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“Jeff’s a good guy. You can trust him. I do.” He folded his hands on the table, watching me take my first sip of the drink. I was too focused on how sweet the added cherry flavor was to fully comprehend that his hands looked bigger than I remembered. “What happened, Taylor? Why did you call me after all this time?”
My injury-free hand toyed with the straw in the drink, while my bloodied one still sat in my hoodie pocket. I couldn’t look at him for extended periods of time, mostly because whatever familiarity there’d been between us when we were younger was gone now.
He was a stranger now, not a boy, but a man, and a man I didn’t know anymore. Handsome, intense, and well put together. He made me uncomfortable because I didn’t know what he was thinking when he looked at me, if I was just a reminder of his mom and everything he’d lost.
“I…” I started, pausing. Some older song played from the jukebox, filling the bar with music. I didn’t know what song it was, too old for my tastes. “I need help.” I shifted my weight, crossing my legs under the table and, in the process, brushing my foot against his leg.
Man, his legs were long. They took up damn near the entire underside area.
“Sorry,” I whispered.
“You don’t have to apologize to me,” he said, scrutinizing me in such an intense way, I had to look away. It was like he could peer into my very soul and see all of my mistakes, all of my fears, everything I wanted to hide from him and the world. “What help do you need? What happened to make you call me after all this time?”
“I got into it with my dad,” I told him, pain throbbing on my hidden hand, proof of that. “I need a place to stay. I can’t—I can’t go back to him. He, uh…” My eyes fell to his hands. “He kicked me out.”
He was silent for a while, not saying a word as he studied me, as if trying to see if I was lying or something. Maybe he didn’t trust me. It had been ten years, after all. Trust was something that was so hard won and yet so easily lost.
Ironic if that was the case, though, because I wasn’t the one who left.
Maybe it was because he wasn’t saying anything, but I felt like I needed to explain further, so I said, “I don’t have anywhere else to go. I have friends, but they’d ask questions, and I… they don’t know how it is with my dad. You do. You remember, right? He got worse after you left.” My voice dropped to a whisper, “He got so angry.”
The hand fiddling with the straw dropped to the table, and I absentmindedly picked at the wood. I certainly wasn’t expecting him to reach for it, for one of his big, strong hands to grab mine and squeeze. The action made me freeze up.
“Are you all right, Taylor?” Again, he said my name in a way I’d never heard it before, and I fought the urge to yank my hand away from his. Having him holding it, feeling his heat flowing into me…
We weren’t strangers. We couldn’t be. There was a familiarity between us neither of us could deny, even if it had been ten years. And yet, him holding onto me like that made me warm in places other than my hand.
“I’m okay.” My voice came out small and quiet, unsure—mostly because I wasn’t sure if I was okay. Ignoring what happened with my dad, sitting here, feeling his hand encompass mine and squeeze my fingers together like that… how could I be okay when the person I’d missed most of all had answered my out-of-the-blue call and was now acting like he cared?
He didn’t care. He couldn’t. Why would he have left ten years ago if he cared about me?
“If you say so,” he said, slow to pull his hand off mine, letting me breathe in deeply now that I was free of his warmth. As I took another sip of the drink, a big sip, he went on, “You can stay with me. I have a decent place downtown. You can stay as long as you need to.”
I couldn’t help it; I grinned at him. “Thank you so much.”
His dark eyes fell to my lips. “I have missed that smile. I’ve missed a lot, but we’ll have time to catch up once we’re out of here. Finish your drink. Do you want food? Have you eaten dinner?”
“I’m okay. The drink is fine.” I didn’t think I could eat, even if I tried to. Not tonight, not after everything that happened. The turn this day took; who would’ve known I’d end up here, with the one person I missed above all others. People came and went from your life all the time, but there were only a select few that made a lasting impact. He was one of mine, if not the only one.
As I sipped the drink, I found him watching me, hardy blinking. It seemed his intensity had only gotten worse—or better, depending on how you looked at it—with age. He stared at me like I was a mess of puzzle pieces, and he was trying to put them together as quickly as he could.
“You know, it’s funny,” I said.
“What is?”
“I memorized the number you gave me before you left. So many times I put it in my phone, but I stopped myself right before I dialed. I never let myself call, and I always stopped myself from saying your name.” I bit my bottom lip. “In a weird way, I think I was saving it, your number and your name, so that when I really needed you, I’d use it and you’d come to save me.” I let out a chuckle, but it was a humor-free sound. “Pretty sad, huh?”
“It’s not sad. I’m here now. You don’t have to be afraid of saying my name.” He paused, letting his words sink in. “You know I’d always come running when you call.”
I wanted to ask him why he’d left so quickly, why he never visited. Why didn’t he come back for me? But it was useless to dredge up the past; had to focus on the here and now, the person in front of me.
“Creed,” I spoke his name for the first time in years. “I missed you.” A simple sentence, and yet that sentence carried a certain weight behind it only he and I knew. Creed, my brother, the boy I’d risen high on a make-believe altar to worship when I was younger.
Now that I was older, though, I was painfully aware that he was no boy anymore, and he wasn’t my brother. He was my stepbrother, and now… now he was like a stranger, someone who answered my call but a stranger nonetheless.
But, I guess that was a lie too, because you didn’t trust strangers. You didn’t know strangers, couldn’t pick them out of a lineup. You didn’t know who you could trust your life to, but Creed? I trusted him more than I trusted anyone else, including myself.
Creed’s mouth was slow to smile, though it was more of a smirk than a grin. He didn’t say anything in response to me speaking his name and telling him that I missed him, but that was fine. I didn’t need to hear him say it. He’d answered my call and come to me, and that was honestly all I’d needed.
