Page 9 of Freak
Chapter Three
Abigail Freeman’s housewas like something out of an old folk tale.
On the outside it looked like a normal farmhouse, setting aside the vivid purple paint and black trim (and the graffiti she’d left on a side wall and prettied up like it belonged there), but a step over the threshold revealed a home like nothing Mel had seen outside a book of fairy tales.
He understood why some folks around here thought she might really be a witch.
Take this kitchen, for instance. At its base, it was a regular country kitchen: large and practical, with a wood floor and wood countertops, lots of wooden cupboards and other storage, including two big old hutches and a hand-built case of floor-to-ceiling shelves. She had three ovens—two in a wall unit probably installed in the 80s and a monster range that was probably twice as old as that. Her fridge was an antique beast as well, the kind where the freezer had to be defrosted a few times a year.
The base of her kitchen, in other words, was what one would expect from a hundred-plus-year-old country house—funky and aging, but practical. The wild stuff began the next layer up. The cupboards were painted a deep purple color—not the violet of the exterior but a rich, reddish purple like a ripe plum. The ceiling was painted black. A patchwork of thin, woven rugs in a vast array of colors, patterns, and sizes covered the floor. The backsplash behind the sink was gold tile, each one hand-painted with a different flower. Half a dozen pendant lights hung from the ceiling, each one with a vintage glass globe in a different color and shape. The walls—wood planks—were barely visibly behind the hutches, the shelves, a big pegboard hung with rows of live plants in small glass pots, and another bedazzled with an extensive collection of cast-iron cookware.
And then there were the little glass pots and bottles that filled that case of shelves, each one carefully marked with a label in Abigail’s calligraphic handwriting. In a normal kitchen, that would be a spice rack, and about one-tenth the size. This one indeed held kitchen spices, every one Mel knew and a whole bunch he didn’t. But then they took a decidedly fantastical turn. Dried bits from strange, spiky plants, odd things in liquid, things with names he’d never heard. And also names he knew but unsettled him nonetheless: bee venom, dried crickets, dried ants, and more. He wouldn’t have been surprised to find ‘eye of newt’—but that was not among her strange ‘spices.’
Maybe shewasa witch. He hadn’t asked; that seemed like one of those questions it was best to keep to himself.
What really made it seem so ethereal wasn’t the strange little bottles but the plants, so many plants the kitchen was a jungle. In addition to that board of baby plants, three pots hung from macrame hangers before the window at the sink, dozens of plants hung from the ceiling in similar hangers all around the room, one enormous plant made a vining curtain over the side window, and bunches of leafy stems had been bound together and strung across the room like clothes hanging to dry. At six-one, Mel practically needed a pith helmet and a machete to cross the room.
Coming into this kitchen from the outside was like walking through a portal and landing in the forest where Hansel and Gretel got lost. It was dark, verdant, unusual, and bursting with life. And in the middle of it stood this woman, herself verdant, unusual, and bursting with life.
But she wasn’t dark. Abigail Freeman’s inner light was bright as a lighthouse.
Mel was maybe a little bit in love with her.
Er ... no, not that. He didn’t do love; with love came commitment, and that wasn’t his bag. He’d done his time being responsible for another person, and now he liked captaining a ship for one. Nobody leaning on him, nobody riding him if he got home late, nobody waiting on him for anything.
But damn, he liked Abigail’s company.
Until a pack of unknown (yet) shitheads had ransacked this homestead, Mel hadn’t known her particularly well. The people up here in the hills stuck to themselves more than not, so he wouldn’t have said he knew any particularly well. Gary Prentiss, he supposed, but that was because Gary had been a minor thorn in the Horde’s side until he’d ended up dead because of it. Abigail he’d known only because she made the best damn pies and jams he’d ever had, and he always made a point of stopping by her booth at a town festival and loading up on provisions.
Simple coincidence had brought them into each other’s orbit. Mel had been the one to answer the phone—a landline that almost never rang—when she’d called the club for help that day, and since then, Abigail had become one of his favorite people. Yeah, she was a little weird, but it was the best kind of weird, entirely without malice or cynicism.
She was one of those folks the sun seemed to shine straight through. Always smiling, always sweet, patient with young and old, deftly disarming anybody who might be inclined to be difficult. That last one spoke to a strength of spirit most ‘nice’ people didn’t possess, in his experience. A lot of people were ‘nice’ because they were afraid of confrontation and wanted to slip under the radar. They were people pleasers, not actually compassionate. Abigail was kind, but she wasn’t afraid of confrontation. She stood her ground with a sincere smile and without aggression. She simply held her boundaries firm.
She was the type of woman who’d leave a nasty message meant to hurt her feelings and deface her home right where it was and paint flowers, butterflies, and honey bees all around it, turning something that had been done to her into something that was hers. There was a firm FUCK YOU in a move like that.
She was kind, but there was steel in her.
She was real nice to look at, too.
If Mel had a type, it was ‘independent.’ He admired anybody who handled their own shit. He didn’t like clingy women, those made their guy their whole personality, but otherwise he liked most of them. If he had a physical feature he appreciated most of all, it had to be eyes; eyes were what he noticed first on anybody, and a pretty set on a woman would pull and hold his attention every time. Abigail’s eyes were the clear blue of a June sky, and her perpetual smile kept them sparkling like a lake on a sunny day. Combined with that wild mess of dark hair and those bodacious curves a man could sink into, okay, yeah, he’d had a thought or ten of her during his ‘personal time,’ sure.
Men who thought only skinny women could be beautiful were missing a bet. There was nothing like pulling a woman with some meat on her close and wrapping her up in his arms. It felt good absolutely everywhere. Skinny girls were sharp and bony, and he could barely feel he had anything in his arms—not to mention being half-worried he’d accidentally break one if he got too energetic. They were pretty, too, he wouldn’t kick a lanky girl out of bed, but they weren’t the be-all, end-all of beautiful, sexy women, not by a long shot.
Sometimes his eyes settled on Abigail from behind and he almost grunted.
So yeah. He was attracted to her. And okay, maybe he had a little crush. He damn sure wouldn’t turn down the opportunity. However, he’d tossed a few feelers out over the past few weeks, and she hadn’t picked up on a single one. Not even a little extra pink in her cheeks or a flutter of an eyelash. He could admit some insecurity at having his signals so roundly ignored.
Mel wasn’t shy about making his moves, but he liked to have some indication a move was wanted before he did anything obvious. Abigail was sweet as candy and said she enjoyed his company, but she was clearly not interested in anything more than platonic.
Word around town was she’d never been with anyone, not a relationship, not a one-nighter, nothing. He knew for sure she wasn’t strongly religious, at least not in the Bible-waving way, so it wasn’t that. Maybe she was one of those aromantic or asexual folks and not interested in anybody ever.
While he couldn’t relate to that thought—hardly an hour of his life went by where he didn’t think about sex—it helped. He was vain enough to think if she liked men she’d at least give him a second look. He took care of himself, worked out and all that, and he had no, like, deformities. Enough women had called him hot that he could be confident he was decent looking. He was getting up there a little, maybe, just a couple years shy of fifty now, but he still did okay for himself, and not only at the clubhouse.
He tried to be a decent human being, too. He didn’t have a hero complex, didn’t need to look for people to save to feel good about himself, didn’t need a chick fluttering her lashes at him in gratitude, but he threw in where there was need.
It was a lot easier to believe Abigail wasn’t interested in sex than that she wasn’t interested in him. He was pretty comfortable with himself, but rejection still hurt, even if it was only implied.
After a last, lingering glance to watch her body move as she mashed potatoes, he carried the jar of wildflowers to the dining room and set them in the middle of her round table.
