Caroline
Dr. Levinson calls it "perseverative cognition."
My college roommate called it "being the most annoying person alive."
Jaden, my Mercury-in-retrograde ex, called it "suffocating," which, like, fair, but also, maybe don't leave your Hinge profile active while we're dating and I won't have to perseverate about it, Jaden.
The point is, after discovering a tattoo on Afon's ribs that is a perfect match for the symbol my dead father drew in his final letter to me, I say nothing, and that might just be the hardest thing I've ever done.
By the time evening rolls around I'm vibrating at a frequency only Wolf can hear.
He keeps looking at me. Wolf, I mean. Those big brown eyes track every step I take around the hut.
Every time I move from the bed to the stove to the bed again, his gaze follows, patient and mildly concerned, like he's a babysitter and I'm a wobbly-legged toddler getting a little bit too close to taking a tumble down a staircase.
Afon, on the other hand, seems to have bought my "nothing" wholesale.
He spends the afternoon pacing in and out of the cabin doing Lord knows what.
He obscures our tracks in the snow, then goes back out to check to be sure he did it right the first time.
He disassembles and reassembles and disassembles and reassembles the gun so many times that I start to get concerned.
But still, I say nothing. Like the Cool Girl I am, I merely use the time alone to have a silent, contained panic attack that involves pressing my face into the wool blanket and screaming without sound.
The swallow. The key. My father's letter. Afon's skin.
What does it mean?
Fuck if I know.
Dinner is beans.
I know. Shocking. The plot twist of the century.
We've ascended to the top of a mountain to escape armed drug runners, and the culinary landscape is just as bleak as the literal one.
Afon opens two cans of kidney beans, heats them in a dented pot on the cast-iron stove, and divides them onto two tin plates.
"Bon appétit," I say sarcastically.
"Shut up and eat," he replies, which is his version of the same sentiment.
We sit across from each other at the rickety table, which is so narrow that our knees touch underneath it.
The kerosene lamp throws shuddering shadows against the stone walls.
Wind screeches outside. Wolf has positioned himself equidistant between us, his chin on his paws, waiting for any accidental bean overflow that might fall his way.
I eat, but beans taste like beans no matter what, and I'm starving enough to devour every last little lentil there is.
Even that's not enough: When I'm done, I use my finger to mop up the sauce, which is not something I'd normally do in front of another human being, but we're pretty far past decorum at this juncture.
I mean, the man has carried me unconscious and held me while I ugly-cried and been literally shot in my general vicinity.
The social contract has been voided.
What happens next is anyone's guess.
Afon finishes his own plate in about four bites—big, efficient, joyless bites—and stands to wash the dishes as best as he can with the meager supplies available to us.
I watch his back. The sweater is dark enough that the bloodstain doesn't show anymore, but I know it's there, just like the tattoo, both of them proof that he will conceal anything from me if it spares him just a second of tough conversation, because he's an emotionally constipated mountain of a man with the communicative abilities of a junkyard toilet, and if he could just spend one goshdarn second contemplating what it's like to be me in this situation, then—
Oh, hell.
Screw it.
I can't do this anymore.
"Afon."
He grunts and stops scrubbing the plate for a second, though he keeps his back to me.
"The tattoo on your ribs."
His hands stop moving. Just for a beat—a half second, maybe less—before they resume rinsing. "What about it?"
"The swallow with the key. What does it mean?"
"It's a tattoo."
I give him a slow, vicious clap. "Oh, wow. Incredible. Thank you for illuminating me. Let me rephrase: what does it signify?"
"It signifies that I sat in a chair and someone put ink in my skin."
I can feel my blood pressure climbing. "Afon."
"Caroline."
"Has anyone ever told you you're an asshole?"
"Many people," he replies somberly. "Most of the ones I've met in my life, actually."
I pinch the bridge of my nose. He's trying to throw me off track, but I can't afford to get lost in the weeds here.
"Afon, my father drew that exact symbol at the bottom of the last letter he ever wrote me.
The one he left with Matvei. It's half of what brought me up this mountain in the first place. "
Afon sets the plates down. He turns around and leans against the makeshift counter—which is really just a shelf nailed to the wall—and crosses his arms over his chest. In this posture, backlit by the kerosene lamp, arms folded, jaw set, he looks exactly like what he is: a concrete wall.
"It's late," he says. "You should rest."
"You keep doing this!" I shove back from the table angrily.
The chair scrapes against the stone floor with a sound that makes Wolf's ears twitch.
"You keep opening a door halfway and then slamming it in my face.
Every time I get close to something real, you shut down.
And I have been patient. I have been so patient that my therapist would weep with pride.
But I can't—I physically cannot—pretend for one more second that there aren't things you're hiding from me. "
Afon's expression doesn't change. His arms stay crossed. "The symbol is not something I can explain in a sentence," he says.
"Then use two sentences!" I cry out. "Use ten! Use a hundred! We're in a cardboard freaking box on the side of a mountain and there is literally nowhere for you to go!"
Almost automatically, his eyes flick to the door, as if he's testing my assertion. Like, Well, maybe I could make it if I just went out right now…
But then he sighs and looks back at me. I guess even Afon Satyrin has his limits when it comes to freezing to death as an avoidance tactic.
"I told you," he says, "when the time is right, I'll tell you everything. But there's an order to it, and this isn't—"
"Reasons, reasons, reasons," I snap. "You and your fucking reasons are going to be the death of me.
There's always a reason it's not the right time.
Tomorrow, you'll have a new reason, and the day after that, guess what?
Another one! A new Reason growing on the Reason tree!
You will always find a reason, Afon, because the truth is you don't want to tell me. You never did."
"That's not true."
"Then what is it? What are you so afraid of?"
Afraid is the word that does it. The first crack in that unbroken wall.
He's been trespassed upon and shot at and screamed at and so many other things since I came barging into his life, and he's shrugged off every one of those intrusions like it's just another thing that happens to be happening to him.
But calling him afraid?
Oh, boy.
If it hadn't worked so well, I'd almost be terrified of the consequences.
He flexes his massive hands open and closed. "Be very careful about what you say next," he warns.
But any ability I once had to be careful got left back at that bus depot in Pike Hollow. And we're a long fucking way from there, that's for sure.
"Or what? You'll put me on another snowmobile? Send me out into the cold to become a human icicle? Do it, I dare you. I am fresh out of things to be scared of, and that includes you."
"Caro—"
"You're a coward," I interrupt. "That's all you are. A coward."
If afraid was a knife in his ribs, coward was an atom bomb.
I know it's cruel. It's the one word guaranteed to detonate whatever fragile bonds hold this man together.
But I let it fly anyway, because cruelty is all I have left, and because somewhere in the stubborn, grieving, desperate mess of my heart, I believe that if I push hard enough, the wall will break, and behind it will be the truth I've been chasing since the day I put both my parents in the earth.
Afon moves.
He moves fast. So fast I don't even register the individual steps, just the blur of him crossing the space between us, and then my back is against the stone wall and his hands are on either side of my head and his face is inches from mine.
"I warned you," he snarls, huge and terrifying. "I've never given a second warning in my life, but I'm making the exception for you right now: Do not call me that again."
I should be afraid. Everything in my rational, magna cum laude brain is telling me to back down, de-escalate, give him space. And I am afraid. I'm as much of coward as he is.
No, actually. Not quite. I'm one percent less. Because I'm willing to shove my way into the darkness he keeps around his heart.
"If you aren't a coward," I whisper meekly, "then tell me the truth."
He's panting like he just, well, hiked a mountain. "You have no idea," he grits out, "what I've done for your family."
"Then tell me!"
"You don't know what I gave up, what I lost. The things I did to keep your father alive, and when I couldn't do that anymore, the things I did to keep you safe.
You want to stand there and call me a coward?
Fine. That's your right. But you should know that every scar on my body, every year I spent in that fucking organization, every night I've woken up screaming…
half of it was for your family. For Bill. For Susan. For you."
Something hot and wet slides down my cheek. How dare it! I didn't give it permission.
"Then why won't you just talk to me?" I beg.
"Because once I do, it's done," he rasps, shaking his head like even the idea is unthinkable. "Once you know, you can't unknow it. And you will look at me differently. Your father and mother, too. And nothing—nothing—will ever be the same. I won't do that. I've already taken enough from you."
"You haven't taken anything from me."
He shakes his head again. "I've taken everything from you, Caroline. You just don't know it yet."
We're breathing the same air. His forearms are braced against the wall on either side of my head, caging me in, and I can feel the heat pouring off him through the inches of space between his chest and mine.
The lamplight catches the star on his throat, the silver in his beard, the devastation in his eyes.
"Afon…" I whisper.
I don't have a follow-up. I just needed to say his name.
I needed him to hear it in my voice and understand that whatever he thinks he's taken from me, whatever he believes he's done, I am still here.
I came up this mountain of my own free will and now that I'm here, I'm not going anywhere.
No revelation, however brutal, is going to change that.
His gaze drops to my mouth.
It stays there for one heartbeat.
Two.
Then he kisses me.
We're still arguing as we kiss; we're just doing it with our bodies instead of our words.
All that force and frustration and fear go funneling into the only outlet we have left.
His mouth finds mine and his hands drop from the wall to my jaw, both of them, tilting my face up while his body presses me into the stone.
The wall is cold against my back and he is burning against my front.
I'm caught between those two temperatures, suspended, annihilated.
I grab the front of his sweater with both fists.
Not to push him away but to pull him closer.
I pull and he comes willingly, closing whatever gap remained, until there is absolutely nothing between us.
My brain and ankle are both protesting, as is the lingering knot on my forehead, but I don't give any of them a lick of attention.
He's a good kisser. Slow at first, hesitant, like it's been a long, long time since he's done this, but what he lacks in familiarity he makes up for in presence. He swallows down my gasps and parts my lips with his tongue, cradling me against him the whole time.
It's not like I haven't been kissed before. At the time, I actually considered some of those kisses to be half-decent. College boyfriends, bar mishaps, Jaden, a wild night out with some colleagues…
This erases all of it.
This is the asteroid that wipes out the dinosaurs.
Everything that came before is extinct.