Each Other

Once again, created for a Story Club challenge – and I can no longer remember what the required elements were!


*


She isn’t home.
This Liam tells himself as he stands in her front yard, under the half-shelter of the maple tree’s arching branches. Watching the rain hit the sidewalk, run along the rutted street, stream between the rusted bars of the grate and into the storm drain. Smelling the sharp aroma of wet cedar, the peatiness of damp earth — the smells he knows she loves.
She isn’t home.
This Liam repeats to himself more strongly. A warning? A reassurance? He isn’t sure.
Their car isn’t in the driveway. That grey four-door sedan, the symbol of all that is safe and domestic and dull.
She deserves better.
This thought, too, he repeats. But even as he thinks it, he knows it isn’t true. He hears a whisper repeat the soft truth.
She loves him.
Liam hates that whisper. He tries to push it into the darkest corner of his mind, where unacknowledged truths live in the shadows.


long hair
wet from the shower
clinging to her face
catching the light as she leans over her cup of tea

Liam reaches his hand out from beneath the maple tree’s sheltering embrace. Lets the rain slide through his open fingers, tickling his palm with a touch as soft as hers.
He never used to like the rain. A child of sunnier climes, he couldn’t get used to the West Coast weather. The damp. The chill. The rain that turned his neatly pressed clothes into sodden rags and (though he’d never admit this aloud) flattened his wavy hair.
He has nice hair. He thinks this but never says it, feeling it too weak — too female, if truth be told — to admit that the thought had even crossed his mind. At his age (thirty-eight, though he never admits that aloud either), he could be greying. Thinning. Most of his high school buddies are. He never mentions it on those rare occasions when he sees them, but he notices all the same. His thick dark hair has long been a source of unspoken pride, a secret held closely to himself.
He’s never told anyone. Except Erin.
He confessed once, during one of their walks in the rain, how much he hated that grey Vancouver downpour for what it did to his hair.
He sees that moment clearly.
She turns — she’s three steps ahead, as she always is, energy brimming over in a walk that’s half-bounce, half-skip — and laughs.
Not at him, though. At the rain.
She reaches up a slim hand and pulls off her tuque. Her Amazing Technicolor Dreamhat, she always calls it. A loosely knitted tangle of purple and red and blue and green that should look ridiculous.
Somehow, though, it doesn’t. It clings to her head as if it’s always been part of her, smoothly hugging her shining hair — hair the colour of the liquid honey she spreads on her toast in the mornings.
Mornings she shares with him. Their two heads bend together over matching blue pottery coffee mugs, flushed cheeks and tangled hair telling the story of their morning’s awakening, the lazy dawn loving that sends her smiling into the day.
Liam shoves the thought away and replaces it with the picture of Erin. That moment on the street when she tilts her head back. Lets the cold fingers of rain caress her face, slide along the shining surface of her hair, run down the smooth white curve of her neck.


a flash of white neck
white shoulder exposed
white fingers curled around mug
a glimpse of softly rounded breast as she tugs at the white towel

She smiles. A child’s grin that dances with mischief, an eight-year-old girl in a slim woman’s body. She twirls. Down the sidewalk. Around the stop sign. Past the arbutus hedge that lines the schoolyard fence. Eyes meeting his and laughing. Always laughing.
Liam loves her laughter.
He loves her serious moments, too.
When she curls up in the high-backed armchair in her sunny front window, head bent over a Carol Shields novel.
When she sprawls on the couch in front of one of her favourite videos — Pride and Prejudice (“two words: Colin Firth,” she giggles) or Much Ado About Nothing (“two more words,” she says, nose wrinkling impishly as she grins, “Kenneth Branagh”).
When she curls up cross-legged on the floor, guitar in her lap.
Those nights, Liam loves to watch her. She leans forward, slight shoulders rounded, hair falling into her face, chewing her bottom lip in concentration as she works her way through the difficult fingering of an unfamiliar passage. The flickering firelight catches the red tints of her hair and casts a rosy glow on her white face.
She doesn’t see Liam those nights.
She sees only him.


a startled giggle
a tentative smile
fingers clutching towel closed
a hint of white thigh as she turns
oh! where did you come from? how did you get in?


She does see Liam sometimes.
When she’s arguing, for one. Sounding off, as she is wont to do, about the problems of the provincial government, giving short shrift to Liam’s half-hearted protestations that the Liberals haven’t done that bad a job. Or about the state of society and whether the world is a place of turpitude and moral decay — as Liam often argues — or whether people are inherently good.
“It’s not like there’s no evil, Liam.” She’ll lean forward, elbows on the worn wooden table in the corner of the pub, impatiently shoving her hair back as her words spill out in an eager torrent. “It’s just that I don’t believe it’s the norm. Most people do the best they can with who they are. Sometimes they screw up, that’s all.”
He’ll fight back, riling her by telling her that in ten years — when she’s as old as he is now — she’ll see things differently. He never wins. She always wears him down in her Liam-you’re-such-an-eejit-and-someone-needs-to-set-you-straight kind of way.
And she’ll reach across his pint and pat his hand, in an affectionate gesture that’s part mother, part friend, part little sister.
Liam steels himself for those moments. She never knows what the laughing caress does to him, never sees his need to reach for her. She never realizes that the feather-light touch helps Liam see straight into her soul.
In those moments, he knows her better than she knows herself.


a shake of her wet hair
a slightly embarrassed grin
sorry, I didn’t know he was home yet
if I’d known he let you in, I’d have gotten dressed before I came down
let me just get my jeans


Liam knows her so well. Better than he does, Liam often thinks. But never says.
Doesn’t he mind that they spend time together, Liam wonders.
He asks her once, over pints at their corner table.
“We’re not joined at the hip, Liam,” she responds chidingly, putting on her best mock-schoolmarm glare. “I’m allowed to have friends, amn’t I?”
She giggles, meeting his gaze with a grin that flashes through the air and into his eyes.
Into his heart.
The thought escapes the safe confines of its shadowy prison, rises from the quagmire of confusion and chaos and turmoil that inhabits the darkest corner of his mind.
The corner where the word lurks. The word Liam never says, even to himself.
The word she’s already said to someone else. The word that flashes a warning every time she moves her hand and the light catches the delicate circlet of gold on her thin fourth finger.


can I get by? don’t be an eejit
let me get my clothes
I’ll be right back
thin hands clutching towel
white leg shoving chair aside
damp skin brushing his arm as she steps by
damp skin loosed from white towel
damp skin under his fingertips


Liam knows she was beautiful the day he put that ring on her finger.
Liam wasn’t there. He didn’t know her yet. (He often finds this odd, that he hasn’t known her always.)
Liam likes to rewrite this in his mind.

Scene 1: Liam is there, sitting in the third row on the bride’s side, between crotchety Aunt Gloria and chatty Aunt Ellie, passing them kleenex and patting their hands comfortingly.
Sometimes he prefers Scene 2: He isn’t there. Erin wants him to be, of course, but he’s out of the country. Riding a camel across the Moroccan sands or downing pints of Guinness in a dark Irish pub or cleansing his soul at a mountaintop monastery in Tibet.
Liam never lets himself write Scene 3: Liam knows her first. She never meets him. She reaches out to receive the delicate circlet of gold not from him but from Liam.
He doesn’t let himself think it. When the idea creeps into his mind, he shoves it back into the darkness where it belongs.
Liam wasn’t there. He didn’t see her in the long white dress that skims her thin shoulders, clings to the curve of her breast, hugs her small waist, slides in a silken waterfall to the floor.
He knows she smiled a lot. That she was the happiest bride everyone had ever seen. That’s what her friends Sandra and Kelly — the other HR clerks in their overcrowded office — always say.
That’s what the picture says too.
Liam sees that photo every day. It perches on her desk among the piles of paperwork she never quite gets around to filing — “Filing is overrated, Liam,” she pronounces, “and, anyway, I know where everything is.”
In the photo, she’s looking up at him. They’re both smiling, heads bent so close they’re almost touching, seeing nothing in the world but each other.
Liam doesn’t like that picture. But he can never look away.


what are you doing
damp skin on fire
stop it, what are you doing
dry hair against wet
dry lips on moist trembling mouth
dry hands on damp skin
what are you doing
stop it stop it stop it
liam!


“She doesn’t love you.”
The sound of his own voice startles him, recalls him to the moment where he is. In her front yard, under the half-shelter of the maple tree’s arching branches. Watching the rain hit the sidewalk, run along the rutted street, stream between the rusted bars of the grate and into the storm drain.
“She doesn’t love you.”
He says it again and feels it hit him.
The wave of darkness rolls out of its shadowy corner and threatens to consume him. The darkness that envelops him and makes him believe in her. In her smiles and touches and glances and twirls and laughter.
He’s never given in to the darkness.
Except once.
Except tonight.


tears in waves
sobs racking thin body
white skin exposed on cold tile floor
white limbs curled into tight ball
white face buried in thin hands
gold glinting on white finger
get out get out get out get out get out


Liam smells the peatiness of damp earth, the sharp aroma of wet cedar. He feels the rain trickle through the fingers of his outstretched hand. Sees the empty driveway where their car should be parked. The dark front windows where the soft amber of firelight should cast a warm glow over the yard.
Liam wonders where they’ve gone. What she said. What he will do.
He steps out from under the tree and feels the cold grey rain.
He sees her in his mind. That moment in the rain when she turns and laughs.
He holds that moment until the laughter turns to tears. Until the dancing eyes fill with pain. Until the slim twirling body lies white and trembling beneath him.
He shoves the thought away, back into the darkest corner of his mind, where unacknowledged truths live in the shadows.
Slowly, he starts to walk away.
The rain is cold.
There is no laughter in it tonight.