Chapter 18 I Have Free Will And I’m A Goddamn Adult.
I HAVE FREE WILL AND I’M A GODDAMN ADULT.
Partners in Crime by FINNEAS
Holden
“Hello, Natalie.” My smile fades instantly when the bag on her shoulder catches my attention.
“Oh, hey. What are you doing here?”
My thoughts are constantly occupied with you and our time together.
I want light and happiness, and you give me both.
I think constantly about you, and I realize I have free will and I’m a goddamn adult.
“I thought to stop by before the hospital. Are you—are you leaving?”
“Mm-hmm. Ellie is here today.” This is the first time I’ve noticed there’s someone else here. “She usually helps in the mornings, but she’s available all day today, so I’m going to take advantage of it and paint my living room, which has had chipped paint for months.”
“Do you want company?” I don’t think about it before I offer, but fuck it. I want to spend more time with her. The weekend was excruciating without seeing her, and she’s closed on Tuesdays, so I won’t have another excuse. Painting? I can paint.
“Don’t you have to work?
Yes. “The beauty of being a business owner. I don’t have to follow rules.”
“Why would you spend your free morning painting a stranger’s house?”
Stabbing the knife and twisting it deeper, I see. “Ouch.” I cover my chest with my hands. “I thought we were friends.”
She sucks in a breath, panic immediately covering her features, and when she usually turns different shades of red, this time, it’s the opposite.
“I’m kidding, I’m kidding,” I offer.
She lets out a shaky breath. “We are friends. Sorry, that came out all wrong. I can paint on my own, though.”
“I know you can, but I’m not asking to help because you can’t. I’m asking because I want to.”
The tension between us thickens, and all sounds suddenly become muffled. There’s nothing else in this moment but her and me.
I can’t breathe.
“If you’re sure, I’ll take the offer,” she replies, obliterating the silence.
I nod. “I am. Let me grab some coffee to go first and meet you there?”
“Sure! Ellie is a queen at making coffee, too. She’ll take good care of you. See you in a bit.”
She leaves, taking all my new favorites along with her. There’s not a prettier blue than Natalie’s eyes, or a more beautiful red than her hair. My favorite sound is her voice now, and her scent, like fresh days and sweet cookies, is one I’m trying to bottle.
I order my coffee, but it’s all wrong, starting with my having to choose what kind, not having whatever it is Natalie adds to it. Her secret ingredient.
I drive in silence to her home, organizing my thoughts and figuring out what this feeling is in my chest when I’m around her. I can’t turn a blind eye to the comments my friends made last week. The insinuation I like her doesn’t seem quite as impossible now. It feels as though they might be right.
I’m so fucked. I want so much more than to be her friend, but I don’t know how to bridge that gap.
I turn left from Cypress Street onto a gravel road, leading to a small driveway with an olive green house at the back. All colors are beautiful, but green was made for her.
I park under the oak tree covered in moss and take note of the previously broken wooden swing that now moves gently with the wind.
The endless possibilities of what her girls do playing out here invade my mental space, and I catch myself smiling fondly at the thought of how I could fit in.
Daydreaming, of course, because I can’t even get Natalie to call me a friend, let alone think of anything else.
I don’t deserve her either. There's too much going on.
I keep walking, taking the space in on this humid, gloomy day in the middle of summer. Almost like a mirage, Natalie stands on her porch with a pitcher of lemonade and a shy smile on her face. A shirt frames her body under loose overalls covered in paint, a white bandana over her wavy, sunset hair.
“You know you don’t have to make me lemonade every time I come here.”
“It’s the least I can do. Something tells me if I offered to pay, you’d say no.”
“You’d be correct.” I hop over the four steps on her freshly fixed porch. “Nice porch.” I wink, grabbing the glass of lemonade and drinking it immediately.
“Do you add the secret ingredient to this too?”
Natalie shrugs nonchalantly, stepping into her house. I don’t follow, instead I look at her, dumbfounded like a fifteen-year-old boy with their first crush for the first time.
“Are you coming, or are you going to stand there, staring into the abyss?”
Oh. Sassy.
“Yes, ma’am.”
The inside of her home is nothing like I expected.
Her store is whimsical, with green, pink, orange, and gold accents everywhere, from flower prints in the bathroom and behind the shelves to sheer pink curtains covering areas.
Dark wooden shelves match the coffee bar and the cash register, all in perfect harmony.
Her home is more like what Daisy, who is an event planner, would consider country chic or whatever the fuck it is.
All the furniture is beige, brown, and white, with the walls to match.
Large wooden frames are stacked on the floor.
I’m assuming she took them down from the walls to paint, and even the dining table is rustic with neutral accents.
It’s pretty, and it feels calm, but it definitely doesn’t scream Natalie.
“You feel it too?” Her question catches me by surprise as she holds her hips and looks around.
“What?”
“The sadness. It’s so black and white, it feels monochromatic, and I’m tired of it. I need—”
“Green?”
“I don’t know; I was thinking orange,” she says between a laugh and a sigh. “Not the whole thing, but I don’t know. A pretty orange may look good here.”
“Like your hair?”
“I was thinking more like sunsets.”
I eye her suspiciously. Did she think about this before I said anything about it being my favorite color, and she’s trolling me now?
“When you said you like burnt orange, it got me thinking about sunsets and how beautiful the sky is. I want to remember beauty and vastness and life when I look at these walls, not everything that’s missing.”
“There’s only one question left.”
“Oh yeah?”
I smile sheepishly. “Where are the brushes?”
A few hours later, Natalie takes a step back and looks at our creation. She picked one accent wall and different shades of orange while the others we painted cream. It feels like standing under the sun after a cold night, and judging by her smile, she likes it.
I have to go soon if I’m going to meet up with Jerry, but damn it if I don’t want to throw it all away to spend more time with her. That’s if I don’t ditch him to help her move furniture back in place.
“You did well,” I whisper.
She bumps her hip against mine. “We did.”
I look down, and at the same time, her intense eyes lock with mine. I gather paint off her chin with my thumb, her breath catching as I do.
“You had some paint there.” I clear my throat.
She pulls back but doesn’t take her pretty eyes away from mine. They’re so light today, almost as if she was shedding darkness with every stroke of paint. Another fucking reason why I can’t pursue this.
A friendship, sure; anything else, no. Even just looking at her sets my soul on fire. One look, and I feel happier. I feel like a better man.
She’s light and joy, and I’m matches with kerosene.
I need to go before I spread both and burn everything to the ground with me.
“I have to go.”
“Oh.” She places her brush down and wipes her hands on her paint-covered overalls. “I-I-I thought we had more time, and I was going to make you lunch.”
“You don’t have to make me lunch, Beauty. I had a good time. I have a couple of calls to make—” liar “—before I head over to the hospital to see Jerry.”
“Let me get you some lemonade to go, at least.”
I open my mouth, but she narrows her eyes at me. “I don’t want to hear a no for an answer. Come on.”
I follow her to the kitchen, which has been previously Natali-fied. There is a giant wooden cutlery hanging on the green and cream wall. The table is clearly old and has been loved—one of those round wooden vintage tables everyone growing up in the South in the early 2000s had in their kitchen.
There’s art and diplomas with her kids’ names on the refrigerator, Veronica Joy Bradshaw and Isabella Nicolette Bradshaw on every single one of them.
Beautiful names and somehow familiar, but I shake it off, because why would I even know these girls?
Maybe it’s the familiarity from listening to Natalie talk about them.
The rest of the kitchen has appliances on top of the white tile countertops, alongside a giant stand-up mixer all girls want.
Or, at least, my mom did. It was the first thing I bought for her when I had the money, after I continued adding things she wanted for her kitchen.
This is exactly the feeling I get at Natalie's.
Everything matches—green, gold, and cream, except the espresso coffee maker in the corner, one she catches me staring at.
“That’s my next big-girl purchase. Every few months, I save enough to buy one item for the kitchen that makes me feel good. My good friend calls those glimmers, you know, like the opposite of a trigger? I realized color, aesthetic things, and a matching space are all glimmers to me.”
“I like it. It suits you.”
The corner of her mouth lifts as her eyes sparkle. “If I could only get the girls to get diplomas and art in matching colors, I could stop twitching every time I look at the fridge.”
“I actually like it. It shows how much you care about them. I bet they make you so proud.”
“You have no idea.”
She eyes the diploma with her eldest’s name. Award for Grit, it reads. “Tell me about them.”
“I thought you had to leave.”
“I have a few minutes to hear you brag about your girls. You also said you had a drink for me.”
She hands me a cup with a paper straw. “Vero was born with a developmental delay. I don’t want to burden you with my trauma, but basically, she had some oxygen deprivation that led to motor, speech, and cognitive delays.
She does several therapies every day at her preschool, and then sometimes in the afternoon.
This one—” she touches a blue award “—was her graduation from full-time to part-time care. It has been such a relief to see her improving this much, so I want a reminder of how hard she’s worked, especially when I want to cast blame. ”
“On whom?”
“Myself.”
“You—”
“I know,” she interrupts. “I know it’s not my fault, but there’s zero logic behind it. I just feel it.”
“You’re doing a great job. I can tell by the way you talk about them.”
“Thank you. It’s hard but worth it. I love being their mom.”
There’s a pause when she’s looking at the award before she continues. And this one—” she holds the Grit Award I was eyeing earlier “—she’s so good, Holden. She’s fourteen, but her soul is like twenty with the maturity of a fifty-year-old. She’s so cool.”
I can’t help the smile painted on my face at the way her eyes light up when she talks about them. “She’s the best older sister, friend, daughter, all of it. I hit the jackpot with her.”
“She’s lucky to have you.”
“I’m lucky to have them. What a beautiful, rich life I get to share with them, even if it is incomplete.”
I wish apologies would make it better or that there were words big enough, strong enough, to help ease her heart. Since there are none, I do the next best thing and squeeze her shoulder.
What I really want to do is hug her, but I’m not sure, so I don’t.
“Thank you for your help. You still owe me, though.”
“Oh?”
“I haven’t heard anything about Jerry again.“
I let out a sigh. “I know; I don’t even know what to think myself. Last week was a lot. Maybe I’ll have more to share after today.”
She waits, biting her lower lip and looking to the side. “If you want to chat, I’m off tomorrow, and I would love an update. Maybe it won’t be as hard if we’re not surrounded by people at the store.”
I don’t want to read too much into it. I want to take it for what it is. Natalie is offering friendship.
“That sounds good. Can I take you to breakfast?” I ask, leaning a hip against the kitchen counter as she rinses her cup in the sink.
“Oh, you don’t have to do that. I can eat here.” She wipes her hands on a dishtowel, glancing over at me.
“I love eating breakfast out. Think of it as a cushion so my bad news has a soft landing.” I push off the counter and take a slow step toward the door.
“I mean, if you’re sure.” She follows, hesitant.
“I am.” I hold the doorframe lightly, waiting for her answer.
“Then sure. Breakfast sounds good.” She tucks a loose strand of copper hair behind her ear, revealing two gold earrings I hadn’t noticed she was wearing.
“Can I pick you up at eight?”
“I have to drop the girls off, so nine?”
“Fair. It’s a date.” The words slip out before I can stop them.
Her mouth opens wide.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean it like that.” Didn’t you, though? You did, but clearly, she didn’t.
“That’s, um, okay.” She gives a small, awkward smile.
I pull the door open, stepping through onto the porch. “See you tomorrow, Holden.”
“See you tomorrow, Natalie.” She closes the door behind me, and I drive to the hospital with a smile on my face that will be really hard to erase.