19. Lena #2
Then, because apparently the dark makes me reckless, I add, “It wasn’t a bad dream.” I stare at the outline of him. “You don’t have to say anything incredibly noble in response to that.”
“I wasn’t planning to.”
“Good.”
A beat passes. Then another.
Finally he says, “I shouldn’t ask.”
“But you want to.”
“Yes.”
I shift a little, blanket rustling softly. “That’s not very priestly of you.”
“I told you,” he says, voice low. “I’m not the priest.”
I look at the ceiling again because it’s easier than looking at him while I say the next part. “It was you first.”
He doesn’t speak.
“You,” I say, more quietly now, “then Havoc. Then Knox. Which is, honestly, deeply inconvenient for me.”
That gets a soft exhale out of him. Not amusement exactly. Something rougher. “In that order?” he says.
I turn my head fast enough that the pillow shifts under me. “Did you really just ask that?”
“Yes.”
“You’re unbelievable.”
“And yet,” he says, “you’re answering.”
I hate that he’s right.
The darkness makes him bolder too, I think. Or maybe just more honest.
I pull the blanket higher. “I don’t know what that says about me.”
His reply comes immediately. “It says you’re human.”
I blink at that. “That’s a very generous read.”
“No,” he says. “It isn’t.”
I let the silence sit between us for a second, then ask, “What does it say about you?”
He takes a long time. Long enough that I think he might not answer at all.
Then: “That I’ve wanted things I shouldn’t.”
The words move through the dark slowly. Heavy. Certain.
I ask, “Is that how you think of me?”
Another pause.
Then, “No.”
I wait.
He knows I’m waiting.
Finally he says, “That’s how I think of wanting you.”
The room feels smaller after that.
I stop breathing for a second.
I swallow. “There’s a difference?”
“Yes.”
“What is it?”
He shifts onto his back again, staring up into the dark. “You’re not wrong because I want you.”
My chest tightens unexpectedly. “Then why do you sound like you’re confessing to murder?”
A humorless breath leaves him. “Because with me, those things have never lived very far apart.”
I don’t know why I care so much that he hears me. I probably shouldn’t. But I do.
Maybe because he sounds like someone who’s been reducing himself to his worst acts for so long he’s forgotten there’s any other language available.
Maybe because I know something about that too.
Not the violence. The shrinking. The decision to make yourself smaller and uglier in your own head so nobody else can do worse.
I say, “I’ve spent most of my life feeling like a placeholder. Like the world just kept setting me down somewhere temporary and forgetting to come back.”
He turns his head toward me again.
I keep going before I lose my nerve. “So when you talk like that, like you’re only the worst thing you’ve ever done… I get it. More than I want to.”
He says my name once. Quietly. “Lena.”
I hate how much fits inside one word when he says it like that.
“What?” I whisper.
“You shouldn’t.”
“Shouldn’t what?”
“Understand me.”
I stare at him in the dark. “That’s not really something I can help.”
“No,” he says. “I know.”
The room goes quiet after that. Not empty. Just full in a different way. The kind of quiet that feels like it’s waiting to see which of us is going to break first.
I lie there with the blanket pulled up to my chest, staring into the dark where his face should be. I can only make out pieces of him. The line of his shoulder. The shape of his head on the pillow. That scar catching the weakest bit of light from outside.
He’s the one who speaks first.
“My father was a hard man,” he says. His voice is flatter than before. Less careful. Like once he starts, he has to put some distance between himself and the words or they won’t come out at all.
I don’t interrupt.
“He believed pain made people useful. That softness got them killed. That fear was something you beat out early, before it turned into weakness.”
My throat tightens a little.
He says it like it’s old weather. Like it was just the climate he grew up in.
“He wasn’t violent, not how you would expect an abusive father to look like. Mostly he was controlled. Cold. The kind of man who could ruin your day with one look and make you feel grateful he stopped there.”
I stare into the dark and try to picture him younger. Smaller. Trying to be good in front of a man like that.
“Was he military too?” I ask.
“No.” The answer comes immediately. “He just liked obedience.”
There’s something in the way he says it that makes my chest ache.
I turn onto my side a little more, facing him fully now even if I can’t see much. “And your mother?”
A pause.
“Gone early.”
I wait, but that turns out to be all I’m getting on that.
He keeps going before I can decide whether to ask. “The fire happened when I was seventeen.”
My eyes catch on the scar again.
He doesn’t look at me. Just keeps staring into the ceiling-dark, speaking into it like it’s safer than speaking to me directly.
“There was an old outbuilding on the property. Half workshop, half storage. He liked sending me in there when he was angry. Said if I was going to waste space in his house, I could at least make myself useful somewhere else.”
I don’t say anything. I think he needs the silence more than comfort right now.
“One night,” he says, “when I was seventeen, there was a storm. Power kept cutting in and out. He sent me out there anyway.” His voice drops a little. “I remember the smell first. Fuel. Heat. Then smoke.”
He stops.
I can hear him breathe in once, slow and deliberate, like he’s forcing air through a place in himself that doesn’t open easily anymore.
“When I realized what was happening, it was already too late to get clear. Something came down. I don’t know if it was shelving or timber or part of the roof.
I remember the impact. Then I remember fire.
” His hand shifts once over his ribs, almost unconsciously.
“My face. My neck. My shoulder. I couldn’t see properly for a while after. ”
The motel room feels even smaller now. The dark around us tighter.
“How did you get out?” I ask quietly.
He answers after a beat. “I don’t remember all of it.”
That feels true and not true at the same time. Like he remembers enough and has decided the rest stays buried.
“I remember clawing at the door,” he says. “I remember the metal being too hot to touch. I remember thinking I was going to die there.”
The words go through me like cold water. I hug the blanket a little closer to myself. “And when you woke up?” I ask.
His laugh this time is very soft and has no humor in it at all. “I was alive. Which apparently disappointed him.”
I go still.
He doesn’t take it back.
“Your father said that?” I ask.
“No.” He shifts his head slightly on the pillow. “He didn’t have to.”