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“Just what you needed?” he joked, still uncomfortable, still shaken.
She stood up from against the wall, putting her hands on his cheeks, looking deep into his eyes in a way he found utterly intrusive but was unable to stop.
“Don’t pretend like you didn’t need that too. Something wild. Something a little dirty? Fun?”
I just need to be touched. The thought came out of nowhere and shook him down to his boots.
He kissed her lips and stepped away, needing a little distance from the satiated woman in his arms. The thing that had fallen from his pocket crunched under his boot heel. A half-eaten baggie of crackers.
Casey’s after-school snack.
Reality hammered down around him like a cold driving rain.
This is not for you, Stone, he told himself. Do not get attached to the fun this woman brings to your life. Those boys, they’re your life now.
“It’s getting late,” he said. “The boys—”
She blinked, the radiance fading as he forced real life upon their wickedness.
“Sure. I…ah…have you seen my purse?”
He picked it up from the ground behind them and handed it to her. “You’re not…you’re not going back in there are you?”
“No.” She took a deep breath and swung the purse up over her shoulder. “I know the taxi idea is ridiculous, Jeremiah. I know it’s not me, or what I do, but I don’t do the thing that made me me anymore, and I…well…I guess I’m floundering.”
“You’re allowed to flounder, Lucy.”
She smiled into his face, cupping his cheek in her soft hand. “So are you, Jeremiah.”
“Well…” He took a deep breath. “I’d like to flounder with you again sometime.”
She laughed, and the bird in the bushes finally gave up his roost, flying up into the night. “Me too, Jeremiah, me too.”
They walked, not quite hand in hand, but with their arms touching as if their skin was magnetized, and maybe it was, he thought.
“I’ll pick up Aaron on Tuesday,” she said.
“I thought you weren’t doing the taxi thing.”
Her fingers touched his face, glanced off his cheek, his lips. “It’s a favor,” she said. “For a friend.”
She got in the car and drove away, and he watched until the red of her taillights disappeared into the distance.
Friend. He tasted the word, rolled it around on his tongue. It was why he’d come to the bar tonight, why Dr. Gilman had sent him out of her office.
But she didn’t feel like any friend he’d ever had before. And it wasn’t because of what they’d done behind this bar. It was because, in this new landscape he lived in now, he’d never had a friend. Maybe when life was hard, friendships came with some extra complexities. All his drinking buddies from the old life, they had faded away after the accident and he barely mourned them.
What could they possibly have in common?
Reese, the most stubborn of them, was still calling, but not with the same frequency after his visit up here.
Friend.
He didn’t know how to feel about it, so in the end, he just left it alone, watching her car vanish, until the heat she’d called to his skin, to his heart, turned cool, and then finally, when he was numb again, he got in his car and headed home.
12
Tuesday afternoon, the second the car door closed behind Aaron, he started talking. He talked nonstop. About hockey. About school. Kids she’d never heard of. It was as if the boy’s cork had been stuck and she’d managed to get it free just by putting him in her car.
The only word she managed to get in edgewise was when she noticed a sign for McDonald’s and asked him if he wanted something to eat.
“I’ve got a sandwich,” he said and pulled out a smooshed peanut butter and jelly from his school bag. He pulled it free from the bag and offered her some of it.
So charming these Stone boys. She smiled and waved it off. “I’m fine.”
It took him a few minutes to eat, and the silence that filled the car was slightly awkward. A little too aware.
“Is Ben actually working at your house?” he asked, scrunching up the sandwich’s plastic wrapping and shoving it into his book bag.
“Why do you ask?”
“Because I don’t think he is.”
“He’s not exactly cooperative.”
Aaron laughed through his nose. “He’s making Uncle J crazy.”
She laughed, putting her elbow up in her unrolled window, holding back her hair, which wanted to fly in her face. “That is true.”
“Do you think he’ll leave?”
“Who? Ben?”
Aaron shook his head. “Uncle Jeremiah.”
She gaped at him for a moment. “Why...why would you say that?”
Aaron shrugged and looked away, and Lucy felt her stomach bottom out. These boys and their pain were so endlessly surprising. So shocking.
“He doesn’t like it with us. He misses the rodeo. He...he misses his old life.”
She could say no, he doesn’t, but they’d both know it was a lie. “Just because he misses his old life doesn’t mean he doesn’t like it with you guys.”
