—TWELVE—
I trudge through heavy sheets of rain, my shoes sinking into the mud like quicksand.
Motherfuck.
Why am I here? Why the hell did I even answer my phone?
Melody’s number was saved into my contacts from our string of messages about her bathroom reno that I completed. When her name flashed across my screen as I was finally responding to Magnolia after hours of stalling—because fuck talking about my damn heart—something in me felt compelled to pick up.
“Amelia didn’t answer.”
Jesus Christ.
I’m pretty sure rage is what’s dragging me towards her stalled car in the middle of this fucking monsoon, soaking wet and ready to blow a fuse. Her silhouette is visible through the drenched glass, her fingers curled around the steering wheel, head bowed.
I pound my fist against the window when I approach, causing her to nearly hit the ceiling. Melody clasps both hands over her heart, scared shitless, then finally pushes the door open.
“Get out of the fucking car,” I order, watching her red, puffy eyes slowly roll up to me. “Now.”
Her gulp is almost audible as her throat bobs and two shaky legs step out. “I’m sorry.”
I don’t want her apology. I just want her to move faster.
Snatching her wrist, I pull her to her feet and yank her away from the car. She squeaks, then stumbles toward me… and it’s then that I smell it.
She reeks of fucking liquor.
I drop her arm. “Are you drunk?”
Melody refuses to make eye contact with me, and instead, dips her chin and wraps her arms around herself like a security blanket, shivering as the rain floods her. “This is a mess.” She looks up at the sky, letting the rain douse her face as she releases a pained breath. “I’m a mess.”
She wobbles and sways, talking to me but looking to the stars for answers. I grit my teeth. “You’re an idiot.”
This gets her attention. Melody whips her head towards me, eyes narrowing with disdain. “Excuse me?”
“You heard me.”
“You’re an asshole,” she spits out, all venom and vitriol.
“Maybe. But I’d rather be an asshole than an idiot.”
Two shaky hands plant against my chest, and she shoves me backwards, her cheeks flushed. “Go home, Parker. I can’t believe I called you.”
She storms away, feet splashing in mud puddles as she heads toward the hood of the car. I follow, still instigating. Still poking. “Yeah, not too smart of you. Then again, I don’t expect much from someone who gets behind the wheel shitfaced.”
“Please leave.”
“I’m already here,” I say, trailing her. “Trust me, the last thing I wanted to do tonight was play therapist to little miss sunshine. Poor you, right? Poor you with all of your support and fucking cheerleaders. Friends, family, strangers, all flocking to the sun. It must be such a burden.”
“I’m not the sun. I’m just a shadow,” she grits out over her shoulder. “You don’t know a thing about me.”
“So, enlighten me. I can’t wait to hear this. I’m shaking in my sopping fucking boots.”
“Stop!” Melody spins in place, visibly shaking, wet clothes clinging to her. “This is the last thing I need right now.”
“Is it?”
“Yes!” she shrieks, swiping a soaked piece of hair from her forehead. “Just get the hell away from me, Parker.”
I move in closer. “No.”
“You’re a bully.”
“Keep going,” I press.
Melody raises her hands to shove me away from her again, but I catch her by the wrists. She growls in protest, trying to wriggle free. “You’re the opposite of me,” she continues, her anger spewing out in waves. “You’re cruel and hateful. Cold. You don’t smile. You don’t laugh.”
“Keep going.”
She squirms against me, still trying to free her wrists. “You disgust me.”
“Keep going, Melody. Get mad. Let it out.”
“I—” Her words break off, and she goes still, relaxing in my grip, and I’m pretty sure she’s crying, but her face is streaked in raindrops, so it’s hard to say for sure. “I… I’m not okay.”
I stare at her. I stare at the way little water droplets stall on her upper lip and just dangle there, almost floating, before her tongue slips out to lick them away. My eyes lift up to hers, green on green, and I can see a shift—the anger morphs into something softer. Acceptance, maybe. Possibly a revelation. “Keep going.”
Fuck, I hate the way my voice cracks. And I really hate the way my fingers feel curled around her, my large palms swallowing up her tiny wrists. Delicate and breakable. She doesn’t stand a chance against my iron and steel.
I let her go, my feet stepping back, but my gaze still hard and leveled with hers.
Melody’s arms fall to her sides, a sound escaping her, piercing through the heavy rainfall. A laugh, a cry, a penance—its origin is unknown. “I’m not okay,” she repeats, and a roll of thunder follows. “I’m still there.”
“Where?” I make her say it. I make her talk.
“On that street.”
“What street?”
Her gaze cuts away, landing just above my shoulder as her thoughts drift. “With Charlie.”
Charlie. Her husband.
Magnolia also lost her husband, and I wonder if they grieve the same. I’m not familiar with that kind of grief, so I’m not sure if there are different types, different levels. All I know is that I’m envious of both of them in this moment. I’m goddamn jealous of their loss.
To lose is to have loved.
It’s when we have nothing left to lose that we truly know suffering.
Melody runs both hands through her hair, smoothing back the wet strands. She’s illuminated by the headlights of her car and the glow of the moon, shadows carved into all of her curves and crevices. Laying claim to her darker parts. “He fucking left me here alone to sift through the debris of everything we had together. And I’m not okay with that. I’m not okay with his mother calling me wicked and blaming me for his death when I was a victim, too. I’m not okay with the color of the living room because he picked it out, and every time I stare at those rust-colored walls, I cry. I’m not okay with sleeping alone, or mowing the lawn, or peach pie. I’m not okay with that look my mother gets when I zone out of a conversation because I thought I heard his laugh.”
She’s shrinking in front of me, her weights lifting. She looks lighter somehow.
I’m no expert on living, and I sure as fuck don’t have any advice for her, so I just listen.
And I think that’s all she needs right now.
“I’m not okay.” She keeps repeating it, making that sound again, and I think it’s a laugh this time—a delirious laugh. A bolt of lightning brightens the sky just as Melody begins to climb on top of the hood of her car, shouting, “I’m not okay!”
Pacing closer, all I can do is watch while she pulls herself up straight, legs unstable, everything about her unstable, and throws her head back with another roar.
“I’m not okay!”
Melody laughs again, releasing all these feelings I don’t understand. She spins around in clunky circles, arms spread wide.
I’m standing right in front of her now, nearly grazing the front end of the car. Watching. Still watching. I’ve been watching her since that very first day, and I haven’t figured out why.
Her laughter quiets down, her arms dropping, and she whispers to the stars one more time, “I’m not okay.” Then she slides down to her butt, her shoes squeaking against the hood, and leans forward until we’re only a few inches apart. Words of resolution follow as she stares right at me. “But I will be. I’m not ready yet.”
Despite the ice cold rain, I feel a current of heat travel up my neck. My eyes slide down her face and land on her drenched blouse, stuck to her skin, accentuating the swell of her breasts sheathed in a black bra. They heave with every drawn-out breath.
And then I feel some kind of ancient stirring from down below.
What the actual fuck?
I don’t notice shit like nice tits, or a woman’s smile, or the way she smells like fucking lemonade. My biological attraction to women has always been trumped by my emotional resentment towards them. Sex isn’t a part of my life—I haven’t been with a woman in well over a decade, and even then, I never truly enjoyed it. It almost felt like something I had to do—a societal coercion.
I don’t do intimacy, and sex is a breeding ground for intimacy. I much prefer my own hand whenever the itch arises, which isn’t very fucking often. I just don’t really care.
But I feel the itch right now, standing beneath pale moonshine, breathing in her rain-soaked skin, and staring at her tits like a fucking asshole while she’s in the midst of a mental breakdown. I gnash my teeth together and back the hell up, returning my attention to her face.
Her eyes glaze over when they meet with mine, maybe from the booze, or maybe because she noticed my brush with madness. Maybe she noticed me noticing her, and that makes it all the more irrefutable.
Fuck.
There must be something in the rain tonight.
“Parker.” Melody pierces through my miserable thoughts, her voice rough like sandpaper, raw from her screams. “Why did you come?”
I swallow, my jaw stiff. Everything stiff.
Damn it.
Dodging the question because I don’t fucking know, I counter with, “Why did you call me?”
Her legs dangle over the edge of the hood, swinging in opposite time, occasionally grazing my wet pant legs. She gnaws at her bottom lip, glancing away. “Amelia didn’t answer.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
The rain slows as we face each other through the drizzle and humidity, soaking wet, beaten down, and watching each other with matching eyes, green and tired. Melody doesn’t respond to the question, just as I hadn’t, but her expression shifts slightly. Her eyebrows wrinkle with an air of scrutiny, like she’s trying to read me somehow—trying to piece together a puzzle. Unravel my mysteries.
It’s almost as if her demons are interrogating mine and comparing notes.
The look in her eyes, the probing, invasive look, causes my defenses to flare, and a surge of anger pumps through my veins. Cocking my head to the side, I say bitterly, “Don’t. Don’t look at me like that.”
Her brows dip further, confusion marring them. “Like what?”
“Like I’m something you can fix.”
Melody hesitates, my response soaking in like the late-spring rainfall. She worries her lip again before sliding off the hood and landing on her feet, until we’re nearly toe-to-toe. Her body sways and teeters, still unbalanced from the alcohol she poisoned herself with, and she tilts her head up to meet my steely gaze.
And then she fucking smiles… because of course, she does.
“All broken things can be fixed. The hard part is deciding that they’re worth fixing.”
She makes a little sound after the words spill out, almost as if she surprised herself by them, caught herself off guard. Maybe she never thought to apply them to her own dents and cracks. Melody stares off over my shoulder, the ghost of her smile still lingering.
But the moment is severed when a car engine roars up, lights flashing at us, and a juiced-up Land Rover slows to a stop a few feet away. Melody jumps back, moving out of my bubble that she had no business invading in the first place, and her whole body tenses when she spots the vehicle.
She runs her fingers through her mess of matted hair. “Great,” she murmurs.
The driver hops out, looking ready to kill something. “What the fuck, Melody?”
I recognize him then as the headlights brighten his silhouette against the dark night. It’s her brother. He’s got fury in his gait and murder in his eyes. His sandy hair flies in a thousand different directions as he stalks over to us, and I inch backwards with my hands in my pockets, kind of wishing the storm would start up again, so maybe I could fall into that super low statistic of people who get struck by lightning.
“What are you doing here, West?” Melody almost tips over when her left foot sinks into the spongy mud.
“Tammy from O’Toole’s called me and said you walked out of the bar plastered. Then she saw your car speed out of the parking lot. Are you insane?” West suddenly seems to notice my existence and pulls his eyes from his sister, pinning them on me. A frown follows. “Aren’t you the contractor?”
Awesome. I’m fucking soaked and miserable, my dick is acting up, and now we’re having conversations. I blink at him, hoping my face portrays the fact that I’d rather be eaten alive by ancient scarab beetles than be standing here right now. “Yeah.”
West narrows his eyes at me like he’s trying to force pieces together that don’t fucking fit.
“I called him,” Melody intervenes, taking her brother by the arm and trying to guide him back to his car. “It had to do with Loving Lifelines. It’s a thing.”
He pulls his arm free. “Why didn’t you call me? Or Mom and Dad? Or Leah?”
“Can we talk at home? I’m emotionally exhausted right now.”
“Do you not trust us? Are you embarrassed that you’re still hurting? Jesus, Mel, we all love you. You don’t need to hide from us.”
Melody seems to wither, like she is trying to hide from him, and glances my way before reaching for her brother’s arm again. “Just take me home. I’ll get my car in the morning.”
Pinching the bridge of his nose, West reluctantly follows her lead with a harrowing sigh. They both climb into the vehicle while I watch from the ditch, up to my ass in muddy water. The engine rumbles to life as Melody fastens her seatbelt and wrings out her hair, her image hindered slightly by the rainy window. But she turns her head to look at me when the vehicle begins to pull away, tires tossing up mud and gravel, the stereo sounding through the glass with some kind of alternative rock bullshit.
I stare right back at her, our unanswered questions still hovering between us. Still lurking.
“Why did you come?”
“Why did you call me?”
I’ll reckon she called, and I came, for the same reason our eyes always seem to find one another’s, even when there’s a dozen other people in the room—but I don’t have a reason for that right now, so I bury those questions away with the rest of my ghosts and old bones.
And as the car peels off onto the dirt road, I catch the little smile on her face as our eyes hold tight and she mouths, “Thank you.”
Walden lifts up when I trudge through my front door at nearly midnight, looking like a drowned rat. The dog appears confused as hell as he stands a few feet away from me, eyes bugged out and probably judging me. The red ball hasn’t moved from its place beside the couch, and his food bowl remains untouched, leading me to believe he enjoyed his night just as much as I did.
My car keys clank against the little glass table as I pull off my soggy t-shirt and toss it into the heap of other stray shirts I still need to wash. Walden stares at me, unmoving, as I saunter into the living room, bare-chested and bad-tempered, but his eyes never stray from my face. They never dip any lower, and I appreciate that.
He doesn’t notice my scars.
Then I scold myself because he’s just a dumb dog that doesn’t know what scars are, and also, he’s probably going blind, so my thought process is being really fucking stupid.
Shaking my head, I reach for a random banana sitting on the ottoman and peel it back, debating whether I want to head straight to bed or go jerk off in the shower because my dick is still restless and pissing me off. But I think handling that situation will piss me off even more since I know exactly what triggered it.
And fuck that.
Fuck giving anymore ammo to that absurdity.
That fluke.
I eat the banana in three bites and glance at my laptop before heading down the hallway. My unfinished response to Magnolia glares back at me, and I hesitate, finally sighing as I make a pit stop to the rolling chair and gather my train of thought.
Words appear in the little Hangouts message box as my fingers type away, but I backspace and delete them at least five times before settling on something. As I’m reading over my reply, Walden lies down beside me with a little grumble, making his presence known, and I have to do a double-take because he always wanders back to his dog bed after greeting me. He rests his chin between his paws and looks up at me with only his eyes.
I don’t smile, even though the thought crosses my mind, but I do soften my gaze.
I see you, old mutt.
Then I click “send.”
Me: You asked about my heart, so here’s my answer… this heart is a burden. It’s a fraud. Most days I resent it and wish it had been given to a better man. A worthier man. And I know that sounds shitty because your husband is gone, and here I am complaining about my healthy, beating heart. Doesn’t seem fair. But it’s the truth, and I won’t ever lie to you.
Before I rise from the chair and head to the bathroom, because I think I’m going to take that shower after all, I add one more thing:
Me: Unless it’s about Cheese-Rolling. That never happened.