Page 64 of Deacon

Jack shakes his head. “I don’t blame you. I think I need to sleep for the next few days to recover from that.” He stubs out his cigaretteand swings into the truck. “I’ll be back with the trailer and a check for Exile next week. There’d better be a meal in there somewhere.”

I shake my head, watching him back down the drive and disappear. Then, I go back inside to find her wiping everything clean. She yelps when I come up behind her and spin her around to kiss her mouth. The taste of Freya and coffee melt on my tongue. Her face is pink when I pull back.

“Stay,” I say.

Her smile fades. “I’m sorry,” she whispers.

“Too soon?”

She nods, not speaking. I go to let her go and accept my fate, but she holds me near. Her arms come up around my neck.

“Dance with me,” she whispers.

I don’t dance. I always assumed I had two left feet. But I can’t tell her no to anything, so I reach past her to the radio in the kitchen window and turn the dial. It crackles, and the beginning of a slow song that feels like I’ve heard it somewhere starts.

“I don’t know this one,” I say.

She presses her temple to my chest. “I do. It’s from a movie.”

I hold her waist, and we sway. I think that’s all she expects from me. When I look down, her lashes are lowered. I dip my head and breathe in her sweet hair. It smells like something familiar, something I’ve ached for.

There’s nothing poetic about loneliness.

It just fucking hurts.

Now that I have her in my heart, in my bed, and my loneliness is gone, I know how much I hurt before. I’ll let her go home this time. Then, I’ll make all the right moves to get her to come back and make this house into her home. We have time. She can take all of it that she needs.

But when all is said and done, she’ll stay.

“Tell me about home,” I say.

She lets out a little sigh. “What do you want to know?”

“Everything. Tell me what you miss the most.”

There’s a short silence.

“In the morning, before anybody else woke up, I’d go out and walk down the road,” she says, voice fragile like a spider’s web. “We lived on a dirt road when I was little. Then, they poured gravel. After a while, they paved it. But I’d walk down the side to where it met the state route. In the summer, it was too hot, but in the fall, I’d get up early and walk all the way to the end. There was a creek that ran alongside it with raspberry bushes all around it. I’d take the ripe ones and put them in my pocket. When everyone was gone at work, I’d crush them and use them to paint.”

“Do you still have the paintings?”

“No, they didn’t keep,” she sighs.

“How old were you then?”

“Around nine, maybe ten,” she says. “Aiden took Wayland, Ryland, and Bittern to work in the factory. They made cabinets. When they came home, they smelled sweet like cherry wood.”

“Did anybody stay with you?” My stomach has a pit in it. It sounds a lot like my childhood, trying to survive without anybody to look after me.

“No, but I knew better than to go far from the house,” she says. “What about you?”

“I was in a foster home when I was that age,” I say. “Between seven and ten was one of the better ones. I felt bad for the woman who ran it. She was trying to do right by us, but we were a bunch of fucking unruly boys with nobody to keep an eye on us. I got pulled and placed with another family at eleven.”

She turns her head. Her blue eyes pierce right to my heart.

“That’s hard,” she whispers.

“I was tough, always have been,” I say. “We were likeLord of the Fliesin there sometimes, and I was the ringleader. Poor Carrie. She was a good woman, but she had a hole in her heart.”

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