Jill Shalvis - The Street Where She Lives

“Hey, baby, how’s your mom?”

Aunt Mel. Jeez, Emily must not have been that convincing earlier this morning when she’d called Mel to keep her away. Looked like she’d have to try harder. “Hi! Like I said, Mom’s great. In fact, she was just saying again how she didn’t want you to take any more time off work because she’s doing so great.”

“Really?”

Emily could hear the skepticism in Mel’s voice. “Really,” she gushed. “She got out of bed all by herself.” Her father came into the room with the puppy under his arm and gave her a long look as he took Patches outside. Emily winced, but kept up the flow of Mom’s-doing-great chatter.

“So, how’s school?” Mel asked when Emily had finally wound down.

She winced again. School was a deep, dark pit of hell. She had no friends there, no one who cared. “Sucky.”

Mel laughed. “If your mother hears you use that word, it’ll be suckier.”

“Yeah.” Her dad came back in, gave her a thumb’s-up sign over Patches’s head, which meant the puppy had done her duty. But then Patches saw Emily and barked with excitement before her dad could stop her. “Aunt Mel, I gotta go or I’ll be late for school,” she said quickly. “But honest, things are-”

“Great?” Mel said with a smile in her voice.

“Yeah! So stay there and…” What was it Mom would say? She needed to sound grown-up. “You know. Live your life.”

Aunt Melanie laughed. “Sounds good.”

The puppy barked for the second time, looking quite pleased with herself.

“What was that?” Mel asked.

“Nothing. The school bus. Gotta go!”

Oh man, she’d just lied to her aunt. Again. It was accumulating on her. This morning alone, she’d lied to her father, Adam and her mother, too. That must be a record of some kind.

Ben covered the puppy’s mouth and with another long look at Emily, took her back upstairs.

Hanging up the phone, Emily put her forehead to the wall. Being twelve was harder than she thought.

RACHEL NEVER DID manage to get herself dressed that day. When the party finally left her bedroom, she crawled back into bed, both defeated and depressed at her exhaustion level. She fell asleep and was haunted by dreams of strong, loving arms, by whiskey-colored eyes that saw her, really saw her, and by some miracle loved her anyway, and her own feeble, weak fear of letting herself return that love.

Awake now, she lay there staring at the ceiling. Her stomach growled and she could have sworn she’d just heard a dog bark, but that had to just be a lingering dream. She told herself it hadn’t been weakness or fear that destroyed her and Ben so long ago, but cold, hard facts.

He’d had to go.

She’d had to stay.

Simple. Besides, that had been long ago. They’d moved on. Maybe they had to deal with each other again now, but the feelings they’d once shared were long gone.

Her door opened. Ben came in, carrying a tray with hot oatmeal and buttered toast. He set it on her lap, grabbed the chair in the corner of the room, spun it around and straddled it. Steepling his fingers, he peered at her over the top of them. “Eat up. We have a physical therapist appointment later, you’ll need your strength.”

As if she could eat with him watching her like that. “I’m not really that hungry-”

Her stomach growled loudly into the room.

“Yeah, not hungry,” he said dryly. “Eat, Rachel. I’m not budging until you do.”

With that incentive, she ate the entire bowl.

“You feeling any better?”

“If I say yes, will you get on a plane?”

He smiled. “Probably not.”

She had to smile back. “It was worth a shot.”

“Yeah. Eat.”

And good as his word, when she’d finished, he left her alone.

AT DUSK Emily came in with another tray that held some heavenly scented soup and more toast. Behind her stood Ben, his face solemn, and if she didn’t know better, tentative.

Was that from earlier, when she’d fallen asleep on the way back from her particularly brutal physical therapy appointment? He’d carried her inside, set her on her bed, then kissed her softly.

She’d let their lips cling for one moment, and then shocked at herself, had turned away, cowardly feigning sleep.

They hadn’t talked since.

“Mom, guess what. Dad taught me how to cook soup.” She positively glowed as she sniffed proudly at the steaming bowl. “Yum, right? It smells better than all that canned stuff you always make us use. Hey, maybe when you’re better, he can teach you to cook, too.”

Rachel eyed Ben, who was either wise enough not to smile or didn’t find the humor in the fact Rachel had never taken the time to learn to cook much past the very basics.

“Want some company?” Without waiting for an answer, Emily set the tray on Rachel’s lap and sat on the bed. It was the first time that Rachel could remember seeing her without the laptop attached like an appendage to her arm.

“Come on, Dad.” Emily patted the bed. “Sit.”

Ben straightened from where he’d been holding up the doorjamb and shook his head. “No, I-”

“Dad! Mom hates to eat alone. Come on over. Right here, next to me. She’ll share. Won’t you, Mom?”

Ben looked at her as he moved closer, and indeed sat on her bed, carefully, slowly, clearly being considerate to not jar her.

And all Rachel could think, inanely, was that they were on the same bed.

“Now I know how to make mac and cheese and soup,” Emily announced, then frowned. “Dad, what else can you teach me to cook? Pizza?”

Ben lifted a brow. “Well, we could talk about that, soon as you tell your mother about Patches-”

“Oh, wait!” Emily interrupted and cocked her head. “Yep, that’s my computer beeping. Sorry, gotta go.”

“I didn’t hear it,” Rachel said, but Emily was gone, having raced out of the room like a tornado was on her heels, leaving just the two of them.

Rachel stared at her soup.

“Thank you.” With him this close, she had to fight the ridiculous urge to burrow under the covers and hide.

“Don’t thank me until you eat up.” Picking up the spoon from the tray, he scooped a small bit of the hot liquid, then held it up to her mouth.

“I can feed myself.”

He merely nudged her lips with the spoon, and the warm, heavenly-tasting broth slid into her mouth.

He waited until she swallowed. “Well?”

“Amazing,” she admitted, and he smiled and scooped another bite.

“Really, I can do it.”

“Rach…you’re still exhausted.”

She looked away, but he gently reached out and touched her chin, until she turned back to him. “Is it that bad having my help?” he asked quietly. “Really?”

God, his eyes were deep. His meaning even deeper. “No,” she whispered, then closed her eyes. “Not compared to say…I don’t know…getting a root canal?”

Now he laughed, as she’d intended, and yep, the sound was still low and sexy, still made her stomach tingle. Then he brought her another sip of soup. And another…

“You’re still good at the kitchen thing, I see,” she said after a few minutes, her belly getting nice and full.

“Yeah, well, when you grow up having to put it together yourself or go hungry, you learn quick.”

The broth suddenly stuck in her throat, the picture his simple words created breaking her heart-a young boy, terminally hungry. How many times had she suspected his foster home was not a good place? But no matter how many times she’d asked, he’d never opened up about it.

She wouldn’t ask now, she couldn’t afford the intimacy that would require. She waited for the awkward silence to drift over them. Oddly enough, the silence didn’t seem awkward at all.

“Rach?”

She jerked upright, realizing she’d actually started to fall asleep right in front of him. “I’m sorry-”

“Hey, you’re tired, no big deal. You had a pretty brutal physical therapy session today.” Setting aside the tray, he helped her into the bathroom, where she brushed her teeth and got ready for bed.

Afterward, she fell asleep with the image of Ben on her mind. In the middle of the night, she came awake again, her heart heavy, her body aching. She flipped on her light with the clapper Emily had insisted on, a gadget she’d thought so stupid until now, when she didn’t have the energy to do anything but very weakly, very quietly, clap once.

She stared at the pad of paper by her bed, a pad she usually filled with new ideas for Gracie when she couldn’t sleep.

But the comic strip that had been so important to her before the accident now seemed…frivolous. Just a bunch of stupid drawings, whereas other people were actually doing things to help people in the world. Taking action to make a difference.

Like Ben.

“Rach?”

Speaking of. He was a tall, dark shadow standing in her doorway. He took one step into her bedroom and the glow from her lamp bathed him in yellow light.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

He wore only sweat bottoms, low slung and untied, as if hastily put on. Closing her eyes, she tried to lose the image of him nearly nude and so magnificent that she wanted to gobble him up. “Define all right,” she said.

“Do you need help into the bathroom?”

So intense, so serious. Did she look that bad? Yes, she decided, she probably did. “I’m fine.”

“Do you need water? Have you been drinking enough-”

“Truly. I’m fine. I just…can’t sleep,” she admitted. “And I can’t draw to save my life.” She managed to sound calm about that.

“Oh.” He scratched his chest, looking around, clearly unsure how to help her with such an intangible problem.

“Don’t worry,” she said dryly. “I won’t ask you to sing and dance to get me back to sleep.”

“I could read you a bedtime story,” he offered, losing some of his intensity and actually smiling.