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Her eyes widened, and she searched his face for any tell of a lie. While she sure did like what he’d just said, she also needed to get one more point across. “It is extremely important to me that you don’t shut down on me,” she said, her throat so dry. “Because, Mister Holt, I’m falling pretty fast for you too, and it’s not fair to wall off and keep me out of the hard things you’re thinking about and worried about. That’s not the kind of relationship I want, and I’m just not going to live like my parents for my whole life.”
There. She’d said it.
Luke studied her now “Your parents?”
“They don’t talk about anything important,” she said. “There are three safe topics at their house: the weather, work, and food. But only sometimes on the food. My dad has made fun of me for not liking mushrooms before, and my mother gets her feelings hurt if you say you don’t want a glass of iced tea but you wish she had some ginger ale.” She shook her head. “You can’t get it until you meet them. Trust me, it’s not healthy. I’m not going to tiptoe around you, and I’m not going to tiptoe around hard conversations. Iwantto have them. It’s important to me. It’s how we make sure we’re on the same page, and how we strengthen the bond between us.”
Luke pressed his lips together and nodded. “I don’t mean to wall off. I think it’s a defense mechanism that happens to protect myself from saying something hurtful or doing something I can’t take back.”
“Like what?” she asked.
“Like punching something or someone,” he said, and that made Hannah take another step back.
He sighed and dropped her hands, as they stood far enough apart to make it awkward. “I’m a fighter, Hannah. That’s our solution to everything. Hit it. Hit something. I thought for a long time that if I just hit hard enough, I could find a way through some of the darkness inside of me.”
She swallowed, a new kind of buzz moving through her veins. “Darkness?” she managed to ask.
“It’s mostly gone now,” he said quietly. “I learned to deal with a lot of it in prison.” He looked up at her again, the beginnings of a coy look on his face. “They make you talk to a counselor, you know.”
Hannah was glad for that. She swallowed again, wishing she had a bottle of water. “Do you think you need to see a counselor now?”
He shrugged and pulled the chair out from the desk. He sank into it with a sigh. “Sometimes? Maybe? I don’t know. I think I deal with things fairly well.”
“If you need help, that’s not a weakness,” she said. “I’d rather you get the help than lie to me about it.”
He nodded, though his eyes had that blazing edge in them again. “I’m not lying to you. I haven’t lied to you.”
“Okay.” Hannah stayed very still for a moment, trying to find a new way to shatter this tension between them. She took a tentative step toward him, and then another. He opened his arms and she settled onto his lap, though women who carried the extra weight she did probably shouldn’t sit on their boyfriends’ laps.
“Thank you for being brave tonight,” he whispered. He pressed his lips to her collarbone. “Thank you for acting. For having my back.” He tilted his head and looked up at her. “I need someone watching out for me, and I especially like that it’s you.” He graced her with a small smile. “That’s why you’re my angel.”
Hannah returned his smile, leaned down, and kissed him. She’d initiated kisses before, but this one was once again different than the one they’d shared in front of the painting. This one held more depth. This one held more of who she was, and more of who Luke was, and more of who they could be together.
Her doubts quieted, but she’d inspect them later, just to make sure she’d gotten all of her questions answered and that she could operate from a place of full knowledge. She hated it when she didn’t have all of the facts to consider, and she was willing to have the conversations necessary to get the facts.
“I should go back to my room,” she whispered against his lips.
“Mm, in a minute,” he murmured, claiming her mouth again.
* * *
“Okay,”Hannah said a couple of days later. “It’s that road right there.” She indicated the slip of a dirt road up ahead on the right.
“That dirt road?” Luke asked, clearly confused.
“I told you they lived just outside of town.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t think that meant…” He didn’t finish as he made the turn. He’d showed her the house when he’d grown up, and it too had been coated in some sort of magical spell that made her fall in love with it upon first sight. That house sat just outside of town, but the road was still paved, with plenty of land surrounding the home, which was also well maintained.
Her parents hadn’t mown their lawn in a couple of years, she was sure. Maybe longer. Every so often, the youth group from the church would come, each of them bringing tools and weed whackers, lawn mowers and wheelbarrows. They’d work for a few hours on a Saturday morning and clean up the yard as much as they could, haul everything away, and attribute their time and energy to the service project.
As Luke rumbled down the road, Hannah prayed that the youth pastor had been inspired to come do a spring clean-up in the recent past.
The house sat under a huge canopy of trees, so the grass didn’t grow very fast anyway. If her father would even mow it once a month, it would probably be enough. Hannah strained forward to see once Luke had passed the last tree on the right. She and her sisters had once called it the brontosaurus tree, because it had a long limb that arched over the road like the neck on a huge dinosaur.
She told Luke that, and he smiled as the house came into view. “It’s not bad, Hannah.”
“You don’t have to be nice,” she said. “At least when we’re alone.” She knew the house existed in various stages of disrepair. Ruth had called to get the roof fixed a year ago, and Hannah had helped her pay for it. Before that, Bethany had united the girls and pooled their money to get their parents a swamp cooler that would at least keep the living room and kitchen temperature bearable.
