Brazing (Forged in Fire #2) (12 page)

Not that I cared.

Tate Halloway with her gingerlicious hair and sweet smile could just stay down there with the sweet potato pie where she belonged.

Gingerlicious—good Lord, I’m using West words.

I’ve lost it.

Whose bright idea was it to put my sister beside me in line?

Anyway, Tate wasn’t looking over here at all. I knew because I’d been staring at her off and on for a freakin’ hour.

“She’s hungry. That’s all.”

“She’s hungry all right.”

“Knock—it—off.”

Willa shrugged as the first person, Mrs. Abrams, came to the line with three of her kids in tow. Her husband worked in the mines and times had been tough on them. One of her little girls had pigtails and a tattered dress. Wretched guilt washed over me as I realized how much she reminded me of Tate when she was little, minus the wild hair.

I was a little bastard forever making fun of her—trying to get her attention or not.

As much as I tried, I couldn’t stop thinking about Tate. She distracted my every thought and turned it into something about her.

I could hear her voice, above all the others. They were all happy to see her back. Some recognized her instantly and some claimed they knew she looked familiar but couldn’t place it.

“I’m tired of potatoes,” Willa claimed after only twenty or so people and just left me to dole out turkey and potatoes—which was way more daunting than it sounded.

“You’re gonna kill someone with that many potatoes. Death by starches.”

I didn’t even acknowledge her. Slanting my body backwards to look further down the line, I could see my sister and Cami—now serving the pie.

It wouldn’t work. They could put Tate Halloway in my damned pocket and I still wouldn’t fall for her charms. I was made of bedrock—unbreakable. She couldn’t get past my walls. In fact, I’d decided that she didn’t affect me at all.

“It would be a nice death.”

“Is there such thing as a nice death?”

Tate didn’t seem her usual vibrant self around me, so I allowed her one look. She looked better than the day before, but in the dress she was wearing, I could see she was markedly thinner than a few weeks ago and the crescents that hung below her eyes were darker and larger.

I didn’t answer her question. It felt too intimate of a conversation with a girl who I firmly intended to ignore for the rest of my life—in theory.

The influx of hungry townspeople finally dwindled down hours later. Beside me was a girl who was completely worn out despite the niceties and sass she continued to serve everyone who approached her.                      

“It’s nice to be on this side of the line.” She whispered the comment. I didn’t know if she meant it for my ears or not.  

“It’s a blessing to be on either side of this table.”

She chunked her serving spoon into the mashed potatoes. “Have you ever been on the other side of the table, Bridger?”

“No. But I can imagine having a meal on Thanksgiving is a blessing.”

“As long as the people serving it are gracious.”

“Are you saying I’m not nice? You don’t think I’m nice?”

I sounded like her the day before when she asked me if I thought she was ugly.

“You’re perfectly nice, Bridger—and stoic—mostly stoic.”

I wasn’t stoic. Aloof maybe—standoffish, probably—but stoic?

Chapter Twelve

Tate

This boy. Did he want me to dump the entire pan of leftover mashed potatoes on his head? He had no idea.

Just like so many other things.

Bridger was nice and pretty to look at, but when he made up his mind, there was nothing to sway his stalwart opinion. Which would have been fine if he didn’t have such crappy opinions!

“I’m not stoic,” he laughed but it held a bite.

I swiveled to face him and plopped a hand on my popped-out hip. “And completely clueless.”

He pressed his lips together like he had to force himself not to respond. His green eyes looked anywhere but at my face and he rocked back and forth on his heels as if there was just too much inside of him to hold in.

Bridger was on edge and I put him there. He was also pissing me off, so I tried really hard not to enjoy that.

Okay, I didn’t try that hard.

“Come on,” I goaded. “Admit it.”

“Admit that I’m clueless?” His bright green eyes glittered dangerously at me. “What exactly do you think I’m clueless about?”

My fingers drummed against my hip. I had taken extra care with my appearance today and called in the industrial-strength concealer for the unsightly bags under my eyes. I had dropped weight over the last few months, which was always annoying, because I loved my curves and hated when I looked like a stick figure version of myself.

But I had a few clothes leftover from the last round of treatments. Tonight, I’d gone for some wide-leg dark denim jeans that fit like trousers but hid my weight loss. My V-neck burgundy sweater wrapped around my waist and gave the illusion that I still had that hour-glass figure I loved. My hair floated around my shoulders in wild waves and I wore my grandmother’s emerald tear-drop necklace.

The necklace reminded me of a certain someone’s eyes. And bonus, I was trying to get those eyes to notice the necklace. Or rather, where the necklace oh-so casually lay.

What? I wasn’t above acting like a floozy to get this guy to at least acknowledge he could tolerate me.

But like… a classy floozy.

I leaned forward, and he didn’t flinch away, so I took that as a good thing. “How about, what it’s like to be so poor you can’t wait for Thanksgiving just so you can finally have a full belly. How about, what it’s like to sit at home every other night of the year, knowing your mama can’t feed you and knowing that she’s too proud to ask for help. How about, what it’s like to endure the glowers and looks of disapproval from people who think you shouldn’t be poor. Or that you’re poor on purpose or something. People don’t like to see the ugliness, Bridger. People don’t want to have to face the hard things in life and feel a call to do something about it.” I dropped my voice because I happened to be talking about a lot of the people in this room, and I was way beyond forgiveness for them. I didn’t want to open old wounds or offend anyone unintentionally. When I began again, my voice was just above a whisper and Bridger had to lean in to hear me better. “People don’t want to see a family that can’t make ends meet or get through the month. They want to pretend that doesn’t exist, so they don’t have to do anything about it. If they acknowledge those in need, really, truly acknowledge their existence, then something inside us calls us to do something about it. And they don’t want to be inconvenienced. My family and I were an inconvenience. My brother and me were filthy, and scrawny and looked like little street rats running around underfoot and in the way. Nobody wanted to deal with us. Hell, nobody wanted to acknowledge we existed. It’s not all charity and goodwill on the other side of that line. And I know you’ve been through some hard times, and I would never even think of belittling what you’ve been through. But,” and I pointed a very angry finger at the now-empty receiving line, “You’ve never been over there. So don’t pretend like you know what it’s like.”

I couldn’t look at Bridger anymore. I couldn’t even be around him. Like the over-dramatic girl I could sometimes be, I hurried out of the church kitchen and down a back hallway.

I grew up in this church and knew all the secret places like the back of my hand. The halls and rooms were dark at the end of the night. Those that remained were busy in the kitchen, packing up the leftovers to deliver to homes. The rest of the church was eerily quiet as I moved quickly from hallway to hallway.

It was actually pretty creepy. Like the setting of a horror movie.

A secret I would keep to my dying day. Granddaddy would not tolerate those kinds of fears.

Once I made it to the sanctuary, I started to feel a little silly for running away. But I’d already committed to my escape, so I figured I might as well stick to it. Besides, now that I was in this familiar place, I wanted to search out my old hiding place and reminisce about the past.

I had realized back in the kitchen that I had some unresolved feelings about my childhood. The years we lived in Constance were very rough.

Well, the years after we lived in Constance were pretty rough too, but in a different way. Sure, we still never had money, especially after I got sick, but we had more money than we did in Constance. My dad got much better job once we moved to Cincinnati and while it kept us firmly in the lower-middle class, it actually had decent benefits. My medical expenses weren’t nonexistent, but my parents managed the deductibles and still got food on the table.

That was about a thousand percent better than how we’d lived in Constance.

Even with my granddaddy as the preacher, people didn’t look at us as a family in need. They looked at us like a nuisance. Maybe more so
because
granddaddy was their spiritual leader. Maybe they expected some kind of divine intervention with our grocery bill and because there wasn’t one, that reflected poorly on their Preacher.

Or maybe they just didn’t want one more thing to deal with.

I didn’t know. And I didn’t really care.

I didn’t even feel bad about our wretched state. I’d long gotten over the embarrassment of being the ugly child in second-hand clothes and shoes that didn’t fit. But it was that feeling… the pity I’d seen in Bridger’s eyes when I’d accused him of not knowing what it was like. It was the memories of standing on the other side of that food line and praying with all my might, with every beat of my small child’s heart that they would put two scoops of potatoes on my tray and an extra slice of turkey.

It was that feeling. The feeling that I just wanted to be full for once. For once in my whole life.

I’d been through a lot in my life. I’d faced chemo treatment after chemo treatment. I’d faced doctors with grim diagnoses and endless hospital stays. But it was those moments when I was small and confused that I hated the most. It was when I didn’t know any better, I didn’t know that death wasn’t so scary or there were worst things than going hungry. When I was little, being hungry was the worst thing in the world and I hated that all the grownups around me looked at me like it was my fault. Like I should know better than to feel anything but starving.

A knocking on the wood-paneled wall pulled my attention back to the present and I looked up from my place on the floor to find Bridger hovering over the edge of the baptismal.

“Can I come in?”

I let out a weary sigh. “I suppose.” I gestured around at the white walls of my secret hiding place.

“Isn’t this a little… blasphemous?” He raised an eyebrow at me.

I tried to stop the smile. I was never really mad at him and now I was mostly mad at myself for acting like such a spaz. “I used to sneak in here as a little girl. Whenever I’d get trapped at church with Grams or Grandaddy, I’d hide away in here until it was time to go.”

A small smile tilted Bridger’s lips and apparently against his better judgment, he crawled over the side of the enormous tub and slunk to the floor with me.

“Preacher never found you, did he?”

I laughed harder than I thought I was up for. A lightness drifted over my body and took some of the pressure off my heart. “Nope! And don’t you dare tell him. He’ll make me say prayers from now until Easter!”

He shifted positions trying to get comfortable in the awkward space. He turned his face away from me but then his shoulders started shaking and a chuckle forced its way out of his chest. Pretty soon we were both laughing hard and smiling at each other.

“He would make you pray until Christmas,” Bridger said as soon as he settled down. “Christmas ten years from now.”

I grinned at him. “It might be worth it. This place was definitely worth it when I was a child.”

“Why, Tate? Because you were poor?”

I met those perceptive green eyes of his and held on for dear life. This boy could see right through me. He could see everything. With one intense, intelligent look, he saw all the pieces that made me up, the beauty, the flaws, and the places I wanted to keep hidden. He saw me.

All of me.

“Because I was poor, sure. But it was more than that. It was a weariness I wore like yoke around my neck and a hunger that never went away. I didn’t get it, Bridge. I was just a kid. I didn’t understand any of it. But I learned at church, at school, in this damn town, that being poor was wrong. And I learned that fast. My family came to worship and all I wanted to do was hide. And then eventually I did hide.”

“Because of me?”

I had never heard such a broken man. I thought back to his obnoxious pranks and all that confusing attention. “No.” I felt my cheeks heat to match my hair. “Not because of you. You and your family were some of the good people that gave me faith in a better world. Your mama meant more to me than I can express to you. And you… you were just… well, you weren’t as
stoic
back then.”

“You don’t have all bad memories of me then?” He’d inched closer to me on the floor of the baptismal. We faced each other but now our bent knees lined up next to each other side-by-side.

Shivers racked my arms and I forced myself to stay still. My stomach felt fizzy, like someone had shaken up a can of Coke and then opened it inside me.

“I remember you well, Bridger Wright. And there are plenty of good memories mixed in with all those bad ones.”

I thought he would laugh at my dig, but instead his brows drew down and his mouth turned into a frown.

“I remember you too, Tate Halloway. I’m not the only one who’s changed. You say I’m more serious now, but I have reason to be.” He leaned into me and his finger trailed a line from my heart to my throat. His fingers brushed aside the emerald necklace and made a path that I would feel long after he left me. “You can pretend all you want, Tate, but something’s changed inside you too. You’re more carefree than you were, but there’s something serious in your eyes. I might not know how it got there, but I know something bad had to happen to put it there. Did you really get food poisoning the other week?”

My heart jumped in my chest. He was too close. He was too sweet. I couldn’t even think with him touching me like this and he wanted me to remember that I didn’t want him to know everything about me?

I couldn’t lie to him like this. I couldn’t hide the truth when I’d been so honest about everything else. But I wasn’t ready for him to know either.

I didn’t want him to stay friends with me because he felt sorry for me. And I really didn’t want him to run away from me because he was more afraid than he needed to be.

I hated the idea of Bridger giving up on me.

I hated the idea of having to see another pitying look from him or worse, a callous look that would tell me he didn’t care enough to have feelings about it one way or the other.

So, instead of feeding him some bullshit I’d have to make up on the fly, I did the only other thing that happened to occupy my brain space at the moment.

I leaned in and kissed him.

He startled at first contact. I knew he didn’t anticipate me making the first move and he probably would hate me for it in the morning.

He’d probably feel abused.

Sexually.

Bridger was one of those old-fashioned guys that thought men should rule the roost- I could just tell. He probably opened car doors and watched his mouth around the delicate female sex. I was positive he stood when a woman entered the room and I had no doubt he removed his hat at the dinner table.

And I loved that about him. I would love every second of being a pampered woman at the mercy of such a chivalrous male.

But I was also a freed, liberated female of the twenty-first century. I could pump my own gas and order food for myself. I managed to drive long distances while consulting a map and not get lost in the middle of nowhere. I could check the oil in my car.

Hell, I could even change a tire.

If I left everything up to this man, to this man that wanted nothing to do with relationships and was scared of anything with estrogen, our lips would never touch. He would continue to ignore me and continue to let his past haunt his future.

I, myself, had a very unforgettable past, so I felt like he could learn something from me.

Like how to let go and live a little.

Bridger had jumped, but he hadn’t pulled away. I took that as a good sign.