But Eli’s first memory of Glory Greenleaf was a blur and a splash: she’d hurtled past Eli and her brother Jonah on her plump five-year-old legs and thrown herself right into the swimming hole at Whiskey Creek just so she could say she’d done it first, just to impress her older brother and his friend, and just because it was something she hadn’t yet done.
Glory didn’t sit still for much, unless it was to play her guitar. Knitting would send her around the bend.
So that sentence was almost painfully intimate. It contained decades of memories.
And these were the first words they’d exchanged in months.
“Why?” she said finally. “You need a new Christmas sweater, Eli?”
When he was eleven, his aunt had sent him a Christmas sweater featuring three reindeer walking single file. He’d hated it until Glory pointed out that it looked like the reindeer were sniffing each other’s butts. And then he’d worn it all the time.
Heartened, he finally turned around to look at her.
Damn. It was like spring on the heels of a bad winter, looking into her blue eyes.
She was smiling faintly, too.
“Maybe.” He held her gaze.
Once he had talked to her more easily than almost anyone, Jonah included. But layer upon layer of unspoken things had created a nearly tangible barrier between them. Ironically, not unlike the glass that separates a prisoner from a visitor.
He suddenly felt just as much a prisoner as Jonah Greenleaf, trapped by his inability to say the words that would shatter that invisible barrier. He was trussed in a complicated knot of emotions, all of them volatile, none of them compatible.
And it was probably too late to learn eloquence. He’d spent a lifetime letting actions do most of the speaking for him.
Whereas Glory... Glory could sing a single word and make it sound like an entire story, full of nuance and ache. And she could write a song and then pull you into it when she performed, like it was a whole world unto itself. Eli had football trophies, a law degree, a gun, and a badge, but those felt like Muggle achievements compared to what she did, which was alchemy. She made it look easy. He knew it wasn’t. Most people thought she was utterly fearless. He knew she wasn’t. They’d grown up together, teasing and fighting and playing, but somewhere along the line he knew he’d be happy to just be Sir Walter Raleigh to her Queen Elizabeth. The person who laid his metaphorical cloak over mud puddles, making it safe for her to be her dazzling self.
He had a hunch it wouldn’t matter. There were probably no right or safe words at the moment, even if he could come up with them.
Maybe there never would be.
He was proved correct when the faint smile dropped off her face and she turned from him abruptly. “Maybe you can use all that free time in your squad car to make yourself a new sweater, Eli. You know, in between getting hardened criminals off the street.”
That sentence edged all around in little thorns.
A surge of impatience made his back teeth clamp down.
So be it.
He wasn’t sorry about what he’d done to Jonah. Only that he’d had to do it.
“I just might do that,” he said evenly. “Think I’d be good at it, in fact.”
Once the very idea of Eli with knitting needles would have made her laugh.
Now her expression closed up again and she folded her arms across her chest. Then realized what she was doing and lowered them and plucked up a coaster from the bar and twiddled it in her fingers.
Her nails were cut short as usual and painted scarlet, and she’d striped them, for some reason, in silver. Glory did a lot of things just because. He knew the fingertips of her left hand were callused from holding down the strings on her Martin acoustic guitar. They’d probably been tough since she was twelve. Unlike nearly every other member of her family, Glory was willing to put up with a little pain in the service of something beautiful.
He remembered how those fingertips had felt sliding up the back of his neck in the dark.
The bands of muscle across his stomach tensed to withstand an echo of that shocking pleasure, and everything else that came after that.
He’d been able to see the stars up through the branches of the pine she stood against before he’d closed his eyes.
She’d closed hers first.
That was the moment he’d realized with epiphanic clarity that even when they’d seemed to be moving in entirely different directions—when he was a jock dating the cheerleader who was always on top of the pyramid, and Glory was dating that stoner idiot Mick Macklemore who’d had a really enviable GTO... even when Eli had left Hellcat Canyon for the police academy and law school and other girlfriends and she’d stayed behind working one crap job after another and was still with that dip Mick Macklemore—somehow it felt like they were still movingtowardeach other. If life was essentially a big Rubik’s Cube, then every twist and turn, every meeting and parting, everything they’d ever said and done was necessary to get them to that moment at that party outside in the backyard up against that ponderosa pine.
