Levi
Twenty-Two
We drive in silence, winding through backroads that take us up and over mountain peaks, the shadowy trees blurring into a sea of black past the windows.
Night in the mountains is dark, almost eerily so for someone not used to living somewhere with barely any light pollution like North Creek.
I catch glimpses of the stars speckling the night sky through the windshield.
I’ll never not be in awe of the place I call home, and after a day like today, I wonder if the girl sitting next to me has gotten a taste of that awe yet. I hope everything that happened tonight doesn’t dull the wonder I’ve seen sparkling in her eyes since the moment she set foot in town.
It was shitty of me to act the way I did when I dropped her off at the apartments.
I knew she hadn’t been staying there. I ran into Tonia at the gas station the morning I drove Oakley back to her car.
She’s a nice enough woman, but has always been a little too chatty.
Imagine my surprise when she mentioned she had officially rented out the final apartment.
She didn’t say to whom, but knowing Oakley had no way of getting there yet, it wasn’t hard to figure out it wasn’t to her.
Before knocking on Oakley’s door with coffee, I stopped in the motel office and told Adam to charge my card for the room indefinitely without a second thought. I had assumed, after our day together, she might mention she didn’t get the apartment. I was more than a little frustrated she hadn’t.
That frustration quickly morphed to dread when I saw the fear etched into her eyebrows the moment she realized someone else had been in her room.
Someone uninvited and unwelcome. My dread gave way to anger, the emotion crashing through me like a tidal wave, causing my hands to shake and my eyes to narrow in concentration as I swept the dingy motel room, looking for anything the intruder may have left behind.
What I planned to do with that information if I found it was another thing entirely.
But there was nothing for me to do except reassure her that she was safe for the time being, and that she was going to be okay, despite the loss of the money.
But when she opened up and told a bit of her story to me, I recognized the telltale signs that aligned with my own immediately.
I knew there was no reality in which I let her stay another night by herself.
The look of utter dejection on her face when she noticed the safe told me another piece of her story.
One that didn’t need to be spoken aloud to be understood.
Sure, anyone would be upset in her situation.
She’s only been working at the bar for a few weeks now, so she couldn’t have saved up much, especially with needing to buy groceries and other everyday necessities.
But I could tell from the way her shoulders slumped that this was just another thing in a long line of shit that all amounts to really bad fucking luck.
I refuse to believe that the things this woman has endured—which I’m sure run far deeper than she even began to share—are a product of her own selfish, poor decisions.
Sure, any of us can fall prey to an emotional piranha, but I cannot bring myself to justify the notion that she is somehow deserving of everything she’s going through, poor decisions or not.
Karma is bullshit. If my childhood didn’t solidify that belief in me, the beauty sitting quietly next to me does.
A renewed surge of irritation rolls through my body, my shoulders tensing and my hands white-knuckling the steering wheel as I draw in a deep breath and try to calm the thundering in my ears.
Oakley is quiet, reserved, and timid. She seems to shrink into herself, her shoulders hunched as she grasps her hands tightly in her lap in an attempt to make herself appear smaller.
I see it for what it is, knowing intimately what it feels like to be in her shoes, even if I’m not always ready or willing to admit it to myself.
It’s a trauma response, linking back to our most primal animal nature.
An attempt to appear small and undesirable to the predator lurking in the shadows.
She appears small and quiet right now, but her mind is anything but.
There’s a war raging inside her right now.
I saw it up on that cliff, and I see it now in the way her chest rises and falls rapidly, like her heart is readying to burst out of her chest. The way her breaths come out in short little pants through parted lips.
The way her eyes stare straight ahead through the windshield as if they’re keenly taking in everything around her, when in reality, the details are passing her by with lightning speed.
I’ve been where she is, on the brink of a breakdown but trying desperately to keep it together until my next moment alone.
It’s okay. I’ll give her all the time she needs.
She’s safe with me, and I think she knows it, even if she’s not ready to admit it to herself.
If she didn’t, there is no way in hell she would have willingly come with me tonight, my fervent insistence be damned.
I want to ask her if she’s okay. I want to lean over and grasp her tiny hand in mine and offer that silent reassurance she desperately needs.
I want to tell her that she’s safe, and that as long as she’s with me, she will always be safe.
I want to wrap her in my arms, letting the warmth of my body seep into her own.
But I can’t. No matter how badly I want to do all of that and more, I can’t. It feels like every single cell in my body is reaching out for her, begging to connect, begging to offer what little comfort a broken man like myself can.
Fuck, I don’t know what it is about her that draws me in like a riptide.
It must have something to do with the haunted look in her eyes that shines through when she thinks no one is watching her.
It mirrors my own, and it’s because I’ve known darkness that I know that pushing her any more than absolutely necessary will send her running for the hills.
Especially right now. She’s frozen in the terror of her plight, waiting for one wrong move to trigger her to flee.
My spooked little doe.
So I’ll wait. Hell, even now I know that I’ll wait as long as it takes for her, despite my better judgment telling me I have no business trying to care for someone after all I’ve endured. It’s common sense, right? You can’t pour from an empty cup.
Why, then, does it feel like each moment I spend with her is slowly filling me with a renewed hope? Every time her eyes sparkle when she laughs, every time she glances at me with a hushed curiosity, the ache in my own soul begins to ebb.
Does she feel it too?
I’m terrified of the implications of my emotions, the damn things bordering on something more than simply caring for her.
For now, I’ll hang onto that. I’ll hang on for that tiny spark of hope. Maybe nothing will come of it.
Maybe I’ll look back on this forty years from now and wonder how I could have been so naive to allow myself to fall under the spell of a broken girl.
But maybe, just maybe, we’ll find beauty in the chaos instead.