Live (The Burnside Series): The Burnside Series (32 page)

“Also, Desbaby”—PJ leaned forward—“did Betty seriously give you Marvin’s sweet ride to drive around?”

Des laughed. “Yeah, she did. Mainly because she and Rennie busted Dad’s limo.”

“Man”—PJ flopped onto his back—“The Violet Thunder rides again.”

“You should totally pick up your Welshman and make out in The Violet Thunder, Des”—Sarah laughed—“as long as you are totally prepared for Betty to know. Because she’ll
know
.”

“Call the old guy,” PJ said. “He’s not getting any younger.”

Des couldn’t call him because her phone still couldn’t make outgoing calls. But she opened her laptop and went to his last painfully polite email asking how she was from
just a couple of hours ago. She toggled to “Reply.”

Sarah’s doing okay tonight. Want to meet me around seven at my place? We could go for a walk
.

His reply was almost instant.

There’d be nothing better
.

“I can’t believe you ate dinner with Betty.” Des took the hint of Hefin’s fingertips brushing over the back of her hand and laced her fingers through his.

“She talks about you. She puts sugar on her meat. An easy decision actually.”

Des looked at Hefin. It was the first time she’d seen him completely clean-shaven, and he’d gotten a haircut as well. Where it had been trimmed close around his neck, there was a tender-looking sun line. She’d been wanting to put her mouth there while she rubbed her palm over his exposed jaw. He looked younger, the squinting lines at his eyes deeper, his eyes darker.

He’d put on a shirt with a collar, too. It was white and looked soft, the sleeves pushed up to his elbows. It followed his body close, like the kind of shirt you’d wear to a club. He’d tucked it into worn jeans and something about his butter-soft-looking leather belt looked obscene cinched through the frayed loops.

He’d dressed up for her. Possibly got a shave and a haircut though they’d only made their plans an hour ago. He smelled like something she wanted to put her tongue against.

In contrast, she was wearing five-year-old cargo pants and a
DISCOVER LAKEFIELD!
T-shirt that she had caught as it was blasted from a T-shirt cannon during a local minor-league baseball game.

She wondered if she casually unclipped her hair from her barrette, would there be a barrette dent. Probably.

His hand was big with lots of calluses and held hers tightly.

“So did Mrs. Lynch spill all my secrets?”

“Sure.”

“Did she tell you about the time I tried to pick up an opossum that I found on our back stoop and it bit me in the nose and I had to get stitches and rabies vaccinations?”

“Is that what that scar on your nose is about?”

“Yep. I was mauled by a wild animal.”

Hefin leaned over and kissed her nose and he might as well have had his tongue in
her mouth and his hand between her legs because it felt as awesome.

They were walking around her neighborhood, and Ohio was providing perfect spring weather for once. It was just starting to get dark, but not so dark the streetlights had switched on, just the kind of dark that was sort of transparently navy blue.

The air was soft. Whatever the heck Hefin’s devious barber had put on his skin kept floating around and making her horny when she was supposed to be thinking about what to say to him about important stuff.

The future. How the world was small, but not really small enough. Geography.

Of course maybe none of that had to matter on a beautiful spring night like this one. Maybe because beautiful spring nights in central Ohio were so rare that it was easy to forget they even existed until one came along and reminded you of all the other beautiful and perfect spring nights, most of which seemed to have happened when you were a kid, and maybe the only thing you were supposed to do was enjoy it.

Maybe she could pretend that she didn’t hear anyone calling her home to wash up for dinner for just one more minute.

Maybe she could ride her bike around the block just
one more time
.

This moment was a bit of a free pass, wasn’t it? Her sister was better, her brother was with her, and they were watching a movie on his laptop as if the whole world was pausing and allowing a moment of grace.

She squeezed Hefin’s hand, and he squeezed back.

A square of yellow light appeared on the sidewalk in front of them, and she automatically looked into the front windows of the house that had turned on their lights. It was a family she didn’t know—a lot of new families were moving into the neighborhood lately, lured by the cheap real estate—and she watched the woman put a baby in one of those little swing things while the man turned on their TV.

They sat together in a big armchair instead of on the couch, his arms around her.

Seriously, was everything making her cry, lately?

“You can see right in,” Hefin said.

“Yeah. I loved that when I was a kid. I mean, I probably still love that. Walking around in the summers, your bedtime much later than it got to be during school, looking into everyone’s front windows and talking to people sitting on their stoops.”

“It’s not dissimilar where I’m from, actually. It’s a small village, and a traditional Welsh one. Almost everyone speaks Welsh. Everyone certainly knows everyone. There’s
a bit over a thousand people in my village, I’m certain I know all of them. Summers were exciting, growing up, because all the tourists would come in and fill the inns and the hotels and resorts. New faces, new people, new gossip.”

“That’s how you met Jessica.”

“That’s right. I was taking a bit of a holiday, in my own village, that summer. I’d finished my internship and didn’t have a thing to do until September.”

She laughed. “So you got married.”

“Obviously I can’t be left at loose ends.”

They stepped over a huge root breaking through the cement of the sidewalk. “Do you want to see the house I grew up in?”

“I do.”

“It’s just another block up this way. If the Massersons are home, maybe they’ll let us look around. They haven’t changed much yet since they bought it this winter.”

She pulled him down the sidewalk as familiar as her own face. Her neck prickled and she realized she was more nervous showing him the little house where she grew up than introducing him to her sister, then her brother.

On this beautiful night it was just her showing him the little pieces that made her. The corner of the world she belonged in.

Where she lived.

She stopped in front of the brown-clapboard bungalow. Everything was still the same. The seven in the wrought-iron house numbers, nailed over the porch gable, was still crooked. DeeDee Masserson was on the porch, sitting in the old metal glider that had always been there.

“Hey, DeeDee!” DeeDee had been in Lacey and Sarah’s class though they didn’t run with her. She’d participated in a cosmetology vocation program in high school that kept her off campus most of the time. She’d opened a small salon in their neighborhood that always looked busy.

“Hey, Des! What’s up? You guys wanna beer? The kids are in bed and Mike just left to pick up a shift.”

Des pulled Hefin up the walk and checked on him. He was looking at everything, his eyes open and soft. Where his collar was open, some chest hair curled out. She wanted to stick her hand in, tug it, run her hand over the jut of his collarbone and the smooth curve of the muscle in his shoulder. He raised an eyebrow at her and it made her
blush.

“I just wanted to show my friend the house, if that’s okay? Promise I won’t wake up the kids.”

“Oh, honey, you go on in. Nothing could wake those kids, anyway. There’s a Disney movie blasting in Mikey’s room, and he’s snoring right over it.”

“Thanks, DeeDee.”

She stepped onto the porch and DeeDee stood up; she still had on the black pants and white shirt she always wore at her salon. Little bits of cut-up hairs glinted on her pants in the porch light. This week, she had a big, bright pink streak in the front of her hair, which was done up in an old-fashioned pinup-girl way. It fit her figure. “Show your guy the place on the porch.”

“Okay.”

She backed up and pulled him into a crouch on the cement porch, right before the threshold. Written in the cement it said:

The Burnsides
Patrick
Marie
Sam
Sarah
Destiny
And Paul “PJ”

All around their names were handprints pushed into the cement, and a little baby’s footprint for PJ. Des traced her little girl’s handprint, then pressed her hand into her mother’s. Her fingertips overshot her mom’s.

She realized that if her mom were still alive, she’d be taller than she was. That she’d have to lean down to give her a hug and a kiss.

She could still remember what it felt like to curl into her lap.

“I love that, I told Mike we’re gonna leave that just as it is, and then when we replace the walk comin’ up to the porch this summer, we’ll do the same in the square just in front of the steps before it dries. Won’t that be awesome? Two Southie families livin’ large in the same place all through the years. I love that shit.”

“Yeah, thanks, DeeDee. I love that too.” Des stood up and gave DeeDee an impulsive hug, breathing in the perfumes and chemicals of the salon. DeeDee squeezed
back.

“Man, I miss your dad, Des. It’s been nice seeing his limo around the neighborhood again. You know he took me to my cosmetology-school graduation in the limo? Me and my mom.”

“I remember. You always cut his hair for free—he loved that.”

“He had great hair, too. I love redheads. So introduce me to your man, here.”

Hefin stepped from behind Des and reached out his hand. “Hefin Thomas, at your service.”

DeeDee stuck her hand out and grinned conspiratorially at Des. “DeeDee Masserson. Nice to meetcha.”

She looked at Des. “Hol-ee
shit
, girl.”

Des laughed. Hefin stuck his hands in his pockets and she could see his blush even in the yellow porch light. “We won’t be long, DeeDee.”

She waved her beer bottle at them. “Take as long as you want. Don’t kill yourselves trippin’ over the mess.”

Des opened the screen door, the creak so familiar she shouldn’t have even registered it, but for the first time, she really did feel like she was walking into another family’s house.

The feeling didn’t go away as she stood with Hefin in the living room. The built-in cabinets and green-brick fireplace meant that everything mostly looked the same, even with another family’s furniture, but she didn’t feel all empty and heartsick like she had the last few times she’d visited.

She just felt
interested
. She looked around and her gaze landed on a paint-chip strip taped to the wall with a deep, rich green circled in Sharpie. She wondered what it would look like in here with the walls painted that color and thought it would look good. Old-timey.

“It’s nice,” Hefin said. “I can’t believe a family of six lived here, it’s quite small, but it has lots of lovely woodwork.”

“That’s why Dad said he’d bought it. He always meant to get around to stripping and refinishing all the woodwork and the built-ins but I think four kids got the best of him.”

“I bet there’s hardwood under the carpets,” Hefin said.

“There is. Something else he meant to get to. Mike, DeeDee’s husband, his
brother has a floor business and is going to do them.”

She took him through an archway into the eat-in kitchen, and saw that they’d taken the old metal cabinets down and been patching the walls. “Wow.”

“Did all
six
of you eat around a table like this?” Hefin pointed to the small table in the alcove, a high chair and a booster chair shoved around it, the remnants of a pizza dinner still sitting in a box.

“Yeah.”

“Hol-ee shit,” Hefin said, in a passable American accent.

Des cracked up. “Come on, let me show you my room. But you have to be quiet because it’s where she has the baby.”

She led him up the narrow steps off the kitchen, pointing to the one that always squeaked and stepping over it so he would, too. In the hallway upstairs, in the dim light, it felt the most like how it had growing up. She reached up and whispered in his ear, her lips right against his lobe, she had to shut her eyes against how delicious he smelled.

“I shared with Sarah. I had the yellow side.”

He shivered. So she left a kiss on his shorn neck just before she pulled away.

She opened the last door on the right. He had his hand against her lower back, and she wished he’d maybe slide his hands up under her T-shirt.

They stepped in. DeeDee’s baby, Ellen, was sprawled out on her belly in her crib, her little butt in the air, a bottle half-filled with milk clutched in her hand. There was one of those rotating night-lights turned on, sending blobs of pastel lights all around the room like a baby disco.

The room was still neatly painted in two colors, one side yellow, the other side dark purple—a compromise offered when Sarah had wanted black.

Hefin looked around and grinned, then pushed her to the yellow side. This time, he leaned down and put his lips over her ear, warm and soft. “I want to kiss you on your side.”

This time, she shivered, and they tiptoed to the window on her side, where DeeDee had the window cracked to let in fresh air. As soon as she leaned against the wide woodwork around the window, he pressed against her and braced his hands on the window trim and wall next to her shoulders. She looked in his eyes and they were dark, so dark, and the wrinkle was bisecting his forehead.

His close shave made the little swollen curve of his upper lip look totally biteable.
He got a little closer, nudging his thigh between hers. She grinned and pulled his head down by his prickly, shorn neck to whisper in his ear again. “The baby,” she breathed.

“Is sleeping,” he breathed back.

“Just a kiss.”

“All I’m lookin’ for. Just want your room to have this little memory of you.”

She closed her eyes. He was just too much with his domes and flowers for her sister and smooth cheeks and hot outfit. She was starting to feel like he had gravity, and being around him was feeling kind of
inevitable
. It was more surprising than knowing she was falling for him, could love him.