Chapter 3 #2
I turned my head around too fast to see Seamus standing a few feet behind me. Then winced as pain rang through my head. The painkillers had been working so well I kept forgetting I was concussed.
“I’m fine,” I said, a little curtly. Heat flushed my cheeks as if I’d been caught snooping. Then the hurt turned to irritation at the way he looked ready to catch me. Like I was about to fall. I may be injured but I was a little tired of being handled with kid gloves. I wasn’t helpless.
“Oh, it’s just—” But before he could finish speaking, my foot slipped on the mass of long grass beside me. Grass, I saw now, that hid the steepness of the slope next to me. I gasped, but Seamus reached forward, grabbing my hand before I could tumble.
He pulled me toward him until my feet hit more solid ground.
And my body hit solid man.
I reached out, grasping his shirt for balance with my free hand, my heart thumping.
“You okay?” He asked. Rolling gravel.
My throat was suddenly dry. He was so… hard. I hadn’t pictured Seamus as being so muscular, but now that I looked, I could see the ridge of his biceps under his button-down. I was suddenly aware of how close we were standing, and I took a step back, confused.
“I keep meaning to put a sign or something there but… I don’t get many visitors,” Seamus said.
My heart was still beating a hair too fast—almost falling would do that to you. So would being pressed up against a man who felt like a rock. One who smelled like… spring rain or something. No, trees—spruce or pine or fir. Plus, something else specific to him that made my stomach do a weird flip.
I tried to take another step but stumbled, pain shooting up my leg.
He squeezed my hand, pulling me back further away from the slope. “It’s okay,” he said. “I’ve got you,”
How was I still holding his hand? And how was his skin so rough against mine?
He was a contractor, I remembered. He used his hands.
I had a flash, suddenly, of those hands against my cheeks. Or other parts. Something soft and buttery rolled through me.
This was Seamus Reilly. Quiet, always in the background Seamus, Eli’s best friend. I’d never thought about him this way before. I didn’t think. It felt weird, but not terrible.
Jesus, what’s the matter with you?
A slice of memory hit me, of us in the cab of his truck. Just that tiny sliver—him pulling me toward him. Trying to… what, protect me from something I couldn’t be protected from? There was something else there too, just at the edges of my memory. Something about us being in that cab together.
“Chelsea?” Seamus asked. His eyebrows were slanted in concern. He had brown eyes—deep, rich, chocolaty brown eyes with a darker rim around the iris. “You okay?”
I pulled my eyes away; my hand too. “I’m fine. Thank you.”
He nodded. “Maybe you could come back up here a bit, just so I don’t have to stand on guard?” He stepped aside to give me room.
I nodded. “Right.” Then took a few steps forward before looking back out over the view. “Bet the sunsets are spectacular here.”
Seamus nodded.
I thought of one particular sunset, years ago, after a rain.
Me in the woods behind our apartment as a kid.
The sun slanting through remnants of the rain still dripping from the trees; running down paint-streaked paper clipped to string.
“I always preferred the sunrise,” I said, surprised at the sharpness in my voice. “They feel more… hopeful.”
Seamus was looking at me with a strange expression on his face, his jaw tense, maybe. He was probably worried I was going to fall again.
Over his shoulder, my brothers were arguing now, though it didn’t look quite like it would come to blows. “They’re fighting over me, aren’t they?”
Seamus blinked, and that intense look he’d been giving me seemed to disappear. He did that hand-on-the-neck thing again as he turned to look at them. “Eli’s pissed Jude took you out of the hospital.”
At least he didn’t make something up. I sighed. “Yeah. He would be.”
When I looked at him, I could see the questions on his face. How’d they let me out? And why had Jude agreed? But he was too polite to ask. Or he was just Seamus, who I couldn’t remember ever asking a question for his own curiosity.
“Jude owed me one, so he charmed us out of the hospital,” I said, answering his unspoken question in the simplest terms.
The truth was, I’d called Jude, who’d been on his way to the hospital anyway, and told him point blank he needed to break me out and drive me directly to Seamus Reilly’s place, right at that very second.
He’d refused, of course, until I called up something he definitely owed me for.
Jude told the clerk at the counter that we were just taking a walk, and she’d been so charmed by Jude’s grin she’d visibly tittered.
I don’t even think she knew he was a former tennis star—she’d probably have fainted if she had.
In any case, we made it outside and headed right here, my fury so frantic I didn’t realize until now that it had eclipsed my nerves at being in a vehicle again.
Seamus nodded, not asking for more details.
I studied him for a moment. “Do you ever say what’s on your mind?”
“No one needs to hear what’s on my mind.”
“Why not? What if I do?”
He looked me in the eye. I noticed this because he didn’t look up to the bandage. I could tell the difference.
“I like listening better.”
“Why?”
“You always ask so many questions?”
No. “Yes.”
The corner of his mouth lifted. Only a hair, but I caught it.
Had I just made Seamus Reilly smile? Something fluttered in my stomach.
Seamus looked out toward the river, and whatever smile I’d imagined there faded. I opened my mouth to speak, but considering what we’d been talking about, clapped it shut again. After a moment, he said, “You can learn a lot more about someone when you’re not talking yourself.”
I considered that for a moment, something prickling over my skin. I remember having the same thought, but somewhere along the way I’d forgotten.
“I never used to talk,” I said. “When I was really little.”
“I remember.”
That startled me. I glanced over at him, but he was still looking out over the valley.
Of course. Seamus had known me for longer than I remembered him.
I swallowed. “I always thought being quiet was some kind of character flaw,” I said softly.
“In me, I mean. Like it was something I needed to fix. It’s why I…
It’s why I tried so hard to snuff it out of myself last year.
Like if I could just be loud like everyone else, I wouldn’t have to feel so much. ”
The moment the words came out, I felt a rush of embarrassment. Why had I said that? I didn’t fess up to people like that, ever.
But Seamus met my eyes. “Everyone underestimates quiet people. They think they’re scared.”
“Or weak,” I said quietly.
“Maybe everyone else just needs to talk a little less.”
I couldn’t help it; I let out a laugh. Was this what it was like to feel seen?
Seamus looked slightly bewildered, but then that lip twitched again, and I could tell he was trying not to smile. Warmth flooded through me. I’d made Seamus Reilly smile.
He folded his arms. Still, as he shifted, I saw him wince. I realized I hadn’t asked him how he was. He’d been in that crash, too. I opened my mouth when a voice boomed from behind us.
“Chels! Come on. We have to get you back. Cass is losing it.”
Eli. He had his phone in his hand.
“Oh God,” I said, thinking of Cass and the muffin.
I wanted to look at Seamus once more, to tell him thank you, but I was suddenly self-conscious.
I knew Eli’s eyes were on us now, and I didn’t want to give him anything else to get weird about.
So I took one last glance out at the view, and at Seamus’s cabin.
There was a whole chicken coop off to the side I hadn’t noticed before, and a couple of Adirondack chairs on the other side of the porch.
How I would love to sit back in one of those chairs, closing my eyes, breathing in this air.
With Seamus in the other chair, comfortable, for once, in shared silence.
Without meaning to, that’s what had me looking back at him. His eyes were on mine. They hadn’t left me. My skin prickled, warmed, somehow, by the intensity of his gaze. And embarrassed, knowing Eli’s head would be ticking.
I looked away fast. “Guess I better go.” I hesitated, glancing over at my brother. He was talking to Jude, engaged, for just a moment. “I’m sorry about Eli,” I said quickly. “But I guess you know what he’s like.”
Seamus didn’t smile this time. “You have nothing to be sorry for, Chelsea.”
My stomach flipped. I didn’t know what to say to that, so I just gave an awkward nod. Then I began walking toward my brothers, before I made it worse.
Seamus shoved those workman’s hands in his pockets, looking down as I limped past.
“Beautiful place you have here,” I said over my shoulder. “Peaceful.”
He didn’t say anything. I realized I still had that old thought that I needed to speak up. But Seamus didn’t expect that from me.
“What?” I said to Eli as I reached him. Seamus hadn’t followed.
“What were you two talking about?” Eli demanded.
“You,” I said.
I could see Eli trying to figure out if that was true or if I was just saying it to mess with him, but I didn’t give him time to ask. “Come on, Jude,” I said.
It wasn’t until I climbed carefully back into Jude’s Jeep and we were driving away down the pockmarked dirt road, Seamus’s beautiful white cabin receding in Jude’s rearview and Jude chattering away about nothing—the exact opposite of me—that I realized two things.
The first was that I’d forgotten to ask Seamus about the night of the accident.
Somehow, that nagging feeling that there was something I was missing from that night had vanished when I was with him.
The second was that not only had he not stared in that slightly pitying way at my bruising, the bandage, and now my wildly shorn hair, but Seamus had looked at me like I was just the same as before.
I looked exactly like someone who’d escaped from a hospital, robe and bare feet and everything, and Seamus Reilly hadn’t even blinked.