Hate (31 page)

With my help, we settled it over her head and down to her hips. I briefly lifted her again, just enough to slide the gown past her bottom, and then settled her in the seat once more.

Gram was one of those people who would have given anything to still be able to move around with the abandon she once did. In fact, she’d moved freely not that long ago. But she took it in stride, her positive attitude almost always leading to jokes rather than tears.

I took her straight to the sink and we both washed our hands. We worked in silence but also in tandem.

She’d only been here for about a week, but we moved like we had been doing this forever.

Most people didn’t take care of their grandparents this way. In fact, most people didn’t ever take care of anyone this way, outsourcing the care of their parents and loved ones to professional nurses and caretakers. And there was absolutely nothing wrong with that. Actually, it was often right. But, for me, with this, with Gram, right now, this was meant to be. It felt right. It felt natural. It felt like what I was supposed to be doing with my time.

We exited the bathroom quietly, the door lacking the squeak of an older door and headed straight for the kitchen so she could say goodnight.

Blane rounded the kitchen island, coming straight to her chair and squatting down to her level.

He didn’t hesitate to lean in, to grab her and pull her close to his body, the strength of his hug fierce and real. So many people hugged older people too gently, too squeamishly, afraid of their frailty and seemingly fading health alike. But not Blane.

Gram let out an excited squeak, hugging him back even more strongly and planting a fat, wet kiss on the apple of his cheek.

He laughed, an honest, deep, hearty laugh, the muscles of his neck tensing and flexing as she held onto him without letting go.

“You sure know how to hug a man, don’t you?”

She laughed again, this time with a youthful exuberance that was almost comical.

And I found myself laughing too, getting sucked into the moment and enjoying their embrace almost as much as I would have enjoyed my own.

“Goodnight, darling,” Blane whispered, looking up at me and giving me an excruciatingly slow wink.

“Night, hot stuff,” she responded. “Be here in the morning. And if you really want to do me a favor, be naked.”

His face lit up, a smile so bright that it reflected the light of the room off of his eyes and shone all the way onto me.

I felt my cheeks expand, the happiness too much to keep out of a smile.

Grabbing the handles of Gram’s chair, I turned her away, knowing that if I left them much longer, things would start to get really scandalous.

Signaling to Blane with a strategically placed lift of my eyebrows, I suggested that he wait for me out on the back deck as I settled Gram into bed. If he wanted to talk, we were going to do it with several sound muffling walls between us and the horny old lady.

She was old, and she couldn’t hear all that well, but if it was scandalous, she’d find a way.

After all, she loved anything juicy.

Once in her room, I helped her into bed and turned on the TV. I went to recordings and selected today’s episode of General Hospital, making sure it was set to play from the beginning.

“You’re all set, Gram. Let me know if Jason wakes up. Though, I’m not all that interested since it’s not going to be Steve Burton anymore.”

“No worries,” she told me as she wiggled her way into a comfortable position. “I’m sure they’ll pick some other hunk to replace him. And if you really need to drool, just get the hell out of my room and play a little slap and tickle with the real life hunk out there.”

“Slap and tickle?” I questioned incredulously.

“You’re not into the slapping? That’s okay. I’m sure he’ll find plenty of stuff to do with you.”

“Goodnight, Gram,” I said as I moved to the door, ignoring her.

She smirked, and then turned up the volume on the TV, humming along to the theme of General Hospital.

Wasting no time—she was in her Soap Zone—I moved to the door and exited, clicking it closed gently behind me.

Instead of heading towards the kitchen, or even more directly, the deck, I went to my bedroom and did a quick check of my stink factor.

How were my pits holding up? Did I smell grotesquely of restaurant food? That kind of thing.

Satisfied that my smell wasn't repulsive, I gave my teeth a quick brush, the grease from the pizza surrounding my mouth too much of a gross out factor to leave it, and headed back out of my room before I could chicken out.

I glanced into the kitchen, finding it empty and then made my way out to the deck to join the handsome man who’d spent the last thirty minutes patiently waiting for me.

I found him easily, his feet propped up on the stone of my outdoor coffee table, his back slouched into the cushion of my slightly springy chairs.

I expected to see his head bowed, perhaps passing the time on a phone by playing a game or surfing the internet, but his eyes were up, scanning the rest of the neighboring yards.

As I settled into the seat next to him, his eyes stayed forward, so I tried to follow them with my own.

“What are your neighbors like?” he asked, seemingly out of the blue.

I turned to face him, unable to distinguish his line of sight, and answered honestly. “I have no idea. I’ve never met my neighbors.”

That brought his head around, the lines of his surprise lifting his features upward. “Never?”

I shook my head in the minimal light coming from inside the house.

“None of them?” he questioned further.

I pursed my lips before shaking my head again.

“Well,” he murmured, turning back to the fenced-in yards surrounding mine. “That house over there,” he pointed, “looks to be a young family, our age approximately, a couple of kids of both genders. And the father’s either skipped out or something happened to him because the basic maintenance seems to be lacking.”

I didn’t know what he was doing, but I played along. “Maybe he’s just lazy.”

“Maybe,” he said with a shrug. “But it looks like everything had been pretty well maintained up until, oh, say four or five weeks ago.”

I looked closer, realizing he was right. God, I hoped whoever she was, she was alright.

He moved on to the next yard, pointing in the opposite direction. “And this one over here? It’s gotta be a bachelor type. All of his stuff is top of the line, real tech savvy bullshit, but there are absolutely no feminine touches.”

“What’s your point?” I asked, the curiosity reaching a boiling point.

“You’ve lived here how many years?”

My eyebrows pulled together. “Five.”

“Exactly. You close people out.”

“No, I don’t,” I argued immediately. Sure, I used to be a real loner, and maybe I didn’t really have any close friends, but I wasn’t pushing people away. If I found someone who really interested me, I’d embrace them.

His eyes narrowed, determination flooding them.

“I love you,” he blurted without preamble.

I practically choked, scoffing and sputtering until I finally formed words, and my heart felt like it did a flip in my chest.

Where the hell had that come from?

“I thought you understood that I wasn’t ready to deal with that yet.”

“I know that you think you’re not ready to deal with it yet.” He shrugged. “But I am.”

I huffed, indignant, but unable to say anything even remotely intelligent.

“What’s so hard to understand?”

I pinched the features of my face, my chin retreating into my neck with disbelief. “Um, everything.”

He grinned. “Simplify it. Break it down for me.”

“I haven’t seen you in years. Many, many, many years. All of a sudden you’re just in love with me? I don’t buy it.”

“Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and that’s saying something because my heart was already pretty fucking fond of you. Add in the advanced emotional training of experiencing a near death experience with you…of experiencing
your
near death, and things get clear pretty quickly. We’re living in a get busy living, or get busy dying type of world. I’m not into wasting any more time.” I sat shell-shocked as he searched my eyes. “God, Whit. Didn’t you feel it the other night?” He continued to stare at me, my nervous energy forcing me to lick my lips, close me eyes tight, and clench my fists. When I opened them again, his eyes captured mine and didn’t let them go. “I
know
you did.”

My pulse thrummed, the truth of his words instigating the last vestiges of my fight.

“Come on. You left. I practically hand delivered myself to you. Actually, no, not practically, I fucking did deliver myself to you. I jumped through a lot of hoops to come see you that day on the base. You pity kissed me, but that was about it.”

“Pity?” he asked, shocked. “You thought that was pity?”

“Well, you left. What else could it have been?”

He sat forward, slamming his feet down on the ground and grabbing at my hands.

“I had a contract with Uncle Sam. They don’t make you sign the thing in blood, but you might as well. I had absolutely no choice but to leave. And I had to do it right that second. I already got the shit shift for going to see you at all.”

“But you didn’t say anything,” I argued, the fight slowly slipping out of me.

“What was I going to do, ask you to wait for me?” He scoffed. “No way. I would never do that to you. Not to mention, my head was seriously messed up back then. I’d lost too much to see everything I had.”

“But that’s just it. How can you love me, when you loved Franny?”

He shook his head, mystified. “I’m not following.”

“I’m not Franny. I’m not even anything like her.”

The light seemed to dawn.

“You’re right. You’re not Franny. But
she
wasn’t
you
either.”

I swallowed hard, the back of my throat feeling scratchy and dry.

I could feel the monster inside me clawing at me from the inside out, my nervousness working its way up my throat and out my mouth in the form of his name.

“Blane…”

Something shifted in his eyes, and his face transformed from serious back to playful quickly. At the same time his eyes gentled, reaching out to me as though they had arms of their own.

“I’m just lucky enough to have known you both. Biblically.”

I laughed, a single burst of amused disgust coming up like emotional vomit.

“Don’t be creepy,” I said while fighting my grin.

“Ah. But when I’m creepy, you smile.”

“That’s because I’m picturing you serving jail time.”

He grinned. “No. It’s not.”

He was right. It definitely wasn’t.

We sat silent for several minutes, staring out at the houses that backed up to mine. For the first time ever, I took the time to really look at them, taking guesses at what their lives might be as Blane had done. Almost all of the possibilities scared me. Some seemed happy, some seemed sad. But almost all of them seemed valuable, not just to them, but to
me
, and I’d never thought of them that way before.

Turning back to face me, Blane broke the silence, turning his body and chair to face me completely, propping up his foot on the empty portion of my seat rather than the table.

“If you were going on date, assuming it’s with someone other with Jesus, what are you looking for?”

I took a deep breath, and then turned to meet his eyes. “You want the real answer?”

“Always,” he replied, steadfast.

“I just want a guy that I can sit on my couch with while I watch Project Runway. I’d probably order some Chinese food, drop fifty or so percent of it all over my pajamas, and inhale the rest. That’s what I want.”

“So why can’t you have that?” His hand cupped his jaw and his elbow leaned into the arm of the chair.

“Because that’s not what guys want!”

“Who says?”

“God, I say. The last guy I went out was just like all the others. He’s looking for the sexy, adventurous girl. The one who wants to climb mountains and point their furniture at a painting rather than a TV.” I huffed a breath and then flapped my arms like wings. Small ones. “The kind of girl who likes to eat salad while he has the steak and does Yogalates every day to keep the extra inch of off her stomach.”

“Yogalates?”

“I want to lay on my couch and eat cheese dip. I want the biggest TV I can find, and I’ll take any kind of meat I can get my mouth on.”

He sat forward, leaving his foot on my chair but leaning distinctly in my direction.

“Say that, and you’ll have any guy you want, cheese dip and TV watching aside.”

“Say what?”

“The thing about meat in your mouth. Guys
really
like that. And guys like TV too. I don’t know who you’ve been going out with that would rather look at a painting, but maybe you need to reevaluate. Unless the painting is of a nude woman.”

“I swear you didn’t used to be this big of a perv.”

“No, I was,” he disagreed. “I just didn’t really push you on the whole sex thing. On account of you being a prude and all.”

“I was not a prude!”

“Okay,” he nodded, his agreement purely a form of well-crafted coddling.

“I wasn’t.”

“Well, like I said, say that meat thing, and no one will accuse you of it now.”

“Blane…” I started as he stood up abruptly.

“Tomorrow, I want to go on an honest to God date. No excuses, no bullshit, no one but you and me, and that means living or dead. We’re not gonna carry any of our baggage around with us tomorrow. I just want one night. One night, where it’s just
you
, and just
me
.”

That sounded…amazing.

I stood, eager to make myself more even with him as I nodded. “Okay.”

I probably should have seen it coming, but I didn’t. I was so lost in the moment, lost in the alternate universe of the night, dinner and this talk, this time with Blane that I wouldn’t give back if you paid me, that I wasn’t ready. I didn’t guard against it, I didn’t resist, and I didn’t mind when his lips met mine.

They were soft at first, asking for entrance, and I was all ready to grant permission. But I didn’t work fast enough, and their gentle strokes turned rougher, this time demanding to be let in.