Random Acts of Hope (10 page)

I started laughing at her perpetually surprised look as I got dressed, then threw her under my arm and took off. A
s
I walked out the main doors, one of the gym freaks called out, “Happy elopement,” and I shot him a grin and my middle finger.

5:09 a.m. Most people were about to get up.

I was
just
getting started.
At least I knew what to do next. Me and Esme were going on a road trip to see an old friend.
 

Charlotte

“
You’ll probably find her sometime in the next month or two, growing in a wall or trapped in someone’s kitchen,” the animal control specialist explained. Sunrise had just started and the slow trek of Walk of Shame coeds began, their faces down, women hiding behind curtains of bedhead hair. We were on the third-floor stairwell and no one said a word as they quietly peeled off to their various floors, the
snick
of the doors closing like an agreed-upon code.
 

Let’s pretend this never happened.

The stairwell reeked of sour alcohol and beer sweat, w
i
th a touch of cotton candy perfume (the current craze in this dorm, for some reason).
I, however, was not on any kind of Walk of Shame. Hadn’t had one of those in, well…
ever.
 

Instead, I was currently dealing with an escaped snake. And no, not a one-eyed trouser snake.

I wish.

“You’re telling me we just have to accept the fact that a six-foot boa constrictor—”
My voice sounded foreign to me, the words impossible.
 

“Six foot snake of undetermined type,” she corrected. Roberta Smailes looked so much like Liam’s mother I did a double take, except this w
a
s her
doppelgänger
in a weird sort of way. If Sybil McCarthy had majored in animal science and worn hiking boots
and
old L.L. Bean flannel shirts, and never touched makeup or hair color, this could be her.

I towered over her, just like I did with Sybil.

“S
i
x-foot snake is the operative phrase.” I sighed. This wasn’t her fault. “W
e
have hundreds of students in this building. They will freak
out knowing
this thing is just lurking in the building, ready to strike.”

Rober
t
a laughed, a friendly sound of great humor. I wanted to invite her over for coffee. “The most that sucker’s going to do is find a nice spot in a wall where mice and rats run up your pipes. It’ll have a field day in there. Like a snake luxury resort with an endless supply of food.”

“But we bait for mice and rats.”

She scowled. “Then if the snake eats a poisoned rodent, the snake has a strong chance of dying, too. You’ll know where it is by the smell of its decomposing body.”

“Even better,” I muttered. “Those are the scenarios?”

She frowned, thinking for a moment, then gave me a smirk. “Or it slips out of the building one day in search of better hunting grounds. Then someone reports a giant escaped snake and you have a million news crews here.”

“I don’t like any of these choices,” I muttered, then yawned.

She shrugged. “I can’t find her. If I could, I’d haul her away.” She reached into the breast pocket of her flannel shirt and handed me a business card. “If you see a new bulge in a wall, or hear scuffling sounds in one, call me.”

“A bulge in a
what
?”

“The wall. If
the snake
gets comfortable and has a steady supply of food, it will grow. And it might start to push out the wall if it’s wedged somewhere.”

“Oh, God.” I pictured the parent calls.

She clapped me on the shoulder and started to leave. “I don’t envy you,” she called out as she stomped down the stairs.

“Me either.”

“
It’s never fun when a snake just suddenly appears out of nowhere,” she said, snickering.
 

I walked down the stairs a flight behind her, peeling off to my first-floor hallway as she went outside through the exit, the dull-grey light of 6 a.m. a brutal reminder of the night. No one goes into residence life for routine and predicability. That’s for sure.

“Another
morning
for earplugs and a noise machine,” I muttered to myself as I keyed into my apartment, my eyes darting around on the ground. I wasn’t getting much sleep, though. Not with a fucking six-foot snake terrorist living among us.

Someone came into my peripheral vision just as I opened my door. A brown-haired, short woman. I began speaking as I pulled the key out. “Unless it’s an emergency, I’m going to bed, so—”

I turned to find a woman perpetually surprised.

Esmeralda. And attached to her was a big old snake.

More than six feet tall.

My eyes narrowed. “You,” was all I could say. In spite of myself, my hands flew to my hair. It felt like a rat’s nest in a ponytail. My clothes were about as glamorous as you’d expect for a middle-of-the-night call about a loose snake.

Liam looked fresh and wild, his hair slightly wet and his face so raw I couldn’t breathe.

“Me,” was all he said.

“And Esme.”

“She’s a lousy conversationalist,” he said.

My pulse raced and a deep sense of unease poured through me, quickly followed by a rush of hope. Hope
that
I did not welcome, want, or embrace. Once you let ho
p
e come back in you know that pain is next, and I’d spent so much time trying to be resil
i
ent, to make sure that if I couldn’t feel hope, I’d never feel pain.

If Liam hurt me again I didn’t think I could ke
e
p breathing.

“Why are you here?” I asked, my voice cracking.

He frowned, his eyes uncertain, his hands in tight fists. Then he let out a small sound that was supposed to be a laugh but didn’t quite make it. “I don’t know. I practiced a hell of a lot of answers to that question on the drive here, but all of them sound stupid.”

I leaned against the doorjamb and crossed my arms over my breasts. It made me feel infinitesimally more safe. “Try me.”

The air between us crackled with five years of unspoken words, one dead baby, one amazing kiss and…er….one sex doll.

I stared at her and realized I had to get her out of the hall.

Liam followed my look and laughed, but before he could say anything, old Ernie, the retired head of campus security who still took occasional weekend shifts, lumbered down the hallway. He looked like Wilford Brimley, with a long, grey walrus mustache and gold-rimmed glasses, though he weighed about a hundred pounds less. Even his voice was similar, and he impressed the stude
nts
by saying “diabeetus” over and over from an internet meme.

Ernie looked at me and smiled, then turned to Liam with an outstretched hand for a shake. He halted as his eyes skimmed over Esme.

“Now that’s a sight you don’t see every day,” he said drolly.
Then he turned and gave Liam the once-over, tipping his chin up. Ernie was five and a half feet tall on a good day.
 

“You do in
r
es
l
ife,” I said, returning his smile.

“Ernie Driscoll,” he said to Liam,
shaking his hand
. “Everyone round here just calls me Old Ernie.”

“Hey, Ernie,” Liam said. “Liam McCarthy.”

“
That your bucket of bolts out in the main parking lot?” Ernie asked Liam, eyes slowly assessing him.
 

“Yes, sir.”

“The one without a visitor’s parking pass?”

Liam gulped. Ernie had a way of making you feel like you were an errant nine-year-old kid. Liam’s eyes shifted to me, and I wordlessly went into my office and grabbed a visitor’s pass. I guess he was staying.

My heart skipped in double time at the thought as I handed it to Liam.

I
ntroductions completed, Ernie turned to me and raised his bushy, overgrown eyebrows.

“I’m assuming she’s not yours,
m
issy,”
he said, pointing to Esme.
Any other campus professional called me
m
issy
and
I’d be down their throats in three seconds. Ernie was the only one who could get away with it. He made me nostalgic for my grandpa, who died when I was in eighth grade.

“
Not mine.”
 

“Yours?” he said to Liam, eyebrows inching even higher. His eyes took in Liam from stem to stern
again
. “You don’t look like you need to be finding your booty from a plastic doll.”

Liam choked on his response. “No, sir.”

Ernie reached out for the parking pass. “Your car’s unlocked,” he declared, pulling a flashlight out of his holster. “I checked. Not smart. But it means I’ll put this pass in there and make you legal. Lock your car for you, too.” As Ernie’s bushy eyebrows met in a disapproving frown, they looked like a squirrel’s tail.

Liam flushed red and handed over the pass, a little too obedient. Was he as nervous as I was about seeing each other?

Ernie picked up Esme. “Oh, don’t be so surprised, Dolly,” he muttered as he tucked her under one shoulder and began his lopsided walk down the stairs. “I’ll help you find a nice boy down by the dumpster where you can get it on. Maybe there’s a cardboard cutout of that Justin Bieber kid,
l
ike there was a few weeks ago. You two can see if it’s a love match.”

Liam shook his head sadly as Ernie disappeared. “
I’ll never meet another woman like Esme.”
 

“You can buy another one.”

He eyed me with a look so focused and determined.
“Is that what I need to do to get you to come to a gig again and kiss me?”

“I didn’t kiss you! You kissed me!”

And then he did it again, right there in the hallway, under the security cameras my RAs were so eager to view. In that moment, though, I wasn’t aware of anything but his hands on my hips, his lips on mine, the kiss possessive and aggressive, more in tune with the five years of resentment between us than the five years of longing.

Who could separate it all, though? The mixed emotions made a giant fireball that was erratic and dangerous, completely capable of destruction and yet so powerful it was a thing of beauty to behold.

We didn’t make a sound, his tongue breaking through and exploring, his hip sliding against my thigh, hands riding up my back to my crazy hair. Heat filled all my pulse points, caring not one whit for the unbreachable between us but instead moving with kinetic power fueled by deep want.

Desire. Not just sexual, but emotional. I needed to know him again, needed him to know and want me, and if I couldn’t fix what happened all those years ago at least I could take in the nectar of this one embrace, this one kiss, this one moment.

He pulled back and held up his palms in a conciliatory gesture.

“What
a
re you doing?” I asked, confused. I pressed my fingertips against my burning lips.

“Just making sure you don’t slap me again.”

“If I did, it’s because you deserved it.”

His eyes clouded. I’d said the wrong t
h
ing. “
We both deserve a lot of things. Some good, some bad.”
 

His words cut to the bone. “It’s 6 a.m. and I’ve just spent the last few hours trying to find an escaped six-foot snake in one of the halls. Did you come here to finally talk to me after five years of silence and pick a fight? Because that’s not going to happen.”

My hands were shaking. My torso shook. The ground, the walls, the ceiling, the sky—it all
tremored
. Some deep vibration of all the cries and fears and confusions of five years decided to be unleashed in this moment, and even Liam himself seemed to be shaking.

“I’m here, aren’t I?”

But what does that mean?
The words were right there on my tongue,
queu
ed up and ready to pour out, but something in me held back. Once they were out I couldn’t put them back in and
we were both on edge. Hell, we were both clinging to the edge by our fingernails. I could see something uncaged in Liam, unbound and free—and not in a good way. He was dangerous, and five years pushed through, unleashed and flowing. Boundaries were gone.
 

“
Y
es, you are.” Safe words. Those were the safest words I could think of. The only ones that came out.

W
e couldn’t stop looking at each other. He kept blinking, hard, and if I weren’t shaking so hard I’d have laughed. The blinking. I’d forgotten about that—how his eyes would dry out and his contacts would bother him. Did he have his glasses in his back pocket, like he so often did for emergencies? In bed we would joke that he could only see things within a few inches of his face without contacts or glasses, and he’d comment on the intimacies of my skin, tell me about scars and birthmarks and my own terrain, a lesson he would
teach with added tactile nuances.
 

His jeans hung on his hips like a muscled man, not tight across a bony teen’s pelvis but snug, molding to a built, mature ass, thickly honed thighs leading down to tall, long calves. He was most certainly cataloguing me, too. My body was so different. Five years had changed both of our landscapes, but not the heart of who we were.

And he wasn’t who I’d thought he was, which made him a stranger. An achingly familiar stranger who
m
I still mis
s
ed so deeply the
craving
lived with me like a scar.

When I’d bled and bled and bled during my miscarriage, after a while I’d felt faint. So faint it was like I star
t
ed to fade out. One part of me at a time, until it seemed I’d slip away and no longer exist. The rush to the ER, the confirmation that the heartbeat I’d heard weeks
ago
was gone, the kind RA who held my hand during the D&C to clean out my uterus and make the bleeding stop—it all happened as I slid between two worlds. Baby and No Baby, I called them.

At one point one of the nurses went over my chart and explained that I would be fine going forward and have no problem conceiving again, and that “someday” I would be able to have children if I wanted to.