Light the Lamp (17 page)

“
What’s that?” There was a smile in her eyes when she gazed up at me, all innocence.

“
I’ve never been jealous of Babs’s cheek until just then, when you kissed him,” I ground out. “Because I know the feel of your lips on my chin. And I want to feel them everywhere.”

“
Oh,” she said. She sucked in a breath as soon as that solitary word came out of her mouth.

I couldn’t take my eyes off her lips—the perfect bow shape of them, and the way her tongue darted out to wet them because she was nervous. Her chest was rising and falling with each breath she took, and her lips were perfectly parted, just enough for me to gain easy entry. And I wanted that. I wanted to kiss her so badly I could almost taste her. My shower had done nothing to ease the ache that had built within me from the feel of her body against mine.

I leaned in, and so did she. Her blue eyes were dark and hungry. My lips were only inches from her, and the clean scent of her soap tickled my nostrils.

“
Wait,” Noelle said just before our lips met. She put her hand on my chest, as though that could prevent me from moving any closer.

But I had no intention of kissing her if it wasn’t what she wanted. I needed for her to want it as much as I did. I pulled back and shook my head. “What’s wrong? Do you not want—”

“
Are you about to kiss me or Liv?”

Until she stopped me, the only thought in my head had been about Noelle. Now that she had mentioned Liv, though, I doubted I’d be able to get her out of my mind. She’d been my first girlfriend. She’d been my wife. I’d never kissed anyone else. Kissing Noelle would change everything. It would change me.

I felt like the biggest ass in the world.

 

 

Liam didn’t answer
me. Not in words, at least, but his eyes told me everything I needed to know. They clouded over with that darkness that seemed to grab him every time he thought about Liv, turning from almost golden brown to nearly black in hue.

He pulled away from me and collapsed against the back of the sofa, and I tried not to let it hurt my feelings. It wasn’t his fault that he couldn’t feel for me what I felt for him. Not really. I knew he cared for me, or else he wouldn’t always try to buy me things, but he just hadn’t finished grieving his wife yet. There wasn’t a timetable you could apply to mourning someone. You couldn’t work through it in a specified number of steps, and then be done so you could move on with your life. Even when you thought you were done grieving, sometimes the pain would crop back up and smack you in the face when you were least expecting it.

I’d experienced that plenty of times in grieving for my parents. Ethan and Chris had, too. It would strike us all at different moments, and then we’d be lost in that haze of hurt again, that enormous, hollow, aching pit in the middle of our stomachs.

Looking at Liam now, sitting beside him as he stared at his hands in his lap, there wasn’t a doubt in my mind that his pit of grief was eating him from the inside. It started gnawing at me, too, building up until it threatened to crush me.

I needed to comfort him. I needed to take some of his pain before it became so great that it overwhelmed him completely, but he always put this wall up between us when it came to his pain. He wouldn’t let me in. Each time he got so overcome by his grief that he couldn’t see the goodness of life, he retreated further into himself and pushed me away.

I’d thought we had made some progress on that score this afternoon, when he’d told me more about losing Liv. I’d thought maybe he was getting to a point where he could trust me to take some of the hurt from him so he wouldn’t have to carry it all by himself.

That’s a lot for any one person to try to carry. If he’d give me just a little of it, maybe he could start to move forward. I wanted to try again, to see if he would let me in just a little, so I reached for his hand.

He pulled his away from me.

“
Liam?” I heard the hurt in my own voice. His hurt. My hurt. Our hurts. All rolled up together.

“
I can’t,” he whispered. “I can’t let you be swallowed up in all of this. I just can’t.”

I recoiled as though he’d slapped me in the face. It hurt me as much as a physical blow would have. Maybe more. Being here for him, listening and trying to help him with his grief, was the one thing I felt like I could do for him. But he wouldn’t let me.

“
All right,” I said slowly. One thing I’d learned over the years was that I couldn’t force people to let me share their burdens. It had to be Liam’s choice. He had to choose to let me help, and that seemed unlikely at the moment.

I leaned across the space between us and kissed his cheek, just like I’d done with Babs only a short while ago.

He flinched.

I took that as my signal that I should leave him with his demons. I got up and folded the blanket, setting it over the back of the recliner where he’d found it.

“
Good night, Liam,” I said.

He didn’t respond. He didn’t even look at me.

I went into my bedroom and closed the door.

“
Good night, Noelle,” he said, just loud enough for me to make out his muffled words through the wall.

I collapsed on my bed, desperate to come up with some way I could help him. It wasn’t even about getting him to be able to care for me the way I was starting to care for him. That wasn’t important. I could guard my own heart.

I would have to, just like always.

But if he wouldn’t let me do
anything
, how could I possibly stay beyond the initial week I’d agreed to? I felt as if I was abusing the situation, taking advantage of his generosity, and that didn’t sit well with me. It pressed against my heart and created a whole new sort of unfamiliar ache, and I didn’t have the first clue how to get rid of this one.

Apart from leaving him. If only the thought of leaving didn’t cause another ache of its own.

I took the
Max across town to Helping Hands the next day while Liam and Babs were at their morning skate.

Cindy Wakefield, my former boss, looked up when I came through the door. She was smiling at first, but then she glanced out the window and frowned, a deep crease forming between her eyebrows. “Where’s your car? And why haven’t we seen you in forever? I’ve been worried.”

“
We’ve
been worried,” Phil Tate corrected her as he came in from the kennels. He shoved his long, stringy blond hair over his shoulder and sat down behind his desk. “You haven’t been here to shower in a long time. No word from you. Nothing.”

There was no alleviating the worried look in Cindy’s eyes. “You know you can come stay with me anytime, hon. Rob won’t mind if you’re on the couch for a while.”

Phil and Cindy were the only two employees who worked here. They worked crazy hours because there was way too much work for only two people to do. That was why I’d worked here for so long. But there just wasn’t enough money to pay anyone else. Another employee’s salary could be spent on helping so many dogs instead, and that was the whole purpose of the organization, after all.

I gave them a sheepish smile. “I never meant to worry you! I’m sorry.” I took a seat behind my old desk. It was covered with the makings of a big mailing—asking for donations—and I automatically started stuffing envelopes. “There was a bit of a problem with my car—”

“
Did your radiator finally give out?” Phil interrupted. “I told you I could help you with that.”

“
Not exactly,” I hedged, but then I had to wonder why I was trying to hide anything from them. Cindy and Phil had been my two closest friends for years. They looked out for me. They deserved to know what had been going on in my life. I set the envelope in my hands down and met Phil’s concerned eyes. “It overheated when I was coming back from an interview in Salem. I pulled onto the shoulder to let it cool down, and a man stopped to help me. He didn’t want me to stay where I was because it was dangerous, so I went—”

“
You left with a man you didn’t know?” Cindy practically shouted at me. She pushed back from her desk so she could really look at me, whereas she had been continuing to work on her computer while we talked. “Noelle, that’s just not a good idea, hon…”

“
It was fine. He took me to a well-lit parking lot and would have called for a tow truck but a pickup truck hit my car.”

“
Pickup?” Phil stared at me, dumbfounded. “On the Hawthorne Bridge Saturday night? That was your car that burned up?”

I shrugged, sheepish. “You know about that?”

“
It was all over the news!” he said. “Of course we know about it. How could we have missed it?”

Cindy got up and came around her desk, sitting on the edge of it with her ankles crossed. “That’s been almost a week, Noelle. Where have you been all this time?”

“
Liam took me back to his place—”

“
Liam?” Phil interrupted again. “Do we know Liam?”

“
The man who saved me.”

“
You not only got in a car and drove off with a man you’d never met before, but you
went home with him
?”

I’d never seen Phil so upset before. He was usually calm and collected. That was why he was so good with the dogs. Some of them had been abused or neglected by the time they got here. He helped them learn that sometimes, a human touch could be loving. He gave them a possibility for a good future.

Right now, though, he was livid.

“
He’s a nice man,” I said. “No, he’s better than that. He’s a
good
man, and he’s gone out of his way to take care of me.” I wasn’t sure why I felt the need to defend Liam to my friends. The two of them might never meet him. Maybe it was better if they didn’t. But I couldn’t seem to stop myself from wanting to be sure Phil and Cindy didn’t think poorly of him.

“
Yeah, I bet he’s
taking care
of you. In exchange for what?”

And that was the problem. Liam wasn’t getting anything in return. Nothing at all, not even what Phil was insinuating. He hadn’t kissed me last night, and I couldn’t tell if he had really wanted to kiss me or had been thinking about his dead wife, and I was so insanely confused about it all that I wanted to scream.

“
It’s not like that,” I said. I got up and headed into the kennel. The dogs would understand, and they wouldn’t make assumptions about a man they’d never met.

“
Baby girl…” Phil said on a sigh as I left.

There was a new pit bull at the back, well away from the other dogs. He was afraid, too. When I came in, he let out a low growl, trying to scare me as much as he was. I kept my distance from his cage, talking to the other dogs and taking a few of them out to play. That way, he could get to know my voice and start to figure out that I wasn’t here to harm him.

I understood dogs like this one. It was easy to figure out their motivations.

For that matter, I understood why Phil and Cindy were reacting like they were. They just wanted to be sure I was safe. They’d known me for years, since I’d started coming to help out with the dogs when I was fifteen.

The only one I couldn’t seem to understand—to really, truly understand—was Liam.