“Well, hello to you too, Kevin.”
“Hi,” he stumbles out the word, his pale cheeks flaring red and his brown eyes opening wide behind his glasses. “Welcome back.”
“Thanks.”
As awkward as Kevin is, he’s entirely harmless, and Harper has never minded working with him. He always takes the insufferable customers, like the lady with the five bratty kids who always try to climb the cold case, before Harper even notices they’ve come in, always cuts the liverwurst when someone asks for it, even if it’s her customer. When Hilary comes back from her lunch break, Harper shoos her away with an, “I’ve got this,” and a smile. “Go conquer that mountain of bills on your desk or something. I saw how far behind you are.”
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely.”
The afternoon goes pretty quickly, despite the lack of customers. Behind the register, Kevin and Harper sit on stepladders nicked from the cooler and he tells her how he got tickets for the Emerald City Comic Con, but she only hears half of it, her mind straying to thoughts of Austin’s eyes at the name. When her attention comes back around, Kevin is talking about the Star Wars Expanded Universe book he’s been reading. To keep herself in the moment, she asks him questions—So, wait, Luke Skywalker isn’t in it? What about Han? Chewie?—and she finds herself wishing she had a hobby of her own to talk about in such detail. She played soccer and ran track in high school, but over time, Liam became her only real hobby. Until she finds a new one, she vows to give Kevin’s the respect they deserve, and when he offers to let her borrow some of his EU books, she gently accepts, though she’s pretty sure she won’t read them. Kevin’s whole face turns into a smile at her assent though, and Harper thinks that whatever her hobby might one day be, she wants it to make her feel like that, smile like that.
When five o’clock rolls around, Harper folds up her stepladder and seeks out Hilary. She finds her squinting at the screen of her ancient PC, elbows deep in overdue bills, and when she looks up to find Harper standing in front of her, she has to blink a few times to right her vision. “Everything okay, honey?”
“Yeah. I was just wondering if I could clock out a little early, though.”
“You don’t clock out at all,” Hilary reminds her as she slides her glasses down the bridge of her nose. “The joys of a family owned and operated business. You, my dear, were born into a life of indentured servitude, just like your mama and my mama before me.”
“You know what I mean,” Harper replies dryly, but a smirk plays on her lips. She thinks it’s nice to have the old Hilary back. And she’s sure Hilary feels the same about the old Harper.
“I do. And of course you can. Hell, I wasn’t expecting you to be here anyhow.”
“True,” she laughs. “Thanks.”
“Sure.” Hilary smiles, righting her glasses and turning back to her computer screen. “See you at home, honey.”
“I’m supposed to grab a drink with Austin tonight, so I don’t—”
“Hayward? That Austin?”
“Is there another Austin in Ashland that I have a history of social interactions with that I don’t know about?” Harper looks at her mother with an amused sort of suspicion. “Of course, that Austin. Why?”
“With everything that happened with Liam, don’t you think—”
“Just be careful, Harp.”
“Be careful?” she scoffs. “About what?”
“He’s been arrested, Harper,” Hilary says bluntly. “More than once, I might add. He isn’t—”
“I’ve been friends with him for a decade, Ma. A decade.”
“Well, you were with Liam for a decade—” Harper inhales sharply and Hilary covers her gaping mouth with both hands, horrified at her words. “I’m sorry, Harper. That came out wrong. I’m—”
“It’s fine,” Harper says quickly, a hand held up to stop her mother from making things worse. “But, unless there’s anything else, I’m going to head out.”
When Hilary nods, Harper grabs her purse from the work table and pushes through the swinging door. As the deli counter comes into view, she hears Kevin say, “Hi, Mrs. Barnes, what’ll it be?” and her breath hitches. She’s pinned in place, stuck beside the band saw in the cutting area, halfway between the back room and the floor of the shop, and she knows that Sly has spotted her through the glass that separates the two areas. She hasn’t seen Sly since before—some morning Harper and Liam rolled out of bed and stumbled into the kitchen, and Sly made her coffee with cream and two sugars, while Liam cracked eggs in a pan. Sly’s almond-shaped eyes, the ones that Liam’s blues reflect exactly, soften immeasurably at the sight of her, and Harper feels something well in her chest, her throat.
Her legs decide to run before she’s consciously made the decision to flee. She runs through the back room and past the coolers, runs away from her mother’s concerned voice as it trails after her, and bursts through the back door with a sob. She makes it halfway through the alley before she doubles over, the weight of her sorrow crumbling her to the ground.
When Austin comes to collect Harper, it’s nearly an hour later and as he rounds the corner into the back alley, he lights up a smoke. When he sees her, the cigarette falls from his lips, embers striking his forearm as it drops, and he falls with it, kneeling at Harper’s side on the cold pavement. Without question or hesitation, his arms wrap strongly around her quaking shoulders and pull her to him, but he feels no pleasure in touching her now. There’s only pain there, and as he holds her tighter, she tells him, “I’m not okay,” over and over, and the pain swells.
CHAPTER FOUR
The ticking of the clock that sits atop Austin’s mantle cuts loudly through the silence, but the sound isn’t what Harper notices when she comes to. She focuses on the fact that Austin has a mantle at all, let alone a massive brass clock set on it, and she cannot believe that in all the years she has known him, she has never been inside his house. The week he and Liam moved him into the row home Dan cosigned for on Hersey Street, Harper had the flu and couldn’t help or even oversee them as they hauled boxes and furniture out of the Barnes’ basement and across town. After that, she’d never had a reason to be there. The trio gathered at Rhodes, on the trails in Lithia Park, or at the top of Emigrant Lake’s waterslide, at Noble Coffee and the Varsity, on the floor behind the registers of Barnes Drug and Beauty while Liam worked, or on the SOU campus as Liam navigated his pre-med studies, before he left for OHSU. Harper and Austin may have been longtime friends, but they were also always two-thirds of a whole, and they never purposely spent much time together without their missing piece, even during the four years Liam spent in Portland—until now. She rubs her eyes and takes in the sound, watches briefly as the gears behind the face of the clock turn hypnotically, before her gaze drifts to the photo at the opposite end of the mantle. It’s of the three of them from the summer after she moved to Oregon, no more than a few weeks before her father’s death, and it was one of the last times she can remember being happy that year. It was always one of her favorites, not because of the picture itself, but because of the way it made her feel—loved, happy, blessed—and she needed to be reminded of that often in the months following her father’s passing. It doesn’t make her feel that way anymore, though, and she forces herself to look away as her eyes brim with tears.
In an armchair a few feet away from where she sits, Austin is folded in on himself, legs crossed and arms wrapped around his torso as if he’s holding himself back, and in a way, he is. He’s pictured her here, in this place, over and over. He’s always wondered about the way her hai
r would spill onto and blend in with the mahogany-colored leather as she lay on the sofa, the way her bare feet would sound against the bone- and ash-colored travertine tile as she led him up the stairs to his bedroom, the way her low, breathy voice might echo against the beige walls as he pleasured her first thing in the morning. He never pictured her hugging her knees to her chest and crying over Liam, though. When her watery gaze wanders over to him, his eyes are trained on her, searing in their intensity.
“Aussie,” her voice cracks around his name and she sniffles through a pause, “why am I on your couch?”
“The alleyway? Do you—” He sees her eyes fill with a semblance of recognition mingled with an ounce of discomfort, and he looks away. “You fell asleep on me and I—I figured this made sense,” he says, his voice soft and hollow. She thinks it’s because he doesn’t care, that she’s inconvenienced him, and that stings more than she thinks it should, but he knows it’s because he cares too much. It is the only reasoning he has for walking a mile in the frigid wind with a broken girl in his arms and his heart kicking in his chest, the beats of it drowning out the sounds of her whimpers.
He needs to be stoic, because she won’t hold him the way he held her. She won’t comfort him if and when he breaks down. And he wants to break down, it kills him to see her like this, but even if she would console him, she’s in no state to do so right now, and he knows it’s selfish to make her try, so he keeps his distance as best he can. “I thought here was safe. I didn’t know where else to take you,” he explains, wanting to pull her against him again, wrap her securely in his arms and show her how safe she can be, but he doesn’t move. He sits stock-still in the chair wringing his hands in his lap, a scowl fixed on his face as he helplessly watches fat tears descend Harper’s cheeks. Her hands wipe them away and then grope wetly at the leather as she repositions herself on the sofa, tucking her legs beneath her.
The damp leather reminds him of tanned skin, what his chest might have looked like if he lived under the unforgiving Arizona sun of his youth. The way her fingers press into the sofa just enough to dent the surface makes a warmth spread through him, as if he were laid out in the brutal desert heat now. If his father had never moved them to Oregon, he never would have known Liam, never would have watched him break Harper’s heart. But why would Austin care for her heart at all, he wonders. He wouldn’t know her either, if he was brought up in Arizona, and that thought saddens him more than anything. He clears his throat and returns to the present, fixates on the wall just above her head, and says, “This just made the most sense to me.”
“I’m so sorry—”
“No,” Austin tells her sternly, “you don’t get to do that. You don’t get to apologize and act like you broke all by yourself. It’s his fault, Harp. His. Not yours.”
“He’s not here,” Harper counters, her voice barely loud enough to cover the ticking of the clock, but even at the faintest volume, the depth of her sadness is apparent. “I can’t blame a ghost.”
“But that doesn’t stop the ghost from haunting you.” Austin can’t help but think of his father, of thick fists and leather belts, and the jagged scars that litter his body begin to ache. “Doesn’t stop the pain.”
“No, it doesn’t,” she agrees solemnly.
“That fucking bastard,” he seethes quietly as something starts to swell in his chest, tighten against his ribcage, and no matter how firmly his arms wrap around his torso, he can no longer hold himself back. His boots strike the tile roughly as he moves to the sliding glass door and heaves it open. His shaking hands fumble a soft pack of cigarettes and a book of matches from the pocket of his jeans. The pack is crushed from the hour he’s spent seated on it in the chair, and with his dexterity rattled, he struggles to remove a cigarette. When his fingers fail him, he shakes the pack until he gives up and pitches it viciously against the wall where the living room meets the kitchen. His anger is coming to a head, showing in his impatience and need, and he can’t stop himself from erupting. “I can’t—” He stalks across the room and back again, his hands clenching into tense fists at his sides. He knows the feeling in his chest is his heart trying to force its way to the surface, beating so hard up against his ribs that he thinks his skin will be bruised from it. “To you—of all people—I can’t—that fucking piece of shit—” He sputters and rants incoherencies and expletives until he runs out of steam and sees the worried look that has etched itself onto Harper’s face as she takes it all in. “Harper—Harper, I—fuck. I’m sorry. I just—”
“You’re angry.” She nods acceptingly, calmly, and then adds with a humorless laugh, “I get it. Trust me. If anyone gets it, it’s me.”
Austin bends at the waist to snatch a cigarette from where they’ve scattered themselves across the floor and focuses hard to light it as he moves toward her. He takes one heavy drag and then another as the spent match falls from his fingers and he kneels in front of her on the tile, his palms flattened against the leather on either side of her thighs. “Harper,” he sighs, the anger gone and replaced with something akin to longing and regret, “I never could have—” He stops himself there, unable to really put into words what he would or wouldn’t, should or shouldn’t. He hangs his head, his hair just barely brushing over Harper’s knees, and takes another drag from his cigarette, the ashes drifting carelessly onto the floor, and mixing with the first drops of his tears. He cries silently, a skill he perfected as a child, and smokes the rest of his cigarette furiously, stubbing it out in the tear-formed rill in the grout.
“I saw Sly,” she explains after some time. She finds herself wanting to explain the state he found her in, like she owes it to him. “I was fighting with my mom. And then I saw Sly. And it was like staring right into Liam’s eyes. And I just…”
“And you miss that,” he fills in the blank, his voice thick with emotion.
“No.” Harper is quiet for a moment, unspoken words lingering on her tongue. “It just—his eyes were the first thing I ever noticed about him. And I don’t know how we got from the glimmer in them when he said, Hey, new girl, come eat with us, to the deadened look in them when he told me, I don’t think that this is best for us anymore. He was the only guy I ever dated, and I thought he was it for me, you know? I thought I would be looking into those eyes forever. But seeing Sly, seeing those blues, it all just—it felt like a lie.”
“What did?”
“Loving him.”
“Oh, Harp,” he nearly whimpers with pure empathy. “We’ve got to fix you.” The words are muted, spoken to her shins and the floor, but she hears the way they come out, weighted with poignancy. She stares at him in wait until he finally looks up at her again, his eyes full of something so devastatingly broken that to stare into them stops her breath. “You deserve so much more than a broken heart—so much more.”
He hangs his head again and Harper slowly moves a hand from the sofa, tenderly brushes aside the windblown golden strands that fall haphazardly in Austin’s grey-green eyes. She feels it then, the same heat she felt at the pub, and a shiver cuts right through her, giving her justification to touch him and feel that warmth again. She strokes her hand slowly along his temple and feels herself ignite.
As much as it kills him to do so, Austin reaches up and stills her hand against his hair and through the rough hold lust has around his throat, he manages to choke out her name.
“I’m sorry—”
“I’m not,” he tells her gravely. His whole body pulses with pain, old and new. Her hands seem to stem the ache, but he knows when they go, the comfort will leave with them, and he’ll be worse off. “But I will be.”
“Why?”
“Because if you touch me like that—” Her fingers slide from beneath where they’re tucked under his palm, and rake across his scalp, down behind his ear. “Yes, like that,” he says with a low grunt as his eyes fall closed. “I can’t—you can’t.”
“You can’t?”
“I can’t let myself…”
�
�Is this about Liam?”
“No, it’s about you.” Austin’s words are chosen carefully, deliberately ambiguous, and as her nails trail through the short, wispy hairs at the base of his neck, he pulls his lower lip into his mouth to keep himself from expounding on them with a lustful cry. His eyes flicker up to hers and he pulls her hand away, traps it beneath his on the sofa, and this time she surrenders, the pains of rejection clear in her eyes. “Harper—it’s just that you—you can’t do that, touch me like that, and…”
“And…”
“And not expect me to like it,” Austin admits starkly, all ambiguity gone.
“You like it, but you don’t want me to?”
“No, I do,” he confesses, his gaze steady on hers as he lays himself bare. He never imagined outing himself like this, or at all, really, but now that he’s started, he can’t stop. And he knows he needs to stop. But his need for her drowns out all reason and logic. “That’s the problem. I always want you to touch me.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. Oh.” The word is a solemn echo, and Austin regrets having said anything at all. “I’m such an asshole, and this is all so out of nowhere, so sudden—”
“Is it?”
“It’s wrong of me to even—”
“Austin, I want to—I want to touch you,” Harper admits, wholly bold and honest, and he heaves out a breath as the words stun him. She waits for a reaction from him that doesn’t come. He’s frozen in place, afraid that if he moves and doesn’t somehow end up inside of her, he’ll break. He’s sure of it, when she murmurs, “Let me.”
Harper slips her hand from beneath Austin’s, who watches her with wide eyes and a decided lack of resistance, and strokes her fingers determinedly through his hair, from widow’s peak to nape. Austin’s lips part and his eyes fall shut, fingers pressing into the leather as he grips it roughly, and he’s consciously aware of the sound that comes from his mouth—something halfway between a grunt and a purr—as he leans into her touch.