Heart on a Shoestring by Marilyn Grey Read Free Book Online Page B

up, Derek. Even more than he was before. His counselor was just starting to get somewhere with him. Then he shut down. I’ll never forget his face that day. The hose fell to the ground, spraying him in the face. He panicked because he doesn’t like getting wet. I walked away, laughing and hiding my broken heart.” My voice rose and fell as I spoke with my fists clenched into balls. “Laughing. I laughed at him as he had a meltdown. My mom heard him and came outside but I was already driving away. All for what? For some guy who wanted to screw me. That’s it. Not even passionate love-making. He wanted to use my body and our conversations gave him a doorway into my pants. At least I wasn’t that stupid. Just stupid enough to hurt the sweetest kid in the world.”
    Derek stood in front of me and held my arms. I shoved the tears to a faraway land and looked into his eyes. The rain picked up, but we stayed there, staring at each other as the summer sky darkened. He ran his fingertips up and down my arms, then stopped on my hands. Rain tapped hard on the leaves around us. A rhythmic pulse. I bared my soul, my deepest regrets, and all I could think about was how bad I wanted him to kiss me. He leaned toward me. Pressed his body into mine and held me like a husband holds his wife. I consented. Allowing our bodies to touch when our lips couldn’t. For years I used guys as an escape from myself. My pain. My past. A kiss is all it took to send me into the stars, bouncing off the glowing fire balls from one romance to another. If you could call it romance.
    Derek pulled back, his shirt soaked and clinging to his obviously defined chest. I looked up, allowing the rain to land on my eyelids, my cheeks, my neck. And I inhaled the life around me.
    “My regrets are five-thousand and seventy times worse,” he said.
    A deep cry immersed from my heart. Then another. But he couldn’t tell. Our bodies were laden with the earths tears. Mine blended in. The tears I should’ve cried long ago. Instead of smiling as my brother screamed in the yard, wondering why his best friend made fun of him.
    Derek’s palm rested against my cheek. I placed my hand over top of his. The weight of the wind bore down on the trees as they crouched and swung in the howling sky. Throned in sheets of lightening, somber clouds hovered, taunting us. It wasn’t the wrestling sky that scared me. Or the fleeting thought of Dorothy carried in a breeze. It was the feeling I had, as the sea and the air became one, that perhaps I loved the man in front of me. Perhaps the warmth of his hand really was making me forget I was wet and cold. And scared. 
    The storm hissed and wailed as Derek pulled me back to his garden. He shoved some bricks into the tent and pushed me inside, then followed after. We sat together. His body next to mine, close enough to feel his arm muscles move, but too far to hear him breathe. The night, alive and well, entertained us with its exploding thunder and etches of light.  
    I didn’t fear the man sitting beside me.
    I feared my inability to give my heart fully, unadulterated, and guiltlessly to another soul. And no, it wasn’t the giving that petrified me. It was the forever that would bind my soul to another’s. That intimidated me even more than the crashing trees around us.
    Derek inched toward me and cupped my face. “You okay?”
    “Yes,” I said, but he couldn’t hear me over the whipping and lashing of nature.
    Lightening streaked the sky, imprinting shadows of trees on the fabric around us. I thought of Max and I huddled under blankets when we made shadow stories with our hands. I begged my parents for another sibling. I wanted a sister so bad. All boys. And I didn’t want to be the baby. Dad didn’t want another kid. Not sure he even wanted the ones he had.
    Max was an accident.
    When emotional storms swept through our house at night, they didn’t know I was listening. So many times I heard my father whisper in a tone so