Chapter Four
Caleb
Mouth parted, I cleared my throat. The rasp sounded as dry as the south side of a cactus growing in the sand. I was so thirsty, surely I’d die of it. I turned my head to the side and jerked back with pain. “Sss,” I hissed, drawing air through my teeth.
I’d known pain. I was a man, and Lord knew I’d done some dumb shit in my day that got me really hurt, but I’d never felt pain like this. I was burning.
Searing flames engulfed every surface of skin I possessed.
The wooden ceiling above me offered little to focus on.
The wood was an aged dark gray and unpainted.
Other than the tattered white curtains that had seen better days over the front window, the house remained untouched. Unadorned. Uncared for.
A low grumbling noise sent my heart into a panic. Adrenaline laced my veins as my brain screamed that the grizzly had followed me here. It was back to finish the job.
Nothing happened.
Another grumble sounded, this one more pathetic than the last. I turned my head gingerly to the side, wincing as clotted injuries stretched and reopened.
Crazy Mira lay on her side, completely unconscious.
Was she dying? At some point in the throes of pain, she had lifted her knees to her chest and wrapped her thin arms around her abdomen.
The position shielded most of her frame from me.
I looked at her face. It was relaxed and free of fear. She was beautiful when she was asleep.
Her slightly parted lips were paler than they should’ve been, but they were full. Her dark eyebrows arched attractively, and her nose was small and feminine. Her thick, dark hair didn’t look so overwhelming when it was flipped to the side and laying harmlessly across the wooden floor beside her.
A man could tangle his fists in hair like that.
I turned back to the ceiling. Maybe I was hallucinating from shock.
The adrenaline had done something uncomfortable to me. It hurt to move, but I felt fidgety like I must. I tried to sit up but realized I needed help to get anywhere. And stitches. Lots of stitches.
“Mira,” I said.
She stirred. Her stomach growled again. She was starving, and I thought about Jake’s Quickstop for the hundredth time in a week. She probably hadn’t had groceries for a while because of me. I felt like grit.
I pulled my foot to the side and caressed her head with the tip of my boot. It was all I could do. “Mira, can you hear me?”
Her eyes fluttered behind her eyelids, and she opened them slowly. I couldn’t look away. Her eyes weren’t like everyone said.
Don’t look into Crazy Mira’s eyes. They’ll pull you down to hell.
She’ll cast her spell on you if you look into the black abyss of her eyes.
Her eyes weren’t black. They weren’t even dark. They were gray. My mind raced with the realization. Maybe I really was dreaming. Perhaps I was already dead. I squeezed my eyes shut. I couldn’t be. Heaven wouldn’t hurt this much, and I saw no hellfire.
As realization dawned on her face, her pupils began to dilate until her eyes looked black once again. A fear induced response then.
I looked back to the ceiling to give her privacy. “Mira, I think you need to eat something. Do you have anything to eat?”
She shook her head, her face scraping softly against the grain of the floorboard beneath it.
I clamped my teeth until my jawline worked. I’d never known hunger. Not like this. “Can you make it to the sink? Run the water and drink it until your stomach feels solid. It won’t help for long but it might make you feel a little better until we can figure something out.”
“Okay, I’ll try. Don’t look.”
I turned my head to the wall, ignoring the pain in my neck. She scuffled to the kitchen and ran the water. She drank for a long time.
“Not too much or it’ll make you sick,” I advised.
The glass clinked on the counter. The sound of her boot steps faded, then returned as she came back to stand beside me.
“I’m dressed,” she said.
She wore a thin gray tank top over her jean shorts. I couldn’t take my eyes off a line of oddly puckered scars that ran in a circle around her throat. They stood out against her alabaster skin.
“What happened to your neck?” I asked.
She raised a hand to her chest in an attempt to cover them. Her face said she’d forgotten all about them. Her panicked gaze lifted back to the direction of the room she had come from. Her room.
“Do you have anything else to wear?” I asked, giving her an out.
She shook her head again. “Nothing that would cover them.”
She looked longingly at the tattered rag against my neck.
“I owe you some new clothes then,” I offered.
“I don’t need your charity.”
“It’s not charity. One shirt for the shirt I ruined. Deal?”
She bit her lip. “Fine.”
I tried again to sit up. “Where’s your uncle? We need to send for a doctor while you start stitching up my neck.”
“He’s dead.”
I stared at her dumbly. “Dead? Since when?”
The uncertain look on her face said she didn’t know if she could trust me, but after a moment all I saw was resolve and wild hair. “Since last November.”
I don’t know what she saw on my face, but she scooted farther away from me and waited.
I slid a suspicious gaze to the back room.
What did I really know about Mira Fletcher?
Only that every single person in town thought she was bat shit crazy.
The kind of unbalanced that scares people.
Who was I to argue with every single person who had come into contact with her in the last five years?
“Is he still in his room?” I asked in a low voice. My eyes held hers. I wanted the truth.
Her lip curled up in apparent disgust. “Yeah, I left his rotting corpse in his bed, Caleb. That is the creepiest thing anyone has ever said to me.”
I cleared my throat, feeling bad for my earlier suspicions. “Where is he then?”
Her sigh tapered into a growl, and she stood to leave. I thought she was running from the confrontation, but she returned a minute later with a thick stack of papers in a manila envelope clenched in her shaking hand. She threw it on the floor in front of me and disappeared into her room.
The front of the baby-puke-colored folder had the words Brady Fletcher’s Will written in angry, scribbled, dark letters.
I unclasped the metal clips and pulled the stack of legal papers out.
The first page was handwritten and signed by Mira’s uncle at the bottom.
An undignified piece of me found it surprising he’d been literate.
I skimmed the document and grew bored enough on page two to toss them back onto the envelope.
Mira returned with a stack of sheets in her arms.
“I buried him under the big oak tree out back like he wanted. He had the tombstone made years ago. I guess he lasted a lot longer than he thought he would. Or than he wanted. I don’t know.”
He had stated in his will he didn’t want fuss. He had given Mira specific directions, and she had followed them. The law would question her about the timing, but I couldn’t really find anything wrong with the way she put him to rest. “How did he go?”
“Drinking,” was all she said.
Mira put her hands under my arms and dragged me as best she could with what little help I could offer. Other than my brain, my body didn’t seem to want to work right. Mira said it was because I lost a lot of blood.
“You need a doctor,” she said when I lay crumpled and broken on her bed.
“Why didn’t you put me in your uncle’s room? He won’t need it.”
“That room is haunted,” she said matter of factly.
I chuckled, thinking she had made a joke, but she regarded me with serious eyes. Mira couldn’t seem to take her gaze off of my curled lips. I wondered what she was thinking so I asked her.
“I haven’t seen someone smile in a long time is all. You need a doctor,” she repeated.
I sighed. I knew I did. The pain was excruciating, and I could feel the little blood I had left seeping out of my open neck.
Open arms. Open chest. My skin felt cold except for the tiny puddle of fresh blood in the hollow of my neck.
I tried not to swallow too hard for fear that my adam’s apple would dislodge the only warmth I had left and loose the pool of fiery liquid to flow down my throat and into Mira’s clean sheets. I needed it more than they did.
“Do you know, you don’t have a single gate in your fence line big enough for a truck? I had to borrow a horse from my dad’s barn to get up here.”
An antique looking chair screeched across the floor boards as she dragged it closer. Heavily, she sat. “That’s the way my uncle wanted it.”
“I won’t live through another horse ride,” I told her honestly. “It’s gotta be you. You’re going to have to put me back together. Do you have first aid?”
I expected her to pass out. Or to scream and clutch her chest, or I don’t know, a hundred other reactions that any girl in town would’ve had.
Instead, she nodded and disappeared to rustle through what sounded like a drawer full of supplies.
She returned and dropped a needle into some peroxide before threading it deftly with a package of sterile sutures.
I arched my eyebrows in surprise. “Have you done this before? Given someone stitches?”
Mira tied a knot in the end and nodded.
“Who?”
“I’ve stitched myself. Now hold still,” she said as she pinched the skin on my neck together firmly.
I gasped at the pain and squeezed my eyes as tightly shut as I could in hopes that it would help.
It didn’t. I tried to imagine Mira having to do this to herself but I couldn’t wrap my head around it.
The pain made me dizzy, and I focused on breathing.
Breathe in, breathe out, two stitches down, breathe in, breathe out, another two stitches down.
Only a billion more to go if Mira was ever to put Humpty Dumbass, the horseback-riding bear victim, back together again.
It took her two days to sew me back together.
That’s what it felt like at least. I waited to pass out from the pain, blood loss, and exhaustion, but I stayed miserably awake.
I supposed it was my penance for hurting the girl who was working to save me.
I watched her stitch the inside of my arm.
I couldn’t move my jaw much with the fresh sutures, but the top of her head bent over my body in concentration, moving only when she wiped more blood away from her work.
I didn’t understand how I had so much. How I was even still here, breathing.
I watched a bead of sweat run down the side of her face.
It moved as if in slow motion, desperate to seek refuge in the wooden floor boards beneath her feet.
To fall with a tiny moist sound to the earth, as drained of energy as I felt.
I stared at it until a soft sigh escaped Mira’s lips, and she straightened up, stretching her back.
She wiped her face, and the bead of sweat became a small moist smear on the back of her hand, never realizing its goal.
“Done?” I asked in a gravelly voice I barely recognized as my own.
She seemed startled by the sound, and her eyes turned black. She scooted her chair farther away from me and looked at the ground. “It’s the best I could do. I’m out of thread. The rest will have to heal, but you’ll scar. Or maybe not. I don’t know how it works for your kind.”
My kind? “We can match,” I said with a smile that held no humor. I don’t know why I said that. I could tell me knowing about the marks around her neck made her uncomfortable, but my mouth just kept bringing them up. A part of me wished she would just tell me about them already.
She remained silent, too angry or afraid to meet my eyes.
Instead, she looked at my chest and abdomen.
Her gaze dragged slowly, and I wondered if she liked what she saw.
Would a wild and fiercely independent creature such as Mira Fletcher ever look at a man intimately?
From the way she stared unashamedly at my body, I thought maybe she wouldn’t ever need a man.
Not in the way a town girl like Becca Barns, who’d harbored a crush on me since the tenth grade, would need a man to coddle her, compliment her, and protect her.
“I need to go hunt,” Mira said. “We both need to eat.” She looked shaky and weak, but she stood with a fierce determination. A rifle clicked as she cocked it in the front room.
And just like that, she had answered my question.
Mira didn’t need anyone.
****
Mira
Caleb McCreedy looked a lot better than any man I’d seen in the three Seventeen magazines I had read in one of my foster homes when I was a kid.
I put my left hand over my cheek to feel if the skin there was growing hot at the memory of Caleb’s shirtless chest. It was still cool to the touch.
My body was apparently too hungry to waste energy on blushing.
No amount of filth or injury or blood could hide that Caleb was fit.
Not the rail thin, emaciated look that I had unwillingly adopted in recent years, but the protein and veggies and heavy lifting kind of fit.
His chest had flexed with every breath and every flinch of pain, and rippling mounds of muscle across his taut stomach begged for me to touch them, just to see if he was as hard as he looked.
Shadows had hovered in the twin creases that dove over his hips and into his jeans, highlighting the light hair that trailed from his belly button down.
Thank goodness I hadn’t noticed that before I was done stitching him up or I would have never finished.
Instead, I would’ve been petting him like a handsy lunatic.
For some reason I couldn’t understand, the way he looked made me sad.
Another beautiful thing I would never touch without it breaking or shuddering.
He was a colorful glass-paned window in my black and white existence, and if I dared touch him, the shards would surely cut me deeper than any unkind words ever had.
A man like him would never, ever want anything to do with a girl like me.
I knew all about Caleb, his brothers, sisters, and their father, an oil tycoon.
Uncle Brady used to talk about them. They were the only family with real money in our sleepy little town.
Caleb and I were unarguably from two completely different universes.
That much had been made clear with his words at Jake’s Quickstop.
There was no room for someone like me in his world.
I was alien.
Searching the canopy above me for squirrels was the only thing that could pull me out of my revelry now.
There really was no use in mourning the loss of something that had never been mine to begin with.