Page 16 of Salvaged Heart
“Last week when we picked up breakfast.”
“There’s nothing really to talk about.” I kept my focus glued to my task despite his eyes burning a hole in my back. “That guy came out of nowhere. It scared me. I reacted… poorly.”
“He knew you.”
Not a question. “Well, I didn’t know him.” From the insult he’d thrown at me—Fag—my best guess was I had tried to hit on him in my drunken stupor the night before, but he had been the furthest thing from my type. Someone he’d been there with then? I didn’t know or particularly care.
“Do you have panic attacks often?”
I spun on the ladder, almost losing my balance in the process. I caught myself at the last minute before I tumbled awkwardly to the ground. “That’s not what that was.”
“Seemed like one.”
“I just needed a smoke.”
He cocked his brow in and gave me a long assessing look. His eyes softened. “I know I don’t know you well, Anders,” He paused, no doubt to determine if the next words he spoke were true, “But I would like to. Get to know you, I mean.”
A heavy silence hung between us as we stared back at one another awkwardly. The lonely child in me craved what he offered: a confidante, a friend. I hadn’t called someone that in more years than I could count. Sure, back in Nashville and Atlanta, I had people, but when they were only interested in getting high or drunk or off with you…Did that count as a friend at all? The last person who truly earned that title was Jonah, and, well, I couldn’t let my thoughts wander there. “Why?”
“Why not?”
I could think of about a hundred reasons.
Beckham had this pure spirit. He looked at life through rose-tinted glasses at a world full of possibilities. All he needed to do was discover them. You could tell he had been raised by the sort of parents who told him all he needed to do was put his mind to something, and he could achieve it. Laurel claimed he lacked direction in one of our few non-hostile conversations with each other, but I saw past that. Beckham’s problem was that he had made Laurel his entire direction, but once he recognized that, he would be unstoppable.
Meanwhile, I was a cynic who saw only what could be lost in any situation. I walked through life not trusting anything I couldn’t see with my own two eyes, and even then, I maintained a healthy wariness. I learned a long time ago you could not trust other people. The day you gave even the smallest piece of yourself to another was the day you gave them the ammunition to break you.
I knew all this. But then, why did I find myself considering his offer? Allowing him to see some of these fractured pieces of me?
“Look,” He sighed. “I’m not saying we need to make friendship bracelets and get matching tattoos, but we will spend a lot of time together this summer and…” He paused, gauging whether he thought his next words would spook me. “I get the vibe that you could use a friend.”
Ah, there it was.Pity.
“You don’t need to do this.”
“Yeah, but I want to. Heck, I could use a friend, too. If anything, allow me this for selfish reasons.”
He let me ponder his proposal for several minutes and busied himself getting the long handle screwed onto the roller before slavering it with paint.
“It doesn’t have to be weird. I’m just saying we can talk about stuff that’s slightly deeper than this renovation or the weather. That’s all.”
I nodded. Something about Beckham made me feel like I could tell him anything, and he would listen. That it wouldn’t send him running to the hills. Stage one had been getting here. Stage two could be letting someone in again–even if it was just for the summer. If I was too much for him, if all my dark places scared the shit out of him, come August, he would be free from me anyway. We could wash our hands of one another and never think about this again.
“Okay.” I finally relented.
“Okay.” He echoed.
I turned back around on the ladder and resumed work. The squeak of the roller sliding back and forth over the walls behind me told me he had too. “How does this work?”
“What being friends?”
“Yeah.”
His silence was suffocating. Had I already fucked this up by admitting I had no idea how even to begin having a friendship with another person?Way to come right out the gate being a complete and utter basket case, Anders.
A-fucking-plus.
“Well… I’ve got an idea. Hear me out, okay?”
