Islip out my front door and into Daphne the next afternoon. I know where I’m going—there’s only one house at the end of Mulberry Street, but I don’t know what I plan to do once I get there. I just need to see his face. Maybe I won’t even get out of the car.
But, of course, I do.
I’m smarter about it this time than I was before. I call him first instead of just bursting inside.
“Hello?”
“I’m outside,” I say when he answers his phone.
A moment later, his front door opens and Heath steps out onto his porch. I feel my heart lurch toward him a second before my feet follow suit. I slow as I reach the bottom steps, not because my longing to be near him has lessened any, but because he hasn’t taken even a single step to meet me. His hand is still resting on his screen door.
I thought no one else would be home. He told me before that he usually has the house to himself for an hour or two in the afternoons, and I made sure there weren’t any other cars parked out front beside the truck when I called, but now I’m not so certain. I want there to be a reason he’s keeping his distance besides the one I gave him last time we were together.
I stop before ascending the steps, looking at the house behind him with uncertainty. It’s a nice ranch house, the kind that looks so much a part of the surrounding landscape that one could imagine it growing from the earth alongside the honey locust trees heavily shading either side of the porch. The shingles on the roof are lifting and the stone-gray paint on the siding is cracked and faded in places. There’s space though, enough land that the nearest neighbor is little more than a smudge in the distance.
I’ve never been here before. I had no reason to come before I met Heath, and after...
It suddenly strikes me as every kind of foolish I’ve ever been to come to his house like this, worse even than bombarding him unannounced at his work. Then, at least, he’d still had reason to want to see me. I may need him now, but that doesn’t mean a thing has changed for him.
And this is his house. The home his brother lived in.
“I wanted to see you,” I say, feeling the need to at least try to explain myself, though it’s as plain as the expression on his face that he doesn’t feel the same way. I stand still, my heart high in my chest as though awaiting a pardon or an execution.
Heath’s eyes never leave my upturned face. His brows are drawn together, as unmoving as the rest of him, but then they relax. Just a little, but I see it.
“Come on.” He steps back, holding the door open for me to follow.
There’s a TV on somewhere in the distance. Heath leaves my side and disappears down the hall to shut it off. I start to follow, but stop when I see all the photos. So many I can barely make out the paint color of the wall behind them. They span floor to ceiling, photos that look to stretch back generations, many of which appear to have been taken in front of this very house. My eyes scan faces that must belong to Heath’s great-great-grandparents all the way down the hall to Calvin in his cap and gown at his high school graduation.
“My family is big on photos,” Heath says, making me jump. I don’t look away though, I can’t. I remember Cal, but distantly, the way you remember a face you saw only a few times and didn’t realize at the time it was important. And it was impossible not to see his face plastered online and on TV, but it was usually the same one or two photos. I never watched long enough to see more. I don’t have the option to look away now, and I don’t think I’d take it if I did.
Instead, I look my fill, and Heath lets me, offering commentary when I stare longer at one photo or another. He speaks stiffly at first, then with greater ease the longer he talks, as though warming up a muscle long out of use. The more comfortable he becomes, the more uneasy I grow.
Heath doesn’t act embarrassed when his voice cracks, and he doesn’t turn away. It’s the most naked I’ve ever seen a person and it’s hard to watch, hard to hear. Cal has always been a person to me. I never tried to pretend him away for the sake of my brother. I know he had a family, parents, plans for his life that were cruelly cut short. But that knowledge has always been in the background, deeply and profoundly sad, and yet, hard to focus on when Jason occupied so much of the foreground. The perspective is changing now.
Heath and I are standing at the end of the hall now. I can see that the pictures continue around the corner, but these are the last ones of Calvin. High school graduation, one of him standing in front of his red truck, loaded for bear on his way to college. As with many of the photos, Heath and their older sister are in it with him.
“That’s the last one of the three of us. My mom was certain we had some from Christmas and her birthday, but—” Heath shakes his head and taps one finger against the glass “—there’s just this one.”
I turn, watching him watch his brother as he recounts that day, smiling a little here, voice catching a little there. He doesn’t jerk away or even start when I slip my hand into his. His thumb grazes over the back of my hand and he keeps going. The story ends, not when it’s over, but when Heath is too choked up to go on. His face is a blur in my tear-filled eyes when I tug him toward me, rise up and brush my trembling lips to his.
It’s only meant to be a small kiss, a light gesture of the heart when neither of us has words left. But when I would have dropped back down on my heels, Heath’s arms encircle me, holding me to his chest while his mouth presses more insistently against mine and I taste our mingled tears.
All the hours I’ve spent held in Heath’s arms practicing lifts, and even the first kiss we shared pale in comparison to this. This kiss is still forbidden, but unlike the hesitancy that accompanied our first kiss, this one is bold, reckless. All the pent-up desire and longing we’ve both been feeling is unleashed and poured into each other. It’s almost frightening how tightly he’s holding me, or it would be if my grip on him were any less fierce.
I give in to this kiss and the tears that won’t seem to stop. I taste them on his lips. I hear them in the soft sounds of my breathing and his. The rise and fall of my chest and his is the only movement between us as we break apart and our eyes meet.
We’re still pressed against each other and every breath I take comes from air leaving his lips. Heath’s hands slide up my sides, ghosting over my rib cage, and trigger endless tremors to pulse through my body.
“I’m sorry I hurt you,” I say.
“I hate that I hurt you. I’ll never do it again.” One of his hands breaks free to trail over my shoulder and leave goose bumps along the supersensitive skin at my neck. It takes almost no urging to lift my chin and meet his lips again. To taste, not tears this time, but something infinitely sweeter.
I lose all awareness of time and myself in this kiss, in Heath, in the way I feel in his arms. It goes on forever, flaring up then burning low, but never dying out.
My first sense that something is wrong doesn’t come from anything I hear but from something I feel. Heath jerks in my arms as though whipped. His head lifts from mine, and my emotion-fogged vision clears as panic shoots wide in his eyes. I have just enough time to crank my neck around to see two women striding in the front door. One in her early fifties and the other in her early thirties. Heath’s name dies on the younger one’s lips as she sees us.
“What on earth? Heath Christopher Gaines, who in—” His mother’s words end in a strangled choke as Heath drops his arms from me. He doesn’t look at me, and an icy cold sensation eats the last trace of our heat away.
