Chelsea Fine - Best Kind of Broken

She’s all big eyes and fragile bones, with her pretty mouth tilted up as she scans my face and softly asks, “Does it hurt you to be around me?”

It hurts and it heals.

It aches and it comforts.

I swallow and quietly say, “Does it hurt you to be around me?”

Neither of us responds as we gaze at each other in the moonlight.

I step back from the sweet, warm haze Pixie just wrapped around me with her goddamn goodness and shake my head. Not saying anything, just shaking my head like an idiot, I leave her room.

This morning the electricity has been magically turned back on, and I don’t care about my cold shower as water runs over my shoulders. I stare at the simple white wall in front of me, thinking about last night.

The anger. The hurt. The cruel wanting we can’t entertain against the backdrop of the thing we don’t talk about.

Just thinking.

I rinse the conditioner from my hair and turn off the shower.

When Charity died, it was like the friendship Levi and I had died too. Our bond just sort of disappeared.

At her funeral, every instinct in my soul wanted to run after him and find comfort in the arms of the boy who was my hero, but I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t face the shame I’d feel in his presence.

I had been reckless with Charity. I’d been reckless with me. And because of my poor judgment, Levi had lost his sister.

I didn’t know how to face him, so I never did.

And now here I am, living next door to him and trying to ignore pretty much everything that comes up between us.

My scar. The ghost of Charity’s memory.

The magnetic heat that just magically appears whenever we’re near each other…

Yeah. Lots of ignoring going on.

I wrap a towel around my body and step into the hallway just as Levi steps out of his room. Our eyes meet, and at first it’s really uncomfortable.

Like, Oh crap. I was hoping to avoid you until the end of time.

And then it’s normal.

Like, Hello, old friend whom I grew up with and trust with my life.

And then it’s dangerous.

Like, Can I help you out of your towel and slip you into something more comfortable? Like my bed, perhaps?

The tension in the hallway is hot and foreboding as his gaze strays from my face to every other part of my tiny-toweled body. And I’m checking him out in all his white-T-shirt-worn-jeans hotness, and my thoughts are going no place pure.

I feel the heat in my cheeks as I stare at the way his shirt pulls tight across his chest and molds to his muscles and, just when my body’s getting too hot for a towel, his eyes snap to mine.

It’s uncomfortable again. He goes back into his room and shuts the door behind him.

I stand confused for a second, barefoot and damp in the hallway, trying to figure out what the hell is wrong with us. It’s like we can’t get our chemistry right. It’s either rude and mean, or sad and heavy, or hot and naughty.

Where’s the happy medium?

God damn.

Pixie needs to start wearing a muumuu wherever she goes. I can’t do this seeing-her-half-naked-all-the-time shit. With her long legs and flushed skin and her warm, wet body…

God damn.

I shake my head like that’s going to clear up all the guilt and lust I have warring inside me and exit my bedroom for the second time this morning. I have work to do. I have stuff to fix.

Douche bag Daren is loitering at the bottom of the stairs, making my morning just fucking perfect as I head to the front desk.

“ ’Sup, Andrews?” he says.

’Sup?

He’s a white boy in a polo shirt. ’Sup is he’s a poser.

I don’t respond.

“Is Sarah upstairs?” He scratches his neck.

“She’s busy.” Apparently, I just spew shit sometimes.

“With what?”

Not with me, that’s for sure. Though I could certainly keep her busy and—god damn, Pixie in her towel!

I sigh. “What do you want, Ackwood?”

He narrows his eyes. “Are you two… like… together?”

And now my head is swimming with all the possibilities of “together,” and most of them—hell, all of them—involve no clothes and tangled body parts.

“Why?”

He shrugs, all confident and douchey. “You seem pretty possessive of her; that’s all.”

“Whatever, man,” I say and move past him.

Pixie’s not mine. I don’t care.

I’m not sure where Daren goes after that because I force myself not to turn around. But damn if I don’t want to track him down and put a leash on him.

“Morning.” Ellen smiles at me from behind the front desk.

Haley’s nowhere to be found, so I assume she’s late.

“Morning. I called the alarm company this morning. Here’s the estimate,” I say, handing her a price sheet. “They can come out as early as next week to do the install. You just need to call them back to set up a time.”

“Perfect.” She smiles. “Your To Do list is on my desk. You’re awesome, Levi.”

I purse my lips and nod before heading to her office. I’m not awesome. I’m a loser who calls Pixie names.

But for some reason, Ellen doesn’t hate me.

When my parents split, I didn’t take their separation well. I knew they blamed me for Charity’s death. Hell, I blamed me. But after they left town, things just went even more downhill.

I no longer cared about my grades or school in general. Football wasn’t a problem for me because I got to step onto the field and do my job—and do it well—and step off the field without incident. It was the only thing I didn’t hate about my existence.

But at one of our last games of the season this past winter, I absently looked up in the stands for Pixie and Charity, temporarily forgetting how drastically different my life had become. I searched the stands for my personal cheerleading section, and when reality hit and I realized that I would never see Charity—or Pixie—cheering me on ever again, I just choked.

I couldn’t play. I didn’t want to play.

Not then. Not ever.

I was failing my classes. I was failing as quarterback. I was spiraling down a winding staircase of guilt and grief. And then I got the academic probation notice from Dean Maxwell.

Needless to say, I had no desire to try at anything in life, let alone my studies, so I lost my football scholarship and, therefore, lost my room in the dorms. The day I packed up my things and drove away from ASU in my truck, I was a homeless college dropout without a job or a future.

I was halfway to Copper Springs when I realized I didn’t have a home to go back to. Why I didn’t call one of my buddies to see if I could crash at his place, I’m not sure. Shame maybe? I probably didn’t want to explain how my parents bailed on me because, you know, I killed my sister.

When the Willow Inn showed up on the side of the road, I impulsively decided to stay there for the night and formulate a plan for my future in the morning.

Ellen was at the front desk when I walked inside. I forgot that Pixie’s aunt owned the inn. She knew who I was and she knew I’d almost killed her niece, so she was surely going to kick me out.

“Hey, Levi,” she said pleasantly as she looked at my duffle bag. “Need a room?”

I stared at her warily and nodded.

She smiled and started typing stuff into the computer before grabbing a key.

“How many nights?” She made it sound like I was just an average guest, but I knew twenty-year-old unemployed football players weren’t her typical guests.

“Uh, just one,” I said.

She glanced up, looked at my bag again, and said, “We’re having a two-for-one special right now. Buy one night, get the second free. Want to stay two nights?”

“Uh, sure.” I shifted uncomfortably.

“Follow me.” She led me up to a room, left me in peace, and I dropped on the comfy bed, trying to figure out what the hell my next step was going to be.

The next afternoon, Ellen knocked on my door. “You used to work in construction, right?”

“Yeah.” It had been one of the many summer jobs I’d taken to save up for my truck.

She sighed dramatically. “You don’t by any chance think you could help me fix the downstairs banister, do you?”

I paused, because I didn’t know shit about fixing banisters.

“I’ll give you another night for free for your trouble?” she offered.

“Uh… I don’t really know much about stair rails—”

“Oh, you can do it.” She waved a hand. “You’re smart and strong. I have total confidence in you.”

“I guess I could try—”

“Perfect.”

And that was the beginning.

Ellen kept finding things for me to fix around the inn and kept offering me another free night’s stay for my work. Three weeks went by before I realized I’d been roped into a job that came with room and board.

I tried to bail, but the woman was convincing and, by that point, I was actually starting to like fixing things around the old place. It made me feel… well… not useless.

So we made it official, and I moved into the old wing of the inn, where I had several bedrooms and a single bathroom all to myself.

Until Pixie.

Everything was fine until Pixie.

I smell Levi before I see him, and this is why I have no business sharing a bathroom with the guy. If just the smell of him can drive me crazy, I certainly should not be anywhere near him when there’s hot water and soap involved.

“The sink’s broken?” he says.

I keep my back to him as I stir potato soup on the stove and point to the sink.

Things between us have been civil lately. Fake as hell, but civil. We haven’t argued in several days, but we’re not getting along either.

I’m not really over the erotic calf caressing Levi gave me last week, or the fact that it hurts him to be around me, but you know what? Screw him.

He’s not the only person who lost Charity. I lost her too, and then some.

I lost the only real family I’d ever known and the house I considered my safe haven. I lost my childhood friend and the keeper of the “best” part of our “best friends” heart-shaped necklace. The only thing I had left after the wreckage cleared was Levi.

And then I lost him too.

He promptly headed back to his life at college and left me behind in a town where nothing held any more significance for me and no one understood my pain.

Levi left me, and he didn’t look back.

Sharp bitterness heats low in my stomach as I think back to the many days and nights after the accident where I was too hollow to cry, and the only thing that kept me from tearing my hair out was the hope that Levi would come back home so I wouldn’t feel so lost, so alone anymore.

But he didn’t.

And then, when I was healthy enough to be discharged from the hospital so I could start my first semester at ASU two weeks late, I thought for sure Levi would hunt me down and at least say hello. Maybe give me one of his awkward boy hugs and just let me be silent against his chest for a moment. Like maybe if we embraced and pressed our broken hearts together, for a moment—just a moment—things might somehow be better.

But he didn’t.

The one and only time I ever saw him on campus was from across the library. I was seated in the back behind four textbooks when I saw him walk in through the squeaky double doors. He didn’t see me as he headed for the reference section, but just the sight of him, the visual confirmation that he was alive and breathing and twenty yards away from me, made my broken heart leap.