I manage through them, “you aren’t hurting me.”

  You’re still
the absolute best thing I’ve—

  Clearing my throat doesn’t pair well with laughing; I’m suddenly choking on my spit like an idiot.

  Noelle yelps and I think tries to scramble to her feet, but her legs are still tangled in the blanket. With a louder gasp from her and a pitiful one from me, she goes tumbling over the edge of the couch.

  A muffled thud hits the air along with, “Ow!”

  “Oh, sh—” I can’t even cuss around all my coughing. I sit up and reach down to help free her of the blanket, my eyes watering and my throat burning.

  “I’m okay,” she assures me. After a moment, she’s clear of the blanket, so she gets on her knees and starts patting my back.

  I nod my thanks and as if to say I, too, am okay, even though this kind of thing is always an embarrassing pain in the ass.

  Shortly, I’m able to get a good breath. I fan at my face and shake my head. As she stops patting my back, she presses her lips together to hide a smile; it doesn’t work.

  And even with rumpled hair and post-crying eyes, she’s so lovely it hurts me.

  A muttered, “Damn it, Noelle,” falls from my mouth before I can stop it.

  She nods sympathetically, and that smile gets loose as she says, “Sucks, I know,” because she thinks I’m complaining about the choking thing.

  Yeah, that sucks too.

  I tip a weak smile at her, then take another few moments to finish composing myself.

  Back to normal, I remind those hung-up parts of me. Calibrate.

  “You’re all right after your dream?” I check again.

  Briefly, her expression flickers toward unsettled. By the time she’s done glancing over my face, though, it has relaxed again.

  “Yeah,” she answers softly, “I’m all right. Thank you for….”

  Her eyes move over the rest of me now, and I think I see color coming into her cheeks.

  Not needing her to finish the sentence, I promise simply, “Always.”

  Nevertheless, there’s a moment of quiet stillness—two moments, three—in which we dance around looking at each other straight. Each time we make eye contact, it’s gone again even before my pulse can skip. She’s decidedly blushing, and I guess I’m starting to do the same, judging by how warm I’m growing.