Chapter 37Liem
37
Liem
The waves crashed against the darkened beach as an odd question was put forth.
“Is restless toe syndrome a thing?”
I scrunched my toes in the sand as I considered, not nearing any conclusion before the man beside me continued his musings.
“Sometimes when I’m not walking, my toes try to keep going.”
I’d had my doubts about the possibility of this day getting any better. Not after a morning at the Locc painting Cody, painting Cody again, and then an afternoon wrapped up in each other.
The quiet dinner we’d enjoyed together at the seafood shack was pleasurable in its own right, starting with Cody’s brief shyness that dissolved as he directed me to a booth at the beachfront restaurant and guided me to sit on his left, then continuing with the way he reached for my nondominant hand, gripping it between us as we ate.
And concluding now, with the rambling.
I’d never known him to talk like this, save for once. And even then, on that early January day over a year ago, it wasn’t so much a ramble as it was a cascading avalanche of worries that he’d held onto for much too long.
I glanced up at the man beside me on the beach, at the agitation written all over his body.Closing the short distance between us, I shuffled through the sand and stopped right in front of him, the choppy tide only a few feet from us.
Then I stepped onto his restless feet.
He stilled and frowned down at them. “Huh.”
I smiled. “Better?”
His hands found my hips then, squeezing once before smoothing around to my lower back. “No. It really isn’t,” he said, a sharp edge to his words as he pressed against me.
I didn’t bother holding back my laugh, bouncing on top of his feet experimentally as I went for a distraction. “Have you heard from our best friend today?”
Cody’s eyes narrowed deliciously; then he reached down and swatted my ass, the jolt brushing our bodies together. “Don’t test me, Ti Bet.”
I maybe should consider workshopping this with my therapist whenever I next saw her because the possession in Cody’s voice turned my blood to lusty flame.
Even the way he guarded his friendship with Bree was triggering in the best way, if my blatant physical arousal was anything to go by.
“Hmm,” he mused, lightly grinding against said arousal. “Didn’t I say I wanted to walk with you on the beach so we could talk?”
He had said that at dinner.
“Okay,” I agreed, bouncing again. “Let’s talk. I do love to hear your voice, so please. Use it. Use it on me.”
Cody cursed and tightened his grip on my hips. “I was inside you today, Liem, and it’s all I can think about already, so please don’t fucking talk to me like that.”
“These instructions are becoming not only complicated but a bit contradictory,” I observed.
He pressed a kiss to my forehead, so sweet and at odds with his distress. “I need you to distract me from dragging you back to the bungalow and taking you again.” He met my gaze, concern filling them. “Are you sore?”
I smiled widely. “Deliciously. Thank you for asking.”
“ Goddammit, Liem,” he groaned, dropping his forehead to mine. “Please.”
I took pity on him and started talking.
“Tell me about your mother.”
He tensed, then lifted me off his feet. “That’ll fucking do it.”
Offering my left hand, I gave him an apologetic smile. “Shall we walk?”
He stared at my hand cast in blueish shadow from the dusky light, then took it.
The waters of the Gulf became more turbulent as we walked, and we passed very few people as we drifted along the shore.
My heart beat a furious rhythm as the wind picked up again, my hair blowing wildly and blinding me. Cody stopped us, and then his hand was there at my wrist, slipping off his elastic as he guided me to face away from him.
He combed his fingers through my hair and then gathered it as he started talking.
“To answer your earlier question, Bree Faust is fine, and yes, I did text her earlier. Nothing new to report from Bay Springs.” He swatted my ass once more and then started fussing with my hair again. “The woman from whose womb I was created and ejected is a different matter. She lives in Louisiana. You remember I went to visit her recently?”
“Yes, the morning after the parade.”
“After the parade,” he confirmed, still brushing out my hair with his fingers. A favorite activity of his which I was swiftly becoming addicted to.
“When I arrived, she wasn’t there. At our house. But another family was. She’d sold it without me knowing, the house I raised myself in.”
He seemed to get lost in his own thoughts until I said softly, “Tell me.”
His deep breath was thick, the exhale tickling my shoulder. “She left me at that house when I was twelve,” he said quietly as his fingers moved through my hair. “For three days.”
I forced my breaths to come even as they wanted to halt, listening keenly to every word.
“She would do that. Leave without warning. You’d think that with the money and resources she had, I would’ve had a babysitter or some kind of nanny, but no. Every time she walked out the door, I never knew when she’d be back. For as long as I could remember.”
I squeezed my eyes shut and pressed my hand into my stomach, taking in his pain as my own. He parted my hair into sections and then tugged lightly before he planted a kiss on my neck. Then another. Then a row of them along the curve of my shoulder, but when I tried to turn to him, he stopped me.
“I don’t think I can say this with you looking at me, LL. Not yet.”
Swallowing against my suddenly dry throat, I nodded lightly so I wouldn’t free my hair from his grip. A few seconds later, he started braiding my hair, the feeling so familiar that I recognized it easily enough to know that it wasn’t a French braid but a simpler one with my hair woven from three large sections. Over, under, over, under.
“I’ve lied to Bree three times that I can remember, though all three were lies to myself too. So, I guess you could say they were truths with expiration dates. When we graduated high school, she wanted to rent an apartment together. I found a place by myself instead, and when she asked if she could live with me, even offering to sleep on the fucking floor, the diva, I lied. I told her it wasn’t safe, which to be fair, it wasn’t, but that wasn’t the real reason.”
He released my hair, let the braid unfurl, and then gathered the strands and restarted.
“The truth was that I knew she was going places, and one day, she’d walk out the door and wouldn’t come back. And I couldn’t fucking tolerate that. Not even the idea of it. I cannot stand it when people leave.”
A pause, then over, under, over, under.
“Even worse, I can’t stand when people let me go. On the occasions when my mother would leave on the weekend, I would leave too. Some small part of me hoped that she’d come back and panic to find me gone and feel an inch of what I felt.”
It was beyond my comprehension. I may have had free rein growing up, switching to a hybrid of homeschooling and online school young and graduating early, leaving at any hour, but my parents always knew where I was. Not to control me, but because it was automatic. Their love and care were intrinsic, as a parent’s should be.
“When I asked her if I could go live with my dad, she agreed. Like, instantly, LL. No questions asked. I didn’t lie then, not to Bree. I told her the truth. That living with Dad, who was practically a stranger at that time, but being near her and the casino, was better than what was happening at home. Dad kept a rigid schedule, and I always knew where he would be and when. And even though he wasn’t home a lot, he always did come home. And when I went to the casino, I knew I could find Bree… and food.”
I would simply sink into the sand if this was going where I thought it was, but I wouldn’t let him brush past that. “Food?” I asked quietly.
He grunted. “I always knew I could get a meal at Fortuna. My dad used to load me up with comps for the buffet and Dawn’s, always making sure Bree and I had them in our pockets when we were set loose, which was always. That wasn’t always the case at home. Knowing that I’d have something to eat.”
The pace of his braiding increased, going from achingly slow to hurried.
“What was the second one?” I asked, my voice cracking. “The second lie?”
“The answer I gave to nearly every single question Bree asked me from September to February, Liem. Every time she asked me how I was.”
My heart was in agony. Was this what it was to love someone? To feel their pain like this?
He tied off the braid instead of letting it unravel this time and then slowly, so slowly, came to stand in front of me.
We looked at each other for a long moment, the lap of the tide just as loud as his pain.
“Like I said before, I remember the first time I heard your voice. LL’s voice,” he started hesitantly, licking his lips. “I remember the first time I saw you, what you were wearing, how your shoulders moved. How you breathed. The color of your eyes.” He took my face in his palms with aching tenderness, something almost like despair in his eyes. “And I told myself the worst lie of all. I told a version of it to Bree, too, when she saw the way I looked at you.”
His eyes closed shut briefly as he sank into memory, but then he opened them, the greens blooming under his confession. “That the dazzling creature in front of me, the one who was my quiet solace for so long, wasn’t meant for me. That I should leave, distance myself before I tarnished his shine with my dark clouds.”
Trailing a single finger over my face, he paused at my cheekbone, the same side from which he’d brushed the flour, and stared at it before speaking again.
“I want to know all of you, Liem, and I mean that. I have a notebook full of questions about you. Some of them have answers now, but so many don’t. That notebook that is also full of plans, reasons that the third lie could actually be a lie.”
“Anything,” I assured him evenly even as butterflies flew and fireworks erupted. “Anything you want to know, you can ask.”
“I know,” he replied, then added with a knowing look, “especially after this afternoon.”
My cheeks heated, not with embarrassment, but as an automatic physiological response to any allusion to our joining.
I hoped they always would.
“I wrote down every question I’ve ever had about you so I wouldn’t forget any of them.” He took my hand again and walked us to the water, our shoes long forgotten by one of the bridges. His eyes grew distant as he stared out at the Gulf. “I’m not good at remembering things, Liem. Except when it comes to you.” He brought his gaze back to me and grimaced. “I left that fucking notebook at the restaurant.”
I laughed, wild and free, the mounting tension receding enough to allow it. “So, then, what exactly would someone find if they opened it, besides those questions?”
“Harebrained plans, mostly,” he replied. “Ideas I’ve had with my dad. Business goals, hopes, dreams, ideas. A future. A few possible futures.”
He sounded so wistful, but hopeful too.
I was glad he’d forgotten the notebook. Any future with Cody would be the one for me.
Silence spread between us, and we let the tide wash over our feet for several minutes before I asked, “Do you want to ask me one of those questions?”
Biting into his lip briefly, he nodded, then turned toward me. “I do, but every time I look at you, Liem, or even fucking think about you, I can only remember one of them. And I think I’m starting to know the answer. I… I may not need to ask it anymore.”
“Ask me anyway.”
His eyes turned glassy as he swallowed thickly, and after several false starts, he finally did.
“If I love you, Liem, will you ever let me go?”
My eyes filled with tears. Tears of hope, of heartache, and of joy as I took his face in my hands and let it show, hoping he saw all of it as I answered.
“Never.”