Soft flannel hank, p.1
Soft Flannel Hank, page 1
SOFT FLANNEL HANK
ELEMENTS OF PINING
BOOK 1
ELIZA MACARTHUR
Copyright © 2023 by Eliza MacArthur
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, business, events and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Cover image edited by Lara Hodo.
Typography by Eliza MacArthur.
Created with Vellum
For the MacCoven and for Sarah.
I couldn’t love you more if I tried.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CONTENT WARNINGS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Epilogue and more
Want to read what happens to Jory and Callum?
Also by Eliza MacArthur
Acknowledgments
About the Author
CONTENT WARNINGS
Hello, dearest reader. Before you dive in to Soft Flannel Hank, I wanted to give those of you who appreciate them a few content points to be aware of. Things you will find within:
Mention of law enforcement and police brutality (Hank has left his job in law enforcement before the start of the book.)
Memory of cancer/illness/death of a parent
Vampires/vampirism/blood
Brief mention of suicidal ideation
Therapy
Depression, anxiety, and panic attacks
Firearms (mentioned but never deployed)
Concern about stalking
Memory of childbirth
Divorce
Discussion of previous assault, which occurs before the book’s beginning and not to any on-page characters.
Irresponsible alcohol consumption
This book also contains explicit sexual content.
I tried to take great care to treat these subjects with as much sensitivity and care as possible. That said, please take care, dear reader.
1
“Why don’t you tell me about yourself, Hank?”
“Well, I’m here because I can’t sleep anymore. Not since I left the force. Not since—” He cleared his throat, his voice feeling crackly and brittle from days of disuse. How long since he’d had dinner with Magda? “I don’t sleep. I don’t leave my house much. I—”
“Hank?” a soft voice interrupted. “I’m sorry to interrupt you, but I didn’t ask you why you’re here. I asked you to tell me about yourself.”
“I thought you’d need to know about all that so you know how to fix me.”
Her eyes crinkled at the corners as she gave him the same pursed smile that his mother used to wear before she said, “Oh, Hank, honey, you’re just such a mess.” And he had been. Always covered in mud or jam or snow or blood. A rough-and-tumble child wandering around the woods of the Pacific Northwest with his friends, Buck and Jamie.
“I just want you to fix me,” he mumbled to the ceiling, gripping the arms of the chair in his hands. He felt his knuckles crack, felt the rasp of his calluses against the linen upholstery. Was it linen? Is this what linen felt like? He didn’t know.
His ex-wife, Marnie, had had a linen sundress. He tried to remember the texture, but he couldn’t conjure it, couldn’t remember how the linen felt as he gathered big palmfuls, rucking it up her body to grip her backside as he pulled her against him. All he remembered was the feel of his calloused hands against her smooth skin, how she complained about them.
Feeling the calluses scrape against the armrests again made his stomach lurch and he moved his hands to his knees, the worn denim sliding effortlessly under his palms. Easy. Soft. Uncomplicated.
“Hank,” the voice broke through again. Hank’s breath sawed out of him, making him aware that he’d actually been holding it in the first place. He looked up, seeing a head tilted at him.
Magda had been pushing him to go to therapy for months and, as a favor to her, he’d finally relented. It certainly couldn’t hurt. Nadja Stonebreaker was the licensed clinical social worker in town who offered counseling at a pay-what-you-can rate. And since his abrupt departure from the World’s End Police Department six months prior, what he could pay was not much.
What an ironic place to live. The legend went that the explorer who first colonized the area that became the town thought he’d reached the end of the very world itself. Sometimes it felt like that to Hank.
Nadja sat in a chair that looked a lot like his and wore blue jeans and a cream fisherman sweater that threatened to swallow her whole. When he’d seen people in therapy on TV, there was always a couch where a person reclined flat and poured their guts out for a tweedy therapist with tortoiseshell glasses and a legal pad who would nod and ask the occasional question about how a thing made them feel. The thought of sitting through that gave him hives, but he’d made the call anyway. What did he have to lose? He certainly didn’t want to keep going on the way he had been and if Magda thought therapy would help, Hank was willing to try it. He was willing to try just about anything.
He was relieved to find that Nadja’s office was nothing like those stuffy, close rooms he’d pictured. Floor-to-ceiling windows spanned one wall, with the dense, feathery branches of evergreens trailing through the October rain glazing the windows. A worn oak coffee table separated him from her, the varnish gone in several places, on which sat his untouched white paper cup of black coffee and Nadja’s travel mug, which said “I’m a therapist, not a magician!” in bright pink letters.
She wanted him to tell her about himself. Where to start? How he’d grown up wild in the woods? That he’d taken care of his parents when their bodies decided to start calling it quits far too soon? That he fell in love with a girl who was only passing through and unintentionally trapped her with a marriage proposal and a baby? That he’d let her leave and take their daughter without a fight because he was scared? That he was a failed father? That his daughter came home for one year, fell in love, fell out of love, and left him with as much ease and speed as her mother had seventeen years prior?
That he had only ever wanted to help people and keep them safe? That he left the police force because he just couldn’t do it anymore? He couldn’t be the enforcer of rules that didn’t look the same for everybody? Couldn’t tell one more person there was nothing he could do to help them because of a broken system?
That he hadn’t slept in six months, since a raid that had gone wrong in a town not so different from his own, a mere two hours away? Since that innocent boy had been shot and killed by an officer in his own home? Since the department tried to sweep it under the rug when the governor pressed? Since he’d quit his job without notice, turned over his weapon and equipment to his chief without a word because he couldn’t stand to be in the same building with his colleagues talking about it the way they had? Couldn’t stand to be a part of any of it anymore?
Or should he tell her that he was living off of savings because he couldn’t bring himself to leave his house for more than the essentials? That he felt like he’d been hollowed out and stuffed with old rags, an approximation of the man he used to be?
“Hank,” she said again gently, “Can you take three deep breaths with me?”
Hank vaguely registered Nadja’s presence, saw her set her floral notebook and Bic pen down on the coffee table, watched from a mile away as she wound around the coffee table and knelt on the floor in front of him. He felt her press the paper cup of coffee into his hands, molding his fingers around the sides with her own, squeezing them gently. He felt the warm cup on his palms, her cold fingers against the back of his hands.
“Three deep breaths, Hank. Let’s take them together.”
Somehow, he did take them.
And somehow he murmured answers when she asked him to name five things he could see. Her red scrunchie. The coffee table. The trees outside. The colorful rug. His boots.
Four things he could feel with his body. The warm cup in his hands. The heat from the register blowing on the side of his face. The sock that had slid down too far in his boot and scrunched under his heel. The neck of his T-shirt that suddenly felt impossibly tight.
Three things he could hear. Rain on the roof. The hum of a humidifier in the corner of the room. His heartbeat in his ears.
Two things he could smell. The vanilla candle, extinguished before his arrival, but still scenting the air. Nadja’s shampoo, which smelled like mint and the tea tree oil his ex-wife had used on blemishes.
One thing he could taste. What did he taste? He tasted nothing. He hadn’t tasted anything in months.
“Hank,” Nadja said, gently pushing on his hand. “What do you taste?
He looked down to his hand holding the paper cup. Lifted it to his lips. And drank.
“Coffee. I taste coffee,” he said, his eyes wide with disbelief.
Esther MacLaren had been in World’s End for two weeks. The motel where she was staying left much to be desired in a variety of areas, chief of which was the complete and total lack of any meaningful water pressure, which meant that her thick, curly hair never got fully wet and as such could never get fully clean.
The mini fridge had enough room for a half gallon of milk, some yogurt, a six pack of beer, and a bag of grapes for which she’d paid entirely too much and had yet to remember to eat.
It had rained every day since her arrival. Were it not fifty degrees outside, Esther might have been tempted to try to use all that driving rain to do what the shower could not and clarify her scalp. But it was fifty degrees, and so Esther found herself curled up in a booth in the back of the diner, cradling a chipped cup of coffee in her hands, her messy hair piled on top of her head in a bun and her sweatshirt hood pulled up over it.
It was a steady night at the diner. After two weeks of dinners there, Esther could tell. Her booth was tucked away on the opposite side of the restaurant from the restrooms. Unnoticed, she watched.
Four men from the mill sat at a table, their coveralls dusty and dark, two with toothpicks gripped between their teeth. Two women laughed as one cut up chicken tenders for a small child and the other doled out little pieces of french fry to a baby in a highchair. An elderly couple sat side by side in a booth, eating in silence, their shoulders touching. He ate with his right hand, she with her left, and the press of their bodies in the middle was comfortable. Familiar. It made Esther smile to see them, their movements synchronized in the way of people who have spent decades together, their auras perfectly matched in color and brightness. She wondered if they were holding hands under the table.
Behind the couple, a man sat alone. He clutched his coffee cup with both hands, leaning onto the table, his head hanging. He wore a green flannel jacket over a gray waffle-knit shirt. His dark hair clearly hadn’t been cut in a while and hung shaggy over his forehead and ears, brushing the collar of his shirt. An untrimmed beard brushed his broad chest. The flannel jacket strained over his shoulders. He lifted his head to look out the window at the dark parking lot, and she saw the circles under his eyes, so deep that they almost looked like bruises.
The day before, Esther had been in Charles Mill to buy new watercolor paints and paper. The sun was out—or what passed for the sun being out on the Olympic Peninsula—and so she decided to walk from the craft store to the coffee shop down the block. She had been walking past a gallery sandwiched in between a bistro and a lawyer’s office when her intuition crackled. Curious, she opened the door and saw along the back wall a collection of large black-and-white photographs of shipwrecks. She had stood for a long time in front of the display, studying the wooden hulls, half destroyed by an angry sea, but still somehow holding most of their shape even if they’d lost their trappings. Their decking. Their paint. Their crew.
Now as she watched the man scratch a fingernail against the side of the cup, his shoulders hunched and heavy, Esther remembered the shipwrecks. Like the photos, he was beautiful in a jagged, frayed sort of way. And she could have stood in front of him for a long time studying the heavy pulse of his Adam’s apple as he swallowed, the thick fingers wrapped around his mug. She felt her tarot deck, always in her backpack, calling to her. She wanted to read him, to learn what it was that had left him so very weary.
Which was ridiculous, of course, but as she sat in the shadowy corner of the warm diner, the fluorescent lights casting everything before her in a cheery brightness, the smell of fry grease and burgers and pie and industrial cleaner mingling together, she wanted it all the same.
He looked away from the window, dropping his chin to stare into his coffee again. Not drinking. Just staring. As if the answers to every single problem he had could be found at the bottom of the mug. There was a brokenness, a despair that hung thick around him, clouding his aura.
She put her own cup down and leaned over the table to see him better. She wanted to map the lines that wreathed his eyes, count the gray threads that peppered across the dark sea of his hair. Surely there was divination to be had there, too.
She felt her Doc Martens against the tile floor, felt her body’s energy course unbidden through her feet, felt it snaking between table legs and chairs, around legs and bags and wrappers of sugar packets, dropped and forgotten, until it disappeared under the table where he sat.
His head shot up and his eye locked on hers, the distance between them telescoping down to nothing, the noise of the diner softening to a dull hum. He pinched his eyebrows together, his forehead furrowed, his mouth open, and for the first time, she could see that his eyes were almost as dark as his hair, a deep brown the color of the coffee in his cup.
Esther felt her breath catch in her chest, felt a tingling sensation in her hands and feet. She clenched her hands into fists, stuffing them into the front pocket of her hoodie. But she didn’t look away and neither did he.
The bell over the door chimed, and a tall man in a black sweatshirt walked in, pulling down the hood to reveal shiny black hair tied in a long ponytail. And just like that, the connection was broken. Those dark eyes flipped away from hers to this new man, and something that could only be described as an imitation of a smile appeared on his face. They shook hands, and the newcomer clapped a hand familiarly on the other’s shoulder before sitting across from him. Their low voices rumbled across the space, loud enough to be heard but not loud enough to be understood.
But then his eyes were back. He was listening to his friend—because they were friends, that much was obvious—but his eyes flicked back to hers frequently, his brow furrowing each time. He lifted his mug to his lips and took a long sip.
Before she had a second to consciously make the decision, she reached into her backpack and found her tarot cards. Her fingertips ached as she gripped them in her hands, the worn deck held together by a green, satin scrunchie. She shuffled them, feeling the roughened sides of the cards against the creases at her knuckles.
She didn’t feel called to draw, but the urge to have the cards in her hands was undeniable. And so she shuffled. And shuffled. And shuffled. The cards grew warm and pliable, and the diner slowly emptied out until the only people remaining in the warm, yellow light of the diner front were the shipwrecked man with the beard, his friend, Esther, and the server who was spraying cleaner on tables and wiping them down with a white towel.
Esther had stopped staring at the man some time before, but as if her body had maintained the connection, she could feel his every move. It was almost like a string tied around a rib beneath her heart was anchored around one of his own.
His friend stood. Esther heard him attempt a laugh and clap his friend on the back three times in a hug. The bell above the door chimed as the man in the black sweatshirt pulled his hood up over his head and walked out into the night.
In her periphery, she saw the bearded stranger walk toward the door. Esther’s breath caught in her throat but she kept shuffling, feeling the weight of his presence from across the room. He raised his hand to the push bar on the door, then stopped.
Her hands felt heavy, as if gravity was pulling on them with more force than the rest of her body. And all of a sudden, the atmosphere in the room changed. Like going up in an airplane or elevator too quickly, when the ears pop or your body rebels against the sensation of that abrupt interruption of equilibrium.
Esther lost all of her equilibrium as the man suddenly stood in front of her, hands fisted at his sides, his body a respectful distance from her table but close enough that she could smell the Irish Spring soap and rain and sweat and coffee that clung to him like a shadow. She met his eyes.
