Thin Love (Thin Love, #1)(135)
“Um, I’ll be right back,” he tells Kona, shooting away from the table to approach the redhead and Kona sits back down, grinning like an idiot as he watches his son introduce himself, as he watches the boy work his magic. Inside two minutes, the girl is grinning and Kona sees Keira, peeking out of the kitchen, staring at their son. He catches her eye and shakes his head at how closely she watches the two kids.
Kona thinks she should be worried. His son is too much like him; looks the same, has the same need to prove himself, the same quick temper. But he is kind, gentle and smiles easy, just like Luka. Kona thinks, as Ransom leads the girl to the table, introduces her to him, that Keira isn’t the only worried parent in the room. It is funny to him, weird that he could have this much worry, this much pride in a kid he’s just met.
Later, after the Bless Jesus chili had been consumed, Kona’s belly full with Keira’s exceptional handiwork, he watches his son joking around with his friends and Keira and Leann sitting across from them, talking low, relaxed in two cherry wood Adirondack chairs on the patio. The fire pit burns bright, sparks of flame and ash floating above the wood and the lake is slow, calm. Kona nurses another Abita, closes his eyes, loves the touch of the breeze on his face and the quiet sounds his boy makes on Keira’s guitar.
Ransom has an audience, plays a few tunes, songs Kona can’t make out before he begins a strum that is familiar. “Dark End of the Street.” When Ransom begins the intro, Kona moves his head, glances at Keira to meet her stare. Her smile is thin, loose, and he wonders if she remembers that morning she played the song on the piano. It was the day he’d discovered the hell Keira had lived with in this house.
The longer he stares at her, the clearer the memory becomes and he blinks, a flash of sensation returning to spark; the perfect recall of the rest of that morning, how they forgot the French toast cooling on their plates; how he’d taken her on the counters, then again in her mother’s bathroom. He hadn’t attempted a visit to the kitchen the entire day for fear that the memory would be too sharp, the sensation too biting.
“Mom, come on, sing for us.” Ransom’s voice carries across the low chatter Leann and Keira make and at his request, she waves him off, but like Kona, his son is stubborn. “Don’t make me pull the birthday card.”
Kona sits up straight, curious, wondering why he hadn’t thought to ask the boy about his birthday. They’d talked about football and his classes and the things the thought he might want to do after college, but they’d glossed over details about his birth and his childhood in Nashville. Kona had thought that might be a conversation for a second or third visit.
“That’s not for another two months,” Keira says, her voice soft, lazy. “Too soon.”
Ransom sighs and then his cousin and their friends begin to nag Keira, offer exaggerated eye bats and pouts.
“Come on, Keira,” Leann says, brushing her foot against Keira’s knee. “Sing something so they’ll shut up.”
Kona watches Keira begrudgingly get up, as she shoves Tristan out of his spot next to Ransom.
“One song,” she tells her boy. “And not that one.” A quick glance at Kona and then Keira turns toward Ransom.
“Play Dylan.”
Ransom’s smile grows and he clears his throat before his fingers work over the warm sound of the guitar. Keira’s voice is stronger, deeper than the last time Kona heard it and he loves how she’s stopped singing with her eyes downcast. He remembers her with that guitar, playing “Crazy Love” like it was a letter to him; her great, quiet display of how much she loved him. She’d kept her gaze just below his eyes, only managing to look up at him once or twice as she sang.
Kona had thought it was still beautiful and in that moment, all those years ago in the bedroom above them, he’d fallen harder, deeper in love with her.
Now Keira’s alto rolls across the patio, straight into his chest like a warm wave. She is a pro now with a presence she hadn’t had at eighteen and Kona can’t make his eyes blink or pull his attention away from her face, from the sultry magic of her voice.
He thinks he’s never seen anything more beautiful or heard anything more poetic and then Keira reaches the chorus, sings, I’ve known it from the moment we met, and Ransom sings beneath her, voice lower, crisper, a perfect complement to his mother’s whiskey rasp.
It’s that small length of time and melody with his son’s voice echoing Keira’s that Kona decides he couldn’t love anything more. That boy, that woman, he wants them both. He wants evenings like this. He wants every night to be like this. He wants small chats about stupid mistakes, about girls his boy likes, about football and possibilities his son’s future would bring. He wants Keira around him, holding him, filling in all the gaps of time that Kona had missed. He looks at them both and realizes that this is the family he was meant to have. This was what had been stolen from him, what he threw away without knowing it.
He wants his family.
Kona is selfish. He doesn’t care about the life they’d put on hold in Nashville. He wants to try, to fight, to start over.
The end notes vibrate and Kona feels them, lets them move across his skin and it is Ransom’s smile, the way he slings his arm across his mother’s shoulder that makes Kona smile, has his chest swelling with so much emotion that he ducks his head, rubs his face on his sleeve.