16. Rowe
ROWE
The gravel crunches under our boots, and I keep my hands in my pockets so I don't reach for her.
“Same time tomorrow?” Wren asks at her car door. Her lips are still swollen. Every time I look at them, my brain short-circuits.
“Peanut will be devastated if you don't show,” I say.
She narrows her eyes. “Just Peanut?”
I smirk. “Pip's grown attached too.”
Wren narrows her eyes at me, fighting a smile and losing.
Then she opens the door, tosses her kit onto the passenger seat, and pauses with one hand on the frame.
She presses two fingers to her mouth again, but this time she pulls them away and blows across her fingertips.
Sends it to me on the air with eyes sparkling.
I stand in the lot long after her taillights turn onto the county road, and I catch myself rubbing my knuckles over my sternum like I can work loose whatever's lodged behind it.
It's just a drive into town. Ten minutes. She'll be back tomorrow afternoon.
And in eleven days, the trucks roll, and there's no tomorrow afternoon after that.
The thought lands like a fist. I picture the convoy pulling out, Thistlewood shrinking in the side mirror, her standing in this same gravel getting smaller and smaller, and my chest cramps so hard I have to breathe through it.
Would she come with me?
The question is insane. She has a license in this state.
An apartment with a sentient laundry chair.
A friend named Paige and a career and a whole life, and I'm a man who lives in four hundred square feet, who plans murders in a meeting trailer that smells of burnt coffee, who can't hold her hand.
What do I say? Leave everything. Come sleep three feet from a man you can never touch.
The lion's friendly, the schedule's brutal, and sometimes we bury people.
She deserves someone whole. Someone who can kiss her goodnight instead of standing there like a fence post while she blows kisses across five feet of air.
I rub my sternum again and go find my animals.
Logan's already at the haystack when I get there, sleeves shoved up, pitchfork in hand, splitting a bale for Cleopatra like he does most afternoons whether I ask or not. He hears me coming and doesn't look up.
“Rome's water was low. Topped it off.” He heaves a flake over the paddock rail. Cleopatra ambles toward it, Domino trailing her. “Brutus is sulking again.”
“Brutus is always sulking.”
“This is advanced sulking. He's facing the corner.”
I check the bear. He is, in fact, facing the corner, one round ear swiveled toward us to make sure we notice. I let him have his theater and start on Caesar's evening feed, weighing the meat, and for a while we work in silence.
Logan lasts about ten minutes.
“You sleep okay? After yesterday?”
“Fine.”
“No spiral.”
“No spiral,” I echo.
“Huh.” He forks another flake. “Usually anything to do with him puts you on the ceiling for a week.”
“Not this time.”
“Because of the doc.”
I don't answer. He takes that as confirmation, which it is.
“So how's that functioning?” He plants the pitchfork in the dirt and leans on it, watching me portion Caesar's meat. “You and her. Mechanically speaking.”
“Logan.” It’s a warning.
“I'm not being a pervert. Okay, I'm being twenty percent a pervert. Eighty percent your brother wanting to know if you're okay.” He tips his head. “Cole told me about the board.”
“Cole should learn to shut his mouth.”
“Cole will learn to shut his mouth when the sun burns out. Point is—” He gestures at me with a fire-scarred hand. “It's working. Whatever you've built with her. You're sleeping. You’ve hardly touched your arms in three days. You laughed at breakfast. Jonah nearly choked.”
“Your point.”
“My point is I'm happy for you, and I don't understand it.” He says it easily, no judgment behind it, just Logan thinking out loud like he always does, no filter between his skull and his mouth.
“Twenty years, we throw women at you, you sit in the dark corner like a gargoyle.
This one shows up and inside a week you're building sex furniture.
What's she doing different? Is it a technique thing, or—I mean, how does she get around it? The touch thing. What's the trick?”
“There's no trick.”
“There's gotta be something. Because if there's a workaround, brother, that's huge, that's—maybe it's not as deep as we thought, maybe after Harlan's dealt with you could—”
I clench my teeth. “There's no workaround, Logan.”
“I'm just saying, if she's found a crack in it—”
“It's a miracle I function at all,” I snap. Logan's mouth stops moving.
The afternoon goes very still. Cleopatra lifts her head from the hay.
“Rowe—”
“He raped me.” The word is out. Twenty years I've talked around it, called it what he did and the fixation and my problem, and now it's out in the air between us, ugly and exact.
“When I was a child, Logan. Before I understood what it was.
That's what he does and there's no workaround for it, there's no crack in it, there's just a woman who's patient enough to care for the rubble—”
“Rowe, stop, I didn't—”
“You want to know what's different? Nothing's different.
My skin still screams. I still can't kiss her goodnight.
I stood in that parking lot ten minutes ago and she blew a kiss across five feet of air because that's all I've got, that's the whole inventory—” My breath is coming ragged now, and I can't stop, the pressure of two decades finding the fault line and splitting it wide.
“He made me do it with the other kids. Do you remember that?
The boys. The girls. Lined us up in that room off the chapel and made us—while he watched.
While his Prophet friends watched, sitting in chairs like it was a recital, jerking off, and afterward he'd tell me I did well. He'd pat my head like a dog.”
Logan looks like he’s going to puke. I want to puke too.
“And the cutting.” I yank my sleeve up, shove my forearm into the space between us, the raised lines shining in the afternoon sun.
“You think these were punishment? Punishment I could've survived.
He liked it. He'd recite while he worked, whatever verse he'd chosen for the evening, slow, like a lullaby, and when he finished a line he'd—” My throat closes.
I force the words out. “He'd finish. On the wounds.
On me. His version of salting the cut, he called it sealing the lesson in, and then he'd clean me up so gently, Logan, so gently, like he was the one saving me from what had just happened, and that's why I can't be touched. Because gentle is what comes after the horror.”
The words stop.
The paddock is silent except for Cleopatra chewing and the wind moving through the Big Top's canvas across the lot.
Logan is crying.
I've seen my twin bleed. I've seen him burned, broken, stitched up on a folding table with a bottle of whiskey for anesthetic. I have not seen him cry since Zach died in his arms with the compound burning behind us.
He swipes at his face with the heel of his hand, furious at the tears, knocking them off his jaw like they've personally offended him.
“I knew it was bad.” His voice comes out mangled.
“I knew—we all knew it was bad, but I never—you never said—” He swipes again.
It's not working. They keep coming. “I was right there, Rowe.
A bunk over. I heard them come get you and I'd lie there and count until you came back, and I told myself if I didn't look, if I didn't know exactly, then—” A sound tears out of him, half rage, half grief.
“I should've burned it down sooner. I should've burned it down years sooner.
I should've put a pitchfork through his throat when I was ten and let them do whatever they wanted to me for it.
I'm sorry. God, I'm so—I'm your twin. I was supposed to—”
“Logan.”
“—supposed to protect you, that's the whole job, that's the only job—”
“Logan.” I step toward him. “You were a child. They'd have killed you. And then I'd have had nothing.”
“I'm sorry,” he says again, wrecked, scrubbing at his eyes. “I'm sorry I pushed just now. I run my stupid mouth, I always run my stupid mouth—”
I shake my head. “I shouldn't have snapped at you.”
“You should snap at me. Somebody should snap at me daily. It should be on the schedule.”
A rough sound comes out of me that's almost a laugh, and then I do the thing before my body can call a vote on it.
I hug him.
My arms go around my brother and pull him in, chest to chest, his tears wet against my collar, and my skin lights up with the old alarm—gentle is what comes after—and I hold on anyway. Because it's Logan. Because he counted in the dark for me. Because some things are worth the scream in my head.
Logan goes rigid. His mouth falls open against my shoulder, and his arms hover in the air behind me like he's afraid to close the circuit.
Then, carefully, the way I hold Peanut, he does.
We stand there in the hay dust. Cleopatra watches us. Brutus has turned around in his corner, sulk abandoned, small dark eyes fixed on the two of us like we're the strangest act he's ever seen.
Logan pulls back first, holding me by the shoulders at arm's length, studying my face. His eyes are red-rimmed, and his grin is coming back, but it's soft at the edges, softer than I've seen it since we were boys.
“You hugged me.”
“Don't make it a thing,” I mutter.
“It's a thing. It's the biggest thing that's ever happened. Twenty years and you initiated—” He shakes his head slowly.
“That woman is changing you, brother. For the better.
She walked in here for a monkey with a bruised hand and she's rebuilding you from the inside out and she doesn't even know she's doing it.”
“Maybe.”
“Not maybe.” Logan squeezes my shoulders once and lets go. “There's no maybe in it. I watched you flinch away from a touch for two decades. You just hugged me, on purpose, with witnesses.” He jerks his chin at Brutus, who is still staring at us. “The bear can testify.”
Brutus huffs, right on cue.
“See? Sworn statement.”
I shake my head, but the corner of my mouth pulls up anyway.
“And whatever she doesn't fix,” he continues, “we fix in a week.” I sober up again as my twin keeps talking.
“Whatever she can't reach in you, brother…
we'll cut it out of him. Burn it out. Every verse he ever carved into you, we take back in kind, and when there's nothing left of him but the confession, you'll be standing there whole enough to hear it.”
“Logan.”
“I'm not done.” His gray eyes, twins to mine, are shining again, but these aren't the same tears.
“She gets the after. The good parts. The parts of you that are growing back.
That's hers, and I'm glad, and I'll dance at whatever deranged wedding you two invent.” He lifts the pitchfork and drives it into the bale.
“But the before is ours. And in a week, I'm going to stand in that trailer and watch you take it back, and then I'm going to help.”
The scream that lives under my skin is quiet. My hands are loose at my sides. Across the paddock, Brutus finally abandons his corner and shuffles toward the rail, deciding the show is over.
“Okay,” I say after a while.
“Okay.” Logan wipes his face one last time with his sleeve and grins at me, red-eyed and terrible and mine. “Now help me finish the hay before I end up doing all your chores for you.”