Page 9 of Salvaged Heart

9

ANDERS

I lay on the boat dock, eyes closed tightly against the morning sun. Despite my initial hatred towards this spot, it was quickly becoming one of my favorite places on the home’s property. Partly because there was a good chance it would break any moment under my weight and I’d be drowned, but mainly because the others didn’t try to bother me out here. I had no idea how long I‘d been lying here. I just had no plans to move anytime soon.

A soft breeze blew over the lake, a rarity for this time of year, but it was a pleasant hiatus from the stifling weather we’d been having. The water lapped around the dock in gentle waves caused by the already busy traffic floating by. People starting their Saturday mornings early, scoping out the perfect place to drop anchor and settle in for a day of fishing and drinking. I bobbed up and down, my hazy mind slipping in and out of focus.

Last night had been a rough one. Thoughts and memories I had come to North Carolina to escape had finally caught up with me. The reminder of all the things I desperately wanted to forget, too great for just alcohol to numb. I’d been doing better, keeping the pills at bay, but to think I could hold off that itch forever had been a joke.

I was so fucking weak.

But, like with any time these drug-fueled stupors came over me, I found I didn’t care. I’d feel good until the high subsided. Then I’d feel a thousand times worse when the come down inevitably started and the self-hatred began rolling back in.

As if to foreshadow my impending slip back into the darkness, a cloud passed over my head, blocking the brightness that peaked through my closed eyelids. There hadn’t been a cloud in the sky when I’d closed them, but days could have passed for all I knew. The concept of time was always the very first thing I lost when I gave in to my addictions. I opened one eye hesitantly, squinting up at the cloud, but two bright blue orbs peered down at me instead. Man, every time they looked at me, it was like they were seeing into my soul. I hadn’t heard Beckham approach, but it didn’t surprise me that he had come looking. I hadn’t made it to breakfast earlier, possibly missed lunch, too, and work had no doubt been underway for several hours already.

“I’ll be there in a minute.” I groaned, rolling over and hiding my face in the bend of my elbow. My stomach lurched at the quick motion. I tried and failed to hide the dry retch that burst from me. I had nothing to puke up.

There was a creak of floorboards to my right as Beckham squatted by my side. A firm but gentle hand came down on my forehead, rolling my face so I was forced to look over at him.

“Everything alright down there?”

“Hungover,” I mumbled. It was the closest lie I had to the truth.

One of his eyebrows shot up in surprise. It was adorable that he genuinely had no idea what a fucked up hot mess I was ninety-five percent of the time, but he clearly hadn’t noticed the fluctuations in my temperament. Maybe he just thought I was bipolar.

He seemed to stew on that for a moment before sighing and setting it aside. “Laurel’s got to head back to Knoxville in the morning.”

“Why’s she bailing?”And why does it sound like you’re not going with her?

“The vet clinic called.”

“I didn’t know she had a pet.”

“What? No, it’s the place she wanted to intern this summer. She got waitlisted, but I guess a last-minute opening popped up.” When I continued to gawk at him, no idea what he was talking about, he added, “That’s what she is going to school for…to be a vet.”

Shit, a good brother would have known that. It was lucky I never claimed to be a good brother.

“Ah, yes. Of course.” I pulled myself up into a sitting position and scrambled around for the pack of cigarettes I knew couldn’t be far. Beckham found it first. For a heart-stopping moment, I thought he might chuck it in the lake, but instead, he flipped the top open, pulled one out with his long fingers, and leaned forward to place it in my mouth.

“You should quit these.” He added before lifting my Zippo and lighting the end. I took a long drag, not breaking eye contact with him. Those damn eyes would be the death of me if I wasn’t careful. I bet he and my sister did a lot of intense eye contact fucking, how could they not.

Lucky bitch.

“There are worse things I could do.” The drugs currently raging through my system, for example.

Beckham shot me a look that said he saw right through me. “You think you can stand a whole summer just you, me, and the ghosts of Mitchell’s past?”

Way worse things plagued me than whatever haunted this old house, but I kept that to myself. “I don’t know. Laurel’s warmth towards me made this whole experience tolerable, after all.” I scoffed as he stood and wandered back in the direction of the house.

The following morning, I found myself sitting on the top step of the front porch, sipping coffee so strong it could have powered a nuclear reactor. I watched Laurel and Beckham say goodbye to one another for the tenth time in so many minutes. The hot liquid was almost as bitter as the looks Laurel kept shooting my way as they whispered back and forth quietly enough that I could tell I was the topic of conversation.

“You don’t need to worry, Laurel. Your watchdog won’t neglect his duties while you’re gone.” I interrupted, raising my hand in mock surrender when she threw me another fiery look. “I’ll behave.”

“That wasn’t what we were discussing.” She hissed.

“No, I’m sure it wasn’t.” I rolled my eyes and left them to finish wishing each other goodbye for the eleventh and twelfth times.

Back inside, I tried to busy myself while waiting for Beckham’s return. The truth was that Laurel being removed from the equation was precisely what I needed. Her constant hawk eyes on me made my entire purpose for being here harder to accomplish. I had thought spending more time around the two of them, feigning normalcy, feigning sobriety, would have caused her to back off my case a little, but no such luck. She was mistrustful as ever.

Rightfully so, but still.

Less than ten minutes later, Beckham finally came back inside. “She make it off okay?” I asked, not out of politeness but needing confirmation she was finally out of my hair.

“Just you and me now.” Something low in my gut liked the sound of that very much. “So the living room needs one last coat of paint, and we need to start dismantling the furniture in the primary bedroom. Want to flip a coin for who gets what?”

“How about we tag team both?” The words escaped before I could catch them. What in the world was I thinking? This was the opportunity I had been waiting for to be alone, and I’d just glued us together for the rest of the day. I continued anyway, “We could start here while the light’s still good and then move upstairs?”

He flashed me that gorgeous smile of his. When Beckham smiled, his entire face lit up with joy. The normally chiseled planes of his face grew soft, and his eyes sparkled with mirth. And when he smiled at you, when you were the sole focus of that delight—God, it was breathtaking.

“Sounds like a plan.”

“Let’s do it.”

We quietly worked together, gathering supplies, checking the drop clothes were still snuggly in place, and pouring paint before rock-paper-scissoring for who would get the torture of cutting in and who got the easy way out with the roller. He won, so I dragged a ladder into the corner of the room and clambered up it to begin. Beckham connected his phone to the speaker, turning on a country album, much to my disdain, but I had to admit it wasn’t half bad.

“So,” Beckham started.

He didn’t need to say the following words for me to know where this was heading.

“You want to talk about it?”

I should have known his avoidance of the topic over the last week was too good to be true. Faking ignorance was the best option, not that he would buy it.

“Talk about what?”

“Last week when we picked up breakfast.”

“There’s nothing really to talk about.” I kept my focus glued to my task despite his eyes burning a hole in my back. “That guy came out of nowhere. It scared me. I reacted… poorly.”

“He knew you.”

Not a question. “Well, I didn’t know him.” From the insult he’d thrown at me—Fag—my best guess was I had tried to hit on him in my drunken stupor the night before, but he had been the furthest thing from my type. Someone he’d been there with then? I didn’t know or particularly care.

“Do you have panic attacks often?”

I spun on the ladder, almost losing my balance in the process. I caught myself at the last minute before I tumbled awkwardly to the ground. “That’s not what that was.”

“Seemed like one.”

“I just needed a smoke.”

He cocked his brow in and gave me a long assessing look. His eyes softened. “I know I don’t know you well, Anders,” He paused, no doubt to determine if the next words he spoke were true, “But I would like to. Get to know you, I mean.”

A heavy silence hung between us as we stared back at one another awkwardly. The lonely child in me craved what he offered: a confidante, a friend. I hadn’t called someone that in more years than I could count. Sure, back in Nashville and Atlanta, I had people, but when they were only interested in getting high or drunk or off with you…Did that count as a friend at all? The last person who truly earned that title was Jonah, and, well, I couldn’t let my thoughts wander there. “Why?”

“Why not?”

I could think of about a hundred reasons.

Beckham had this pure spirit. He looked at life through rose-tinted glasses at a world full of possibilities. All he needed to do was discover them. You could tell he had been raised by the sort of parents who told him all he needed to do was put his mind to something, and he could achieve it. Laurel claimed he lacked direction in one of our few non-hostile conversations with each other, but I saw past that. Beckham’s problem was that he had made Laurel his entire direction, but once he recognized that, he would be unstoppable.

Meanwhile, I was a cynic who saw only what could be lost in any situation. I walked through life not trusting anything I couldn’t see with my own two eyes, and even then, I maintained a healthy wariness. I learned a long time ago you could not trust other people. The day you gave even the smallest piece of yourself to another was the day you gave them the ammunition to break you.

I knew all this. But then, why did I find myself considering his offer? Allowing him to see some of these fractured pieces of me?

“Look,” He sighed. “I’m not saying we need to make friendship bracelets and get matching tattoos, but we will spend a lot of time together this summer and…” He paused, gauging whether he thought his next words would spook me. “I get the vibe that you could use a friend.”

Ah, there it was. Pity.

“You don’t need to do this.”

“Yeah, but I want to. Heck, I could use a friend, too. If anything, allow me this for selfish reasons.”

He let me ponder his proposal for several minutes and busied himself getting the long handle screwed onto the roller before slavering it with paint.

“It doesn’t have to be weird. I’m just saying we can talk about stuff that’s slightly deeper than this renovation or the weather. That’s all.”

I nodded. Something about Beckham made me feel like I could tell him anything, and he would listen. That it wouldn’t send him running to the hills. Stage one had been getting here. Stage two could be letting someone in again–even if it was just for the summer. If I was too much for him, if all my dark places scared the shit out of him, come August, he would be free from me anyway. We could wash our hands of one another and never think about this again.

“Okay.” I finally relented.

“Okay.” He echoed.

I turned back around on the ladder and resumed work. The squeak of the roller sliding back and forth over the walls behind me told me he had too. “How does this work?”

“What being friends?”

“Yeah.”

His silence was suffocating. Had I already fucked this up by admitting I had no idea how even to begin having a friendship with another person? Way to come right out the gate being a complete and utter basket case, Anders.

A-fucking-plus.

“Well… I’ve got an idea. Hear me out, okay?”

I hummed in acknowledgment.

“We can take this slow, baby steps. Every day, you tell me three things about you, and in return, I will tell you three things about me.”

“Seems simple enough.”

“Yeah, but we’ve got to have rules.”

“Rules?”

“Rules. Otherwise, I know you’ll feed me surface-level bullshit, and being friends with someone goes deeper than that.”

That was what I was afraid of.

“I’ll allow you two out of the three things to be throw-away stuff. The basics that everyone knows or things that are not hard for you to offer up. But one thing a day has to be something of substance, some truth only for me.”

“You got a lot of secrets, Beckham?”

The smile he shot my way was blinding. “Nah, I’m an open book. But I get the impression you do.”

The morning passed slowly, and by the time we broke for lunch, my arms ached from holding the paintbrush over my head for the majority of the day. I know Beckham’s arms had to burn from moving the roller back and forth, but he had covered the walls quickly and then began cutting in along the baseboards while I finished the tedious task of doing the same along the ceiling. My thighs cramped from constantly climbing down the ladder to shuffle it along a few steps before hiking back up to continue work.

My stomach growled. I’d grown accustomed to three balanced meals a day, mostly thanks to Beckham’s weird insistence on me eating. Something that, before returning to Arbor Ct. this summer, I had not been. Back in Atlanta, it was lucky if I managed one meal a day, and usually, it was fast food or dry cereal shoveled directly out of the box. I wasn’t starving myself intentionally, but the little money I was making from odd jobs here and there I funneled directly into gas for my bike and, after that, my addictions, plural.

“I am allergic to coconut,” I offered up between bites of my turkey and Swiss sandwich. “And my favorite color is green. But not standard Crayola twelve-pack green, more of an evergreen.”

Beckham’s eyes lit up at my unprompted openness.

I forged on, pushing the words out of my mouth before I could second-guess them. “And…I am…gay.” I had thought about the deeper fact I might give him since he’d mentioned it this morning.

So many of my singular truths connected to this one key piece of information about myself. It seemed the logical place to start. Also, the rational part of me, small as it might be, knew that getting this out of the way early would hurt less if that information were a deal-breaker for him. I had known this about myself since I was thirteen and had long come to terms with it. I knew who I was, and I was not ashamed of it, but that didn’t take the sting out of being rejected because of it. Better tear the bandaid off now while I was still warming up to the idea of a friendship than waiting until I was fully invested and having the possibility torn away from me. “Hopefully, that’s not an issue?”

Beckham locked eyes with me, narrowing them slightly. “Why would it be?”

I cleared my throat, suddenly feeling hot under the collar due to his attention. “It has been in the past, for other people.”

He nodded understandingly. “It’s not an issue for me.” Another few torturous beats of silence. “Thank you for trusting me with that part of yourself.”

“It’s not a secret. I have been out of the closet a long time.”

“No, I know.” He took a large bite of his sandwich, chewing it slowly before swallowing it in one go. “But I have a friend who’s gay. She told me coming out isn’t a one-time thing. Once you make that decision, you continue making it your entire life. Every time you get a new friend, boss, coworker, or crush, you have to decide to reveal that part of yourself again, and every time, you leave yourself open to rejection. That’s got to be hard.”

I hadn’t thought about it like that, but it was true. “Well, thank you for being cool with it. Still friends?”

“That’s not something you need to thank me for. But you’re welcome anyway, and yes, we are still friends.”

We moved next to the primary bedroom and set about taking apart the massive amount of furniture it was littered with. Last week, a man who bore a striking resemblance to Colonel Sanders came from a local antique consignment store to appraise many of the larger items in the home. He’d determined that several of them could fetch a hefty price tag. He had a warehouse not far from here that was set up as a showroom for wealthy buyers to view pieces in person, and told us if we could take the items apart without damaging them, he would swing by with a box truck to haul them away.

“Let’s start with the bed. Once it’s out of here, it will give us more space.”

We set to work, me holding bits and pieces at Beckham’s direction while he undid bolts and screws. Then, we carried the items downstairs to stack by the large front doors in the grand foyer. Man, it was heavy. Everything in that room was made of solid wood. Luckily, Beckham was reasonably strong, as I was not bringing much to the table in that department.

“It’s your turn.” I reminded him after a few hours of idle chitchat.

“It is.” He pretended to think hard about his facts, tapping his chin like a stage actor in a pantomime. “I hate avocado. My favorite animal is a Red Panda. And, when I injured my shoulder in May and was told I’d never play ball again, I think I was relieved.”

I considered this for a moment. “Because then you didn’t need to worry about what would happen if you weren’t drafted?” It was the only explanation I could think of for why he might feel relief over being stripped of his dream. To me, it would be better to have something you loved taken from you unfairly than to be told you weren’t good enough to have it to begin with.

“No, I don’t think that’s why. At least, I think…Well, I think I was relieved I wouldn’t risk being a letdown.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The starting salary in the MLB is seven hundred and forty-thousand a year. Most guys get a couple million right out of college if they’re good enough. That’s a lot, at least to a guy like me. What if a team offered me this huge contract, and I choked? What if my name was plastered all over ESPN as a fraud, or worse, what if I was so inconsequential that my name wasn’t ever mentioned at all?”

“At least you would still get to play.”

“Yeah, but for how long? It would only be a matter of time before I was dropped to the minors and then inevitably dropped completely. I’m not sure my fragile ego would have been able to handle it. So, when that possibility was taken from me, I was surprisingly at peace with it.” He shrugged, an expression on his face telling me that statement was not entirely truthful whether he chose to recognize it or not. “I haven’t told anyone that before.”

“Not even Laurel?”

“ Especially not Laurel. Your sister has her entire existence on this planet planned out from her own conception to the day she dies. Plans that involved me heading to the Majors.” He shook his head, wiping the small amount of sweat beading on his forehead away with the bottom of his shirt, flashing me a peak of abs so sharp I could grate cheese on them. “It was easier to let her rage against the injustice of me losing it all to a bad throw. But the truth is, I'd been playing with a shoulder strain for weeks and had purposely not told anyone about it. It was only a matter of time before I over-extended it and tore the whole thing to shreds.”

“So, what’s next? Now you don’t have baseball, what’s the alternative?”

He let out a long sigh. “That’s the big question. If you had asked me a week ago, I would've told you I had no idea.”

“And now?”

“Now, I think I would like to do this.” He motioned around himself at the room.

“Dismantle dead women’s furniture?”

“No, renovate old houses or some shit. You’re well past your quota of truths from me today, by the way, but I’ll give you this one as a freebie.” He chuckled. “My dad’s a contractor. Throughout high school, I always presumed I would follow in his footsteps. Work for the family business, and take over it when he retired. He doesn’t do cool projects like this one, mostly kitchen renovations and home upgrades.”

“So what changed all that?”

He sighed, like whatever he was about to say next brought him great pain.

“Your sister.”