Chelsea Fine - Best Kind of Broken

I’m not sure what it is that draws retired men to my side while I’m fixing things—maybe they find handiwork fascinating, or maybe they’re horribly bored—but I sometimes feel like the Willow Inn sideshow.

Take Earl for instance. He’s pulled up a chair in the lobby and is now watching my every movement with expectant eyes.

And for my next act, I shall fall from this prehistoric climbing contraption and break both legs—with no hands, because they’ll be dangling from this hanging candelabrum after being torn from my body during my amazing fall!

I should set out a tip jar.

Earl scratches his white-whiskered chin. “You sure you know what you’re doing, son?”

“Yes, sir.”

The skin around his faded blue eyes crinkles as he squints up at me. “You look too young to be running the maintenance around here. How old are ya?” He crosses his arms over his short and stocky frame, once probably stacked with muscle, and leans back. His balding head shines a bit in the light streaming in from the lobby windows.

“Almost twenty-one,” I say, shifting the chandelier to my left arm and clenching my jaw under its weight. I find the problem wire and slowly untangle it from the others.

“Did you disconnect the electricity before climbing up there?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Did you check for frayed ends before you started pulling at those wires like a chimpanzee?”

A chimpanzee?

“Yes, sir.”

“Did you—”

“Leave the poor boy alone, Earl.” Vivian, Earl’s wife and one of the inn’s more outspoken guests, enters the lobby with her short blue-black hair wrapped in pink curlers and her thin, pursed lips coated in pink lipstick. She’s tall and slender and manages to look poised even when she’s gripping a martini and slurring her words—which is often. “He doesn’t need you distracting him.”

“I’m not distracting him, Viv. I’m helping him.” Earl gestures to me, like I’m an idiot.

“Uh-huh.” Vivian glances up at me through a pair of dark brown eyes. “You just go on and do your fixing, honey. Don’t mind my meddlesome husband.” She walks to the front desk and starts complaining to Haley about the bar’s hours.

“Meddlesome, my ass,” Earl mutters.

Vivian and Earl travel from Georgia every summer to stay at Willow Inn. Their visits are never shorter than four weeks and they make themselves right at home, hence the pink curlers.

They make an odd couple, with Vivian being a good five inches taller than her husband and at least a hundred pounds lighter. Side by side, they look like a pink giraffe and a white-whiskered monkey.

Earl watches me wobble. “Have you ever had professional electrical training, son?”

Good Lord.

I steady myself and keep my eyes on the wire. “Did you catch the game last night, Earl?”

He starts rambling about idiot referees, and I know I’ve bought myself a few minutes’ reprieve from the tutorial on everything I’m doing wrong.

“All I’m saying,” Vivian’s Southern drawl carries through the lobby, “is the bar should be open before noon.”

“Yes, well. I’m sure Ellen has her reasons for the bar’s hours.” Haley lowers her voice a smidge. “It’s probably because of everything that happened with Mr. Clemons last year.”

“… things are different now.” Earl’s voice pulls me back.

“What’s that?” I ask.

“I was just missing the good ol’ days.”

For the next ten minutes, Earl picks apart my electrical skills and chats my ear off about how the world was so much better when he was young and how people these days don’t know anything about hard work. He says these things to me as I’m balancing on the world’s oldest ladder while holding a lighting device that weighs more than I do.

“What can I say,” I grit out as I finish with the chandelier. “We’re a lazy generation.”

I climb down the ladder and turn the electricity back on before returning to the lobby. Earl is still in his front-row seat, eagerly waiting to chat my ear off about politics.

Like hell I’m touching that subject.

On my way to the light switch, my eyes catch on a flyer pinned to the activities board by the front desk. It’s an advertisement for the annual Copper Springs Fourth of July Bash, one of the few festivities my hometown actually does well.

Every resident attends, and the town spares no expense on live music, games, food, and pyrotechnics. This will be the first year since I was nine and had a mad case of chicken pox that I won’t be in attendance.

I flip the light switch, and the chandelier lights up in all its ridiculously complicated glory.

The Amazing Levi, ladies and gentlemen. I’ll be here all week.

Just as I’m turning to walk back to my ladder of doom, Pixie rounds the corner and slams into me. Chest to chest, body to body.

The smell of lavender wraps around me as she looks up through startled eyelashes and, for a moment, it’s thirteen months ago and everything is okay. Nothing is broken. Nothing is lost. Her green eyes slowly sink into mine, soft and safe, and I like it. I like it a lot.

Panic floods my veins.

Desperate to rectify any hope, or memory—or God, anything good—I see reflected in her gaze, I give her an annoyed look and make my voice as sharp as possible. “Can I help you?”

The softness vanishes and a sneer twists her face. “Nope.”

She moves past me with a jerk and my heart starts to hammer. I head back to the ladder, my thoughts jumping in and out of memories.

The fourth grade when Pixie would drink all my chocolate milk when I wasn’t looking. Junior year when she would sing along with the radio at the top of her lungs as I drove her home from school.

It feels like a lifetime ago. It feels like yesterday.

“Mm, mm.” Earl stares after Pixie’s retreating form. “I love watching that girl walk away.” He makes another appreciative throat noise, and my fists tighten around the rickety ladder as I fold it up.

“Easy, Earl,” I warn.

I swear to God, between Ellen and Pixie and all the assholes that gawk at them, someone’s going to get their face smashed in.

A gravelly laugh tumbles from his mouth. “Nothing about that girl looks easy.”

I sigh. Tell me about it.

After a few more repairs, I finish for the day and head back to the front desk to collect my mail. Angelo is leaning over the counter, speaking to Haley in his thick Jersey accent.

“Vivian Whethers was trying to get a martini from me before breakfast had even started. That woman can drink her share of liquor, I’ll tell ya that much.” He leans closer to Haley like he’s spilling some huge secret. “And I swear to God she leaves her sticky fingerprints all over my bar top on purpose.”

Haley giggles. “She probably wants to leave her sticky fingerprints all over more than just your bar top.”

“Well, that’s too bad for her.” He winks at Haley. “ ’Cause Vivian ain’t my type.”

I try not to make a face as I step behind the desk. I’m pretty sure Angelo and Haley are sleeping together, which is unsettling because Haley is sweet and bubbly and Angelo is… well, terrifying.

He’s nearing fifty, but carries himself like an angry forty-year-old. He’s built like a bulldog and resembles one too, with his shaved head, golden canine tooth, oversized jowls, and sleeves of tattoos. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was a mob boss with minions and a shovel resting beside a bulk supply of hand sanitizer in his trunk.

“How goes it, Levi?” he says, turning his head in my direction.

“It goes.” I frown at the beige envelope topping the pile of mail Ellen set aside for me. Its placement is no accident.

“Good to see you’re finally picking up your letters,” he says. “They’re an eyesore, ya know.”

“Oh, I know,” I say. They’re hurting my eyes as we speak.

Gathering the stack, I go up to my room and toss the top letter on my desk, where it joins five other beige envelopes. All unopened. All making my chest tight.

I’d rather fix a thousand chandeliers than deal with one of those envelopes.

“I will pee on your bed.” This is my big, scary threat.

Levi used all the hot water again this morning, so I marched into his room in a rage. I never go into Levi’s room. It’s a personal rule of mine.

Our relationship—if you can even call it that—works because it’s simple. We never talk about the past. We sometimes argue. And we always stay out of each other’s business.

But here I am, in the business of Levi’s room, gripping my towel as cold, wet hair drips down my back. I haven’t had a hot shower for four days. Four days. This nonsense has got to stop.

“You seem stressed.” Levi, whose jeans are so low on his bare hips that I can tell he’s going commando, tilts his head. “You know what you need? A nice hot shower… oh wait.” He gives me an impish smile.

I might just pee on his bed right now.

“Joke all you want, Levi. But the next time you’re out fixing a broken window or a fire alarm, I will sneak into your room and pee on your bed.”

I’m dead serious here. If I don’t get a hot shower tomorrow, I really will pee on his bed. Or at least find a cat to come pee on his bed. But either way, there will be urine on his sheets and I won’t feel bad about it.

The impish smile grows. “I can think of better things for you to do in my bed, Pix.”

Silence.

If his plan was to make me uncomfortable by flirting with me, it totally backfired. Because the second those words left Levi’s mouth, his body stiffened in awareness and the space between us became electric. So now we’re staring at each other’s lips and we’re both breathing heavier than necessary, and neither of us is really dressed.

I shift in my towel and feel the material slip a bit as I pull my eyes from his mouth and try to coax my face into a look of something less come-and-get-me and more ew-you’re-pathetic.

I’m gearing up for my comeback—which will be brilliant and kick-ass as soon as I nail it down—when his eyes drop to my chest, and all the air leaves the room.

He’s not looking at my cleavage.

He’s looking at the raised red scar peeking out from the top of my towel. The scar that cuts diagonally across my torso, running from my left hip bone to the top of my right breast. The scar I normally keep hidden under strategic shirts and dresses.

It’s hideous and jagged, but I don’t hide my scar because it’s ugly. I hide it because it’s a reminder of pain and loss. And Levi’s eyes are fixated on it.

Pain. Loss.

My heart starts to pound and I no longer care that my shower was cold or that we have weird sexual tension. I don’t care about Levi’s forearm muscles or the way the bathroom smells like his soap.

I care about my scar and what it means. It hurts me. It hurts him.

It’s the only thing we still have in common, the only thing we absolutely avoid, and now it’s glaring at us—marked on my skin in permanent red, rising along with each of my breaths.

The horror in his eyes has me hollowed out and helpless, and I have no words. Unable to speak, I numbly turn and head down the hall to my room, shutting myself inside a millisecond before my body starts to shake. I lean against the door and try to take a deep breath.

I’m fine.

I’m fine.

I hear Levi’s bedroom door slam closed with a heavy thud, and the vibration runs down the wall and shakes against my back.

He’s not fine.

I’m not fine.

Fuck.

I clench my fists until my arms are shaking. I want to hit something, and I want to scream. God, do I want to scream.