Chapter 10 #2
He was measuring her, shoulders squared, ready to snap.
Then she tipped her chin at him. “Lincoln, Lincoln …. You’re looking at some interesting files at home.
Give me a call if you ever want insight.
” She slipped another card into my palm, this one different—sleeker, stripped of any company ties, just her name and a number.
“That one’s for Lincoln. We’ll all be in touch, yeah?”
“About what?” I asked, confused.
“About all these clients that want to work with you.” She winked at me. “Toodles, people. Don’t break your heads thinking.”
Before I could reply, she was walking off, perfume trailing sharp in the air.
“What the fuck was that?” Lincoln asked me.
“I think I just got myself some clients to pull me out of this hole.”
When I looked at the phone, there were twelve voicemails and seven texts. Presumably all clients who want me to work on their marketing strategies.
Finally, a fucking break.
I was woken up by a loud crash in the middle of the night.
So jarring I didn’t move, just lay there on my bed, eyes opened, staring into the shadows dancing on the wall in front of me.
almost thought I was imagining it, settling back to sleep when another thump reverberated through my room.
I startled, whirling around to stare at the wall behind my headboard just as another one came.
Thump. The sound was too muffled to be coming from the bathroom, which meant it must be coming from the room on the other side—Lincoln's.
Panic rose up in me, sharp and unrelenting.
He’d fallen. Gotten dizzy, dropped on the spot.
My heart clenched. Blood seeping into the rain-covered asphalt flashed in my mind.
Would another hit to the head be what crashed through this strange, fragile routine we’d built?
He’d remember whatever I’d done to make him hate me this much.
Right when I felt like I could do this, right when I had started to feel, dare I say, settled.
I rushed down the hall and pushed the door open without knocking.
Lincoln stood in the middle of the carpeted room, shirtless, loose shorts hanging low on his hips, eyes wild and desperate as he searched for the next target of …
whatever this was. His gaze zeroed in on a basket on the bottom shelf of a small table, skin stretched tight over his muscular chest as he yanked the basket and upended it onto the floor.
My gaze lingered on the strip of hair leading up from his waistband, his abs contracting, before it gave way to the rougher patch across his chest. A rush of heat crept to my cheeks, and I averted my eyes to the floor.
“Nina, crap.”
I coughed and shifted on my feet, thinking I’d have to work harder to stop imagining running my fingers through the hair on his chest. The room itself, though, pulled me sharper than any of that.
Emptied drawers, clothes and papers scattered in piles, shoes shoved aside, hangers cluttering the floor.
He’d torn through the room like a man possessed, or perhaps a man hollowed of memories.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you.” An explanation that didn’t add any clarity. He went back into the closet again, the lines of his back flexing as he bent toward the lower drawers of the dresser, raw energy spilling off him.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
His head snapped toward me, eyes feral and bright blue.
His jaw clenched and unclenched, a tic of frustration before he dragged both hands through his hair.
The anger within him traveled along his shoulder blades, knots forming as he moved, and never releasing.
There was spark of tenderness when his eyes met mine, and my own tension loosened.
This frustration was not directed at me, but at some gnawing, shapeless thing inside him.
“I can’t find it,” he said, voice rough. “The album. The one I made with my mom. It should be here. It should be right here.” The way his voice cracked on that last word pulled something tight in my chest. “I’d have never gotten rid of it. Ever.” His voice cracked some more. “That, I’d never do.”
For all the wreckage of the room, what he wanted wasn’t anger or destruction.
He was reaching for pieces of himself, clawing for proof of a life he couldn’t remember, or maybe proof it’d been different at one point.
Turned out, Lincoln was as lonely as I was.
He’d seen it. “That woman couldn’t care less about me.
Vinny hasn’t bothered to visit.” Lincoln needed a tether: the only one left was his mom.
I stepped inside, mindful of the chaos, offering him my hand, and softened my tone. “Okay. Let’s look together.”
He took it with the same urgency a castaway would cling to a lifeline thrown at them.
“Did you check under the bed?”
He shook his head. We knelt on the carpet until we found a box.
So similar to the box I used for the few mementos I still own of my parents’.
That same box I’d thought lost once, same one he’d taken from me.
I wanted to hold it against him then, everything he’d done.
We were so similar, why? Though, with him holding the box close to his chest, it was easier than I thought possible to be in the present with him and lose track of the past.
Sitting on his left, I saw it. Ink swept over his ribs.
A small bird mid-flight, its wings unfurling into a musical staff.
The lines weren’t heavy or harsh, just fluid, accompanying the scattering of notes from the song I knew so well.
The whole thing looked ready to fly off his skin and sing.
My hand was on it before I could stop myself.
The skin moved with the draw of his breath, making the bird itself seem alive under his skin.
“Why do you have this?” I whispered.
His eyes fluttered closed, and another time, maybe I would have marveled at the way goosebumps raised over his torso and arms. For now, all that mattered was the bird. The bird from “Songbird.” My dad’s favorite song. The song to which we’d met. The song to which he’d tortured me with.
“Why?” I raised my voice.
“I don’t know, I don’t remember. It seems to be a few years old.” He exhaled, his ribs expanding over my open palm, covering the whole tattoo.
Of course he wouldn’t.
When I shifted, he did too, and we sat side by side, backs against the bed, my hand still on the tattoo. He didn’t ask me to stop touching him. I toyed with that idea of telling him the meaning behind the tattoo.
The whole scene played in my mind. “Actually, Linc. This is the song I was listening to when I first saw you. It was my dad’s favorite song. And I was suffocating in grief, so I’d listen to it on repeat.”
While responding, he’d stare into my eyes, making me understand the truth of his words.
“And I inked it on my skin because meeting you wasn’t meaningless.
Hurting you wasn’t a passtime.” It wouldn’t make it okay.
It wouldn’t ever excuse his treatment of me, but it’d make sense of that horrible senior year and of his entitlement during Infinity Weddings and all other projects where I’d fought him tooth and nail.
It was pointless, though. He couldn’t remember. For all he knew, his first girlfriend had good taste in music and that’s why the bird was there. He wouldn’t soothe those wounds.
I exhaled and pulled my hand away. Answers were a nice fantasy, but they wouldn’t pay the bills or heal the soul.
“Do you miss your mom?” I asked, trying to distract myself from the sickening feeling.
His eyes cast downward as he played with the loop of tied string that kept the box on his lap closed.
When he opened it, there was a large photo album inside, with little rocks, jewelry, and other trinkets keeping it company.
The cover was decorated in a DIY style with laminated handprints in different sizes.
Glittery childlike letters read “Linc ? Mom” and “Mom ? Linc.” He took it out of the box with the care of someone holding onto the last thread of their own sanity, worried it’d disintegrate if handled too roughly.
He opened the album. Photos of a woman and a boy, from baby to teenager, flooded the pages.
“You said she’d be proud of me. But I don’t think so. I’ve read things on that phone, Nina. I don’t think I’ve been a good person.”
I didn’t know how to handle this. I felt the urge to excuse him; sometimes, we made bad choices. However, Lincoln Carter had made more than bad choices, and I’d carried the pain of his decisions for a long time. In some ways, I still did.
My silence was louder than anything I could have said.
“I don’t think anyone who hasn’t gone through it can understand what losing a parent does to you,” Lincoln said.
I agreed. I’d had so many people tell me they couldn’t imagine it happening to them. I’d screamed at a few. They needed to stop trying to imagine it and let me grieve in peace. Lincoln didn’t have to imagine. He knew it intimately.
“Do you know where my father is?” he asked, his forearms tensed, showcasing the veins trailing up his biceps.
I shook my head. “I think your situation with your dad is … complicated.”
He chuckled. Sour and acrid. “What was it like between my dad and me once you moved in with Vinny?” He swallowed. “Because if it got any worse than what I remember …, it wasn’t complicated, it was impossible.”
We were so close my hair brushed his shoulder when I turned toward him.
“My room shared a wall with yours.” I hated that side-by-side structure where there was only a wall between Linc and me.
I was barely able to sleep most nights. “Yelling, thumps, and crashes loud enough I heard them. Sometimes, it carried onto your yard.”
Lincoln looked away from me, cheeks red. “Yeah,” he said, “that sounds pretty impossible to me.”
He then looked at the photos in front of him and told me about each one. Stories of his mom filled the silence, and sometimes, I’d respond with a story about my mom. We spoke for a long time. Sometimes, we even laughed.
“Nina …,” he murmured, as if he was conjuring a wish.
I knew our truce had come to an end.
I stood.
“I know you felt it,” he said, on the verge of sounding accusatory. He didn’t move, though, just sat on the floor, letting me have all the power of standing over him this once.
“I felt nothing.” I lied.
“You did. You felt how good we could be.”
He was right. I had. It could have been good with him.
We could have been healing each other’s orphan hearts together.
If only he hadn’t done what he had or been who he was in high school and then the past year at 3D’s.
Now it was all up to me to remember not what it was or what it could have been but how it had been.
“You don’t have a clean slate with me.”
“That’s fine. I don’t need a clean slate.”
“That’s the problem, Lincoln.” I raised my voice. “You do have a clean slate. That’s why you’re behaving this way. We’re not on equal footing; you can’t remember shit you’ve done.”
“Shit I need to earn forgiveness for, right?” He held a picture of him as a little boy, hair so blond it looked white flowing in the wind as his brunette-haired mom swang him in the air. “I did something bad. I can handle that.”
“You can’t earn forgiveness for things you don’t remember doing.”
His knees shifted, drawing closer to his chest, and for a second, the man who tormented me in high school blurred, while the boy in the photo became clearer—folded in on himself, cornered.
“It’s my choice to try.”
“No. I’m telling you, you’re wasting your time.”
He finally looked at me, eyes bloodshot but steady, his thumb tracing circles into the corner of the photo as if he could smooth it back to new. “Lucky me that my time is mine.”
Truth is, I wanted to tell him we could leave the past behind.
Not forgive him but move … ahead of it. I wanted to be strong enough, lofty enough, above it all to be able to find a way to be around him without all the baggage.
It simply was not me. This … romantic delusion he had was insane, but I felt envious that he could be free.
Except he wasn’t, was he? He was weighted by everything he didn’t even know he’d done. My forgotten pain was his own oppressive choke of grief.
I sat down next to him. The mess of clothes and overturned drawers between us a metaphor for the obstacle course of our past. I wrapped my arms around my knees, making myself small. “There’s so much you don’t know, and it’s heavy shit.”
His gaze lifted to mine, his eyes glacial blue and so intent I almost looked away. “Doesn’t matter. I can handle it.”
For a long moment, neither of us spoke. Dust and the smell of old cedar clung to my airways until I could barely breathe.
Then he shifted, resting his head against the bed.
“You don’t have to believe me. I’m going to figure out every single fucked-up thing I’ve done. And I’m going to make up for it.”
He shook his head, then switched topics. “Now, tell me, Nina. Tell me more about your parents.”
We were so starved for the space to grieve that we both put everything aside. For the first time, we were on the same side of the line, at the same level. Equals in sorrow and possibilities.