Chapter 7 #2
At this point, Will starts laughing again, but there’s nothing even remotely mirthful about it—it’s more despair than happiness, the noise a body makes when it knows it won’t be allowed to cry.
Shivering, Will doesn’t bother trying to contain it as he checks the trunk, and then the back seat, and then the trunk again for jumper cables.
He doesn’t find any, which doesn’t matter, because there’s no one else here to jump the car if the battery is dead, which he can’t check, because he doesn’t know how.
With the jaunty spirit of the well and truly doomed, Will pastes a bright grin on his face, walks back to the front of the car, and replaces the caps on the battery bolts.
He also slams the hood shut with an unnecessarily forceful bang.
Then he gets back in the car, rictus grin still in place, inserts the key into the ignition with a stiffness borne both of cold and distress, and turns the engine over.
The car doesn’t do him the courtesy of emitting a single sound.
Will lets his grin fall first; then he lets his head fall, wincing as it squelches slightly against the steering wheel. He decides, in the proud tradition of his name, to give up.
He can’t really give up, of course. However much he might like to, he can’t sit here until the grass grows up over him and this stupid horrible useless waste of a car, until birds nest in his hair and hedgehogs build a home in his lap.
He will, at some point, have to get up. Do something.
Walk back, probably, to the Robertson Family Farms market, through its new, cheerful yellow door, and admit right to Casey Reeves’s infuriating, unfairly chiseled face that he is a helpless idiot baby who can’t even manage a simple rental car.
No, Will decides with a shudder. He simply can’t do that; it isn’t in him. It’ll have to be the hedgehogs after all.
For a long time—he’s not sure how long—he just sits there, his head against the steering wheel. But then, to his slow, crystalizing horror, he hears footsteps approach. And then, much worse, a voice.
“You know what?” God help him, it’s Casey, walking up from behind from the farm parking lot.
Will thinks very hard about evaporating—surely, if nothing else, he’s wet enough.
“I can’t sit in there looking at the tail end of your ugly car through the shop window, waiting for you to make up your mind about coming back in to mess up the rest of my afternoon.
So tell me: What is it?” Will can see Casey’s face in the side mirror now, dripping wet and twisted up with anger.
“On top of everything else, you can’t just leave?
You had to wait, and make me come out here in the rain, to say whatever else it is you have to say about how terrible this place is and how much you can’t wait to be rid of it? Is that it?”
Will does not like to lose control of himself.
He was raised to bottle things up, to put them away on a shelf, and to stare at that shelf in resentful silence in his own private time.
But as he climbs out of the rental car, wet and angry and upset and still seeing the image of those stupid, heartbreaking Post-it notes every time he so much as blinks his eyes, he is at the very end of his rope.
And when he turns around, and takes in the full picture of Casey, dripping wet, clothes clinging to his thick thighs and broad chest like something directly out of Will’s hindbrain except for the expression of total disgust on his face, Will lets that rope go.
“What is your DAMAGE,” he yells, stalking towards Casey, whose expression changes from twisted rage to surprised confusion as Will approaches.
“Can’t you see my stupid CAR has broken down and I don’t WANT to be here?
” God, Will’s voice is breaking; he tries his best to ignore it.
“I’m sorry you HATE me, but you can just GO INSIDE! And leave me out here to drown!”
But then Casey yells back, “Well, why didn’t you just SAY that then, or come back to the HOUSE instead of standing out in the RAIN? How was I supposed to know? You don’t even have the hood open!”
“I closed the hood!” Will more or less screams this, even though Casey is close enough now that he doesn’t need to shout anymore.
“I closed the hood, because I’m supposed to check if the battery’s dead, but I don’t know how to check if the battery’s dead, so there’s no point!
In having the hood open! And anyway, I didn’t think you’d be particularly eager to help me, since you seem to be hoping that I fall into the nearest MANHOLE and?—”
“If you’d have just asked me to help you, I would have,” Casey cries, throwing up his hands. “Have you just been sitting out here in—honestly, what’s wrong with you? Just because I don’t agree with what you’re doing here doesn’t mean I’m a terrible person . And I know how to jump a stupid battery!”
“Well—then I guess—thank you!” Will’s voice comes out as a strangled yelp this time, as some of the anger that was fueling him starts to drain away.
There’s a beat, and then Casey, in a voice only slightly louder than what Will has come to understand is his usual register, says, “Why are we yelling at each other?”
Will stares at him, searching himself for an answer, and draws only a shivery, ice-cold blank.
This time, when he starts to laugh, it’s genuine, although the edge of hysteria is still there.
And it’s drowned out, anyway, that harsh edge, when Casey joins him, his deep, baritone laugh richer and more inviting than Will’s, seeming to shake his own body.
For just a second, it crowds out even the thunder.
“I don’t know,” Will admits, shaking his head and still chuckling, after a minute.
“God—I don’t know. Look, I’m—sorry, okay?
I didn’t come here trying to mess everything up for you, I’m not…
This isn’t… I’m not, uh.” He swallows, hard, against the idea of admitting this, but something about Casey’s bright, inquisitive gaze seems to pull it out of him: “I’m not exactly doing great right now, so.
Uh. I’m sorry.” Quickly, before he has to bear a reply to that, he adds, “Can you really help with the car? ”
Casey pauses for a second, seeming to consider his answer.
Then: “Yeah,” he says, with a little sigh.
“I’ve got a lot of experience with cars.
But one thing I know for sure is that it’s not a great idea to mess around with jumping a battery in a lightning storm.
I think you should let me tow her back into the lot.
We can do the jump once the weather’s calmed down. ”
“And until then, I just…what?” Will says, trepidation mounting. “Wait around out here?”
Rolling his eyes, Casey says, “I mean, in the market, yeah. Or in the house, if you want. Might be better, and I do know it’s…uh, technically yours, or whatever.”
“Generous of you,” Will mutters under his breath, regretting it immediately, but Casey’s looking away, and a roll of thunder blots it out. He tries again: “Um. Thanks? If you really don’t mind towing the car?—”
But Casey’s already jogging off, calling, “I didn’t say I didn’t mind! I said that I would ,” over his shoulder, which, Will notes, is not very reassuring at all.
He trudges soggily after Casey, his cold, wet clothes heavy and clinging.
But he quickly realizes, watching Casey pull a dark blue vintage pickup truck out of the staff garage, that Casey has no need of him, and is capable of handling this process entirely by himself.
Pointlessly—it’s not as though there’s any part of him left to keep dry—Will shuffles over to stand under the market awning.
He can’t bring himself to go inside, to step again through the yellow door to the strange, changed world within, but he can’t bring himself to go back to the house without Casey, either.
It’s too…awkward. It feels, now that Will has a slightly better grip on the situation, like crossing a line, even though logically he knows he has more right to the house than Casey does.
Still, he stands there, shuddering slightly, cold to the point that he’s stopped feeling it or thinking particularly clearly.
He watches as Casey, in the distance, pulls up in front of Will’s rental, hops out of the cab, pulls some hook-ended chains out of the truck bed, and starts setting up the tow.
In spite of being every inch as wet as Will, his body language communicates the easy good cheer of an action figure, or perhaps a cartoon—Will bets that Casey’s whistling , the bastard, and he just can’t hear it at this distance over the rain.
A sharp voice, unsettlingly like Selma’s, stirs from a cat-like sleep in the back of Will’s mind.
Hmm , it says, let’s try this again. Instead of simmering in needless resentment, have you considered approaching the incredibly handsome, apparently unmarried, devastatingly muscled man who labors cheerfully before you in a friendlier spirit?
Have you thought about suggesting you work out some of this tension between you in a more productive way?
Have you, even once, entertained the idea of saying, “Hey, Casey, thanks so much for helping with my car, why don’t you let me repay you with a ?— ”
“Nope!” Will says aloud, through slightly chattering teeth.
“Nope, nope, nope.” That’s enough indulging of his inner Selma; she can’t be trusted.
The real Selma is also a fountain of bad ideas, but sometimes they’re bad ideas that turn out to be weirdly good ideas, and when they aren’t, she’s always there to bail Will out of the consequences.
The Selma of Will’s mind, however, is merely a reflection of his own baser impulses, and lacks Selma’s discernment, taste, and understanding of the criminal code.
He’s learned a few times too many that he’s better off not taking her advice.