Page 12 of Redeem

Needing that moment as much as she did if not more.

Today had been fascinating, interesting, surprisingly emotional.

I’d felt connected to Dana since the first time I’d seen her at the hardware store, well before that even. I’d been certain that connection was because of the debt I owed her, the amends I’d needed to make.

Now, I wasn’t so sure, and that left me in an even more precarious situation. None of this was why I was here. I’d tried to remind myself of that, tried to focus on the memory of her heartbreak, had more than once worked myself up to finally speak the words that had made finding her imperative.

But those words refused to come out.

During the course of the day I hadn’t been thinking of the past and hadn’t been thinking about the future, either. I’d been focused on this time with her, looking at her as she’d been so stridently not looking at me, watching as her mind had worked, trying to interpret what her different expressions meant.

It had been fascinating to watch her. At some moments, she’d be deeply focused, her face an unbroken mask of concentration. Other times she seemed to be somewhere else, her mind adrift.

Beyond the fascination with her, this entire experience was novel to me. I tried to remember even a day that had felt so unburdened, so straightforward, and I came up with nothing. This felt like an entirely different world, one where I didn’t have to worry about what was hiding around the corner. Didn’t have to think of the pain I’d caused, the lives I had taken. Didn’t have to think about how my very presence here was yet another crime.

What I did think about was living this kind of life with Dana, staying here with her. It was dangerous, foolhardy thinking, but my mind kept going back there nonetheless, and I wasn’t able to stop it even though I knew there was no way it could happen.

Dana’s chair scraping against the scarred wood of the porch as she reclined brought me back to the moment. I looked at her, looked away just as quickly.

“Is this a farm?” I asked, genuinely curious to know the answer, and even more anxious for distraction from my thoughts.

The property was vast and it looked like a farm to me, but what did I know of farms?

“It used to be,” she said.

“Used to be?”

“Yeah, I bought it from an old man. He told me that the land had gone bad so he couldn’t farm it anymore,” she said.

“But you bought it anyway?”

“Yeah. Couldn’t beat the price,” she said.

I looked at her face, saw that there was some emotion there, but I didn’t push it. Dana wouldn’t tell me anything she didn’t want me to know anyway, at least not verbally.

She sighed, but after a moment she continued. “Besides, I love the land, the house…”

“You love it?” I asked.

My skepticism must have been clear in my voice because she looked at me then, her eyes bright with amusement.

“You can’t see the draw?” she said.

I looked back at the structure, one that I would only loosely call a house. It was huge, but the outside was weathered, the wood siding chipped, and I could see where it had been patched in some places.

At least five of the windows were broken out and had been boarded up, and I could remember how worn and weathered the roof had looked as we’d approached.

“I’m sure it has some charm,” I said.

She curled her full lips into a soft smile and then took a sip of her soda before she put the can back down.

“How diplomatic. The place is a dump,” she said.

I studied her, watching as the sun shone against her skin and gave an amber hue to her dark eyes. She said the place was a dump, but her behavior suggested she thought otherwise, a contradiction I found myself wanting to pursue.

“The land is bad. The house is about to fall down, but you bought it. Why?” I asked.

The faint trace of the smile that had been on her face faded, and she kept her gaze away, her expression again taking on that reflective look.