Hard Irish by Jennifer Saints

nine at night.  By the time dark hits, you’ll be fine.  You promised me that you’d follow my directions now.”  He did not look happy, but the lines of pain etching his face told him she was dead on.  “Macho only goes so far before it crosses over into stupid.  You’ve a fractured leg and thirty stitches keeping your calf together.”
    Jared rolled his eyes.  “Hairline fracture.  I’ve had worse.”
    She held out the pills.  “You promised.”
    “Fine.  I’ll take the pills under one condition.  You give me your word that you’ll stay inside until I am firing on all cylinders.  No roof top meditation.  No pool.  No gardening.  Read a book.  Watch TV.  Bake cookies.  Whatever.  Just stay inside. Okay?  I guess it wasn’t so out of line for Jesse to stick his nose into the situation and demand I check in.”
    “I thought your big brother being all big-brotherly was...incredibly cool.  You can tell how much you all care about each other.  Being an only child, I always wanted to have a brother or sister.  Wished for it every day up until...well for a long time.” 
    “Guess I don’t appreciate what I have.  My brothers are all blue-nosed mules.  You avoided the promise.”
    “I promise I’ll stay inside.”  He took the pills from her.  She packed ice around his leg, too aware of his scorching gaze burning her senseless.  The bar incident, the planter thing, and taking him to the doctor had plowed through barriers she’d had up since her divorce.  Barriers that Dessie’s outrageous-get-him-bedroom-bound comments and her pocket Kama Sutra had weakened.
    Sex aside.  There was an intimacy involved in taking care of Jared and even more so in the fierce protectiveness he had of her.  It was more intimate than she’d been with any man in a long time.  It seduced that part of her that had kept a man at arm’s length.  Did that mean she was weak, or did that mean that Jared was right guy material?
    She went back to the kitchen to make more ice packs, wondering where this unexpected twist in life was going to lead.  Well, hell, she knew where it was going unless she derailed it.  To the bedroom—and moving like a runaway freight train at that.
    Thank you Ms. Desmond Langford.
    When Rocky returned to Jared, he’d shut his eyes and she held off adding any more ice.  He needed some rest and she took the opportunity to grab her mother’s books off the shelf.  Before reading, she realized that she should have heard from Uncle Pat by now.  She stepped into the other room and called his cell.  Getting voice mail, she left a message for him to call her.  That she could either come get her mother’s box from him at his house or that he could drop it by hers.  Her second call to the nursing home for the day, informed her that there’d been no developments in her father’s condition and he’d made no more attempts to talk.  After calling her father’s attorney again, and getting the same out-of-town message, she left her number and then she curled up on the other end of the couch and read.
    Rocky didn’t know if she was just older, or if she’d been through more of the pain that life dished out than before, or if having lost her mother made everything different, but Rocky found herself more drawn into her mother’s words than ever.
    One poem, titled “Unforgiven” stood out, prompting her to read it several times.  It wasn’t just because the title of it was so close to Unforgivable , the word her father had spoken yesterday, but the power and the rawness of the poem gripped her, along with the fact that her mother had at least felt unforgiven for a sin.  What?
    I know the depths of sin.
    The wretchedness of the depraved.
    I know the darkness within
    I’ll never escape it, even in the grave.
    Though I know it is wrong
    And I’ll pay with my soul
    I could not turn away from
    The love that made me whole.
    So I stole every moment of time
    And lived in the shadows
    To