Part of me gets it.
She’s sixteen.
She’s mad.
She’s smart as fuck and just as emotional, but she doesn’t have the maturity to know the way she can cut people deep with words. She just knows she’s hurting, and that makes her lash out to hurt someone else, like she can punish me for making everything so messy.
Maybe she should.
I sigh again, opening my eyes and starting the engine.
“Maybe I’m being a little hard on him,” I admit.
She doesn’t answer, won’t even look at me.
“We’ll try again some other time, Violet,” I tell her.
“Don’t call me that,” she mumbles, but it’s softer, less furious.
Fine. That’s something.
“Sure, Andrea,” I say as I pull out of the diner’s parking lot and hit the road for home. “Sure.”
We don’t say anything else for the rest of the ride.
I just wonder how the hell it is I can give everyone else in this town advice, but I can’t get my own shit together to save my life.
7
Gambler’s Song (Peace)
Is it sad I’ve been listening to the radio every night?
I mean, the music’s not bad. It’s a mix of old eighties and nineties and aughts top hits, the kind of thing you find way out in the boonies where the local stations either have to rebroadcast bigger stations or go for the stuff with cheap licensing fees.
It gives Heart’s Edge this kind of homey, lost-in-time feel.
I like it.
But what I’m really listening for is Blake freaking Silverton.
I’ve only heard him one time since the night he picked me up.
The night after I gave him his first massage. The inside of my chest was still hurting and feeling oddly hollow after listening to him talk about all those little cuts that built up under his skin the same way his scars did.
He’d been so quiet on the air that night. Subdued. Whispered.
No wisecracks about people calling in about kinky stuff or humoring the tinfoil dude who swore the evil Galentron people were beaming signals into his head.
In the time since I’d seen him, something happened to cut Blake open again and leave him bleeding from fresh wounds.
And I’d sat curled up in bed, hugging my arms to my chest, listening to the ache of compassion and pain in his voice as he comforted a girl named Felicity. Apparently, she owns a place in town called The Nest.
She’d called asking how she could sleep at night when every time she tries, she remembers the bad man who locked her up in a basement and tried to burn her alive along with her cousin and her aunt.
God, the things that happen to people here.
The trauma in that girl’s voice, when she talked about her nightmares.
And the kindness in Blake’s as he soothed her so gently. Told her that one fine day, she’d wake up and this would be nothing but a bad memory, and she’d be too far away from it to hurt anymore.
He said she was too close to it now, it could sink its claws in, but every day was another step forward. Another step she could put between herself and the pain. The pain was stuck in place, locked in that moment, but she wasn’t.
He didn’t offer useless platitudes.
Didn’t tell her to try things that would only be a Band-Aid.
He just honored her pain. Talked to her like he knew it was real…and that it didn’t have the power over her she thought it did.
Wow.
I wonder if anyone’s ever told him the same thing.
I wonder if he needs to hear it.
I shouldn’t be wondering if he wants to hear it from me.
But tonight, as the radio show comes on right on schedule around ten, when all the good little boys and girls are in bed and there’s no one left but us late-night degenerates and night owls…
…I can already tell he’s feeling better.
The intro jingle passes and he launches in with this soothing, musical voice, starting with a rumbling “Good evening, Heart’s Edge.”
The name of the town might be a metaphor for my heart whenever I hear him—pushed to the edge, teetering on the brink of falling.
When he talks like that, he takes my breath away.
And makes me remember him lying nearly naked under my hands, his body tanned and hard and thick with corded muscle, dusted with bristles of coarse, rusty brown hair.
That’s Blake. Part Greek God, part black bear, and so much to explore.
He was striated with scars, old wounds that looked like they came from blades and other sharp edges, a few bullet nicks, though that knot on his thigh was the worst of it. His body had a sort of crude, sensuous artistry, like some kind of natural formation that time had worn into grace and beauty while still remaining feral.
Go ahead. Call me smitten.
He’s as beautiful to look at as he is to listen to with those strong thighs and thick hands, with that broad chest and—God—the tick of his pulse against his throat when he swallows because he’s struggling with his own vulnerability.