Melbourne

Gold and Silver [Serenia/Melbourne]

When Luke first woke in the hospital, his panic was so aggressive that several nurses had to come and hold him down so he wouldn’t make his injuries worse. In the last few weeks, his sleep patterns were terrible enough that he wasn’t able to tell the difference between his subconscious and reality – everything was just a fog until he mentally committed to being awake.

This time, when Charlie woke him, he slowly sat up and blinked at her, as if he were imagining things. The breeze, the coffee, her smell –

“Shit,” he breathed. “I thought you were in my head for a second.” He pinched the bridge of his nose and blinked some more. If she only knew how much of his sleep real estate she took up. Most of it was stress, like he could hear her and couldn’t see her. But not all of it.

Luke took one of the mugs of coffee and swallowed a scorching sip. He liked his first cup to be an almost undrinkable temperature. It did a better job of jolting him awake than the caffeine. Looking at Charlie in the kitchen made his brow crinkle slightly in amusement. “And let you have all the glory of slopping the pigs and shoveling chicken shit?” He grinned and put his mug on the counter before headed up the stairs to get dressed. “Not in this lifetime,” he said from the staircase. He didn’t address his makeshift bedroom, figuring he’d get a box fan while he was in town. Maybe that would help.

When he came back down, he smelled like aftershave and toothpaste. He wore one of his several pairs of farm Carhartts (jeans were for the bar, Costco, and haircut appointments), a highlighter orange pocket t-shirt, and his ratty Bolton Feed trucker hat that was fraying at the brim.

Luke moving around the kitchen, dining room, and mudroom to gather all the things he’d somehow managed to scatter literally everywhere in his twelve hours back was kind of like watching a kid get ready for school. Nothing was in the right place, and sometimes he looked for something, forgot, and went back. He stuffed a granola bar in his mouth and another in his pocket, for when he’d inevitably be starving again in ten minutes. His sunglasses were on top of the fridge, not on the island like he thought. The box of toothpicks he kept by the landline were still there, and he chewed on the end of one while he put on his boots.

He fired several questions at Charlie while he got ready. When was the last time she’d gotten eggs from the coop? They could put them in the truck and trade them at Bolton’s. Was Maggie, one of their two horses, still taking all those vitamins? Did she think it was going to rain later? What did she want for dinner?

Luke grabbed work truck keys off the hook on the wall and turned around at the last second. Eager eyes found her as he moved the toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other. “You’re coming,” he asked, “right?”

Gold and Silver [Serenia/Melbourne]

He loved you, you know.

Luke knew, but he sometimes forgot, especially when they had disagreements or Sam was accusing him of fucking his wife. But he knew. He’d never forget.

At Charlie’s question, he let a large breath fill his chest. “No,” he exhaled. “Let’s go tomorrow. After the chores.” Maybe it was the jet lag, shooting himself in the chest with painkillers, or their two hours of emotional surgery, but Luke was exhausted. He couldn’t even remember the last time he felt rested. For now, he wanted to memorize the small feeling of hope he held, so when he lost track of the light at the end of the tunnel, he could call back on it. There was a future for him that didn’t involve guns in the desert – bombs, mines, death, and skeleton cities. It was still small and fleeting, but it existed.

Then they could take stock of everything that needed fixing and repairs before winter. Build up the pantry again, in case there was a storm. Assess the barn’s insulation. Fix the field truck…

“I’ll have coffee on at five.” He gave Charlie’s arm a squeeze and fought the urge to pull her in and press his lips to the top of her head, which he sometimes did before he left for a long time. Instead, he avoided any eye contact that would linger and brought his bag upstairs to the guest room.

“Guest room” wasn’t entirely accurate, because to Luke’s knowledge, he was the only one who’d stayed in it for the last few years. It was across the hall from the bathroom, past which was the master and what he knew what going to be a nursery. If he thought the kitchen felt haunted, he was wrong. Downstairs had nothing on the memories of the upper floor.

Luke changed the sheets, wiped dust off the bureau, and unpacked his bag. Fatigues went in the closet, shoes on the rack, clothes in the drawers. He plugged in his phone and put the miscellaneous items in the nightstand drawer. As chaotic as certain aspects of his life were, the military had taught him the importance of systems and organization. Everything had a place. It made up for how untethered he sometimes felt.

Over the last few weeks, he’d taught himself how to take off a t-shirt without aggravating his healing chest. He got his right arm out first, pulled the shirt over his head, and then gently worked it off his left arm. Many hospital bathroom mirrors had gotten him accustomed to his new Frankenstein aesthetic. The red scar at his neck went down to his first left rib, the focus of most the damage. It ended in mottled tissue and surgical scars. Most of the bruising and discoloration was gone, but at first glance, it was startling. Like something out of a horror movie. Not even his various torso tattoos could distract from it.

At some godforsaken early morning hour – well before five – Luke gave up on sleeping. Every house creak or noise outside festered in his brain. Usually, it was nightmares that kept him up, but now, it was his incessant trainwreck of thoughts that crashed into each other. He figured it was better than any of his reoccurring bullshit dreams, like the echoes of Sam’s shouts in the barn, or trying to find Charlie in the dark, following the sounds of her sobbing.

He pulled on his jeans from earlier, forewent the shirt because he didn’t want to deal with the misery of taking it on and off, and stepped as quietly as he could down the stairs. Luke felt around in the dark for the small light above the kitchen sink and got himself a glass of water. After smoking a cigarette outside in the dark, he sat at the kitchen island and put his head in his hands.

It was supposed to be me, he thought, closing his eyes. Why wasn’t it me? He sank down farther in his seat, until his forehead rested against his forearm.

Maybe the bed was the problem – because that’s where Luke fell asleep.

Gold and Silver [Serenia/Melbourne]

Luke was back home for a few months, and Sam had convinced him to book a flight to Nashville to meet his girlfriend. “I’m going to convince her to move up here. I know it. You have to see who I’m talking about. You’ll love her.” And talk about her he certainly did, almost endlessly, even when Luke was deployed and he had few precious moments to video chat him. Charlie and the farm. The farm and Charlie. That’s it. Admittedly, Luke did want to meet her, to see what in the hell got Sam like this. He’d had girlfriends in the past, but none of them had made him overturn his hard-nosed, work-centric attitude like Charlie.

Of course, Sam picked the worst place on Earth to meet a new person. The downtown honky tonk bar was loud, sticky, and horribly crowded. Live music and bachelorette parties in matching t-shirts filled every corner. He couldn’t turn around with hitting someone’s shoulder or accidentally pressing against a stranger’s sweaty arm. His phone dinged with a text from Sam. ‘Grab me a beer and meet me at one of the window seats. I’m going to find Charlie. She’s here somewhere.’ Easier said than done. Luke didn’t have tits, so getting his hands on two Miller Lites was like a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that wasn’t there.

“Fifteen dollars,” the bartender said.

“Are you fucking serious?”

“Seven-fifty each. Price goes up the more I dislike you.”

Luke gave him a twenty, grabbed the beers, and was too busy being pissed to watch where he was going. He absolutely shoulder-checked the girl behind him and drove two fistfuls of bottles into her chest. Foam went everywhere, and he drenched both himself and his unwitting subject. “Jesus Christ – ” he cussed at the same exact time she gasped, “Fucking God!”

He shoved the bottles onto the bar and grabbed her shoulders. “Holy shit, I’m so sorry, are you okay – ”

She wrenched away from him. “Get your fucking hands off me!”

“I’m sorry! Relax! You were up my ass! How was I supposed to see you?”

“Well you took twenty years to order,” she snapped. “I didn’t think you’d move so fast all of a sudden.”

Luke glared at her, and the greenest eyes he’d ever seen glared at him right back. She was gorgeous. And a bitch, apparently. “Listen. I’m sorry. Really, truly sorry, okay? I’ll buy your drinks. I’m meeting my brother, and I didn’t know this place was a money laundering racket.”

Surprising him, she laughed. “Yeah, I hate it here too. I’m meeting someone also – my boyfriend’s brother – and I’m not exactly calm about it.”

Luke looked at her again. Hard. Those eyes, her dark hair, her bright smile. The pictures Sam had shown him. Meeting someone in person was different, especially when she was wearing a beer and yelling at him. “Charlie,” he said softly, finally putting it all together. “You’re Charlie.”

It had always been this push and pull. They’d vibrate, like two similar ends of a magnet forced together, until one of them turned and they snapped into place.

“You never said or did anything. That’s not betrayal, Charlie. At least, I don’t think it is.”

Doing it would be the awful part. It was a dark forest path they both separately agreed to never acknowledge. No good would come from it. A selfish piece of him yearned to know what her version of this betrayal was. Every thought and fantasy. However, her head gently resting at his shoulder told him that it didn’t matter. Right now mattered. That was most important.

Luke leaned against the railing, smoking until Charlie took the cigarette from his fingers. He watched her carefully, knowing she was either going to tell him to kick shit or ask him to stay. She couldn’t keep riding the line like this – she needed to pick one.

And for him – for right now – she picked the exact thing he wanted to hear.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Luke said, voice barely audible as the words lingered in his throat. “I’m staying.”

He wrapped his arm around her shoulder, took back the cigarette with his free hand, and snuffed it out on the wooden railing. Sam always went batshit when he did that. The rain would take care of it.

“You remember when we first met? When I decked you at the bar and got beer everywhere?” He left out the part about wanting to put her over his shoulder and walk her out the front door. “Sam made you seem larger than life. Sweet, kind, compassionate. He sung your praises to hell and back. And when I actually met you and you were pissed at me, I couldn’t put those two people together at first. We all have multiple sides. Different versions, you know?”

Luke wasn’t sure where he was going with all this as he watched Jake weave back up the barn bath. The shepherd sniffed out his tennis ball, brought it up the steps, and put it at Charlie’s feet before nudging at her knee with his nose.

“We bring out different sides in each other. Good ones. And we can use them to make this place everything that it can be.”

As the sun set over the edge of the barn’s roof, a horrible aching feeling at the back of his throat radiated in his chest. His little brother, the one who’d always worked so hard to knock his moral compass into place, was gone. A cold headstone was all that was left of him, just down the hill. And yet somehow, he was still all around them.

“I fucking miss him, Charlie,” Luke whispered, hoping to hell she couldn’t hear the cracks in his voice. “I miss him so much.”

Gold and Silver [Serenia/Melbourne]

For all his vices, Luke didn’t particularly care about gambling, but he would’ve bet money on Charlie’s reaction. Let me put a thousand on ‘she already knows’ and ‘she makes it about Sam.’ He put his dish in the sink and washed it so he’d have something to do besides look at her frozen expression. He even dried it and put it in the cabinet. When he had nothing left to touch or move, he got his cigarettes out of his pocket and put a dry one in his mouth. “You fucking asked about the letter so now you fucking know,” he said in a flat, matter-of-fact tone. There’s a sixty percent chance of rain in the valley today, folks. Stay in the right lane to merge onto I-90 West. Please do not stand up while the ride is in operation.

Luke pulled back the sliding door and Jake bounded out of the kitchen, down the stairs, and towards the path that led to the barn. He usually took ten minutes to tire himself out before slinking back to the house, whining for a treat or a game of fetch. The sun was just starting to set, and there was a warm late-summer breeze he wanted to let into the house. The air pressure in the room currently could make an astronaut pass out.

“It’s the truth. Call it betrayal if you want. Whatever you’ve got to tell yourself, Charlie. Because if that’s the case, I’ve been betraying him for years. Him being dead or alive doesn’t change how I feel.” He’d somehow crushed the cigarette with all his fidgeting and hand gestures while he talked. He threw it out and got another one. “Him being dead or alive,” he repeated, “doesn’t change the fact that I’m not going to cross that line. Maybe I want something I know I’ll never have, but I’m not a fucking asshole. Telling you something you already know and acting on it are two completely different things.”

He dug a finger into his chest – the good side, the right one – and stepped into Charlie’s space, eyeing her like he was a wolf in a cage who should not, under any circumstances, be let out. “Leaving this place always hurt me. I left because it was my damn job. You guys had this, the farm, the dream, everything. Why would I stay in this town when I felt like a stranger in it for my entire life? Why? Why, when my unit needed and wanted me?” Luke caught himself raising his voice and lowered it, knowing that his volume wasn’t going to make her hear him any more or less clearly. “It wasn’t because I couldn’t stand being around you. It was because I could stand being around you a little too much.”

Before he crushed it again, he put the cigarette behind his ear and walked around her, back to the sliding door. He could hear the jingle of Jake’s collar tags off in the distance.

“I want to stay if you want me to stay. I know this farm, this place. We can make it run. We can make it work for us. It’s going to take time, months – fucking years. We commit, or we sell it. I’ve stood still for thirty years. I’m done now.”

He stepped onto the porch, lit his smoke, and whistled for the dog.

That kitchen was going to be the death of him.

Gold and Silver [Serenia/Melbourne]

All his life Luke had been the troublemaker. He started shit, caused chaos, and generally created problems if there were any that needing causing. Sam was the reasonable one who tried to smooth things over. That’s why the pot always threatened to boil over when he was with Charlie and circumstances found them without his brother. She knew exactly how to press his buttons. Like when she’d worn his work shirt downstairs after the whole goat incident. She hadn’t even said anything and it fucking sent him.

If she gave him an inch, he’d pull all twelve feet out of the measuring tape.

“I apologize, darling,” he drawled, unable to keep his finger out of the wound. “I won’t call you that again.” Admitting that it’d just come out and he couldn’t help it seemed like the worse option somehow. But Luke liked that it got her fired up. He liked it a lot. It was a hell of a lot better than watching her ghost move around the dusty house. The real Charlie was in there somewhere still, and he was going to find her.

Letters.

Anger flashed across his features. She’d seen the stupid envelopes. Of course. He braced his hands on the island and used the edge to help him get up. The lightheaded feeling still lingered, covering the part of his brain that told him to leave it. He’d scared her and she was hurt, so she was pushing back. A calm, reasonable man would’ve explained what the letters were – and also explained why he couldn’t give them to her.

He grabbed his bag, put it on the counter, and pulled at the zippers and straps with rough fingers. German cigarettes and Syrian banknotes fell out while he rummaged for a piece of paper addressed to Montana. When Luke found the right envelope, he fought the urge to crumple it and stuff it into the garbage disposal, but the part of him that suddenly needed her to know what was in it – that part won. And it shouldn’t have.

“It’s for you,” he said with a fake cheer, almost as if it were a birthday present. “I wrote it. I write them every time I leave, in case I don’t come back. And because – ” Oh, he was on it now. He dared her to stop him. He absolutely, truly dared her. “ – you were one talented surgeon away from getting this two months ago, you deserve to know what’s in it.”

Luke’s eyes held hers as he stuffed an index finger under the flap and ripped it open. It was two pieces of a notebook paper with his tight, blocky handwriting. A picture was with it. Lake Michigan, three years ago. He had on sunglasses and no shirt, his arm around her shoulder while she laughed and tried to push him away. Luke remembered calling Sam, saying that his leave was just approved, and his brother said that they were actually getting ready for vacation – to book a ticket, to come out and meet them. All that fishing they tried to do and caught nothing. Beers and sunburns on a boat. Surely there wasn’t a weekend in any other August where he’d laughed more.

The corner of the picture had a rusty line, from when he kept it paperclipped to the bunk springs above him, with the other photos from the things he liked about Montana. He’d taken that one out to put it in the letter because over the last year, it made this hard burning feeling grow in his chest when he looked at it before he tried to sleep.

He gave Charlie the picture and started to read.

“Dear Charlie,

I’m sixty kilometers from Aleppo, and if it gets any hotter, you’ll be getting this letter sooner rather than later because I’ll have died of heat stroke. However it happened, I’m sorry. I’m sorry that you were right about how I wasn’t going to come back. I feel more at home out here than I ever have in the States, and I know that hurt you. I will always be sorry for that.

But it’s going to be okay because you have that home. The place you’re building with Sam is beautiful, and you’re going to have everything you ever wanted. You’re going to raise those kids right. They’re going to be smart, empathetic, and independent. I won’t be there to teach them the quietest way to sneak back into the house after curfew, but just so you know, it’s through the basement window.

When you say things out loud, or you write them down, it makes your feelings true. I’ve never told you certain things because it’s not my place. But I don’t really want to be dead without you knowing that you’re not making it up. You know what I’m talking about. When you stare out at the trees with that burning feeling, wondering if you’re a horrible person for wanting someone else. I know because I feel it too, all the time, even when I’m way out here. I fell in love with you years ago. I couldn’t tell you when or why. It just happened.

You can’t control who you love, but you can control what you do about it. I never would have said or done anything. Not on my fucking life. I respect you and Sam too much to threaten what you have together. He can give you everything you want. Please, just let him.

Do me a favor and always remember to take care of the broken things. The damaged, lost, and forgotten things. You were always so good at that, like you were with me.

Love,
Luke”

He neatly folded the letter back up and handed it her. Someone must’ve had taken the air from the room because Luke felt like he was thousands of feet in the sky with no foundation. He never meant to turn the screws, to make her feel bad. That wasn’t why he read everything aloud. It was because if this was going to work, she needed to know where he was at. She needed to trust him.

His words were soft when he finally said something that wasn’t already written down. “I can’t move time backwards or forwards. I don’t know if I can go overseas again, if I’ll pass the physical. Even if I passed, I don’t know if I could leave. All this.”

If I could leave you.

Gold and Silver [Serenia/Melbourne]

Blood rushed to his chest, his body’s attempt to combat the threat in his muscles. A willowy lightheaded feeling threatened to take over Luke’s limbs, but he fought the urge to pass out, even though letting go would have brought him peace and relaxation. He mumbled something he himself couldn’t understand while Charlie dumped her medicine cabinet on the island. He tried to tell her that none of that would help.

“My bag. The front – oh, you fucking bitch,” he wheezed, pressing both hands to his side. It’d never hurt this bad. He couldn’t even make dinner without having an episode, which made disappointment and anger flood him. The letters on her sweatshirt became blurry. “The front pocket, baby. There’s a shot. Like a…like a…” He forced the words through clenched teeth. “Like an insulin pen.” Mostly slurred nonsense left his mouth. Luke had only called her “Charlie" before. Never, ever anything else.

His Army bag was still in the corner by the hutch. There were several hundred pockets, but the one at the top had random things like his passport, cigarettes, a ratty pack of chewing gum, several types of medication, his muscle shots, and envelopes that he hoped she either wouldn’t see – or would forget as soon as she saw them. There were only two, one addressed to Samuel McCormick and the other to Charlotte McCormick. Whenever he was deployed, he wrote them both letters in case he never came back. Once he was in Montana, he threw them out.

Orphenadrine. It was in a plastic bag with other pain meds and sleeping pills.

He could do the shot himself. Explaining how and where to do it would’ve been too much for him to explain.

Luke pulled the cap off his with his teeth and put the needle into his left pectoral, through his shirt. It took him a minute to adjust, but the pain blocker was immediate. Numbness crept through his chest and up to his shoulder. Color gradually came back to his face and he relaxed a bit, refocusing.

He gave Charlie a goofy smile, one that only happened when he was drunk. She was slowly coming back to focus, and when he registered how stricken she looked, he reached for her hand, arm, hip, anything. “Fuck the farm,” he mumbled. “You and me – we gotta open a Rite Aid.”

The island was covered in bottles. With the precision of a seasoned alcoholic, he tried to sit up in his seat. “A few minutes. Ten, and I’ll be back to normal. I just overworked everything." A pause. "I'm sorry you had to see that."

Focus ticked back into his brain every few seconds. Soon, he started to put the spilled medicine back into their containers and separated hers from his. Pain, fog, slurring, and then he was back down. The whole process was alarming but brief. It was impossible not to glaze over the bold letters on the sides of the bottles. Fluoxetine. Alprazolam. No bad pills. Nothing truly alarming. When Luke talked to the doctors, he was very insistent on not having opiates. At the end of his mother’s life, he’d seen what they did to her.

Once he was mostly back to himself, he looked up at Charlie. “How about that TV, huh? How do you feel about that? Something stupid.” He grinned, just slightly, unable to help it. “No Yellowstone.”

Gold and Silver [Serenia/Melbourne]

Luke preferred eating at the island. The kitchen table was a stuffy relic from his childhood that his father insisted on keeping as the “moral foundation of the household.” His dad got worse as his mother’s health declined. When he was sixteen, he’d gotten in a fist fight at school and had to later sit at that ridiculous table with a black eye while his father ripped him a new asshole. Sam’s going to run a business. What are you going to do, huh? Besides give me a goddamn stroke. Luke remembered laughing at him. I’m getting as far away from here as I can, and I’m never coming back.

If he ever convinced Charlie to get rid of some of this shit, the table was going first.

The trouble with the island was that he’d pictured her sitting on it with her legs wrapped around his waist – more than once. He blamed it on all the time they spent together in kitchen. Proximity. That was all.

The biscuits were slightly underdone, but it made no difference to Luke as he cut into his dinner. His habit of always eating like he never would again made it strikingly obvious that Charlie had barely even taken a bite. Her lack of an appetite critically concerned him, in addition to the fatigue she couldn’t hide. He didn’t address it because the only thing it would likely do was embarrass her. Luke would make her three meals a day for the next several months if that’s what it took.

“Me and Anna are friends.” Now that he was no longer moving, he was acutely aware of how terribly his new scarring itched under his shirt. The angry, red start of it was just visible over the tee’s collar. He pressed a palm to the side of his chest and took another bite of his dinner. “I don’t have a ‘thing’ for her, Charlie,” he teased gently. “I sneak her notes in math class and we make out at the lockers after school, but that’s it.”

She had a point. He could very well ask Anna to dinner. The likelihood he was going to pass a physical and psych evaluation for another deployment was low. Plus he wasn’t sure how long it was going to take to collect the rubble and get the building blocks of the farm standing up again. He didn’t know what the goal was. When he found Charlie on the back porch, smiling for the hell of it? When the house felt like a home again? When she laughed and it didn’t feel forced?

He conceded. “I will. Later. Not now. I want to…” Luke gestured at the sliding door behind them and the farm beyond that with his fork. “You know.” Fix this.

The movement caused another sharp pain in his ribs. Maybe it was his ribs. All of it ached, so he couldn’t tell exactly where the problem was. Everything from his shoulder to the middle of his chest was the equivalent of hamburger meat stitched back together. A muscle tightening in his neck was the only indicator that something was wrong. He ignored it. Charlie didn’t need to know that he couldn’t lift anything above his head. She didn’t need to see all the medication in his green duffel that he needed to fall asleep at night. Another reason why he wasn’t drinking as much. He refused to be another thing she had to worry about it. He could do this. Just a few more weeks and he’d be fine. “I need a game plan before I can – ”

Luke dropped his fork and gripped the side of the island. "Jesus fuck,” he hissed. His small window of ignoring it was gone. He pushed his stool back and put more pressure to the left side of his chest with his palm, taking a moment to breathe and focus on what was wrong. The weight of his hand helped. Jake picked his head off the floor, ears up, a small whine in his throat.

He swallowed and swore again.

“It’s from all the moving and travelling. It’s healing. It seems worse than it is. I tried to leave when they told me about Sam, and I made everything worse and had to get another surgery. I bet he was watching, fucking laughing at me.” He was talking in circular nonsense now – not to Charlie, but to himself. Luke grit his teeth as the pain spread. The stitches had only just barely healed, but the muscle needed much more time.

Dark eyes begged when he looked up at her, voice hoarse. “Nothing bad is going to happen to me. Please. I promise.”

Gold and Silver [Serenia/Melbourne]

Charlie had lost her husband, yes. She’d found his body. Slept beside his empty space in the bed each night. Saw his clothes in the closet. Dealt with everyone’s apologies, for weeks, while Luke was getting surgeries at a hospital half the world away. She was the one with her boots on the ground. Still didn’t change his resolution that they didn’t have to live in a haunted house because of it all. Maybe you being here will make it easier to deal with his absence. Luke’s shoulders lost some of their tension as he let the words settle under his skin. The statement bothered him for some reason, but he couldn’t explain why. It was clear that they dealt with loss differently, and if he had to look at Sam’s old things every day and every night, then he’d do it. He already said his piece. He wasn’t going to beat the subject to death.

When she came to take the club soda can, his hold was so loose that he almost dropped it. Over the years, small touches became their way of telling each other that everything was going to be ok. Or that everything was going to shit. For some reason, words made all their feelings seem much more real, which would be their damnation. Touch could be misconstrued. Tell me that you need me. Say that you think about it too. Beg me to stay, and I will – that was crystal fucking clear. Her hand on his elbow or his back while he poured coffee? That could mean anything.

Luke’s own hands were worn and scarred from being a shithead teenager, working on a farm, and being in the military. The Army was selectively lenient with arm tattoos, but anything on his hands was a hard no. Instead of ink, he had callouses, marks, and one missing fingernail on his left pinky finger. He’d gotten it caught while trying to fix the tractor two summer ago, and Christ if it didn’t bleed so much that Sam joked about him sleeping outside so he wouldn’t flood the house. The nail never grew back. There was a scar on across his palm from when he tried to get a rabbit out of a fox trap. The rabbit got free, but Luke hadn’t. His hands never truly seemed clean, no matter how hard he scrubbed them.

Gently, he took the fresh glass from Charlie, and his gaze found her wedding ring. His father never took his off after his mom had died. “Then I won’t tell you what I ate out in the desert,” he said, unable to stop his smirk. “You won’t like it.”

The look on his face changed when she asked him about his errands. He took a large sip from the glass, draining most of it, and turned his attention back to the pot on the stove. It was done. He flipped the burner and removed the lid.

“I have to stop by the police station. Anna messaged me when I was in Germany, and she said I still had personal effects from last summer.”

Anna Bowers was the Hingham Valley Chief of Police. She was also the girl who smoked cigarettes with him under the bleachers in high school. If time and life were different, he probably would’ve married her, but she wanted kids, a house, and roots. She wanted everything that Luke couldn’t give her. He never wanted to be locked in this town. He wasn’t Sam. He never would be. Even still, when he was in town, they would go out for beers and have sex. Just familiar people doing familiar things.

She was also exactly the type of person who would show up unannounced if Luke said he was going to do something and then didn’t.

Luke put his tongue in his cheek and didn’t look at Charlie. Instead, he got plates from the cabinet and made a big deal out of making sure that the silverware matched. He’d rather inspect the patterns on the fork handles than watch her remember exactly why he’d spent a night downtown a year ago. He’d gotten in a bar fight with one of the Atkinson brothers, a drunk who liked to say stupid shit. Shit like if Sam and Charlie had a baby, then Sam needed to get a DNA test to make sure it was his. So jail it was for Luke. And he couldn’t call Sam about it because he’d spiral, so he’d called Charlie. And that was the story.

He handed her a plate. “We’re going to have this all week, so you better like it.” Either way, it was better than funeral casserole.

Gold and Silver [Serenia/Melbourne]

Luke squeezed his eyes shut and pushed his thumbs into the sockets until he saw stars. She fucking killed him sometimes with her old “you weren’t the one who stayed” schtick, like he hadn’t been in the military for ten years before he met her. Like Sam didn’t have a farmer’s conference in Nashville years ago and went back every other month until he convinced Charlie to move up here with him. Like he somehow knew Charlie before Sam, like it was a choice to “leave” or “hide” or “abandon.” Besides, he wasn’t convinced that if he’d met Charlie first, then she wouldn’t have fallen in love with Sam anyway. Because she did love him. He saw it every time he came home in the last goddamn five years. Right in front of his face. Wedding shit, baby talk, renovation dreams. When he heard their bedframe hitting the wall before dawn, he’d get up early and muck out stalls in the dark. Maybe they had more sex whenever Luke had a weird tension snap with Charlie, like when he brought home a girl from the bar last year and he had to hear about how “this isn’t a hotel” for a week straight. Maybe he was making it up. Some fucking choice.

When he opened his eyes, he somehow seemed even more tired. He ran his tongue along the inside of his teeth and shook his head. “Jesus Christ, Charlie, give me a break. You know that’s not what I mean. Do you think I erased Matty? Our mom, our dad? Huh? Any of the dozens of guys I’ve seen killed in the desert?”

He plucked her wedding photo off the fridge, tossed it on the island, and pointed. “He loved you, to hell and back. I’ve never seen him care about someone more, I fucking swear to God. And when you love someone like that – ” His voice got quiet and his jaw tightened. “When you love someone like that,” he repeated, “it never goes away. You don’t forget it. You don’t get over it. It stays with you, forever.”

Luke took some steps away from her, having gotten too close during his monologue, and he turned his back while he checked the stove. Not done yet. He put the lid back on, a little too forcefully. “A part of you will always belong to him,” he said to the backsplash behind the oven. Even the spices she had stacked along the top of it were dusty. “I promise.”

As he willed dinner to finish cooking, he got a club soda from the fridge. He wanted a drink more than life itself, but lately alcohol only just highlighted everything he was feeling. And he sure as hell didn’t want to feel more of it. Three hours back in the house, and he’d already told Charlie to sell and to hurry up and get over her dead husband because he found it depressing. Luke stared at the pot on the stove. He wasn’t going to burn dinner on top of it.

Gold and Silver [Serenia/Melbourne]

The touch at his elbow and small “thank you” made Luke train his eyes on the back of the empty cabinet. After getting in a pissing match with her about selling the farm, the least he could do was make her dinner. “Give me an hour,” was all he said before she went up the stairs.

He wasn’t an idiot. He knew it was exactly that kind of shit – the looks, the touches, the talking without using words – that made people talk. It made the old woman who used to cut his hair ask about his wife, when it had just been Charlie flipping through a magazine in the waiting room, insistent that she had “other errands to run in town too.” It made his brother paranoid and self-deprecating when he was too drunk. It made the buddies from his unit say “sure, whatever” when he explained that it was his sister-in-law who sent him pictures and letters from home.

Sometimes he thought that with all the talk, they just should’ve done it. They should’ve fucked it out against the side of the barn, after any of their numerous fights, laughs, lingering looks, or frustrations. Other times, he saw how Charlie looked at Sam like he was responsible for the sun rising and setting each day, and Luke knew that they would never. Could never. Even if they were simultaneously stupid enough to be that degree of selfish, they couldn’t. It would ruin their dynamic, their friendship, their relationships with Sam. Everything.

And now when Luke looked at Charlie, his entire chest fucking hurt. Her effort to be normal was not strong enough to overcome her grief. At least, not to him. He let his gaze linger on the family photos on the fridge before taking a deep breath and shifting his brain into a different mental gear. Dinner.

The cellar yielded promising results in the form of a small canning “apocalypse” shelf (as Sam had called it) and a chest freezer. Underneath a disconcerting amount of frozen casseroles that Luke knew were, in fact, funeral dinners, was a package of chicken thighs without too much freezer burn. He defrosted them in a microwave, browned them in a cast iron, and sauteed a hearty onion and few sad carrots from the crisper drawer in the chicken fat. While the chicken cooled, he smoked a cigarette outside and tossed Jake a ratty tennis ball. His little cooking task had distracted him from the fact that Sam was gone for thirty minutes. Well, he figured, it was better than nothing.

When Charlie came downstairs, she found him digging around in the back of the fridge for chicken bouillon, but as how everything goes with Luke, one project became three others. While he’d gotten rid of everything expired, reorganized the shelves by putting most perishable in the front and least perishable in the back, and tossed everything that he recognized from his last visit over Christmas, eight months ago – dinner was only halfway cooked. This was the part where he usually would’ve joked about how she trusted him, didn’t she – that she had four fewer weird fridge mustards than she did an hour ago. He would ask her for baking powder and make fun of her when she gave him baking soda.

Instead, Luke leaned against the counter and cleared his throat, fiddling with the lid of the chicken bouillon. “Another hour. I promise.” He was normally much better about it, but being exhausted made Luke’s “idiot brother” traits come out. The lack of focus, the temper, the tangents, the general affinity for being up to no good. Despite his obvious fatigue and exhaustion, he did offer her the smallest of grins. “It’ll be worth it.”

He got out a stockpot and made a roux with some flour, milk and chicken fat. He added the shredded chicken, carrots, and onion back. Water. Bouillon. High heat. Stir. Frequently. “Chicken and biscuits,” he finally told her. The Army had taught Luke that he really enjoyed cooking. And goddamn if he wasn’t thrilled to eat something besides a MRE. Once everything reduced to a stew, he made a loose biscuit mix (which was thankfully barebones because Charlie’s baking supplies were horribly lackluster), he dropped them on top of the stew and put the lid on.

At Jake’s whining insistence, Luke threw him another tennis ball off the back porch.

He couldn’t avoid the elephant in the room any longer.

“You can’t live like this, Charlie. We can’t. We have to paint the walls, put things in storage, burn that fucking chair. Sell his fishing rods in the basement.” Luke itched for a cigarette, but he tried not to do it directly in front of her face. “He didn’t even like fucking fishing!” he yelled, throwing his hands up. “Change your bedroom. Raise baby chickens. Find a new normal.”

Luke’s eyes begged, and he wasn’t sure if he was trying to convince Charlie to change, or if he was trying to convince himself.