Deacon held Blair’s hand in his as they walked to the creek.
He tried to get some thoughts together to ask the Lord what exactly he should say and what she wasn’t ready to hear yet.
And what he was jumping the gun about.
He knew he needed to be careful, because if God ever gave him his dream of being a pastor, whoever he married would end up being a pastor’s wife with all the responsibilities that entailed. He needed to make sure he was finding someone who was capable of those things.
Blair was capable. He wasn’t sure if she wanted to.
Any time he tried to get close to her, she seemed to pull back and put distance between them. He wasn’t sure exactly why.
Maybe they could get to the bottom of it today.
Tinsley, her pigtails bouncing, came running over and grabbed him around the waist. “Daddy! I’m so glad you’re here. Can we get in the creek now?”
“Hold on a minute, baby.” He put his hand on her head and smoothed her hair down. Someday she’d be grown, she’d no longer call him “Daddy” and wrap her arms around his waist, and he appreciated this. “I don’t think you’ve met Miss Blair. Blair, this is my daughter, Tinsley.”
Tinsley lifted her head out from where it was buried in his stomach. “Nice to meet you, Miss Blair.”
Just the way she’d been taught.
He didn’t expect Blair to have a problem communicating with Tinsley. Blair had been excellent with the children at church, and he did have several parents come to him and tell him so. Of course, he’d had complaints as well—but not about how she treated them.
He hoped, as Blair continued to come to church, continued to live in the town, and continued to show by her life what she was, that those complaints would die down.
It would always be in her past, but it didn’t have to be in her present or affect her future.
Blair surprised him. She stared at Tinsley like she’d never seen a child before. She didn’t have a cute word to say or a smile. Her mouth kind of hung open, and her eyes searched over Tinsley like she was looking for a gang tattoo.
“Are you okay, Blair?” Deacon finally asked.
Her head shook, and her body twisted like she had just realized that she’d been staring and not very kindly.
“I’m sorry. Tinsley.” She cleared her throat. “What a lovely name. It’s so nice to meet you.” Blair smiled, and Tinsley grinned back at her, but Deacon could tell that Blair’s smile seemed forced and strained.
She’d always had some kind of odd reaction when she was around his daughter.
Lord? I can’t marry a woman who doesn’t love my daughter as much as I do.
He had to still the racing heart and the eagerness of everything in him to be with Blair, if she wouldn’t accept Tinsley.
“I’ve never swum in the creek before. It looks like a lot of fun.” Blair’s smile had relaxed into something more natural.
“Oh, it is. We hunt for crayfish, and we build dams, and we try to balance on the rocks, and sometimes we try to build a waterfall.”
That was just like Tinsley to say a million things in one sentence.
“That sounds like a lot of fun. Maybe I can do it some today.”
Relieved that Blair seemed to have recovered from whatever problem she’d had, he said, “Let’s eat first. That way when we get cold in the creek, we can walk home.”
“Aww. Do we have to? I really wanted to get in the creek right now.”
The other kids who were standing behind Tinsley chorused their agreement with her.
“It won’t take any time at all. We’ll just see what Grandma packed and eat what we want. Aren’t you guys hungry?”
“Yeah. I’m always hungry,” Huck said, with a hand in the pocket of his shorts. “I hope she made tuna salad. That’s my favorite.”
“I don’t know. We’ll have to see.”
“Grandma gave me the blanket to carry. It’s over there.” RaeAnne pointed to a bundle on the grass. She had grown up with her mother, an actress, and acted with more reserve than the other kids.
“How about I spread that out then?” Blair looked up at him, as if asking for permission.
“That sounds great.” He held up the bags. “I’ll just hold the food.”
“Should we trust him with that, guys?” Blair asked the kids surrounding her.
A chorus of noes rang out.
Blair laughed and gave him a look. “Then we better get that blanket spread out pretty fast. Come on.”
Her hand slipped out of his as she walked over to the blanket with the children surrounding her, chattering.
Her laughter touched his heart, made it swell. Tinsley walked beside her on her right, and it seemed odd, but her hand seemed to just float over Tinsley’s head and down her back. There, but from what he could tell, not quite touching.
Like the invisible touch of a mother’s loving hand.
Odd.
He followed them over more slowly, watching as they giggled and covered themselves with the blanket first before everyone grabbed a corner and stretched it out while Blair directed them to slowly lay it down.
“Okay. That’s perfect.” She put her hands on her hips and turned toward him. “Don’t you think so, Deacon?”
He wasn’t looking at the blanket. Blair stood with her hands on her hips, her head tilted, the breeze lifting her hair away from her rosy cheeks.
Her lips were pulled back in a smile, and he found himself unable to pull his eyes away. She was beautiful and strong and tough, but she stood beside him in the hospital, being compassionate and caring, and supported him in a way that he hadn’t even known he needed but craved.
Deep in his soul, she felt like his perfect match.
But maybe that wasn’t the way he was for her. After all, he hadn’t supported her through anything. She had no reason to have any feelings for him.
Although she’d allowed him to hold her hand.
“It’s perfect,” he finally said. He hadn’t even looked at the blanket, because he wasn’t talking about that. He was talking about whatever was between Blair and himself. He felt like it was perfect. He could only hope she felt the same.
He held up the bags. “Should we get this out and see what Grandma sent?”
The kids all yelled and jumped.
“Everybody find a spot on the blanket.”
He got the food out and spread it around, and they prayed over it. Blair bowed her head and whispered an amen after his. He met her eyes as they lifted their heads.
He hoped she wasn’t too set on playing in the creek, because he thought he might get to talk to her while the kids were playing.
He felt a little sad about a childhood that hadn’t had that kind of fun in it.
He watched as she chatted with the children, asking them about what they were going to do this summer and listening to them as they said how they couldn’t wait for their other cousins to come.
“They’re talking about Zane’s kids,” he said low, under the chatter.
She lifted her brows and nodded.
There were other cousins too, since all five of his brothers had children.
Funny, that he was really the only one who didn’t, but he had still ended up with a child too.
He had never asked around, and he didn’t really know what the townspeople thought about Tinsley, whether they still believed that she was his truly or not. Not that it mattered.
She was his in every way that counted.
The kids all wolfed down their half sandwiches while chattering, mostly with their mouths full. Deacon let it go. It was a picnic, after all.
They also ate their oatmeal raisin cookies and guzzled some water. RaeAnne wasn’t quite done when the other ones had finished up.
“Can we go now?” Huck asked with a definite pleading tone in his voice.
“Just hold on. Wait for everyone,” Deacon said easily. He’d stretched out on his side, leaning on his elbow. Tinsley was near his head, with Blair on the other side.
Three minutes later, RaeAnne said, “I’m done. May we go now, please?”
“Sure can. Put your garbage in the bag.” He held the bag open as the kids gathered up their empty containers and stuck them in the bag before running off.
The kids scattered up and down the creek, and although they could hear the splashing and the music the creek made as it went over the rocks and the yelling of the kids, it was a lot quieter. Not uncomfortable though. Not to him.
“I heard you say you wanted to go play in the creek.” He stuck the last of his sandwich in his mouth.
“I think it will be fun. I’ve never done it before.”
“It is fun. I wanted to talk to you some though, sometime.”
“Now is fine,” she said with a little shrug. “I hardly think I’ll last as long as the kids do. I’ll probably get cold.”
“Yeah. That’ll be when we’re done. When they start to shiver. Otherwise, I think they’d play all day.”
“It makes for a fun childhood.”
“Sure does.” He straightened up, putting his garbage in the bag and tidying up the blanket. “Would you like to walk a little?”
“Sure.”
They stood up, and he held out his hand this time, giving her a choice as to whether or not she wanted to take it. Her eyes went to his before her fingers slid in his palm, and they curled together.
“I’m probably reading more into that than I should be. But I like it.”
“I don’t know what you’re reading into it, but it definitely means I like you.”
“Good. Because I really like you.” That’s not what he wanted to say at all. Wasn’t even something he had planned to talk about. But it was the absolute truth.
They went a little ways down the creek, not going far away from the children. The creek was shallow, and they would all be fine, but he wouldn’t walk away from them.
“You know it was just my mom and me growing up, and she had to work. So I didn’t get to do a lot of things like this. But I always swore if I had children, I would make sure that this was the kind of life they had.”
He swung their hands a bit. “I think we all want our kids to have a better life than we did. Isn’t that natural? Sometimes we do so much trying to make their lives better that we ruin them, I think. The word spoiled actually applies.” He’d seen it over and over in his years as a pastor. “Parents giving their kids everything, and the kids being worthless in return.”
“That’s true. If we don’t have to work for anything, we never develop character.”
“Hard times do it too.”
“True.”
“Where was your dad?” He paused. “Or is that prying?”
“No. You can ask.” Her hand twitched in his, and he thought maybe it wasn’t her favorite thing to talk about. “I don’t know. You know he left my mom for someone else. I heard from him sporadically through my childhood, but it tapered off in high school, and I haven’t heard from him since I went to prison.” She brushed a hand down her leg. “That would make any relationship awkward. And I guess it was enough to break ours.”
“Have you thought about looking him up?”
She shook her head, kicking the ground with her foot. “No. We never had much of a relationship, and I don’t want the drama. I guess in my mind it would be nice to have a dad who loves me, but I know the reality isn’t going to pan out. I don’t want to go through it.” She pulled back and lifted her eyes. “Does that make me a bad person?”
He pressed his lips together and shook his head. “No. It just makes you human.”
She dropped her eyes and looked away, her eyes tracking the meanderings of the creek as it twisted and turned through the field. “Maybe someday I’ll feel strong enough to handle it. But I know he doesn’t really want to hear from me anyway. He never has. And to think anything else is just deluding myself. I know that’s negative thinking, but positive thinking in this case would just be pie in the sky.”
“You’re just protecting yourself from being hurt more. He already hurt you enough, with the rejection throughout your childhood and the complete cut of communication. I don’t blame you.” His heart cried for her, and he tugged on her hand, pulling her to face him. “It’s okay to not want to be hurt by people.”
She took a deep breath through her nose. “I guess I never really thought about it like that. But you’re right. Drama usually hurts, right?”
“Most of the time.”
“I promised to tell you why I went to prison.”
“You don’t have to. Not right now. This isn’t supposed to be Blair-confesses-everything day. It’s too pretty and nice out for that.”
She looked off into the distance and blinked. “No. It’s not really hard for me to tell. Just words. It’s hard for me to admit to it and to see what the information does to other people when I tell it.”
“It’s not going to change anything for me,” Deacon said with assurance, because he knew it to be true.
Her smile told him that she believed him. He liked that.
“I was in with the wrong crowd. You knew that.” Her eyes slid to his, then away. “I’d gotten booked for a couple of things. DUIs. A shoplifting charge.” She shrugged, one slim shoulder going up like it didn’t matter, but her face said different. “I had a record. I let the people I was with influence me and shut the adults who cared out of my life. There were drugs, of course. One of my friends at the time needed money, and he had the idea to rob a convenience store. I didn’t steal anything, but I’d held one of his guns. And that’s what got me the time.”
She looked like she might say more, then her lips pressed together, and she shoved her hand in her pocket.
He squeezed the hand he was holding, and she squeezed back, but she didn’t look at him.
She’d trusted him with so much—first her dad and now her prison sentence. He wasn’t sure whether to push or not, but he figured he’d ask the question, then leave it up to her as to whether or not she would answer.
He took a breath and said with soft, measured words, “I heard there was a baby.”
There, he said it. The thing that most bothered him about everything.
“There was.” She swallowed tightly. “That’s probably the most painful thing out of any of it.”
Yeah, that was all he needed to hear. He thought about all the things he counseled with other women over the years, women who were eaten up with guilt, who believed the lie that it was a part of their body or just tissue.
Women who had finally seen an ultrasound and realized what they had been duped into doing. It wasn’t an act that was ever going to leave. When a person killed her own child, they lived with that for the rest of their lives.
He’d seen it.
He didn’t want to give empty words to Blair. Most of all because she hadn’t asked for any.
After a long time of staring at the ground, she finally said, “You know, when you’re a teenager, and your life is stretched out ahead of you, and you’re so excited about everything, and then things don’t work out the way you think they should. You realize the people in your life that you resented the most because they didn’t tell you what you wanted to hear were actually the ones that loved you the most. And they were right. Then you wish that you could go back and you could do it again, and you could just listen and do what they wanted you to, without having to experience the pain on your own. Because it wasn’t just you that hurt that whole time. The people who loved you went through it too, and what you did hurt them every bit as much as it hurt you. Maybe even more.”
She shook her head, her face drawn. “Why was I so stupid?” Her eyes searched his. “What made you so smart? How did you know? How did you know not to do the things that I did? Why was I the stupid one? Why didn’t I listen to my mom? All those questions, and they’re pointless now. It’s done and over with, and the only way through it is forward.”
He wanted to put his arms around her and comfort her, but she was frustrated and upset, and he wasn’t sure his touch was welcome. He didn’t want to go there. Not now.
But he put a hand on her shoulder, because there was something necessary and elemental in the touch of one human to another. “I can’t answer those questions. I was never tempted to run with a bad crowd. I just wasn’t. I don’t know why. It wasn’t anything good that I had done. I don’t know if it was God protecting me or my mom’s prayers. Or whether God just ordained it that way. I don’t know. All I know is that I’m never going to understand everything about God, because there’s too much. Any being who can do what He did is beyond my comprehension. That’s where the childlike trust comes in. Because that’s all I can do—just trust.”
Blair’s sigh was a whisper, almost taken away by the wind. And then, slowly, she took a slight step closer and put a hand lightly on his chest. Her head tilted up, her eyes on his chin.
“Is this okay?” she asked softly.
He wasn’t sure exactly what she was asking. “Yes.” The answer came off his tongue, even without knowing the question. Easily.
His chest ached where her hand rested, and he wanted her to press harder, wanted her to step closer. But he didn’t want to push her, and he didn’t want to take advantage of her vulnerability right now.
From the counseling that he’d done, he knew one of the deepest hurts a person could experience was the rejection, or the neglect, of their parents. It was hard and left scars for the rest of their life. Blair would have that. And he wanted to help heal her, but the privilege wasn’t his. Not right now.
Her eyebrows twitched, and she bit her lip. “And if I step closer?”
His breath trembled as he let it out. “That’s fine too.” His words came out soft but rough. It was hard to speak when all he wanted to do was feel.
His hands hung at his sides. He fought the urge to lift them up and put them around her, waiting. He wasn’t sure exactly what he was waiting for. Waiting for her to be ready.
“Why does being with you always make me feel like I can be better?” she asked softly, still staring at his chin.
He wasn’t sure exactly what she meant and what that had to do with her position, and so he didn’t answer.
“Maybe the way a tree casts shade and a person is drawn to the coolness…you just seem to have so much integrity and honesty. I guess I see that and I want it for me too.”
Disappointment spiraled in his stomach. That wasn’t what he wanted from her. It was the way he wanted to live, true, and he was glad she saw it. But from Blair, of all people, he’d wanted more.
He stood still, throat too tight for words, heart too full to figure out what he wanted to say anyway.
She pressed her lips together before she whispered so softly he almost didn’t hear, “But there’s an attraction too. I’m sorry. I know that’s probably not what you want. But I fight it every time I’m close to you.”
He closed his eyes, breathing out slowly. That’s what he wanted. That’s what he’d been waiting for. His hands came up and settled on her back, and he pulled her closer.
“Me too,” he said, his cheek down on the top of her head. “Me too.”
He could watch the children from where his head was on hers, and hear their laughter and their splashing, and knew that everything was okay with them. But it was hard to focus, with the writhing of his heart, and the scattering of his thoughts, and the way he just wanted to move closer and be like that forever. Maybe that made him crazy.
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