Caroline #2
"He was sitting too close to you," he says at last.
"Do you really think that's my first time with a man invading my personal space? Flirty men sit too close. It's, like, their whole thing." My voice is rising and I can't stop it.
"Not if I can help it."
"No. Stop that shit right there. You don't get to do this.
You don't get to say we're not together in front of Barb and ruin the whole mood and break my—" I bite it off.
Break my heart? Hell no. I am not going to say that.
"—and then come storming in like Drake committed a felony by telling me I'm pretty. "
"He told you what?" snarls Afon.
But I'm not here to indulge his immature jealous streak. If he wants to claim me, then fucking claim me, dammit. None of this hot-and-cold bullshit.
"Why did you… Why did you have to—" My breath fogs the air between us, ragged. "Why did you say it like it disgusted you?"
He stands. Turns. And in the dark, with the snow lashing sideways through the spruce, I can't read his face at all.
"It didn't disgust me," he intones.
"Then explain yourself. Because I'm done coming up with explanations for you."
His jaw grinds. His hand goes, just like it always does, to the bronze band on his left ring finger, twisting it once around. For as long as that ring is rotating, I let myself believe that he's going to give me something.
A real thing.
A true thing.
The kind of thing that makes the cold worth it.
"Get under the tarp," is what he says instead. "You're shivering."
The disappointment is so total and so familiar that it almost makes me laugh.
"Of course," I say. "Of course. Not here. Not now. Never now."
I drop down onto the blanket he's spread, because my ankle has had enough and because I am too cold and too defeated to keep standing on principle.
"You know what, Afon? Fine. We're not together.
How could we be? You live in a fucking fantasy world!
You camp in a snowbank and assume Barb is a hitman.
You snarl at Drake and won't tell me why.
You lock away your secret phone and your secret order and your secret everything, and you stand there twisting that ring like it's going to unlock the secrets of the universe.
" I pull the blanket up to my chin. "I cared about helping you get out of all that stuff before.
But not anymore. I'm done asking. I won't keep torturing myself with wondering why you hate me.
I'll just take it as a fact that you do, and I'll move on. "
He stands over me for a long moment. The snow lands on his shoulders and doesn't melt anymore; he's gone that cold. Wolf circles once and drops against my side, a warm wall, the only one in this whole frozen world who has never once made me guess.
"You're wrong about one thing," Afon says at last.
I laugh bitterly. "Only one?"
"I don't hate you." He crouches down, finally, at the edge of the blanket, close enough that I can see the exhaustion carved into his face, the gray under his eyes, the blood he won't admit is still seeping at his hip.
"I hate that I know too much about the world, because what I know is this: Whatever you love can be taken from you.
Maybe it's Reznik that takes you, or maybe it's just a man in a stupid canvas coat.
But when he leaned in toward you… when you laughed…
" He leaves the sentence unfinished and goes to start the fire instead, striking a match against the box, cupping the flame from the wind with hands that have killed people and bandaged my ankle and held me on the floor while I cried.
"I didn't like it. That's all I've got for you tonight.
I didn't like it, and I'm not going to be a good enough man to pretend I did. "
It is not an apology.
But it's something.
It's a crack in the wall. A half-inch of maybe.
I almost take it. I really do consider wrapping myself in this scrap of emotional comfort he's tossed me and call it warmth.
Then I think to myself, No.
Fuck no. I am so tired of subsisting on his scraps. Of being grateful for half-inches.
I didn't like it is not even close to the groveling apology I deserve for this one step forward, two steps back act he keeps pulling again and again.
"That's it?" I spit in disgust. "That's what I get? 'I didn't like it.'"
His face twitches. "Caroline—"
"No." I push up off the blanket, ankle be damned, until I'm standing in the snow in front of him.
"You don't get to hand me a crumb and call it a meal.
I didn't like it. You know what I didn't like?
I didn't like being kidnapped. I didn't like a zip tie cutting into my wrists in that bunkhouse.
I didn't like watching you bleed through your sweater for fourteen miles because asking for help is more frightening to you than dying.
" My breath saws white between us. "But I survived all of it, because I thought—stupid me—that there was a person under all this granite who might, eventually, say something real to me.
But you don't. You won't. Again and again, you refuse. So I'm just gonna stop asking."
"You don't know what you're asking for," he warns. "You think you want the rest of me. You don't."
"That's not your call!" The shout tears out of me, ragged and hot.
"You've been deciding things for me since the second I cracked my head open on your mountain.
You decided I should leave. You decided everyone in that diner was a hitman, that I couldn't talk to a man for forty seconds, that I should sleep on frozen dirt instead of a real bed, that I should starve up here with you rather than make one phone call on the phone you think I don't know about. "
His whole body goes rigid.
There it is.
The truth, for once in his damn life.
"Yeah," I breathe. "I found it. In your jacket.
" My voice climbs and I can't stop it, don't want to stop it.
"So don't you stand there and twist that ring at me and tell me you care, that you didn't like it, while you've got a way out of this whole nightmare sitting in your pocket the entire time and you'd rather drag me through a blizzard than push one button.
What's so scary about it, huh, Afon? What is so terrible about that phone that you'll let me freeze, you'll let yourself bleed out, rather than dial it? "
He doesn't answer.
"That's what I thought," I snap. "You'll do anything for me except for the two things that matter most: You won't tell me the truth, and you won't let me in.
The snow hisses through the spruce. The unlit match is still in his hand. He has not moved an inch, and that stillness is the most infuriating thing about him, because I know now that it isn't calm. It's a man holding a door shut with his entire body.
"You're a coward," I tell him. "Because you'd rather take a bullet across the hip than a question across the heart. And I am done begging you to show me what's on the other side. Keep your half-inch, Afon. I'd rather have nothing than starve on your scraps."
I turn my back on him before he can see my face do the thing it's about to do.
The match scrapes. Catches.
I don't look at the light.