A/N: FYI for those of you asking about my story, "The Idiot's Guide," I continue to work on that along with the others! I'm determined to finish them all. Thanks for all your comments and favorites, and for sticking with me for so long! Please keep it up, as it is extremely encouraging while I write.
Chapter 4
Calleigh had been sitting on the porch for hours. Her house was an anomaly in that part of the country: anachronistic and beautiful. The Remy family went back generations, first in South Carolina, then in Georgia, and finally, Louisiana.
Her maternal great-great-grandfather moved to Louisiana with his gentleman's money and Deep South charm, and he built his wife an antebellum masterpiece of a home. Big, white, with a wrap-around porch shaded by wisteria and massive magnolia trees.
That porch gave Calleigh solace. As a child she sat outside and played on the white wooden planks while her mother hosted brunches and socials. Later, as a teenager, she spent long hours reading in her favorite rocking chair, or she'd sit on the swing and talk with her best girlfriends. When her dad left, she went there just to think, to find quiet.
Tonight the quiet felt suffocating, and the usual comfort she found there stayed at arm's length.
J.J. found her out on her old shooting grounds and insisted she come back with him. Calleigh conceded wordlessly and followed him home without a fight. She couldn't say no to her baby brother. He made her a cup of hot chamomile tea, gave her a blanket, and settled her on the porch swing where he knew she'd want to be. Then he left her alone.
The sky grew dark and she was still there, not moving and staring at nothing. Calleigh wasn't sure what she should be thinking about. She knew it should have been something, but her mind remained blank. All she'd done in the last month was feel or fight against feeling, and now she felt nothing except numb.
All she wanted was to forget it all. Forget how dirty she felt. Forget the anger. Forget the shame, and the feeling of helplessness that had turned to hopelessness. Maybe if she stayed numb long enough, the fear and pain, the anger, would no longer stalk her.
The gravel crunched in the driveway and a bright beam of headlights temporarily blinded her. For the first time in hours, Calleigh looked up. Her green eyes lingered for a moment on the old farm truck that had pulled up behind her dad's beamer, and she sighed. Derek was home. Her middle brother lacked J.J.'s patience and soft compassion. Derek was like his sister, headstrong and persistent. This was one conversation Calleigh did not want to have.
She was considering abandoning her snug roost on the porch in favor of her upstairs bedroom when she heard not one truck door slam, but two. Calleigh's head snapped to the driveway a second time, and her heart stopped. Some part of her brain registered Derek carrying a suitcase around to the back of the house, but her eyes were glued to the man standing beside the truck.
Eric.
Calleigh drowned in deep brown eyes. Eric wasn't moving, and she could see that he hesitated out of deference to her. She gave an infinitesimal nod of her head, and he took his first, slow step toward her.
As he moved, Calleigh broke their eye contact and stared down at the ice cold mug of tea that was practically molded to her hands. But her eyes soon filled with so many tears she could no longer make out the definite shapes of the cup or her fingers.
Eric had spotted Cal as soon as they pulled into the driveway. She looked like a little girl, all bundled up in a quilt and curled into a ball on the swing. Until he saw her face, and then she looked like she was carrying the kinds of burdens brought on by many years.
He and Derek had agreed before they reached the house that all Eric needed to worry about when they got there was finding Calleigh wherever J.J. had managed to plant her...assuming J.J. had managed to keep her somewhere at all.
Eric stood by the rusty old pickup truck and simply stared at her, sitting still in the swing on the porch in the dark. A solitary light shone through a window behind her, illuminating the dark porch in the faintest of glows. She sent him that tiny nod, and it was all the incentive he needed to close the distance between them.
Eric made it to the next-to-last step of the stairs. For some reason he felt like he needed her permission to take that last step onto the veranda.
When Calleigh didn't hear Eric's footsteps traverse the wooden boards, she finally raised her head to look at him again. He was standing at the top of the stairs, waiting for her. She gave a watery chuckle and turned her gaze past him into the black of the night. Eric stayed still on the penultimate step, and Calleigh realized that she was going to have to come to him. Only half-begrudgingly, she unfolded herself from her perch, set her mug aside, and crossed the porch.
The man watched her every move. Calleigh wrapped her arms around herself when she got up off the swing, and Eric wasn't sure if she was guarding herself against the night chill, or against him. She kept her distance once she stopped in front of him, maybe two or three feet, and her eyes searched him for answers.
"Your dad called me," Eric explained quietly.
Calleigh's lids brimmed with moisture again. She bit her lip as she nodded and looked away; Eric could see how hard she was fighting. They stood like that for a long moment before Cal turned her face back to Eric and considered him closely, almost like she was sizing him up.
She darted her tongue over her lips—they were dry and stuck together from the hours she'd spent in silence—to make them work. "You shouldn't have come, Eric."
Eric figured that would be one of the first things she said to him, and he was right. "It's my job," he responded, shaking his head, "I'm your best friend."
She rolled her eyes and let out a deep, tired breath. "You're not here as my best friend, Eric," she shot back gently.
Calleigh's honesty surprised him, and Eric sensed she was testing him with her candidness. He could be candid, too. His eyes bored into hers.
"No, I'm not," he stated.
Again, Calleigh sighed and turned her gaze away from him for a moment before recapturing his deep look, wrapping her arms tighter around her body.
"Then what are you coming as, Eric?" she asked.
Her voice flowed weary and raw, like she didn't have the strength left to fight him anymore.
"A man, Calleigh," he answered quietly. "Just a man."
Cal's eyes strayed from Eric's once more as she took in the whole of him. There was a nervousness about the way he stood in front of her—his arms tentatively at his sides as if he was waiting for a cue to hold her—but there was nothing hesitant in the way he spoke those words.
A man, Calleigh. Just a man.
Eric watched as a solitary tear escaped from Calleigh's eye, watched as she reached up in confusion to wipe it away, watched her stare at it in wonder as it rested on her fingertips. She squeezed her eyes tight.
A heartbeat later, Calleigh was in Eric's arms. Standing one step above him, she easily looped her arms around his waist and buried her face in the crook of his neck.
"It's okay to cry, Cal," Eric murmured into her hair as he felt her tremble against him.
"I couldn't—I can't," she gasped, her words muffled in the hollow of Eric's collarbone. Calleigh hadn't shed a single tear since her kidnapping. She wanted to cry, she felt like crying, but her eyes stayed dry.
"Well, you're allowed. All you want. I'm not going anywhere," Eric promised.
She sighed against him and hugged him tighter. Her chest heaved and her throat burned, and Calleigh couldn't stop the tears now even if she wanted to.
"Make it go away, Eric. Just make it all go away," she whispered desperately against the soft skin of his neck.
She barely got the words out before the sobs came.
Standing on the top steps of her family home, held by the man she trusted most in the world, Calleigh Duquesne wept, really wept, for the first time in her life.
"This hand is bitterness
We wanna taste it, let the hatred numb our sorrow
The wise hand opens slowly to lilies of the valley and tomorrow
This is what it means to be held
How it feels when the sacred is torn from your life
And you survive
This is what it is to be loved
And to know that the promise was
When everything fell, we'd be held"