Touching Scars (12 page)

I watched as his eyes cleared and he
really
looked at me now. “Shit,” he breathed.

“Timber?” I barely whispered.

His blade dropped out of his hand and made a clinking noise when it hit the ground. He looked like he was about to be sick. Swallowing hard, his eyes searched all over my face and then down to my neck.

“Oh, Christ, what’d I do?” He was speaking so low I could hardly hear him.

Very tentatively I reached up to touch his cheek. As soon as my fingers made contact with his skin, he shoved off of me so fast you would have thought I burned him. The pained expression from his eyes made my heart ache.

“Timber?” I asked again, just a little louder.

He paced back and forth a few times before he stopped and looked at the ground. He ran his hands through his hair and sighed. I was still lying completely motionless on the ground, unsure of what to do next. Slowly he brought his eyes back to me. His features hardened and I knew he’d officially shut me out.

“You okay?” His tone was clipped.

I barely nodded my head.

“Good. I’ve got to go.” He grabbed his keys from the kitchen counter and walked out the door before I even had a chance to process what just happened. Slowly rolling over onto my stomach, I laid my head on my forearms.

What the fuck just happened here? I barely remembered anything about last night. When I woke up I had looked around my still darkened room. My stomach had rolled from the alcohol.
I was never drinking tequila again
! On my bedside table there had been a glass of water and two aspirin. Sitting up in my bed, I had seen two very large feet hanging over the arm of the couch and I had somehow known they belonged to Timber. That thought warmed me. He stayed with me last night to watch over me. I’d never had a guy do that before- well besides Roger, but that didn’t count. After taking the medicine, I had gone and perched myself on the edge of the coffee table and stole a few moments to watch him sleep. His brows had been furrowed and he was apparently dreaming about something. My initial thought was, ‘
how cute, he can even look grumpy in his sleep
.’ It stopped being cute when he started shaking his head back and forth, mumbling incoherently. It didn’t take long before he started thrashing around. I tried to wake him by calling his name, but it wasn’t working. Even as I jostled his shoulder, he wouldn’t open his eyes. Then all of a sudden he
did
, and I found myself pinned beneath him with a knife to my neck. I don’t even know how he moved that fast. An average person would have been terrified of dying in that moment, but I wasn’t. I wasn’t scared for me at all. I was scared for him. I’d never seen a man look as lost as he did. It took my breath away.

 I’d wanted to fix him. My desire was so strong — just to wrap my arms around him and whisper ‘It’ll be okay, you’re safe’ in his ear. He pulled away from me before I got a chance to do more than touch his cheek. His warmth had seeped through me, and now that he wasn’t here, I felt cold and bereft. It made me want to cry. How did I got from being skeptical of his intentions to wanting to give him my shoulder and fix him?

I’m not sure how long I laid there, but I figured it was time for me to get up and shower. I’d dwelled on what happened for far too long and I had errands to run before the bar opened. Ed needed me to head to the post office to mail his bills and then to the grocery store to get things such as limes, lemons, maraschino cherries, and oranges. I got up from the floor and headed to the shower to strip down but was brought to a stop in front of the mirror. On the left side of my neck was a deep red line. The knife hadn’t broken the skin, but it had apparently bruised me. Great. I’d have to think of something to tell Ed, Mel, and Beaver because they would undoubtedly ask me about it, unless of course, I braided my hair to the side to hide it. I stepped into the shower and stood there for a while, just feeling the spray soothe my muscles. It helped relax me enough that my hangover was slowly subsiding. I made a mental note before I got out that I’d need to carry a bottle of water around with me today. Rehydrating myself would keep the nausea from rearing its ugly head.

I loved stopping in the post office for nothing more than to talk to Marg and Henry. They ran the place and had for the past fifty years. When I looked at them, I could see what Ed and Rose might have been like. I made me hurt a bit for Ed because his love was gone, but I also liked knowing that he had had a love like that.

Marg ran the front counter, weighing packages, selling stamps, and putting the mail in people’s PO boxes. Henry typically worked in the back and sorted the incoming and outgoing mail. They’d broken down and hired someone younger to go out and actually drive the mail car after Henry had a heart attack in front of someone’s house five years ago. Since then, he and Marg decided that it was best to keep him close by in case something else happened. He’d received a pacemaker after the attack, but it still scared poor Marg to death that she’d almost lost her husband.

“Good morning, my lovely young girl. And how are we doing on this fine Tuesday?” Marg greeted me with a warm smile.

I looked into her kind light blue eyes that reminded me so much of my own grandma and answered, “I’m doing all right. Just dropping off some of Ed’s mail. Do you have anything back there that you’d like me to take back with me?”

“Well, let me check.” She walked in the back for a minute and came out with a small stack of envelopes. She handed them to me. “Here ya go, my dear.”

“Thanks, Marg. I’ll let Ed know you said hello.” She said ‘yes ma’am’ to my retreating back. But before I left, I decided to ask a question.

“Hey Marg, can I ask you something?”

“Of course. You can ask me anything you’d like.”

I chewed on the inside of my cheek, unsure of where to start. “Henry served in the Army, right?”

“He sure did. Did twenty-three years. Why’d you ask?”

“
Well, because I have this friend. I knew him from a while ago, and he recently came into town for some work.” I divulged this bit of information, knowing that she’d never go around gossiping. “Anyway, he just recently got out of the Army, but I’d heard he’d done some time overseas. He seems…different.”

She nodded her head in understanding. “That’s because he is, honey.”

“What do you mean?”

“Let me tell ya somethin’, when Henry came back from World War II and fighting in Japan, it was like the Army gave me back a different husband. He’d seen things that couldn’t be unseen. People were shot right in front of him, some of them by his own hand. That naturally changes a person. Henry had changed to protect his mind from going crazy. If he dealt with all of it at one time, he would have self destructed.” She leaned against the counter. She looked at me thoughtfully, then reached across the counter and patted my cheek. I hadn’t even realized I had walked back towards her. “If you’re worried that you won’t see the same person that your friend once was, don’t be. It takes time for them to understand it all, and I’d like to believe that they do it in their own time. He’ll come back to you, honey.” She gave me a small smile and a knowing look.

I nodded, rubbing my lips back and forth. “Thanks. I appreciate your honesty.” I made my way out of the post office and started my car. I sat there, looking out my windshield, letting this new revelation sink in.

Timber had never been my favorite person in high school. But then that one day — the day that he spoke to me in the parking lot — I had started looking at him differently. He’d made an effort to see if I was okay. None of them ever stooped to my level and tried to talk to me. I never felt like I was worth their time. He made that all different that day. That was the day I stopped viewing him as a self-centered asshole. I had begun crushing on Timber. I felt like he wanted more than his friends did. I had started paying attention to him outside of grading his biology papers. He no longer stood off to the side while his friends teased those that weren’t a part of their clique. He would tell them to leave them alone then distract them with something else. Many nights after what Adam did to me, I had laid in bed and wondered what Timber would have done if he knew what his friend did. I made up a whole fairytale in my head that he had come into the shower room before Adam had succeeded in taking advantage of me. He draped a towel around my shoulders and comforted me, after he had kicked Adam’s ass, of course. That dream was all I’d had to help me sleep at night. It brought me more comfort than I should have let it. So many nights I had let myself close my eyes and drift off to my own imagination giving me relief.

I really didn’t want to be thinking about this. I started my car and drove to the grocery store and then made my way to the bar. Mel was already there when I walked in. She was positively glowing. When she looked up from behind the counter, she grinned at me from ear to ear.

“And just what might you be so happy about, Ms. Smiley?” I laughed.

“Giiirl…” she drew the word out. “I have some oversharing for you.”

“Uh oh. From the look on your face, I’m almost certain I don’t want to know.”

She shook her head. “No way, you get to know every juicy little detail. Bring those bags of fruit over here and have a seat. We can cut it while I dish.”

I made my way to the counter and sat down on a bar stool in front of her. She bent down to grab a knife and cutting board and we divvied up the work.

Mel began slicing and talking. “Do you remember anything about last night?”

“Yeah, some. Why?”

“You basically told Beaver and me that we should just fuck and get it over with.” She stopped cutting to look up at me, raising her eyebrow. I vaguely remembered saying something along those lines, but played dumb and kept working on making lime wedges. “Anyway, I think it came as quite a shock to Beaver because he asked me if it was true.”

“If what was true?”

“If I liked him and wanted to do ‘the dirty.’ He accused me of toying with him. I ended up slapping him across the face and told him that he could take his amazing mouth and go fly a kite, and that any interest I’d had was now off the table. Would you believe that the only thing he’d heard me say was ‘amazing mouth’?”

I laughed. “Yeah, I could totally see that.”

“Yeah, me too, cause after a bit of back and forth fighting, when Timber had taken you upstairs, he ended up picking me up, laying me down on this bar and having his way with me.” She sighed dreamily. “It’s true, you know. How he got his nickname and all.”

My smile was promptly wiped off of my face and replaced with disgust. “Ewww! You two fucked on the bar? This bar? The one that we are cutting fruit on? Oh God. Please tell me you bleached it.”

She gave a really ditzy giggle. “I wiped it down, you spaz. Calm down.”

“You wiped it down? With what, soap and water?”

“I’m going to slap you if you keep ruining my ‘I just got the best tongue job of my life’ moment. And it was… the
best
tongue job I’ve ever gotten.”

I gagged. Plugging my ears, I started singing, “la la la… I can’t hear you. I don’t want to know anything else.” We both started laughing and sliced faster, needing to finish before The Hole opened in a couple of hours. “No more over sharing, okay?”

“Psh, if I’m getting laid, you’re going to know about it.”

Oh God.

That night I’d kept glancing at the front door, expecting to see Timber. I found myself hoping that he would come in and sit down, just like he had for the past several evenings.

Night after night passed and no Timber. It really became obvious when, after a full week had gone by and he still hadn’t stepped foot in The Hole, that he was avoiding me. I thought maybe he had been busy and just didn’t have time. Bull shit. I knew why he hadn’t come in.

I debated a few times about going and finding him, but I wasn’t sure if that was the appropriate thing to do. So he had showed up at the beach,
once
. So he had stayed the night to take care of me,
once
. That didn’t give me an excuse to go tracking the guy down and demand to know why he was avoiding me.