Liz Talley - His Brown-Eyed Girl

Hesitating on the steps, she looked at him, not knowing what to say.

Lucas studied the floating clouds beyond her head. “This was a mistake. I’ve got to get out of here. I’m not the right person to take care of these kids.”

Addy started to deliver platitudes but snapped her mouth closed. “Maybe not, but right now you’re all they have.”

“I need clean air and a clear landscape sitting outside my door. I can’t breathe here.”

The longing in his voice touched her. He felt trapped by the world he now occupied. She knew a little about being confined to a smaller world.

A few minutes ticked by as the sounds of the neighborhood waned and an even smaller world was formed on the porch. A line of black ants squiggled across the top step. A spider clung to a web in the camellia bush, and the rocking chair creaked with the slight motion Lucas gave it. Small, closed in. Intimate in a way she hadn’t experienced the other night. Raw emotion pulsed and she knew it was seldom Lucas admitted defeat, admitted any weakness.

He didn’t look at her, at where she stood near the line of overgrown bushes that had needed pruning last fall. Addy knew Lucas was mentally picking up the scattered bits of his emotions and trying to tuck them into an airtight box he kept in his soul.

Like recognized like.

Something inside her stirred, then stilled. Certainty of what she needed to say settled in her gut.

“I’m sorry about the way I acted earlier. Something happened on Wednesday that shook me up, and I allowed a remnant of that emotion to spill over into today.”

He waved away her apology. “No problem. You were right. I don’t have any business prying into your life. We’re not friends, not really anything to each other. You’re a nice person trying to help me. Bottom line.”

The casual dismissal pricked her. She didn’t want to be nothing to him, and that surprised her all over again. “I’d like to think we are friends.”

His gaze swept to hers. “I suppose we are. In a way.”

“Then you should understand something about me. Not even Courtney or any of my other neighbors know this, but somehow, I think you need to know who I am.”

She saw the muscles in his neck move as he swallowed, as his eyes softened. She didn’t understand the need to tell him about Robbie, about the fear that sometimes ate at her. Just knew it would make things better.

“When I was senior in high school, a neighbor, a man I thought I knew, held a knife to my throat and tried to rape me.”

Lucas’s hands tightened on the rocker. “What?”

Acid ate at her stomach and her hands trembled. She tucked them behind her and met Lucas’s gaze. “I was stupid, a good girl, a quintessential overachiever with a pretty face and a bright future, but I had this need inside me, a little part of myself who wanted to rebel. Down the street lived this older guy. He was in his mid-twenties, cute in a boyish way, rode a Harley and sometimes hung out at my dad’s garage. He flirted with me, I flirted back and then one night I snuck out my bedroom window and climbed on his Harley with him.”

Lucas’s eyes narrowed. “You seem so levelheaded. I can’t imagine you sneaking out with an older guy.”

“Of course not. I’ve changed. But we all have some wildness inside us. I just chose to be wild with the totally wrong guy.”

Silence sat for a moment.

“Eventually, being a naughty girl got old. I didn’t really like him as much as I liked the feeling of being disobedient, of having some say-so in my own life. Eventually, I stopped opening that window. But Robbie wouldn’t accept I wasn’t into him. I tried to tell him I had prom coming up and college. I told him we had no future together. And it got ugly.”

“What did he do?” His voice was soft as the day, like sunlight falling on the emerging green of spring.

“At first he said ugly things. Then he showed up at my high school and watched me with my friends. He slashed my tires, wrote me violent letters and called my cell phone and hung up several times a day. I didn’t tell my parents because I knew they’d be so disappointed...and that I’d be grounded for life.” She offered him a wry smile.

He didn’t smile back.

“Then one day I came home from cheerleading practice. No one was around, and I didn’t think twice about taking a shower. That’s when he broke in. Luckily my father had left something at the house—a flyer he needed to print for the Rotary Club. Funny how I remember exactly what was on that flyer—seems silly to remember—but I can’t forget anything about that day. The soap I’d used in the shower, the way my uniform lay crumpled on the bathroom floor, the way that blade felt at my throat. I ran into the kitchen and grabbed a knife—I’d seen too many B movies and thought I could protect myself—but Robbie took it from me. The knife cut me here.” She rolled up her right sleeve to reveal the pink line that ran from mid-forearm to her bicep. It had faded, but the memories had not. Then she pulled down the collar of her shirt to show him the scar on her shoulder. “And here.”

“Addy.” Lucas leaned forward, hands clasping the broad wood arms of the chair. He looked as if he might get up, as if he needed to do something.

She tugged her sleeve over the reminder of what Guidry had given her—not just the wound, but fear itself. “My dad saved me. Hit Robbie with the baseball bat my brother left in the corner of the kitchen. My mother must have told Mike a million times to put it up. Thank goodness my brother had selective hearing. All this happened long ago, but it changed me. I’m cautious, and I fight being afraid. I go to group therapy and I function quite well, but the fear is always there. It’s part of who I am.”

“Jesus.”

“I don’t know why I’m telling you this.”

His face softened. “Don’t you?”

“Watching you struggle, feeling trapped and very much, I don’t know, alone? Guess I wanted you to understand why I’m private. Why I’m not a girl who can open herself to just any guy.”

Lucas watched her, his hands still clasping the chair. Strong hands with hair sprinkled on his knuckles, hair that caught the sunlight. Lucas’s reaction was odd, almost as if he took it personally. “I assumed something had happened to you by the wariness you displayed, but not...that.”

She pressed her lips together, embarrassment creeping in. Or maybe not embarrassment so much as vulnerability. She hated feeling an eternal victim.

He ran a hand through his dark hair, making it stick up and softening his normally hard look. “So is this guy in prison?”

She nodded, anxiety once again filling her at the thought of Robbie Guidry and the scare tactics he employed from behind bars. Seemed ironic he could still bait her from that locked cell.

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