Liesel Schmidt - Coming Home To You

“Rough day, Zoë?” Ray asked over his shoulder as he walked toward the kitchen, presumably to comb the contents of the fridge. It was his first stop anytime he came over, so I usually made sure I had an ample supply of Fig Newtons chilling out in there. Not that normal people generally kept cookies in their refrigerators, but this—as I’d learned over the past several months—was how Ray McPherson preferred them. And Ray was not normal.

I rolled my eyes and shuffled along behind him.

He had no idea how rough.

“Little bit.”

“So tell me about it,” he said around a mouthful of cookie. The man wasted no time.

I blew out a puff of air, wondering where to start.

“That bad, huh?” he asked, still seeming extremely upbeat. Not that my mood was really anything to compare it to.

I set the wine bottle down on the counter and took his hand. “Follow me, Ray McPherson, and behold the indescribable bliss that has been my day,” I said as I led him out of the kitchen and down the hall.

Showing him would be much easier than explaining everything.

“Where are we going, Zoë Trent, and why are we using full names?”

“Just wait,” I said over my shoulder as we neared the bedroom.

“Oh, hey. Um, yeah, Zoë, I love ya and all, but—” Ray stopped the minute his feet hit the destroyed carpet. Even in shoes, the difference was obvious. That, and the overpowering smell of the puddle I’d left on the floor left both of us at a momentary loss for words.

“What the?” Ray turned to me, his eyes wide in amazement, his nose crinkled involuntarily in disgust.

I wasn’t sure whether to answer, cry, or throw up again, because I had the overwhelming urge to do all three. I decided that the best thing was simply to tell him what happened. Then maybe he would be able to tell me if more crying or throwing up again were warranted or just a waste of energy.

“The water heater. In the closet there,” I stammered, pointing in the direction of the door that stood open. “It exploded? Or leaked? Or something?” It might have been an irrefutable fact given the state of the carpet, but it came out sounding like a question, simply because I still wasn’t sure what exactly had happened to the water heater.

Or why.

The carpet made very odd, very loud wet noises under Ray’s feet as he walked across the room.

“Hmmm,” he grunted and scratched his head, working from the back, to the right side, to the hair that ended just above his forehead. He let out a huge burst of air, then ran the back of his right hand back and forth under his chin, skipping up his jaw line to scratch his beard.

And then he started laughing.

“I’m glad you think this is funny, Ray, but I fail to see the humor in all of this. Look,” I said, gesturing wildly at the room around me. “ Look at this room! What am I supposed to do? This isn’t the kind of thing that’s supposed to happen when you’re just watching someone’s house. This isn’t the kind of thing that’s supposed to happen to women who are already teetering on the edge.”

The crying had started again.

And the snot.

My God, the snot.

Why is it that when you’re already reduced to extreme indignity, you’re taken down even more by a seemingly unending stream of mucus?

How fair is that ?

I squeezed my eyes tightly shut and covered them with my hands, trying to stave off the flow of tears, wishing like hell that I could just crawl into bed and pull the covers over my head. I felt Ray wrap his arms around me, wordlessly pulling me into an embrace.

I could have melted into his arms. I felt weightless, formless, and somehow like I’d finally reached water after having been denied it. It had been so long since I’d had a man’s arms around me, an eternity since I’d last felt the security of being held by someone whose bulk felt like a refuge. Somehow, every tear, every gut-wrenching sob that I thought I no longer had in me was dredged up as I stood there wrapped in Ray’s arms. There was nothing romantic in the exchange. It was the solace of one friend to another, where nothing but human contact was needed.

We stood like that for what seemed like forever, the water heater and ruined carpet fading somewhere into a distant haze of unimportance as Ray stroked my hair and listened to my choked sobbing.

Chapter 8

“So tell me about this bottle of wine,” I said, reaching for the Shiraz that had been sitting on my kitchen counter without explanation for the past two hours.

Ray and I had done as much damage control as we could in the bedroom, then decided to make another go of it once it was daylight and within normal hours of operation for water heater repair men.

Ray shifted his weight and leaned against the counter.

“What?”

He bit his lip against a huge grin that was threatening to escape and reached into one of the millions of pockets of his faded cargo pants. No one would ever accuse Ray of being a metro-sexual.

I was about to ask him if he had a frog in his pocket when he suddenly held out his hand, a black velvet box resting in his palm.

My eyes widened, and for the umpteenth time that night, my eyes were welling with tears. But these, for once, were happy tears.

I set the wine back down on the counter and took the small box from his hand. I held it for a moment, running my fingers lightly over the top, feeling the gentle curve of the lid and the crush of the velvet under my fingertips. I realized I was holding my breath when I opened the box, and the faint creak of the hinge was the loudest thing in the room.

Nestled in the blackness of the box was the most beautiful ring I’d ever seen, one that put even the ring Paul had given me to shame.

One-point-five carats of princess-cut perfection sparkled brilliantly, seeming to capture every possible ray of light in the tiny kitchen.

I looked up at Ray, who stood silently, breathlessly awaiting my words.

And there were no words.

I reached out to him and pulled him into my arms, happier than I’d felt in longer than I could remember.

“What do you think?” he mumbled into my shoulder, finally breaking the silence.

I smiled even though he couldn’t see my face. “Yes,” I whispered, my eyes closed as tears crept out the corners and trailed down my cheeks. “I think she’ll s ay yes .”

It’s amazing how much life can change in the space of two months.

I knew from first-hand experience how much could change in the blink of an eye, but I had been on pause for so long that the past two months were like a whirlwind.

Kate was settling in nicely to her new position up in Atlanta—bettering the world in ways that made me feel as though I was merely taking up space on the planet, while she battled every day on behalf of those without voices. She’d been there only a month, but it felt as though she’d been gone a lifetime.

During the month between her return to the country and starting her new job, she had been a daily part of my life, and our relationship had recovering the strength it had lost while she’d been away. Life was gaining normalcy, little by little, and having Kate there to help me keep my perspective was invaluable. She was a lifeline for me, but I knew I wasn’t the only one who was now feeling the sting of her absence.

Though Buzzing Beans and I were seeing less and less of each other, Ray’s presence in my life had grown beyond the brick walls of the coffee house. He was basically the man in my life now, calling at various points of the day to check on me, stopping by the house just for a “quick visit and a cookie.” It had been how I’d discovered his absurd love of refrigerated Fig Newtons. He had come to check up on the house one day, supposedly just to see how things were going, and he’d wandered to the fridge. He’d peeked inside, then closed the door and shaken his head regrettably, all the while muttering under his breath about the uncivilized living conditions of a house with no Fig Newtons in the refrigerator.