Sweetest in the Gale - Olivia Dade Page 0,10
fell silent. “I need to get going. I’m sorry.”
As he reclaimed his cell and slid it into his pocket, a framed photo by her laptop caught his attention. It must have been a new addition from that morning, because he hadn’t seen it before. He’d have noticed, the same way he noticed almost everything about her.
Suddenly, his concerns about lateness, about the turmoil in his head and heart, all vanished. His insatiable curiosity about Candy had reared its rampant head, and he couldn’t deny it. Couldn’t deny himself.
“Is this your sister?”
In the photo, the resemblance between the two was unmistakable. Both built like Valkyries, they stood bumping shoulders with one another, grinning as the sun reflected off their glasses. The other woman in the picture was blonder than Candy, a bit shorter, her glasses rounder, but otherwise could have been his colleague’s twin.
After a pause, Candy cleared her throat once, then a second time. “Yes. Dee. Denise.”
“You two look happy.” He finally glanced up from the photo, only to find that Candy had turned her back. She was fiddling with the Shakespeare poster, tugging its already-straight edges. “I don’t think I’ve heard you mention her before. Does she live close?”
Slowly, Candy swiveled toward him, and he knew.
He knew she was making eye contact only because she’d promised to face him during conversation, and she was a woman who kept her promises, weeping be damned.
He knew why she’d returned to school a woman diminished and gray with pain, even if he didn’t understand all the intricacies of her grief yet.
He knew her sister was gone. Recently.
“She lived in Oregon.” Candy pronounced the verb carefully, even as her voice shook, and he knew something else. She still stumbled over the tense, just as he’d done for the first few months. “She died this summer.”
No euphemisms. Candy was direct about everything but her emotions.
Like him, come to think of it.
“I’m so sorry,” he said, trying to infuse all the sincerity he felt into the simple phrase, and she made a small sound in response. A noise, more than a word. A whimper, wrenched from her resisting throat as she tried so damn hard not to sob out loud.
Shit, he couldn’t just stand there and watch her crumple. Fuck his doubts and fears. Fuck his own grief. Fuck everything but what she needed from him—from someone—right this second.
“Oh, Candy.” He reached for her with both hands, the desire to give comfort instinctive and urgent. “I—”
When she backed away from his touch, it hurt. More than it should have. He, of all people, understood how kindness could wreck someone in mourning, more thoroughly than the most vicious insult.
“It’s fine,” she told him, dashing away tears with her knuckles. “I’m fine.”
He tore his hand through his hair, helpless and frustrated. Unwilling to leave her in this state, but aware that he had no choice, not if she didn’t want him to stay.
“Don’t you have a meeting?” Her brown eyes, lashes now spiked with moisture, were pleading with him to go, to allow her some dignity. “You’ll be late.”
After one last, long look, he surrendered to the inevitable. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
She dipped her trembling chin in acknowledgment, and then he left.
The door closed behind him, and he was entirely certain she was about to retreat to her desk, out of sight to passersby who might peer through the window in her door. She would cry alone, where no one could see, no one could hear. No one could offer her support or affection or anything else she needed, other than her pride and her privacy.
Dammit. He understood that too.
He needed a minute before entering the meeting, despite his increasing tardiness. So he went to the men’s faculty bathroom. Splashed water on his face. Dried himself with a paper towel. Pushed an overlong hank of hair behind his ear and studied his own damp reflection.
How long since he’d last cut his hair or groomed his growing beard?
How long since he’d seen himself without those dark pits beneath his eyes?
Gripping the sink with both hands, his knuckles nearly as white as the chipped porcelain, he acknowledged another unwelcome truth, asked himself another agonizing question.
How long since his own grayness had disappeared? Because he might be unkempt, but Candy’s particular stage of numb, half-dead sadness had passed at some point.
Part of his brain kept insisting he should be ashamed of that.
Marianne wouldn’t have wanted him to mire himself in his grief forever, though. It was a cliché, but also