Charlotte got up the next morning feeling cranky and groggy after yet another night of restless sleep. The part of her that was tired enough to cry wanted to go crawl in bed with Leroy to get a good night's rest. The idea of curling up against a Grim Reaper for the night, regardless of his secrets, no longer bothered her. And that was a serious problem.
Yes, he was a Grim Reaper, but he had still been her best friend for the last four years. Sure, he'd kept his own life a secret from her, but he had never let her down. Every single time she had needed something since she'd known him, he had come through for her.
But...she had to admit that something was still different between them. The more he answered her questions about his long life, the more she wanted to know. She could tell that he was trying to build the wall back up between them—and failing. If she prodded him, she was sure that now she could get him to revisit conversations he'd previously shut down. She wanted to know everything there was to know about him.
The things she wanted to know most were the things she couldn't bring herself to ask him. About his wife, Sarah—a woman he'd apparently not been in love with. What did that mean? And who were the two people he had been in love with? She could only assume that one of them had to be Marilyn, based on his reaction watching the movie the day before.
And it bothered her. A lot. No wonder he didn't date. He'd been in love with the most beautiful woman in the world.
It was all she'd been able to think about for twenty-four hours.
She brewed a fresh pot of coffee, running her hands through her hair as she leaned against the counter to wait for it. She was being crazy. Why should it matter to her who Leroy may or may not have been in love with?
Because you like him, came a little voice from the back of her mind.
For the first time, she wondered if Brandon hadn't been on to something. Leroy was a handsome guy and she couldn't deny that she was attracted to him. He definitely stirred up dormant feelings in her. Maybe it was one of those things you had to do once to get out of your system...
The coffee pot dinged as it finished brewing and Charlotte let out a sigh of relief as she hurried to grab it and fill her mug. After a few grateful gulps, she topped it off again and tried to think of something to do. Well, that wasn't quite what she meant. She needed something to preoccupy her mind from what she wanted to do. As she passed into the living room she walked by the bookshelves and noticed for the first time that there were thick photo albums tucked into the bottom shelf of Leroy's books.
Happy for the distraction, she grabbed them and took them to the couch. Second guessing herself, she wondered if he'd get mad that she was prying into his stuff—but she'd been doing a lot of that lately and he didn't seem to mind as much as he used to. Besides, he was still asleep in his room. There wasn't any harm in looking through them—especially if she didn't get caught.
The very first picture in the album made her laugh out loud. Leroy was standing in a dingy bar and even just a single look at him told her this picture was from the 1980s. He was wearing a pair of leather pants, but instead of one of the ratty band shirts she was used to, he'd paired it with a leather vest and nothing underneath. His hair was long and feathered with a red bandana around his forehead and he was dripping in studded jewelry. She ran a finger along the photo of his chest—he'd had fewer tattoos back then.
It looked like the next chunk of photos was from the 1930s and early 1940s, judging by the neatness of Leroy's hair combed out of his face and the presence of Danny in many of the photos. It was odd to see Leroy so clean cut and so...normal and suburban. He looked like such a mundane, normal father in the pictures where his son was young. Other than his rose tattoos and a strange, bulky ring he wore in all the photos, he looked like a normal, lawnmower-pushing, khaki-wearing dad. In those photos, there was a light in his eyes she'd never seen before. As Danny grow in the photos, they looked less like father and son and more like brothers. Seeing the happiness in his eyes—absent in all the later photos—hurt her to look at. She turned the page, hoping to find a new decade of photos.
The first picture on the next page showed Leroy sitting in a leather booth with none other than the Beatles. Her jaw dropped open as she pulled the album up closer to get a better look. There were several photos of them together. He had photos alongside them as clean-cut kids from Liverpool and long-haired hippies with joints tucked between their fingers. She couldn't believe that bastard hadn't told her he'd met the Beatles—not when he knew they'd been her favorite band since she was a kid. She was so going to hassle him about this.
The stairs creaked as Leroy shuffled downstairs. Charlotte looked over her shoulder, her stomach making a weird flipping motion at the sight of his unkempt bed head and the seductive way his hips swung when he walked. He grabbed a cup of coffee from the kitchen and slumped onto the couch beside her, grimacing and lighting a cigarette.
"What're you looking at?"
She tilted the photo album toward him. "I can't believe you knew the Beatles."
He sucked on his cigarette and said, "Yeah, we used to hang out and play together."
Charlotte tucked one leg up and under her and shifted to look at Leroy. "That is so freaking cool." Leroy nodded, distracted by his cigarette. "You're a history major's dream. You've been around for everything. God you're old."
He rolled his eyes. "I'm not that old."
"You're right. I'm sorry. One hundred and thirty-something is the new twenty. My bad."
"Laugh all you want, but I'm the youngest Grim around. You should see some of the old coots making camp in the European Alliance. The last time some of them were alive, the plague was killing their friends."
"Damn that's so cool."
Leroy rolled his eyes at her again. "Be more of a nerd."
"What is the European Alliance?"
"It's one of the fun little cliques other Grims like to make."
"Are there are a lot of...Grim cliques?"
"Just the three...but it's three too many if you ask me."
"I'm guessing you've met them then."
A scowl came over his face. "Wish I hadn't, but yeah."
"I'm sensing some resentment there."
Rolling his eyes, he pushed himself off the couch and moved to the piano in the corner. He fingered the keys, playing absent-mindedly as he answered, "Let's just say I don't get along with any of those stuffy old bastards. They all think I'm trash and an affront to the 'Great Grim Tradition' or some shit like that."
Charlotte wanted to ask him a few more questions to unpack that statement, but she saw the way he hung his head, his fingers tumbling over the ivory keys. If he didn't want to elaborate about the other Grims, she wasn't going to press him about it.
The next group of photos were from the 1920s, and Charlotte was a little surprised to find Leroy wearing the bulky ring in those photos too. The large ring dwarfed his hand with the carved lions on the side and the dark jewel on top. She flipped back to the first pages of the album and inspected the photos of Leroy in the eighties and nineties. The ring was nowhere in sight. "Hey, Leroy, can I ask you something?"
"Sure."
"What's with this big ugly ring?"
"It belonged to my father."
"Oh. Is it a family heirloom or something?"
He shrugged. "I don't know. I never met him. My mom gave it to me when I was a kid. It was the only thing I had of his—no name, no photo. Just that ugly ring."
"It's in like, thirty years' worth of photos and then it's just...gone."
"Yeah, well, it got lost." She wanted to ask how an heirloom like that—a ring he'd apparently worn every day for at least thirty years—could just...get lost. His jaw was clenched and thinking about it seemed to make him tense. Leaving it alone seemed like the kinder thing to do.
"Oh. I'm sorry."
He just shrugged. She looked back down at the photo album, continuing to flip through the pages. A few pages later, there was another picture of Marilyn Monroe, her eyes glittering at the camera. Leroy hovered in the background, smoking a cigarette as he looked at her with a concerned expression instead of at the camera. She turned to look over at Leroy's hunched figure at the piano bench, wondering if she could bear to bring up the question she couldn't get out of her head.
He took a drag off his cigarette, exhaling a large cloud of smoke as he turned around to look at her, as though he'd sensed her gaze on him. "Well," he asked, raising an eyebrow at her, "what's with the look?"
"You said yesterday that you loved her. Marilyn, I mean. Was she...was she the one? She's why you don't date, right?"
He made a face and turned back around to face the piano with a sigh. "Why is it always about 'ones' with you?"
Instead of responding to him, she waited to see if he'd explain what he meant.
Still playing a soft melody on the piano, he said, "Did I ever tell you that I had daughter?"
"No, you didn't," she whispered, unsure why this was how he'd chosen to avoid answering her question. He was never forthcoming about his life; Marilyn must have done a number on him for him to try distracting her with even more personal information.
"I didn't even know I had a daughter until she died—the twenties were a wild time for me. Just by coincidence, I'd gotten to know her a little over the course of her life, every time she had a close call with death."
He stopped talking, playing the piano like he needed it to think of how to voice what he needed to say.
"But I didn't get to raise her—and it's one of the greatest regrets of my life. I gave her brother everything he needed or wanted. He grew up knowing what it meant to be loved unconditionally, to know that he would always have a soft place to land if he needed it. And every day I wonder if knowing that would have saved her.
"I'm not saying she didn't do well for herself—she was a smart girl and she wedged her way into notoriety. But people remember her the way they wanted her to be—not as she actually was. In life they dragged her name through the mud; mistreated her and pretended it was in her own best interest.
"All she ever wanted was to have a family and to be loved for who she was—not what someone else wanted her to be. I don't pretend to think that she'd be without problems if I'd raised her, but I can't help wondering if I'd kept her safe... maybe she wouldn't have..."
He trailed off, focusing on the piano. After several moments of silence, he added in a whisper so low she almost couldn't hear him, "Maybe then she wouldn't have killed herself."
Charlotte hurried to her feet and sat down next to him on the piano bench and wrapped her arms around his middle. He looked up from the keys, a few silent tears falling down from his blue eyes, his eyelids bright red.
"That was the day that I swore that I'd never have another kid to let down. And I got a tattoo of her signature on my side as a reminder that I have to be more careful than most—no one else needs to be cursed with my DNA."
"Oh," she murmured when she realized what he'd been trying to tell her. The Marilyn tattoo, the pride in his eyes during the movie, his love for her. It made sense, now, and her heart broke for him. She had suspected that his celibacy had been due to a heartbreak, but she'd never expected that it'd been the heartbreak of losing a child—or two. The broken look in his eyes as though he'd been reliving it as he told her, ripped through her heart and made it difficult to breathe.
They sat in deafening silence. She stayed quiet as he took in a ragged breath, tightening her arms around him and pressing her cheek to his, sensing that he was working up the energy to say something.
"Sometimes I go to the cemetery late at night after the tourists are gone and sit on the concrete in front of the mausoleum where she's buried, shape shifting to look like her. Hoping that wherever her soul is, she'd be able to feel the cold stone under her bare feet and the moonlight on her face. And I talk to her, telling her about my life just to hear her voice lilting in the night. And then I pray that she knows that I'm thinking of her. That I'm so sorry."
As another tear fell down from his eyes, she felt it roll down her own cheek and he turned and rested his face against her shoulder. Her skin tingled and felt hot and where it had touched his and she felt a blush creep out over her face. She cleared her throat and nudged him so that he'd look up. When he did, his eyes still red and bleary, she said with a false brightness in her voice, "Play me something."
He breathed a sigh of relief at the distraction. His fingers retook the keys and he started to play "Let It Be," her favorite. The first few notes rang out like church bells through the empty house. His smooth voice started out still wobbly from emotion, "When I find myself in times of trouble..."
Charlotte tightened her grip around him and joined in, "Mother Mary comes to me..."
She dragged her eyes up from the keys to meet his as they sang. Their voices merged together well in harmony—neither out of tune or overpowering the other. Charlotte relished the feeling of forgetting everything to sink into the peaceful moment with him—smiling as they reached the high notes together. She moved even closer to him on the bench so that her whole side was touching his, their faces only a few inches apart as they serenaded each other.
The final chords rang out and their voices fell silent. Charlotte hadn't wanted the song to end. Neither spoke. She sat, looking into his eyes, not wanting to break away.
Leroy inched his face closer to hers so that only a few centimeters separated them. Charlotte's breathing quickened, and her heart thudded in her chest and she wasn't sure in the slightest how she felt. Nevertheless, she leaned in so that only a hairsbreadth was between their lips; she could feel the heat of his lips close to hers, but they both remained still. They paused close there for over a minute, eyes closed, both breathing heavily.
He pressed his forehead to hers and opened his eyes. She looked into them, a tense current running through her body as she held herself back. What she wanted to do was pull him into a breathless kiss to satisfy her own curiosity. But how could she do that knowing all the reasons he was so careful to avoid romance?
As though he'd understood the dangerous look in her eyes, Leroy hurried to stand up from the piano bench. His foot caught the corner in his haste and he tripped as he tried to get up to his feet. Charlotte sighed, unsure of whether of relief or disappointment.