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“Your bad day,” I elaborated. “You want to talk about it?” I leaned forward and lowered my voice. “I’ve heard getting it off your chest can be cathartic.” A teasing smirk pulled at my lips as I shot him a wry wink.
What the hell was I doing?
He offered me a grin and a half-hearted chuckle. “You heard that somewhere, huh?”
Not only had I initiated small talk, but I was now prodding into Holton’s personal life, desperate forsomethingfrom the guy when all I’d come to do in the first damn place was drink in silence.
“Yep.”
He lifted his beer bottle to his lips, and my gaze dropped down to the thick column of his neck as he swallowed. I couldn’t help but wonder what it would smell like if I were to bury my face right there, where his neck met his shoulder.
“Appreciate the offer,” he spoke, breaking me out of the fantasy and dropping me right back into the present, “but I’m good.”
“Yeah, sure,” I said, suddenly feeling stupid for pushing when I knew damn well he wasn’t in a sharing mood. “Of course you are. I didn’t mean to pry.”
I threw back the last of the scotch simply to give my mouth something to do rather than ramble on.
I caught Darla’s eye and lifted my hand in a silent request for a refill.
Holton surprised me by not lapsing back into silence, but instead, asking, “What about you?” Darla brought the bottle over and poured me two fingers.
My brow crinkled in confusion. “What about me what?”
Humor created fine creases in the corners of his eyes. “You feel like getting your bad day off your chest? I’m not going anywhere any time soon if you want to talk.”
“Oh.” The offer was unexpected, that was for sure. But having it come from him flipped a switch inside of me, and the words I’d never wanted to let loose before started spilling past my lips, unchecked.
“It’s my little brother’s birthday today,” I admitted in a quiet, almost shy voice. Unable to stare into those penetrating green eyes as I told him my story, I lowered my head and looked into my glass, my fingers nervously spinning it in circles against the scarred bar top, the deep amber liquid sloshing against the sides. “This day is always the hardest for me.”
“He live somewhere else?” Holton inquired gently.
“No. He... well, he died last spring.”
“Shit, darlin’,” he grunted in a low, craggy voice. “I’m so sorry.”
I glanced at him and offered a tiny, sad smile. “It’s all right. You didn’t know. No one knows, actually. I think this might be the first time I’ve said it out loud.” I brought the glass to my lips and drank before letting out a small humorless laugh. “Like you, I’m not usually big on sharing.”
He looked at me with a shrewdness I could only assume came from training and years of experience as a cop. “You said it’salwaysthe hardest day for you.”
“Yeah.” I cleared my throat to dislodge the ball of emotion that had formed. I shouldn’t have been surprised that he caught my turn of phrase so easily. He was damn good at his job, to hear everyone in town tell it. “I guess you could say he’s been gone for a really long time. Drunk driving accident seven years back. He’d been on life support ever since. My mother—” I had to stop to swallow down the bitterness that slithered up my tongue at the mention of her. “She couldn’t let go.”Or wouldn’t, I thought to myself. I was almost convinced that she’d kept Cal stuck in limbo all those years as a way to punish me. And she’d succeeded.
“Jesus, Lyric. I don’t know what to say.”
“Nothing to say, really.” I’d just given him more than I had given anyone else since starting over, and it still wasn’t even half the story. Despite whatever it was that made me want to open up to Holton and give him my secrets, I couldn’t bring myself to pour out the whole ugly, sordid truth. “I could say the whole clichéd bit about him being better off now than he has been the past seven years, and the reasonable side of me knows that’s the truth. I knew it wasn’t fair to force him to stay with us when it was his time to go—”
“But that sure as fuck doesn’t make it hurt any less.”
My gaze jerked back to him, gratitude that he understood warming that place inside of me that had been frigidly cold all damn day. “Exactly. It sucks.”
He lifted his beer bottle. “To getting past the sucky shit.”
I mimicked his motions from earlier and tapped my glass to his in cheers. “Tomorrow’s a new day after all, right?”
“You said it.”
We drank and I was pleased that the small talk came easier after that. The heaviness of the conversation melted away, and I felt like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders. The pain was still there. I wasn’t sure it would ever fully go away, and I could still see the darkness lurking in Holton’s features, but the dark black clouds that had been hovering over us had faded to gray.
The conversation shifted to more harmless topics. I picked his brain about how he liked being a deputy. He asked how I liked working at the library and laughed when I told him about the time Mr. Hasslebeck, the older man who headed up our Story Hour for the kids each week, had gotten stuck in his costume. It had become somewhat of a tradition that he dressed in character to fit the theme of whatever they were reading that week. Even the other volunteers got into it with hats and crowns and such. That particular week, however, they were reading books about mermaids, and the tail to his costume had proven to be a lot more difficult—not to mention unflattering—than he’d expected. We’d had to wait until the kids left so they wouldn’t be permanently scarred when I had to cut Mr. Hasslebeck out.
