Live (The Burnside Series): The Burnside Series (2 page)

Help everyone
more
.

After five years of one priority project after another, a last year with her dad at his bedside, losing her job made the time seem endless. How could she possibly know how to fill it?

Six weeks into her unemployment, she started rewriting her personal budget over and over. Like playing a solitaire game, she was always one card away from winning.

Two months in, she finally abandoned the idea she could find something better and started looking for anything that might work. When she paid the last rent check she could afford out of her savings, she waited another two weeks before she sold her car.

Then, she asked her best friend, Lacey, to drive her to the storage unit she hadn’t visited since the week after her dad’s funeral. She hauled opened the doors and rescued his orphaned limousine, which had grieved by taking on rust.

After Des peeled the
BURNSIDE’S FINE LIMOUSINE SERVICE
decal off its side right there in the storage center’s parking lot, Lacey held her while she wept.

Sam had to sell the house they had all grown up in, and her brothers and sister had long ago found places of their own in the neighborhood. She’d still roomed with her dad, to help dad keep the house, but after his death and the sale she’d had to move and could only afford to rent a tiny house from a family friend.

Her former childhood babysitter was her landlady, she drove a POS limousine,
she understood her siblings’ life goals better than her own, and she was starting to think that boxed macaroni and cheese was kind of expensive.

So, she decided, if she couldn’t get a job following every rule written about how to get a job, then she would commit to unemployment-benefit regulations like no one ever had before. She sat through their “suggested job-seeker webinars,” downloaded their worksheets, signed up for their newsletters, and dutifully job searched the requisite number of hours every week. She took her yellow search confirmation form to the librarian at the circulation desk to get signed, every day, without fail.

But she didn’t want to open this email. Not today.

She didn’t want to look at one more job ad on MetroLink or GovJobs or WorkSeeker.

She didn’t want to tweak her résumé, edit her cover letter, or reorder her references list.

She didn’t want to spend all of her time looking for a job she didn’t even know if she wanted, then spend all of the rest of her time devastated when she didn’t get it.

She didn’t want to put on a brave face for her sister and brothers; they believed her act less than she did.

She didn’t want to hold her life together with empty routines and fantasies.

She wanted to look down inside herself and know something, see something. Something that belonged just to her, Destiny Burnside.

She opened the email.

Des kept toggling the view button to zoom in, because the screen seemed too blurry. She reached up to pinch her nose in frustration, and of course, the screen wasn’t blurry—the tears were coming.

She especially and absolutely didn’t want to cry. Because even though she had lost her job and run through her savings and sold her valuables and drove a POS limo and had received about three dozen rejections for as many jobs and missed her dad so much she’d started moving his things from the storage unit into her house, what she had not done was cry. She had not. Not since that last time in the parking lot of the storage-unit place.

Des was crying.

The horror of crying in public was that if it couldn’t be shut down right away, it got worse by a factor of ten in increasingly smaller increments of time.

She stared straight ahead and used the palms of her hands to move the tears away, trying to take long inhalations through her nose without sniffing or hitching or sobbing. The tears dripped over her fingers as fast as she could swipe them away; her face was getting slick and burning. She tried a breath through her mouth, and
fuck
, the gasping sob that escaped was so fucking
loud
.

She tried holding her breath against the next one heaving up after the first, and the noise she made sounded strangled. Des gave up and bent over to blindly shove her things into her bag and make a dash for the ladies’, but then a shadow dropped over the keyboard just as a throat cleared somewhere behind her. Big shadow. Manly throat-clearing.

Des didn’t turn around. “Yeah?” Her voice was whispery.
God
.

“You need help, then?” His voice was just over a whisper, but that rolling accent made it seem louder.

“No.” She attempted to take a deep breath, but to her horror, it shuddered its way down her lungs. “I’m good.” The shadow didn’t move. “Fine. Thanks.”
Go away
.

“Miss—” She closed her eyes against embarrassment, against the impossibility of
this
man, who should be safely ensconced in her most private fantasies, bearing witness to her small breakdown. “It’s just”—his voice dipped to a true whisper—“you seem upset.”

“Nope.” She watched her tears darken twin patches on the thighs of her jeans. Drip. Drip. She couldn’t reach up and wipe her eyes without admitting she was weeping in the public library. She would just have to lean over her own knees and drip.

Forever.

“You aren’t crying?” He might have moved in closer, but she refused to turn around or look. She refused to acknowledge this was happening. The sheer force of her denial would dry her tears and she would be good
goddamned
if she would turn around and find The Woodcarver looking at her with pity.

“Nope.”

He was quiet. Des held her breath and to her relief, the idea that he was backing off combined with oxygen deprivation seemed to slow the tears. Before she could let the relief take over and slink out of the library, he was suddenly right in front of her, eye to eye, crouching right at her knees, his elbow resting on the bag she had yanked to the desk.

She swallowed. It
hurt
. Then, horror, staring into his dark, dark,
dark
eyes furrowed with concern, the tears opened up again, almost cool against her flaming cheeks.

He let out a long sigh that almost sounded—annoyed?

“You said you weren’t cryin’.” His eyes were impossible to ignore, they were very dark and long-lashed under brooding eyebrows, and he was squinting at her, like she was painful to look at so close up.

“I’m not. I never cry.”

He squinted at her again. Then reached up to the little shelf running along the top of the printing carrel and grabbed a box of tissues. Des watched as his big hand, with its square angles and long tendons and rough calluses, carefully balanced the box on her knees.

She slowly pulled a tissue out.

“Thank you,” she said.

“You’re welcome,” he answered.

“It’s been a long—year.”

“Of course.”

“I’m actually a very stable person.”

“I believe you.”

“I’m unemployed. Like, really unemployed. And I just got rejected from about the three millionth job I’ve applied for.” Des yanked out another tissue to mop the tears that had collected under her chin.

“That many?” His squint turned into small crinkles that might be some kind of protosmile. Des let herself study him for a moment to wonder what would happen to his face if he did smile. She could guess what would happen to her underpants.

“Feels like. At least.” It was his eyes, she decided. They were like a priest’s or something. Well, not exactly. No priest of her childhood had made her feel like this, even the kind-eyed ones. The Woodcarver’s eyes definitely compelled her to confess, but it was more that when he looked at her, crinkled at her so that the corners of his upper and lower lashes tangled together, she felt
right
. Not wrong.

It was novel. It made her want to test it, just a little bit. And she was a good girl who never tested anything.

“You’re doin’ this all wrong, you know.”

But his eyes still didn’t look at her like she was doing anything wrong. Not at all.

Hefin had no explanation for why he’d dropped anchor alongside this woman. He didn’t know why he’d been watching her for weeks. He had no idea why he, a man who did his best to say as little as possible to as few people as possible, would say almost anything to get her to stop crying.

“There’s a right way to be unemployed?” Her eyes were huge and wet. The hot-looking red spots high on her cheeks made the gray irises, in contrast, look like mica pressed between glass.

“There’s likely a right way to do everything, but I’ve a bit of experience with bein’ out of work, in particular.” Her brow, as densely freckled as the rest of her face, folded into a map of wrinkles and she looked back down at her knees and moved the box of tissues back to the printing shelf. When she reached forward, it shifted the air around them. She smelled like plain soap, warmed up against skin.

Hefin gripped the edge of the carrel tight so he wouldn’t do something else he would have no explanation for. Like loosen the curl of pale red hair her tears had stuck against her cheek.

“At this point, I have a decent amount of experience with unemployment myself.” She said this to her knees.

“Oh, no. You’re still a novice, for sure.”

“I’ve been out of work for nearly six
months
.”

Hefin made a gesture like he was swatting away a fly. “That’s nothing.”

She looked up and Hefin ignored the lurch of pleasure that bumped against something in his chest when she met his eyes. “Yeah?” Her voice was cracked and husky. “What’s something, then?”

Hefin gazed at the ceiling and pretended to count to himself on his fingers. He tried not to think about why he was working so hard to make this woman feel better. “Try two
years
on for size.”

She looked up, then, the wrinkles still cross-hatching her forehead, her eyes still big and shiny. But she looked him right in the eyes and maintained contact, and he
thought it was the first time she’d managed that. “Are you telling me you didn’t have a job for two years?”

“Yeah. That’s what I’m tellin’ you.”

“Here?” She kept glancing away, but he kept his gaze ready to meet hers, and she kept finding it again. This felt like some kind of victory Hefin was unwilling to consider too closely.

“I guess by ‘here,’ you mean in the States?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s right. I’ve worked with plenty of forms like that yellow one you bring to the desk every day, plus I had the hoops set in front of me to jump through by an immigration attorney I could barely afford.”

“You didn’t come here for a job?” Her body relaxed in the hard carrel chair, and she started to lean toward him a little. Hefin felt something akin to walking to the edge of a cliff with the intention to jump and finding, instead of resolve, another jumper and a breathtaking view.

He didn’t like it.

This unexpected suggestion of rescue.

“No.” He bit off the impulse to elaborate.

“Oh.” She looked away again.

She clearly wanted to ask but stopped herself. Her instant acknowledgment of the boundary he erected compelled him, in direct opposition to the pressure in his chest, to break it a little.

It was something about how he had never once seen her so much as sigh, all these mornings for all these weeks that he’d watched her get that miserable yellow form signed. Something about how her back was always straight and how she never missed a morning. How she smiled when she slid her yellow form across the desk even though it was admitting another day of failure.

How she walked across the atrium, her chin high, her bright hair flying. How she didn’t slow down, even a little, except when she walked past
him
.

“I married an American.” He swallowed. To her, maybe these were small confidences from a stranger meant to put her at ease after losing her center so publicly. To Hefin, well, maybe it was those mica shards in her eyes.

“So you left behind a job?” Her voice had evened out a bit, and this was definitely
a sense of accomplishment he was feeling.
Fuck
.

“A life, even.” Her gray eyes widened, slid away again. This time, he let his gaze drop, too. Her sneakers were red canvas jobs, the kind with old-fashioned white laces and high sidewalls.

Her left one had worn through over her little toe, the hole big enough he could almost see the next toe, too, and for a mad moment he imagined stroking a fingertip along the crease.

The thought was enough to motivate him to stand, abruptly.

She cleared her throat. “Did you work at wood carving—” She looked down again, and he watched red splotches spread over her neck near the collar of her tee.
Shy?

“In Aberaeron?” Hefin leaned back and perched on the desktop, tried to keep from looming over her.

She sort of smiled, for the first time, and met his eyes again. Both her incisors were crooked and overlapped her front teeth a bit.
Cute
is what he thought, even as he employed a mental hair shirt against gray-eyed women who cried in libraries and had pretty toes.
Jesus Henry Christ
.

“Where’s A-bear-ah-ron?” She didn’t stumble over the name of his hometown, but said it slowly, even tried to flick her
r
a bit.

“Ab-ba-eh-ron,” he repeated slowly. “In Ceredigion, Wales.”

“Ab-ba-eh-ron,” she said, deliberate and true. “Cara-jig-eon?”

He thought he might be smiling at her. Which would be
not
the thing. “Nearly. Welsh is hard to sit in the mouth.”

“Unless you’re Welsh.” She directed her first real smile toward him, not quite meeting his eyes, which was a good thing for him because he didn’t want to handle those eyes and her crooked white teeth at the same time.

“Unless you’re Welsh.”

“So did you?” she asked.

“Pardon?”

Her fingers were worrying the hole in the knee of her jeans. Another glimpse at something he would rather not know about. Her knobby, freckled knee and the heart she’d drawn on it with ink pen.

“Did you work as a—woodcarver? In Ab-ba-eh-ron?” She tried the
r
again and it was such a sweetness, he gave up and smiled right at her. She looked away instantly, this
time at the ceiling, as if she were rolling her eyes.