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She snorted. “You’re a friend, meaning you do rate the comfy clothes.” She swept a hand at herself. “This is the real me.”
“I was teasin’. I like the real you. ’Course, I like the fancy you, too. Both are damned beautiful.” I stared at her, trying to figure out what was different from yesterday. It hit me, but I wasn’t sure how to put it. “You ain’t wearin’ makeup. That’s what’s different.”
She smiled, but it was hesitant and nervous. “True. I…I don’t know.” Her chin dropped, eyes flicking down and away from me.
I touched her chin, lifting her gaze to mine. “I like you better this way.” I frowned, hesitated. “Not that what I like should make a difference. I’m just sayin’. Liv, you are goddamned gorgeous, and you don’t need a lick of makeup to be that way.”
Her smile returned, brightened. “Thank you, Lucas. That…it means a lot to hear you say that.”
“So. Lunch?”
She nodded. “I know a place close by. I thought we could take my truck.”
“Sure.” I hated feeling like less of man for not being able to pick her up.
I snagged my cane, stuffed my wallet and keys into my pockets, and gestured for her to precede me out of the apartment. We climbed into her truck, and she drove us to a cafe a couple of miles away—farther than I’d be able to walk, and not somewhere I’d been, yet.
We took a booth in a back corner, perused the menu in a companionable silence and then, after we’d ordered, we eyed each other, each waiting for the other to speak first.
“Tell me something about yourself that no one knows,” Olivia said.
I fiddled with a sugar packet. “Um. Only folks livin’ who know a damn thing about me are my boys, and I ain’t told ’em much about myself, so honestly, that ain’t too hard.” I winced. “Well, finding somethin’ nobody knows is the easy part. Sharin’ it? Not as easy.”
“No? Why not?”
I shrugged. “I mean, ’cause most of it ain’t pleasant.” I set the sugar packet aside. “My life ain’t been…well it ain’t been a storybook tale. Put it that way.”
“I’m not afraid of unpleasant things, Lucas. There’s some of that in my own story.”
“Of course there is. None of us get out of life unscathed. Some shit is worse than others, though.”
She nodded. “Try something easy, then. Doesn’t have to be a deep, dark secret.”
I spent a moment thinking—and then our food came and I kept thinking on it while we dug in—her into a salad with chicken, avocado, berries, and shredded cheese, and me into a fat, juicy bacon cheeseburger, with fries.
She didn’t say anything to me, but I caught an odd look on her face when she glanced at my food. I arched an eyebrow. “Okay, so let’s trade. I’ll tell you something nobody knows about me, and you tell me what that look was for.”
She winced. “I’m sorry. That’s my issue, not yours.”
“I’m still interested in knowing what it was about and why.”
She rolled a shoulder and nodded. “Okay. So…what’s your fact?”
“My twin brother, God rest him, was always the good one. I was the troublemaker, if you could believe it.” I laughed, and smeared a fry in ketchup. “We were, oh…sixteen? Seventeen? Identical, too. Even our folks couldn’t tell us apart if we were dressed the same. So, one day, Liam wrecked our truck. Wouldn’t have been anything else to the story except he wasn’t supposed to be out, because it was well past midnight, and he’d been drinking with…Lena. His…girlfriend—sort of. Anyway, they were out late, past curfew, drinking, and he wrecked the truck. I took the blame, said it was me, by myself, and Dad never knew Lena was involved at all.”
She frowned in confusion. “Why would you do that? Take the blame like that?”
I shrugged. “Complicated.”
Her eyes searching mine were sharp and penetrating. “Does it have to do with the way you hesitated over Lena’s name?”
I scoffed. “You are a damn sight too smart, Liv.”
She just smirked. “I think you think you’re harder to read than you are.” She hesitated. “So, you took the blame more for Lena than your brother.”
I nodded. “Yeah. ’Course, I got somethin’ out of it from Liam, you can bet. He had to do my chores for a week.”
“What kind of chores did you guys have to do? Where did you grow up?”
“Grew up on a spread out near Ward Creek, not far from Ward Lake. Due north of here a ways.”
“Oh. So you grew up in Alaska? Bill mentioned he knew your dad, didn’t he? I’d forgotten.”
“Yep, born and raised on that spread. It wasn’t more’n a little log cabin in the woods, built by my great-grandpa. Dad was born there, Liam and I were born there.” I paused to demolish half of my burger in a few bites. “Chores were chopping wood, checking the traplines, hunting, bringing in water from the creek. Things like that.”
“Bill mentioned bringing you electricity?”
I nodded. “Yep. That’d be, oh…late fifties. Bill woulda been just a young fella, his dad and our dad helping Gramps. They had to run a trench, since there was no way to get posts into the ground through the brush. I don’t even know how far they ran it, to be honest, I just know it was a hell of a job, but it got us lights and a radio.”
“Did you have plumbing?”
“Hell nah,” I said. “Outhouse and a well, babe. Old school.”
“And…traplines?”
“We trapped for rabbits, foxes, coyotes, martens, otter, things like that. Fur and meat. We’d eat the meat and sell the fur down in town.” I anticipated her next question. “Hunting was for subsistence, too. If we didn’t bag a deer, we’d go hungry.”
She tilted her head to one side, thinking. “Why did you live up here, off the grid like that?”
I shrugged. “Hell if I know. Gramps was in the Great War, Pops was in World War Two, and Liam and I only missed going to Vietnam because we lived way the fuck out in the boonies like we did, without a mailing address or birth certificates or nothing, so Uncle Sam didn’t even know we existed to be able to draft us.” I glance at the ceiling. “I know Great-Gramps had Gramps late in life. I think Great-Gramps fought in the Civil War.”
She blinked. “Really?”
I nodded. “Yep. I mean, I was born in fifty-seven, and Pops was thirty-two when he had us—late as hell for that period of time. So Pops woulda been born in twenty-five. Figure Gramps was, what—twenty-two?—when he had Pops, and that would have meant Gramps had been born in 1898, or thereabouts? So Great-Gramps coulda fought in the Civil War and had a kid late in life. I know he lived to be over a hundred—he died in…oh god—fifty-five? Fifty-three? A couple years before I was born.” I pause again, finishing the burger. “I think after the war ended, Great-Gramps was sorta just through with folks, wanted to be left alone. Then Gramps fought in the Great War, and he had a similar feeling. Like, people suck, you know? You seen the worst humanity can do to itself, you just kinda wanna get shut of pretty much everyone. Pops, too. He was a grumpy, surly, mean old cuss, my pops. Teetotaler, and just plain ol’ mean. Came back from fighting in Belgium with a heart full of hurt and anger and just…cold-bloodedness. So he didn’t want to be around nobody neither. Which means Liam and I grew up half feral in the Alaskan wilderness—Mom passed on from some kinda cancer or somethin’ when Liam and I were just little tykes, leavin' Pops and Gramps to raise us alone. I was huntin’ squirrels when I was barely big enough to carry my own BB gun, and I could pop ’em through the eyeball from fifty yards with a .22 by the time I was six, and so could Liam. We ran through the woods wearing shit-all but boots and old shorts, giggin’ frogs, bagging squirrels and deer.”
She shakes her head. “I can’t imagine that life.”
“No?”
She shakes her head again, stabbing at her salad with her fork. “Not at all. I’m from the East Coast originally. Grew up in Connecticut, upper middle class as a kid, and then firmly upper class after Darren and I got marr
ied.”
I looked her over again. “Rich kid, huh?”
She frowned. “I don’t like that label. Yes, growing up we had money, but I didn’t get driven around in limousines or anything like that.”
I laughed. “So just rich, instead’a super-rich?”
She frowned. “I can’t tell if you’re teasing me, or if you’re serious and just being a jerk.”
I huffed. “Eh, probably a little bit of both. Didn’t mean to hurt your feelin’s.”
She rolled a shoulder as she chased the last few bits of salad around the plate. “You didn’t hurt my feelings, more just…annoyed me. I mean, I literally just said I don’t like being pigeonholed as a rich girl, and you went and did it again, just differently.”
I winced. “Hey, now. I wasn’t pigeonholing you as anything. People fit in boxes, Liv—loosely, at least. We ain’t always the person in the box we fit in. I mean, sure, I’m a country redneck through and through. I’m more comfortable in a trailer in a holler than I am in an apartment in the city. I don’t know shit about crap like Wi-Fi and computers and all that nonsense. I know woods and huntin’, and trucks and I’ve eaten roadkill.”
She squinted at me. “You have not.”
I laughed. “Sure as hell have.”
She made a grossed-out face. “You ate roadkill?”
I nodded—I had a feeling she was envisioning something a bit different than the truth, and decided to play with her a bit. “Yep. We was down to the last of our vittles, see. Nothin’ in the pantry ’cept a couple cans of beans and some Spam. So, when Pa ran over a big ol’ coon, he pulled over, tossed it in the back of the truck, and we took it home and threw it on the grill. Li’l bit of barbecue sauce? Tastes just like chicken, only mebbe a mite gamier.”
She stared at me for a long moment. “You’re pulling my leg.”
I held a straight face. “Nope. Grilled up coon is actually pretty good.”
She tilted her head to the side, glaring. “Lucas. Please, tell me you’re kidding.”
I couldn’t hold back the laughter any longer. “Yeah, I’m just playing you.” I arched an eyebrow. “Sort of.”
“Sort of?” she asked, and then sipped at her iced tea.
“Well, it was when the triplets were just, oh god…nine? Ten? I was still comin’ to grips with the fact that their mom wasn’t coming back, and keeping food on the table was…challenging.” Mostly that had been because I’d been spending most of my income on Evan Williams, but I wasn’t quite ready to say that to Liv. “So, I was drivin’ ’em home from the store. Sorta late, like just past sundown. A big ol’ doe jumped out right in front of my truck. Smashed the hell out of my front end, too. Well, I went to check on her, see if she was dead. I mean, I ain’t gonna leave a poor thing lyin’ on the road suffering, you know? Turned out, she’d taken the worst of the impact to her head, smashed her brains to goo.”
Liv shuddered, gagged. “Really? I hardly think graphic details are necessary.”
I chuckled. “Sorry. Anyway, point is, it was only her head that got wrecked, rest of her was fine. So, I tossed her in the truck bed, took her home, cleaned her up, and we ate nice fresh venison for weeks.” I grinned at her.
She rolled her eyes at me. “Well, that’s not what I imagined when you said you’ve eaten roadkill.”
I laughed again. “I know. I had a feeling you were imagining me scraping flattened squirrels off the road.”
She laughed. “I was, I admit it.”
“I’ve been desperate, but not that desperate. Close, a few times.”
“Really?”
I nodded. “Yep. When I took off and left Alaska, I had twenty-six bucks to my name and half a tank of gas in a truck I didn’t even really own myself. No food, and just the clothes on my back. I drove till I ran out of gas, found a fella a few miles down the road who needed some chores done, and got a fill-up out of it. Worked my way south that way—doin’ chores and odd jobs in exchange for gas and maybe a bite to eat, or sometimes just cash. Things got real thin a few times. If it was a choice between putting miles between me and Alaska and eating, I’d often pick the miles. So, yeah. I’ve been hungry enough that I’ve thought of going back to grab roadkill to cook and eat.”
Her gaze was speculative, interested. “I can honestly say I’ve never been that hungry.”
I shrugged. “Lucky you. It ain’t fun.” I waved the topic away with a swipe of my hand. “Anyway. I think I’ve told you a bunch of stuff nobody knows. Your turn.”
She sighed. “My turn.”
“Yep. You gave me a look when I started eatin’, and I’d like to know what it meant.”
“I didn’t mean it as a judgment on you, Lucas.”
I tilted my head and squinted. “Liv, I may be country, but I ain’t stupid. Tell the whole honest damn truth, at least.”
She winced, rubbed her cheek. “Lucas…”
I arched an eyebrow. “Liv?”
A long sigh. “Fine. I told you my husband died of a heart attack.” She paused, thinking. “It was avoidable. His doctor warned him he was at risk, and that he had to adjust his diet, but Darren wouldn’t listen.”
“So this—” I slapped my belly, “is a sore spot for you.”
She nodded. “Yes. He…” She licked her lips, stared off to the side instead of at me. “We were active. We hiked, we did yoga, we rode horses, we took long walks around the neighborhood. I suppose he assumed—or, really, I know he assumed, as he said as much—that he was active and healthy, and he was going to enjoy his food.”
“Only he wasn’t as healthy as he thought.”
She shook her head. “No. Clearly not.” Her eyes were downcast, her shoulders hunched. “I did everything I could think of to get him to eat more healthily. Tried to sneak veggies into things, didn’t buy certain things, bribed him, begged him. But he just had a weakness for certain kinds of food.”
“Cheeseburgers?”
“Potato chips, too. Those were his real drug. He could eat a whole bag in one sitting, and not even think twice. It wasn’t just one thing, though. It was a lifetime of consistently bad nutritional choices, along with a genetic predisposition. And staying fairly active just wasn’t enough.” Her eyes went to mine. “So seeing you eat something which I know contributed to Darren’s death is just…hard. And yes, I gave you a look of disapproval, and it was judgmental, and I’m sorry.”
I pushed my plate to one side, wrestling with unease—with truth. “Liv, the honest answer here is that you’re right. You’re right to look at me that way.” I growled, tilted my head back to look at the ceiling. “I did have a heart attack, actually. Only barely survived it. I…well—I ain’t a healthy man, Liv. That much is obvious. And I know I need to change things if I want to stay alive, but…honestly, there’ve been times lately when I just didn’t necessarily see the point.”
She reared back. “Lucas—”
I smiled at her. “I’m startin’ to see the error of my ways, though.” I winked. “Gorgeous women have a way of doin’ that.”
She blushed even as she rolled her eyes at me. “You just met me.”
“Minds can change in a heartbeat, babe.” I paid the check, and we headed out to Liv’s truck. I settled into the passenger seat, and then continued when she was behind the wheel. “In all seriousness, though, I need to get healthy because I want to be around for my boys. And I got a whole pile of nephews to get to know, too.”
“A pile of nephews?”
I nodded. “My brother had eight sons.”
“Had? Past tense?”
I growled under my breath, and then sighed. “Long story.”
“Seems like you have a lot of long stories.”
“Like I said, my life ain’t always been…pleasant, or easy.” I noticed, then, that we weren’t heading back to my apartment. “Where are we going?”
“We’re picking up the paint for your apartment, and supplies to start painting.”
I blinked at that. “We are, huh?”
“Yep.” She smiled. “I’ve got a great shade picked out.”
I blinked again. Did I particularly want to paint? Not really. Did I want to spend more time Liv? Absolutely.
“Sounds good,” I said.
4
Liv
Lucas was… not great at painting. I had put down drop cloths, taped off around the windows and light switches and such, and had even borrowed painter’s coveralls for both of us from a contractor friend of mine—mine were enormous on me, pooling around my ankles and wrists even after being rolled half a dozen times; his were too small by at least a full size, straining around his belly and those colossal shoulders of his.
He had paint on his cheeks, in his beard, on his nose, in his hair, all over his hands…very little was even getting on the walls. He was grumbling a nonstop stream of curses under his breath the entire time as he held a tray of paint in one hand, wielding a trimming paintbrush in the other. He was supposed to be doing around the painter’s tape while I did the broad sections with the roller. Really, our jobs should be reversed, but it was just funny to watch him struggling with it, cursing and grumbling with such comical irritation.
“Piece o’ shit fuckin’ paint brush…goddamn stupid drippy-ass paint,” he muttered, glopping way too much paint on the end of the brush, cursing again as it dripped down the brush and onto his wrist, and then onto his boots and the drop cloth.
He touched the brush to the wall beside the taped-off light switch, only to have the paint drip and roll down the wall.
“Motherfucker,” he snarled.
I couldn’t help it, at that point—I burst out laughing. “Oh my god, Lucas.”
He glared at me. “Glad somebody’s getting some enjoyment outta this shit,” he snarled.
“You know, I’m not even going to apologize for laughing,” I said. “You’re just so darned funny. Such a grump.”
“It’s stupid, and I hate it. It’s gettin’ fuckin’ everywhere ’cept where I want it to fuckin’ go.”
I set my roller aside and moved beside him. “Oh, Lucas.”