WIP Wednesday

I'm in the climax of my current WIP, Moon-Touched, and I'm so eager to get it done so I can clean it up and submit it. Not much longer before it's due!

Since I introduced Andre last week, I figure Thomas deserves a chance now...

*****

Thomas Durling’s arrival made him wonder if his last option had just been taken away from him.

He’d seen pictures but they were all a decade old, evidence of more youthful times. The image he’d learned was a tall, rangy young man, dark hair a little too long, blue eyes laughing as much as his ready smile. Not a single picture where Thomas wasn’t smiling. Even the candids had dancing eyes, a small quirk of lips, like he responded to some inner joy when the outside world was less bleak.

That wasn’t the man who confronted him in the back yard. Thomas Durling in the flesh was bulkier than his photos suggested, arms finely muscled in the stiffly ironed T-shirt, thighs straining against the new denim of his jeans. The hair was shot through with gray, shorn almost militaristically short. The same gray stippled the trimmed moustache and goatee he wore, but none of the facial hair hid the laugh lines bracketing his wide mouth, or the tiny lines at the edge of his cheekbones where endless smiles had forever marked his skin.

But something had happened in the years since he’d left Mellowbush to steal away his joy. Or perhaps, leaving had done it. Because the distrustful, angry man who questioned his motives was not the one he’d expected to arrive.

The smile at the end had startled him. He’d gone off as Thomas had suggested, but the memory of the deep dimple, an echo from the fading photographs Amy pulled out almost every day, had slowed his exit. He couldn’t decide which was the real Thomas. Both? Neither? Sometimes the mask a person chose became permanent.

He certainly understood about that.