Live (The Burnside Series): The Burnside Series (37 page)

She had the chance to be present with him, a man who would make tea for her and make love to her with all the sweetness he could manage for as long as she would possibly let him.

Because he was a goose person, for fuck’s sake.

He was losing her. Or she was losing herself. He didn’t know. He hadn’t worked out a way to get her to talk about it. Last night, when she had drifted through his evening, frustrating him with how far away she was, he had asked if he could properly meet Sam. Paul, too. She had grown quiet, and a short time later asked if they could go to bed.

They hadn’t made love until later. She woke him with her hands over his chest and her leg tangled through his. She had been with him, then, there was enough light from the streetlights shining through his bedroom window that they made eye contact. She’d straddled him and tucked her shins close to his sides. When she moved, he could feel all the muscles working in her hips, working him. She’d come and kept her gaze connected to his, touching his mouth with her hand, rubbing his face.

She’d kissed him after, both of them breathing hard.

And then she told him she needed to go home.

He sat at his workbench, his rolls of tools stacked in front of him ready to be taken home and packed. A lot of them had been his dad’s tools at one time. Many were those he’d bought new, here, but now had handles varnished with the work of his own hands.

He looked at the panels. They were beautiful. All together, the fine detail looked effortless. Just as it should. No reason at all to think they wouldn’t hold up another one
hundred years or longer. Likely longer, as the library had incorporated his suggestions for reworking the supporting wall so that it would stay dry and so the ducts that ran through it were rerouted, preventing hot and cold changes.

So his mark was here, in more ways than one—not just in pencil behind the panels he’d carved.

“It’s beautiful.”

He turned around, and Destiny sat next to him at the bench.

“It turned out very well.”

She reached out and fiddled with one of the leather ties on his tool roll. “Are you—”

“How’s Sarah?” He always asked now. Not,
hello
but
how’s Sarah?

“She got up on the walking bars today at PT. Mostly pain-free. Her MRI yesterday was reviewed, and the surgeon thinks he can revise her original repair and save her hip. She’ll work on gaining back some muscle in PT before they go in, but it will still be a long road.”

He put his arm around her, held her tight against him. “That’s wonderful news.”

“It is.” She sat quietly for another moment, and he wondered why she didn’t sound happy. He ignored an atmosphere of dread that crept around him. “Can I touch them?”

“For a bit longer. Tomorrow, they’ll have the ropes up already.”

She walked over to the panels and looked back at him. “Come here, show me every one that’s yours.”

He came next to her. “There are eight panels, divided into five carvings arranged vertically. The moldings between them are all mine and meant to show off the skills of the carver who was in charge of the project.”

She ran her finger over the designs. There were four wide moldings separating the panels. The first was a repeating pattern of Celtic loops, to commemorate the kind of carving he’d learned in Wales. The second and third, the centered moldings, featured buckeye leaves, seeds, and cardinals to commemorate Ohio.

The last. Well.

“Are these … twigs?”

He put his hand over hers as she rubbed the interlocked relief of twigs along the molding. “Yes. And here,” he pulled her hand down to a medallion in the center that connected the two rows of twigs. He moved her fingers over the relief carving.

“A Welsh love spoon,” she whispered.

“I made the spoon bowl a heart, so the finial could be the captured balls, see—six wooden balls captured in the handle. The Burnsides. So no matter what, you’ll be together, always. In your heart. But the twigs, those are from me.” He put his hands in his pockets. He’d meant to present this to her better. Bring her here with something better prepared to say.

She turned to him, her face red and tears at the corners of her eyes. “You said that these panels would be here always.”

“Yes.”

“You made my family part of this beautiful work, part of Lakefield, for always.”

She rubbed her hands over her face.

“How I feel about you, too. I put that up there for always, too.”

“You did.”

She touched the love spoon again. “I wanted you to show me the panels and tell me which ones were yours so that I would know how to find you.”

His middle clenched, and he shoved his hands into his pockets even harder. “Don’t.”

“Maybe if we’d had more time, or maybe if we could just have a little more time. I think I could make a trip at the end of the summer, sometime before Sarah has her surgery, before you go to China.”

He shook his head.

“I know we decided that long-distance was too hard, but you
know
how it is right now.”

“How will you know?

“How will I know what?”

“When it’s a good time for you to leave?”

“That so hard to know, exactly, but we could figure it out as we went, I don’t want to—”

“Leave. You don’t want to leave, Destiny.”

“You can’t tell me what I want. You can’t just tell me what I want. You can’t just decide you want to keep me and take me with you and tell me it’s for the best. Maybe no one has ever needed you, but I’m needed, I—”

“I don’t want to be needed, Destiny. I want to be wanted. I want you. You’re right, though. No one needs me. I’m going home because it’s been too long. Because I let myself believe I would just make my mom and dad sad. I could have lost them, in the meantime, like I almost lost myself, buried in my thoughts about what I thought everyone in my life needed. Putting together a team and starting on this project was the first beginnin’ of something I wanted. The second was approaching you.”

She traced over his carving for her, pressing her fingertips into the heart-shaped bowl of the spoon. “I wasn’t sure what I was going to tell you, coming here. That’s what I’m waiting for, to be
sure
. It’s not just being needed, it’s not just that. It started like that, but I know I can’t try to keep everything together. But shouldn’t I be certain? Shouldn’t I think about it and feel like it’s the best thing that could possibly happen, or like I can’t imagine doing anything else, or that it’s the beginning of everything and I can’t wait to start?

“I keep going over everything. Over and over it. I feel the happiest, I do, when I’m with you. But when I imagine being with you somewhere else, somewhere I’ve never been, somewhere no one I know has ever been, I just can’t. It’s not just that I can’t imagine the place—it’s that I can’t imagine us together. I can’t imagine it. My mind goes all blank even as everything else, everything, starts to hurt. And I don’t know what’s hurting. I don’t know if it’s my heart, or my conscience, if it’s just guilt for hurting you, or the potential guilt of hurting my family.

“Shouldn’t I figure that out before I leave everything? I feel like you’ve gone someplace without me, already. Like you came to this idea, this idea where I can’t follow you. This big, big idea. You want me, you want these big things from me, this big
thing
, and if I can’t give it to you, nothing else will do. I can’t believe it’s just one thing or the other. Your big idea or us never ever getting a chance.”

Hefin took his hand out of his pocket and picked up her hand. Stroked over the back of it and realized he already knew the pattern of freckles on this hand. Had
memorized them. “I do,” he said. “Have big ideas about us. You’re right, I can’t tell you what you want. I don’t think our choices are one thing, or the other, not exactly. I have learned that even when you want things very badly, life has a way of going on.”

One of her tears landed on his thumbnail where he was holding her hand. “I don’t really want life to go on without you, Hefin, I don’t. I just don’t know what kind of life I want to go on. I want to be two places at the same time. With you, and with where I understand myself the best. I know that one day, I won’t have the option to hold you in one hand and the life I’ve always known in the other.” More tears fell, and he rubbed them into her skin. “I can’t decide which one I would grieve less. And I’ve done so much grieving, I can’t stand to do any more. I’ve lost so much, I can’t stand to lose any more. In my most selfish moments, I demand that you stay here and just stop this decision from happening. But then I would grieve that, too.

“I would think about your parents and your sticky toffee pudding and I would think about all those people who are interested in what you have to say about making saving the planet look pretty and your new job making important things in important parts of the world and then I would be ashamed of myself. I know I could ask you to, and you would. And I think it’s that. Right there. I would ask you to stay, and you would, but you’re asking me to go, and I’m crying in the library again and won’t give you an answer.”

She was looking out one of the windows of the atrium, so he reached up and touched her cheek so she would look at him.

He loved this woman who had lost so much and was fighting so hard to figure out how to stop from losing any more.

If he had to spend the rest of his life softening her blows, he supposed he would.

He wasn’t sure how, but now, at least, she had a phone. She had the dome to look at and think of him every time. Mrs. Lynch was driving her limousine around her neighborhood, and he’d like to think that every time Destiny saw it, she would remember the love they made in it.

Baseballs were common objects. So were donuts and tea. Wet grass and pancakes. He would be here, reminding her. And his love spoon would be here for longer than either one of them could imagine.

He would call her, and he would call her back to him. He didn’t have to take her. They were both already taken.

The world could be made small enough, and God knows he knew how to wait.

He rubbed the tea-stain freckles gathered at her temple with his thumb. He knew those, too. “I love you, Destiny Burnside. You can right count on that for a long time. You can even put away in your heart that I’ll wait for you because here’s the thing, I likely will. Maybe knowin’ that about me is the insurance you’re buyin’ against your fear of leaving. I can live with that, I guess. I’d rather live with you, though.”

She closed her eyes.

He kissed her, then, and she kissed him back, but it wasn’t a pancakes kiss, or a limousine kiss, and it wasn’t a dome kiss. It wasn’t a kiss stolen inside a childhood memory.

It wasn’t a good-bye kiss, either. He made sure of it.

It was a
come back to me
kiss.

He knew it was because it was the first one he’d ever given.

The storm was getting serious, and she wished she’d remembered to replace the windshield wipers in Marvin’s car.

The late spring since she’d let Hefin leave without her had been stormy, and the wipers made a bigger mess than they cleared away. She peered through the greasy-looking rainwater, pulling back on her speed, and finally breathed when she turned into the frontage road that led into her neighborhood.

When she pulled into her drive, she was surprised by Lacey, who was standing under the tiny porch roof over the stoop, her arms wrapped around herself. Destiny parked and ran out to meet her.

“Why didn’t you use your key?”

“It’s hanging up inside the house, and the babysitter’s still there with Nathan, and if I went in to get it, he’d want me and I’d never get to talk to you.” Lacey had to yell over the noise of the rain.

“Okay, quick, come in.”

Des pulled the door shut against the wind picking up. “Holy shit. Did you see the sky?”

“Yeah. There are already tornado warnings for the counties south of us, but they think that stuff will miss us. We’re just getting rain and high winds.”

“Let me get you a towel and I’ll start some coffee.”

“I’ll take the towel, but after my twelve, I’m vibrating. Skip the coffee.”

Lacey was still in her scrubs from the hospital and collapsed on a kitchen chair. “I peeked in on Sarah.”

Des handed her a towel. “Yeah? I was there last night, but because of the weather I hadn’t made it over there.”

“Did she tell you she got her MRI date for her preop images?”

Des grinned. “Yeah. She said they’re just to help the surgeon plan but that it will definitely be a revision, not a replacement, and probably not as involved as they
originally thought.”

“It’s all good news. She’ll have to wean from her blood thinners, but I bet she’ll get a surgery date for early this summer. I’m kind of thinking she’ll get discharged in the next couple of weeks and continue PT outpatient before her surgery, as long as she continues like this.”

“That’s what Sam was thinking, too.”

“She’s still planning on discharging to Betty’s?”

Des took the towel from Lacey and started folding it, then refolding it. “Yep.”

“So that’s kind of crazy.”

“She won’t move in with me.” Des experimented with folding the towel in thirds versus fourths.

“I know.”

“Like, she refused, then called Betty without telling anyone, knowing Betty would completely take over.”

“I know that, too.”

“And when I ate dinner with Betty the other night to work out a potential schedule with her so that I could help her with Sarah, she told me she had it
handled
.”

“Yeah.”

“Sarah won’t talk to me about it, not even a little bit.”

“Good.”

“Right. Wait. What?”

Lacey looked at her and gave her one of her smiles that curled up the corners of her mouth and curled down the corners of her eyes. Pretty and wise-like. Those smiles always made her nervous because they usually meant she wanted to tell her something that was for her own good, like the time right after she graduated and was drunk on her new job and potential new paycheck and almost leased a fancy car.