Lucy saved the day.
As she tended to do with me.
“Wine,” she near screamed, thrusting it at me, snatching my empty beer bottle.
I took it like a life raft, more for something to hold onto than anything else. Something to anchor me to the present so I didn’t do anything dangerous like try to get lost in the past.
I didn’t do that.
I never did that.
I never worried about yesterday and I never fretted for tomorrow.
My family thought that the reason for this was the reason for everything else I did...because I was just Polly.
But the real reason for this was standing right in front of me, hands clenched at his sides, the pieces of me ground up in those closed fists.
Lucy snatched my hand not holding the wine and started to drag me toward the sofa, oblivious to the fact I was leaving a huge chunk of myself in the clenched fists of the man she’d ‘introduced’ me to.
“Now, I need to hear about this cult you’re living in. And make sure you don’t drink the Gatorade,” she demanded, eyes narrowed.
I frowned. “It’s not a cult, it’s a community of...”
And then I lost myself in the familiar. In reassuring Lucy that my latest situation would not result in my getting on the news as the fifteenth wife of an eighty-year-old man and no, I was not preparing for any sort of apocalypse.
Familiar.
But made utterly freaking alien by the man watching me, yanking at the tapestry I’d knit over the broken pieces of myself.
There was only so long I could handle that.
There was only so long any human being could handle that.
So I left, feigning an event that I had to go to. Which wasn’t a lie. There was an indie rock band playing in the Hills. And I had been planning on going. Jett, my kind of boyfriend, who I thought I’d been kind of obsessed with—until now of course—was a member of the band and I had wanted to see him.
But now I didn’t want to see him because Heath had made me see myself, really see me, the me I’d become after four years of denial, and I didn’t like it one bit.
Lucy had let me leave easily enough—well, with a raised brow and an insistence to take the taser she’d shoved into my purse.
Heath had been clenching a beer, his eyes on me, gaze heavier than anything physical could’ve been. His stare was physical. It didn’t bow down to the years between us, the years that should’ve chipped away at the feelings, the memories, until they were nothing but pebbles to be carried around, maybe stumbled upon in the wrong moments of remembering.
But this was not a pebble.
This was a mountain, heavy and all-consuming.
And I needed to run from it.
So I ran.
I wasn’t surprised he’d followed me home.
Not that I knew that much about him—two nights, no matter how amazing and life-changing, cannot tell you everything about a person. But it told me enough.
As did the way he looked at me the entire night. The way he totally and utterly shredded my insides with that intense and knowing stare.
Like somehow he’d learned everything about me in those two nights all those years ago, and he’d held onto it, carried it with him, and then the stare presented me with the truth of that.
I thought I was prepared when I opened the door he had been banging on moments after I’d closed it.
I was not.
All of my breath left my body in a low exhale seeing him standing in front of me.
I expected him to burst into the living room, that for once, was empty. It was almost a miracle. The common area was never empty, due to the kind of people that were drawn to living arrangements like this. People who didn’t live by conventional means, by society’s timetable. At the loft, there was no such thing as ‘proper’ hours. People had breakfast at midnight. Dinner at eight in the morning. Did yoga at three in the morning. Decided to take up the drums in the middle of the day.
It wasn’t for everyone.
Or even the majority.
Which was kind of the point.
In the majority, people like us were lonely. But here, loneliness was actively fought against, and almost impossible.
And I’d never felt lonely.
Because I’d never let myself. My life was designed to look like chaos. But it was really carefully planned to avoid my own demons.
Tonight had straightened up my chaos. Lined up everything so I couldn’t avoid what I was trying to hide. I’d felt exceptionally lonely when I got back to the empty loft. I’d been lonely walking the bustling streets of L.A., amongst the throngs of people, until I got home to rare silence.
Until the banging on my door.
Until he yanked me outside and then began pacing the hallway, running his fingers through his hair.
He shouldn’t be doing that.
Because it made my own fingers itch to do that. I didn’t get to that first night. He was still in the Marines then. They had buzz cuts.
He’d grown it.
It suited him.
It didn’t soften his face as it would have with other men.
It made him harsher.
Wilder.
Before, that wildness was hidden, only slightly, behind his military issue haircut. Behind his clean-shaven face, his neatly pressed clothes. I saw it of course, felt it, biblically, in the night we do not think of.
When he shed his clothes that night, he shed whatever personality the trials and horrors of war had forced him to wear. I saw it. I imprinted that onto my skin. My soul. My broken heart.
I imagined he put it right back on—that military issue personality that matched the buzzcut—when he left me in bed that Sunday morning we do not think of. Seeing him in the flesh, he must’ve. Because he was here. And I knew a lot about war. Because I campaigned for peace. And you had to know the enemy and all that.
I knew it was only those people that wore the uniform on their bodies as well as their souls that survived.
Not just physically, but managed to survive enough when they got home not to spiral into a haze of drugs, alcohol, homelessness. I knew this because I volunteered at three different homeless shelters. The number of veterans amongst the residents in such places was staggering.
But Heath had shed that uniform completely and utterly on the outside, maybe because he knew he couldn’t shed it from his soul. Or maybe I was reading too much into the fact he’d grown the previous buzz cut into a shaggy, shiny and beautiful mane that brushed his shoulders. That his strong and angled jaw was now hidden by a long and trimmed beard. That his previously large but lean muscles were now bursting from the long-sleeved tee he had pushed the sleeves up to reveal corded arms.
He was wearing all black, down to his scuffed motorcycle boots.
I’d thought he was beautiful before.
But this was something less than beautiful. Something so much more.
His eyes darted around the hallway, flickering like the tired light three doors down.
Mine stayed on him.
They couldn’t move.
And then he yanked me in. Not with his body, he still kept space between us. No, with his fricking gaze centered on me. Familiar and alien at the same time. Comforting and terrifying.
Calm and chaotic.
“This is where you live?” he hissed.
I jerked back.
Of all the things I thought he might say, this was not it.
Which was actually a good thing, because I likely wouldn’t have been able to react properly—with strength and willpower—to anything else.