Live (The Burnside Series): The Burnside Series (6 page)

The routes took cyclists over places where bikes normally couldn’t go—overpasses, tight alleys, long stretches of freeway. They were dangerous and cutthroat and promised the kind of exhilaration that Sarah found addictive.

The night Sarah had her accident, it hadn’t even been a week since their father had died. Sarah was brought to the same hospital where Patrick Burnside had taken his last breaths, her body broken and bleeding. Sam had to be physically restrained from the triage room where she was being stabilized.

Des still had bad dreams about how he had cried that night, in a way he hadn’t cried over their dad the whole time he was sick, or when he had finally died. He had gripped Des’s hand and wept, hopelessly telling her about every complication he had ever seen or knew of when a body met a motor vehicle, scaring the fuck out of Des though she had stayed quiet, trying to absorb his current grief, his late grief, she hadn’t known
which.

It wasn’t until weeks later, after Sarah’s second surgery, that Sam had to be pulled out of Sarah’s room again, that time for yelling at her, screaming really. Blaming her for the way the orthopedic surgeons were shaking their heads. For getting hurt and scaring them. Scaring Sam. Sarah had just looked out the hospital room’s window while he railed, quietly pushing the nurse’s call button until staff came and led Sam away.

Des had sat at Sarah’s bedside that night. They were quiet for a long time. Eventually, Sarah had turned to Des and said, “You know, Des, it’s no better to be safe than sorry.”

Sarah and Sam hadn’t really spoken since.

Later that night, after Sarah’s slow and painful-looking physical-therapy session, over veggie burger takeout from the vegan beer hall, Des watched Sarah and their younger brother PJ bend their dark heads together cracking up over some stunt on a reality TV show they were watching on PJ’s phone. They sat in the back of the limo, the sunroof open to the night air, the onions they had picked off their burgers stinking in a greasy paper bag on the floor.

They looked, in that moment, happy. It was almost enough to forget that Sam was nearby, not even a handful of blocks away, working himself to death. It meant that Des couldn’t completely enjoy the moment, laugh with her brother and sister in the old limo bay where they’d eaten takeout together dozens of times.

She couldn’t stop thinking about Sam and how he told them years ago to always get onions on their burgers for the flavor but then to pick them off because the texture was gross. Sam was there, even if Sarah and PJ didn’t acknowledge it. It made Des sad to think of that, at the end of such a remarkable day.

So Des thought of Hefin.

She thought of the clothes loose on his rangy body. She thought of how he refused to let her carry her bag. She thought of how he sucked his sugary tea off his fingers, the way he looked when he slid his pastry over to her to eat, nearly shy. She thought of the way his small smile had made brackets around his mouth. How his top lip was fuller than the bottom, and how this anomaly made his mouth look like it had already been kissed.

She bit into her burger, savory with smoky mushrooms, and wondered if Hefin’s soft top lip tasted sweet, what it would feel like between her teeth. She imagined brushing her fingertips against the grain of his dark stubble while she placed a kiss in the center of
that lip, licked his bottom one.

She imagined how it would feel if one of those looks he had brushed in her direction, for less than a blink, held. If he had kept looking and looking at her, at her mouth, until there was nothing to do but touch her. Kiss her.

In the quiet part of her ear, she thought about how her name, her whole name,
Destiny
, would sound from his mouth, with his accent, when she pulled slowly away from that kiss, when she slid her fingertips from his bristly face to the small curls at his nape. Scraped her nails against the skin there.

She remembered how his eyes had gotten tight at the corners, almost squinting at her, almost looking away, just those few times, but how she would also catch his gaze soft and open.

She wanted to know what he was thinking with each of those looks.

She wanted to take one of his big hands in hers and trace around his coarse first knuckle, all the way along the band of muscle to his elbow.

She wanted to watch him draw, not with furtive glances as she hurried by him in the library, but when they were alone and with long, drinking looks. She wanted to watch his left hand bend over his pencil while he traced designs on the paper, see how his right hand held the paper down and how his lean hip pushed into the worktable.

As the nighttime spring air cooled the interior of the limo, she was glad it was getting dark. She was glad Sarah and PJ were occupied with their gossip. She was glad her face would be indistinct to her brother and sister, that there was no way they could guess she was contemplating secrets. She liked that they didn’t know, for a little while longer, that she was celebrating what felt like the beginning of something. Part of a big family in a small neighborhood, she wasn’t used to having secrets.

It felt decadent, luxurious, expensive. This feeling more than made up for the months of material poverty and draining worry. Des played with the hole in the knee of her jeans, shivering a little when she tickled herself just as a cold eddy of air swirled through her hair. She wanted to laugh but compressed her laugh into a solid gold ingot to rest in her belly, warm.

She imagined the limo was a boat, and she was floating on the sea. Instead of the familiar crowd of identical houses, glowing from the inside with electric lights, wafting the aroma of dozens of dinners into the air, it was the whole wide world around her. Rocky coasts. Lighthouses. Cities that looked like spilled glitter and gave way to misty,
rustic villages.

She liked it. She let her body countersway against the waves. Drifted. Wondered when the wind would pick up.

“You gonna ask your girl to lunch?” Phil had the facsimile of the original plans for the center panel unrolled on the table, copying measurements to compare to the ones he had spent the morning carefully taking from where the panel would go.

Hefin watched Phil write the numbers onto graph paper and took a sip of tea.

“Is that one of my pencils?”

Phil glanced over at him and made quite the show of examining the pencil as if he hadn’t seen dozens of them before, in Hefin’s art box, on the worktable. “Just looks like a pencil to me. Don’t see your name on it.” He kept writing with the soft lead, smirking.

Hefin picked a golf pencil up from the table, handed it to Phil, and held out his palm.

“Jesus, Hef, you’re so weird about stuff.”

“Don’t call me Hef.”

“Like I was saying.” Phil ran the tip of the golf pencil through his collar-length blond beard, as if to sharpen it. Or maybe detangle the beard. And Phil wondered why Hefin didn’t want him using his pencils.

Hefin used his pencil to make another mark on the eight-by-eight-by-four-inch block of oak he was going to start to carve today, as soon as he could feel the caffeine and sugar do its work. This piece would have a captured chain looping from a vase in relief, with carnations, the Ohio state flower, in both the foreground and background, spilling from the vase. An easy piece of oak to ruin, in other words.

It made Hefin think of his dad, who was a deft hand at captured chains, captured balls, other bits of carving showmanship that still earned him a nice commission for his Welsh love spoons, sold in the tourist shop of the famous Aberaeron Harbourmaster Hotel.

Hefin grabbed the back of his neck and rubbed a finger over the wood. He could hardly feel the grain under his callus. When he first came to the States with Jessica, his hands had been soft. His big plans and his work used his head, not his hands.

Jessica had loved his father’s spoons, decorated their tiny stainless-and-granite
condo kitchen with the intricate pieces bearing wax-rubbed hearts, chains, captured balls, crosses, and fancy finials. He tried to explain to Jessica, once, the lexicon of the carvings, why a spoon might have a cross over two entwined hearts and a chain. To explain why it was so overwhelming to see so much of his dad’s carving in one small place, as if she had decorated with pages from his diary.

She had never known that he had learned to carve, too. All the men in his family did, just like they learned to sail. His dad would be horrified to learn that Hefin had never carved his new wife a love spoon, might even say it accounted for their divorce.

Maybe it had.

Maybe if he had worked over a fair and straight piece of wood, thought about what he wanted to say to his lady love, if he wanted to use the old style or the new, then sanded into the small curves of the finished piece with ever finer grades of emery, rubbed in wax, left it for her on her pillow, maybe he’d have something warmer than the memory of Jessica—near less than that, now.

Maybe this had been a pearl he’d missed. Something else he dropped behind him, into the sea, when he left.

He looked away from the wood and into the three-story atrium, filled with marble and art deco flourishes. Some other man, a hundred years ago, had seen his ideas made solid, clad in marble from quarries an ocean away. He wondered what that man’s father taught him, if he had listened.

“So are you?” Phil nudged him with his shoulder just as he was taking a drink of tea. Hefin quickly stepped back so he wouldn’t splash the wood.

“Am I what, Phil? And can you really be so chatty while working out the numbers?”

Phil laughed, the bark echoing in the atrium. “Chatty, am I? Guess I am, to a man who has a demonstrated daily word quota smaller than the number of holes in his belt.”

Hefin grunted.

“Exceptions made, of course, for a certain redhead.”

Oh Jesus
. “I’m missing my larger parting tool. Just going to head to the back for a minute.”

“You’re never missing a tool, Hefin Thomas. Your parting tool set is wrapped
under the bench where it always is. You just don’t want to talk about the redhead.”

“I did. I left a bigger one in the back.” Hefin started walking away because, yeah that’s right. He had no cause to talk about Destiny. He started toward the repurposed conference room, and was halfway there, convinced he really was after his larger parting tool, but of course his whole set was wrapped up neat at the bench, as always.

He also remembered too late that Des would be back here somewhere.

He stopped in the middle of the staff access hallway, his heart suddenly a bit fast. He couldn’t go all the way back to the conference room because he’d have to walk by the area where Des might be working, and he didn’t want to bother her.

Didn’t want her to think he was looking for her, more like.

Turning around would just feed Phil’s teasing.

He took a long drink of tea he barely tasted. It went down the wrong way, almost immediately, and he spent a long minute trying to clear his pipe without making any noise.

He’d seen her come in this morning of course. Phil was teasing him because of the moment he had stood, arrested, watching her walk in wearing a skirt, a small blouse, both pretty, but it was more that he had never seen her in anything but jeans and woolly jumpers. The weather had been warmer, and her legs and arms were bare.

Those golden freckles were
everywhere
.

He watched her stop at the security desk where the guard had stopped her to give her an employee badge. He looked at the freckles gathered in the hollow between her shinbone and the curve of her calf. He looked at how they gilded her long, skinny arms, clustered over her collarbones.

They were beautiful. They made her limbs seem more naked, somehow, to be so decorated—drawing attention to the translucency of her skin and all the places he would put his mouth if she were his.

Which of course, she wasn’t.

Her bright hair was loose, straight as a pin, with fine glowing pieces of it lifted from her scalp with static.

He had watched her smile at the guard and remembered the freckles that had ignored the boundary of her lip line, small ones that had sifted themselves into the pink of
her lips, themselves.

He had thought about those freckles, in particular, last night.

Then she had started to walk toward the entry into the library proper, which would have taken her right by the work site, where he was standing, staring at her like a schoolboy who’d found the door to the ladies’ locker room open.

So he had stepped under a scaffold and pulled a tarp down over the structure, and stood still, ignoring the blush racing up hot from his neck and trying to focus on a small hole filtering light through the dark canvas.

He hid, it was true, he had hid from the ginger corona of her hair and the gorgeous obscenity of her freckles and her gray gaze that would look for him because it had been looking for him for weeks, just like he had been putting himself in the line of her regard, hanging about the workbench in the mornings, waiting.

But that was before he knew how she smiled at him, the overlapping incisors and overwhelming sweetness of it. Now he had an instinct to hide from how she spoke to him, in questions and in thanks. Of course, hiding had told him everything he didn’t want to know about what he had really noticed about Des Burnside. It wasn’t her freckles and gray eyes either. Not even her backside, round and curved away from her straight back.

He had noticed her interest in his interest, what he hadn’t been able to completely hide from her yesterday.

He had stood under the scaffold, draped in the canvas, burning with frustration at himself, at Jessica, at his stony crumble of dreams, at the entire state of Ohio. He had listened to the tap of her shoes get closer. Had listened to the tapping stop at the work site, and like a child, he had held his breath until she moved on.

Now he was standing in an empty hallway, eyes streaming from silently choking on tea, unable to make a simple decision about where to walk because he was afraid of talking to a girl.

God, though, those heartbeats in the dark, when he felt a few strands of her hair tangle in the bristles on his face, heard her fast breath. Was close enough to catch how her skin smelled warm under its veil of white soap. He had wanted to know if he laved his tongue over her pulse, would there still be a trace of bitterness from the lather.