Chapter 23 Mickey
I smell him before I hear him.
I’m sitting on the patio, doing the same thing I do every evening after sessions.
The sun is warm on my forearms and my face and I’m not thinking about anything, which is the closest I get to peace in this place.
I’ve spent the last couple of days practicing how to be alone again.
I’d convinced myself that Tallahassee was a fever dream, and Jacksonville is the cold, hard reality.
Then the air changes. It carries a trace of the cream—the scent of Benji touching the parts of me I can’t feel. I don’t have to turn around to know the man who held my feet in his hands is standing right behind my chair.
Benji is here.
He didn’t text. He didn’t ask. He didn’t let the distance be the excuse I thought he’d take. Now he’s standing behind me, the warmth of his body close enough to feel, and my eyes are still closed. I’m terrified to open them. I’m terrified that if I look, the scent will vanish.
His hands land on my shoulders — both palms warm, settling through the T-shirt with a pressure that is familiar because these hands have been on my skin before.
“Guess who.”
His voice is close to my ear, low and warm, full of the grin I can hear without seeing.
And now he’s standing behind me, and the distance between us feels meaningless. My hand leaves the armrest. The second it lifts, my core balance shifts and I have to engage everything to hold steady. I let go of the chair to reach for him, which is the most reckless decision I’ve made all day.
My hand finds his on my shoulder and my fingers grip tight. My eyes are burning. I keep my face tilted toward the sun and I don’t turn around because if I do, he’ll see the tears. I blink hard. The sun helps because it gives the tears somewhere to hide.
“Benji.” His name comes out rough. I clear my throat and try again. “Benji.”
“Hi, handsome,” he says, leaning closer to my ear. “I’m here to deliver a food order to an Officer Mickey Weaver. Did you place an order from Big Tex’s Roadhouse in Panama City?”
The laugh breaks out of me like a cough, short and rough. “You drove all this way to bring me ribs?”
“And sweet tea. Tex’s recipe. Half a bag of sugar. Sheila packed it this morning. She says she loves you and to eat something. She called me baby again, which I hope means I’ve been officially adopted into whatever weird cult you people are running up there in the Panhandle.”
My thumb moves back and forth across his knuckles. I still don’t look at him. “You didn’t tell me you were coming,” I say.
“I know.”
“Why not?”
“Because you would have told me not to.”
He’s right. I would have said don’t come, I’m fine, handle your life. All the things I’ve been saying through shorter texts and careful distance, convincing myself I was protecting him when I was really protecting myself.
“Yeah,” I say. “I probably would have.”
“And I would’ve come anyway. I saved us both the argument.”
“Come around here,” I say, tugging him closer. “Let me see you.”
He lets go of my hand. My balance shifts slightly, my hand dropping to the armrest to steady myself. He walks around the side of my chair and I can’t stop staring at him.
He’s wearing his eyeliner again. The dark lines make his eyes look sharper than I’ve seen them.
Except they’re not the color I thought they were.
Out here, in the sunlight, his eyes are green.
Blue at the edges fading to green at the center with flecks of gold near the pupil.
I’ve been wrong about the color of his eyes for the entire time I’ve known him because I’ve only seen him inside rooms that lie about color.
He’s wearing a fitted white T-shirt and slim jeans. His nails are freshly painted, dark navy. He’s tan and restored, the dark circles lighter, the bruise gone, his face filled back in.
He squats in front of my chair. His face level with mine. The sun is behind me and falling on him and I’m looking at Benji at eye level in sunlight for the first time.
“Your eyes,” I say. “They’re green.”
He smiles and blinks at me. “They’ve always been green, Mickey.”
“No, they were gray in the hospital. Blue-gray. I thought they were blue-gray.”
“That’s the awful fluorescent lighting. It kills the green.”
“The green is alive now,” I say.
“You look good.” He seems almost shy. “You look really good, Mickey.” His eyes travel from my shoulders to my biceps to my forearms. “You’ve been working out. I can tell.”
“Yeah, I have. Wheelchair push-ups. Transfers. Core work. Jason’s trying to turn me into the upper half of a linebacker.”
“It’s working.”
His eyes come back to mine. The green-gold of them gazes at me.
I don’t look away from him. Not anymore.
“I missed you, Benji.”
The words come out before I can stop them. I’ve been building distance, making the texts shorter, convincing myself that cutting him off slowly would hurt less when he eventually left for good. But he didn’t leave and now he’s squatting in front of my wheelchair.
His eyes go bright and wet, his mouth trembling for half a second before he catches it.
“I missed you too,” he says. “Damn it, Mickey. I missed trying to make sure you were eating and putting cream on your body. I’m not the best caregiver in the world, but I miss trying to take care of you.
I miss the hours of talking to you on the phone and texting you twenty times a day about everything. ”
He’s rambling. I’m watching his mouth move and I want to kiss him. I want to lean forward and put my mouth on his. But I can’t. I haven’t kissed anyone in months, and the last time it meant nothing.
I reach for his hand instead. I take his smaller hand and hold it between both of mine. His fingers are warm. He glances down at our hands and his breath catches.
“Do you want to go inside?” I ask.
“No, you’ve been stuck inside for too long,” he says. “Let’s stay out here in the fresh air and sun. I like the color it’s bringing back to your face.”
He sinks down on the concrete beside my chair, cross-legged, his shoulder leaning against the wheel, his face tilted up toward me.
Benji has always been the standing one. Now he’s on the ground, leaning against my chair like it’s where he belongs.
We stay outside. The shadows get longer. Neither of us lets go.
“How did the wedding turn out?” I ask.
“Callie cried before she even got to the arch,” Benji says.
“She took one look at the Gulf behind the bamboo and lost it. Her dad was holding her arm and he started crying too. I was standing off to the side crying into the schedule. Dante was behind me whispering ‘hold it together’ in Spanish, which did not help. At all.”
“Did the candles work?”
“Perfectly. LED in glass cylinders, fire safety policy, exactly what you said. The wind was blowing twenty miles an hour and those candles didn’t even flicker because they’re fake and fake doesn’t care about wind.
Callie’s mother said they were the most beautiful candles she’d ever seen.
I almost told her they were from the party store but Dante stepped on my foot. ”
“Smart man he is.”
“The best man. He saved my ass. No doubt about it. He flew home yesterday. I drove him to the airport and he hugged me at the curb then left. I stood there like a lost child for about five minutes.”
“I bet Dante and Tex would get along.” I smile at the thought. “What do you think?”
“They would dominate the world together. Two men who believe they’re always right and are, annoyingly, usually right. My God, it would be terrifying. They should never meet. They might team up against us and then what would we do?”
The image of Tex and Dante in the same room is funny to me. I hope I get to see it one day.
“I saw Tex this morning when I picked up the food,” Benji says. “We talked for a few minutes.”
“How was it?”
“We’re good, Mickey. Me and Tex. We’re good.”
“That matters,” I say. “More than you know.”
“He took me upstairs and showed me the space they’re fixing up for you. It’s beautiful and perfect for you. Stormy has thought of everything. Tex is a good friend to you.”
“He’s the best. Like your Dante.”
Benji glances up at me. “When’s the last time you had a decent meal?”
“The last time you brought me one,” I say. “Actually, no, I shouldn’t complain. I did enough of that at the hospital. The food here is much better. Not homecooked, but it’s edible. And they use salt unlike the hospital food.”
“Have you already eaten dinner? Do you have room for Tex’s food?”
“I’m a big man. I’m never too full to turn down Tex’s food. You know that. Let’s go. My mouth is watering, just thinking about it.”
Benji stands and puts his hand on my shoulder, as if that’s his place now. He’s standing and I’m sitting. The height difference is what it’s going to be. At least for a while. It doesn’t bother me as much as I thought it would.
Benji doesn’t look down at me though. He looks at me. There’s a difference.
I put my hands on the wheel rims and push slowly.
Every turn of the wheel puts me a little off balance, and my rolling is still a work in progress.
Benji doesn’t seem to mind the slow pace.
He walks beside me through the patio door and down the hallway toward my room.
His pace matches mine, his hand on my shoulder, and we move through the building together.
Once inside, I wave an arm at the room. “Home sweet home for a month or two.”
He does a slow spin, his eyes taking in everything.
“Are you allowed to decorate it?” he asks, his eyes lighting up. “You could use a couple of throw pillows. And a plant, definitely. Real, not fake, because fake plants are an insult to actual plants. We need to make it livable for you. Liven it up a little.”
I shake my head but I’m smiling. “I’ll check if they allow it. Otherwise, you’ll show up with a car full of throw pillows and get us both in trouble.”
Benji unpacks Sheila’s food onto the tray table and the room fills with Tex’s brisket.
“Brisket, ribs, coleslaw, baked beans, cornbread,” he says, lining up the containers. “And the sweet tea with tons of sugar, in a mason jar, wrapped in a dish towel. And this time, we’re not letting Sheila’s coleslaw go bad. Got it?”
“Got it. That’ll never happen again.”
“Damn right it won’t,” he says. “Not on my watch. If she ever finds out about that, we’re both dead.”
I take the mason jar, unscrew the lid and drink. My eyes close and my shoulders drop, my whole body releasing into the taste. The amount of sugar is obscene. It’s perfect.
“That,” I say, “is the greatest thing I’ve tasted since I got here. Don’t tell Jason. He’s got me on a nutrition plan and half a bag of sugar is not on the plan.”
“Your secrets are always safe with me, Officer Weaver. You can tell me anything.”
The brisket is everything I remembered, tender and falling apart.
Benji eats too. I’ve noticed he’s been doing more of that lately.
At first, he wouldn’t eat but a bite or two whenever he’d bring me food, then one day he started sitting down with me to share the meal.
I catch him looking at my arms again, and his eyes travel from my bicep to my shoulder to my neck.
“What is it?” I ask. “Is something wrong? Do I have barbeque sauce on my face?”
He grins at me. “No, nothing’s wrong.” His eyes drop to my mouth for half a second before he looks away.
My grip tightens around the mason jar.