Page 33 of Safe With Me
Tate
Funny how things didn’t come into clear focus until after everything was fucked up. I’d had to lose Hannah to see that everything stemmed from being afraid to lose her.
I’d been a kid when that crush on Elizabeth started. Jase and I had been seniors, she’d been a freshman, and he’d asked her to homecoming after Alyssa Prescott broke up with him. I’d been adrift, missing Mama, missing the daddy I’d had before Sam Turner crossed a double yellow line in the rain and hit her head on.
After homecoming, Elizabeth had started sitting with us at lunch. She was soft and pretty, and admiring her had been easy. Her sister, who I knew to call by name, was just the friend of my cousin Trace’s new girlfriend. Trace tried to set us up once. I was a dumbass, thinking I loved Elizabeth from afar and being nobly quiet about it, and I said no.
If I’d been a little smarter, a little less traumatized, maybe I’d have seen Hannah then and this morning I’d be with her in our home instead of an unwanted visitor in hers.
She ignored me, ensconced on her plump couch, laptop open on her lap. She tapped away, frowning at the screen, and scribbling in the notebook by her thigh. I didn’t know what she was up to, but that was some serious research. The intensity, the way she chewed on her bottom lip while she read and took notes . . . that made me a little nervous, left a heavy dread in my gut.
I had no right to ask for insight into what she was doing, and I was afraid to say much in case she tossed me out and calledSara or Gracie after all. For days, I’d been starved for her and damn if I’d jeopardize being this close to her now.
So I sat in the armchair, and quiet surrounded us, broken only by her typing, the scratch of her pen, and the hiss of the gas fire in the fireplace. Phone in hand, I watched her on the sly, how pretty her fingers were, the way her hair bobbed when she turned her head, how gorgeous her mouth was when she pursed it, reading.
After a while, watching her felt creepy and stalkerish, so I swiped over to YouTube and went back through Elizabeth’s channel. I wasn’t much for social media – farming was time intensive and when I got home, I’d rather be out by the pond than on TikTok or Instagram or YouTube – so I hadn’t watched many of her videos. A couple of early ones when she started because Jase showed me, maybe another few if someone sent me a link because she’d highlighted a local business. I’d seen the one where she’d waxed lyrical about local “hot farmers” and included me. My old self had gotten a thrill out of that one.
I’d seen the one last week where Hannah refused to talk as Elizabeth followed her around the store because Elizabeth herself had sent me the link with a joky little text –do you believe this?and an eyerolling emoji. I’d clicked on it, watched about half of the infamous video that sparked my disastrous annoyance with Hannah. I hadn’t scrolled the comments on any of them except the hot farmer vid.
If I’d bothered, I’d have known exactly why Hannah stopped talking.
We should have seen this. Me, her daddy . . . anybody who cared about her. Hell, probably Sara saw it. Gracie and Andy, too.Iwas the blind dumbass in this situation.
And this was what people said in public. Lord knew what went on in private.
I jerked my head up, staring at her. “You get ugly DMs?”
She paused, flicked an unfriendly glance in my direction, and returned her attention to her laptop.
Frustration wrapped a hot hand around my windpipe. “Hannah, for real.”
“Before I shut down my social media accounts, yes.” She didn’t look up at me, skimming a finger over her touchpad. “Why do you care?”
I ignored that. No matter how dumb I’d been at the beginning or the end of us, she’d still been my friend.
That had come about the year we lost the farm and I lost Daddy to his shotgun. Elizabeth had been a freshman off at Georgia Southern then. The farm was gone, Daddy was gone, and if he hadn’t had the money to pay the bank, he wasn’t paying his life insurance either. I needed a place to stay other than my truck, and Sara and Trace’s extra bedroom looked better than my aunt and uncle’s place.
Sara was pregnant with Kaydee, and Hannah was around all the time. That’s when our Saturday nights started. I was a mess, and Trace didn’t want to leave me alone on his and Sara’s date nights. So he dragged me with them, and Hannah came along, I guess to keep me from being the weird third wheel.
Those Saturdays weren’t date nights for us, but we’d moved from being acquaintances to friends. She was funny and compassionate, and we discovered we had stuff in common after all – UGA, a love of the outdoors and the land, a strong sense of family, even though the core of mine was gone.
Later, after Kaydee came along, we sometimes babysat on those Saturdays so Sara and Trace could have a real date night. The baby mostly slept, and I made fun of Hannah through corny Hallmark movies.
Somewhere in the middle of those Saturday nights, I started to heal. Somehow, I missed that a lot of that healing had a lot to do with Hannah’s soft, steadfast presence.
When Elizabeth graduated Georgia Southern and came home, she and Jase joined us on those Saturday nights out.
And Hannah pulled away. Suddenly she had dates on Saturday nights or cried off because she was tired after a day in the woods.
Now, I realized all that had been about how I looked at Elizabeth, an old, bad habit that obscured the light of my life. The thing was I hadn’t wanted to see her as that light, as central to my life and wellbeing. I knew better than most how easy it was to lose those centers in the span of a second, from a glance away from a rainy road, from a shaky finger on a shotgun trigger.
I hadn’t lost her – I’d tossed her away and then I’d lived with the loss anyway. I needed her so I could breathe.
I wanted to tell her all that, but not today.
Because we both knew I’d already said too much a little over a week ago.
Chapter Ten
