The Rescue - Nicholas Sparks [93]
She looked forward to everything they did; on a warm night toward the end of July, he took her up to Elizabeth City and they went dancing, another first in too many years. He moved her around the floor with surprising grace, waltzing and two-stepping to the drumming bass of a local country band. Women, she couldn’t help but notice, were naturally drawn to him, and occasionally one would smile at him from across the floor and Denise would feel a quick hot pang of jealousy, even though Taylor never seemed to notice. Instead his arm never left her lower back, and he looked at her that night as if she were the only person in the world. Later, while eating cheese sandwiches in bed, Taylor pulled her close as a thunderstorm raged outside the bedroom window. “This,” he confided, “is as good as it gets.”
Kyle, too, blossomed under his attention. Gaining confidence in his speech, he began to talk more frequently, though much of it didn’t make sense. He’d also stopped whispering when running more than a few words together. By late summer he’d learned to hit the ball off the tee consistently, and his ability to throw the ball had improved dramatically. Taylor set up makeshift bases in the front yard, and though he did his best to teach Kyle the rules of the game, it wasn’t something Kyle was interested in at all. He just wanted to have fun.
But as idyllic as everything seemed, there were moments in which Denise sensed an undercurrent of restlessness in Taylor she couldn’t exactly pin down. As he had during their first night together, Taylor would sometimes get that unreadable, almost distant look after they made love. He would hold her and caress her as usual, but she could sense something in him that made her vaguely uncomfortable, something dark and unknowable that made him seem older and more tired than Denise had ever felt. It scared her sometimes, although when daylight came she often berated herself for letting her imagination run away with her.
Toward the end of August Taylor left town to help fight a major fire in the Croatan forest for three days, a dangerous situation made more deadly by the searing August heat. Denise found it difficult to sleep while he was gone. Worrying about him, she called Judy and they spent an hour talking on the phone. Denise followed the coverage of the fire in the newspaper and on television, searching in vain for any glimpse of Taylor. When Taylor finally returned to Edenton, he drove straight to her house. With Ray’s permission, she took the evening off, but Taylor was exhausted and fell asleep on the couch soon after the sun had gone down. She covered him with a blanket, thinking he’d sleep until the morning, but in the middle of the night he crept into her room. Again, he had the shakes, but this time they didn’t stop for hours. Taylor refused to talk about what had happened, and Denise held him in her arms, concerned, until he was finally able to nod off again. Even in his sleep his demons gave him no relief. Twisting and turning, he called out in his sleep, his words incomprehensible, except for the fear she heard in them.
The next morning, sheepish, he apologized. But he offered nothing by way of explanation. He didn’t have to. Somehow she knew it wasn’t simply memories of the fire that were eating him up; it was something else, naked and dark, bubbling to the surface.
Her mother had once told her that there were men who kept secrets bottled up inside and that it spelled trouble for the women who loved them. Denise instinctively knew the truth of her mother’s statement, yet it was hard to reconcile her words with the love she felt for Taylor McAden. She loved the way he smelled; she loved the rough