35. Chapter Thirty-Five #3
That's what undoes the knot in my chest. It’s not that my dad left me at the gas station, or him breaking my arm –– it’s that they kept me, three words, and my eyes are going and my throat's closing and I have to open my mouth to breathe, and I'm grateful — I'm so grateful I could put my head in my hands — that she can't see my face.
"I waited for them to send me back," I say. “To tell the caseworker I was bad, wasn’t worth it.” The words come out shaking.
"Four years. Every time I broke something.
Every time I got in a fight, every time I mouthed off, every time a report card came.
I'd get my bag ready. I'd put stuff in it.
" I look at the bedroom door. "Mary found it packed once when I was sixteen.
She never said anything about it. She just unpacked it and put everything back where it went and never said one word to me about it, and I hated her for about a week for that. "
I stop.
"But I never hated her the way I hated Mike. I could never because they never sent me back."
She takes a long breath, and I feel her gather herself for it, and then she says, into the dark in front of her, "I draw because nobody looked at me.
" Her voice has changed. It's got the same wreckage in it that mine's got, and hearing it there does something to me — the fact that she's meeting me down here, that she came all the way down to where I am so I wouldn't be standing in it alone. "My dad worked a lot. My mom stayed home and spent all of his money. She still does. And I found out at about eight years old that if I made something, I’d get a reaction from them. I kept drawing, but eventually the attention died.” A short, wrecked breath of a laugh.
"Then I had to start playing pretend for whatever fa?ade my mom had going for the week. Everything is about image for my parents. She sends me clothes because she hated what I chose to wear. She micromanages everything about me, down to the toothpaste I use and the underwear I wear. Nothing in my life is mine.”
She shifts.
"You asked me once who the drawings were for."
Her back moves against mine with the breath she takes.
"I’ve thought about that for a long time because they're not for anybody. The places are empty and alone because that’s how I feel."
Neither of us says anything for a long time.
I don't know how long. Time's stopped behaving properly. I focus on her leaning against me and feeling her breathe slowly. I still want to turn around, but I don’t. I realize that’s the gift she’s giving me.
"Look at us," I murmur.
The laugh comes out of her half-broken. I feel it move through her ribs into mine, and my mouth does something on its own.
"Two disasters."
"Yeah."
"At least we match."
And it's quiet again, but it's turned into something else now. It's not the quiet from before. It's got weight, it's warm, and I could stay inside it for the rest of my life.
"I don't do this," she says after a while.
"I don't tell people things. Ivory has lived with me for two years, and she doesn't know half of what I just told your back.
" I feel her shake her head against me. "I don't know what it is about you.
" She rests her head on me, and I close my eyes. "You don't take anything."
I go completely still.
"Everybody takes something." Her voice drops. "Every single person I've ever known takes something from me. They always need something — a favor, an image, a piece of you they get to have for later. And you just don't do any of that. You've never once taken anything from me."
I can't breathe. She thinks that's a quality. She's saying it like she's found something rare and good in me, and what it actually is, is the nine-year-old in me who’d get river stones thrown at him for asking for anything. Not asking is my survival mechanism. It's damage. It’s cost me everything that I’ve ever had, and I thought for a whole year that it cost me her, but she’s sitting here appreciating it, and I want so badly to tell her that she’s got it wrong.
That I will continue not to ask anything of her, and she’s not going to admire it later.
I wipe my face because this is the worst thing about me.
I actually want things constantly. I want things so badly that it makes me fucking sick, but I’ve never been allowed to want things, so I shove it down where no one can see it.
And it’s worked. She’s sitting here telling me that it’s worked.
I want to tell her, but I don’t. I don’t get to take that from her.
The bed shifts, and my heart starts hammering against my chest. Her warmth is gone. The cold rushes into the place she just was. I turn too, because I need to see her. After all that was said, I want to see her beautiful face.
But when I turn, she’s on her knees, her face only a few inches from mine.
She’s close enough that I can see the wet at her lower lashes and the shine along the bottom of her eyes.
Her hair’s come loose on one side. Everything is out in this room.
Everything. Both of us stripped down to the studs and nothing left folded up anywhere.
And my heart goes. Not fast — hard. Like something kicking the inside of my sternum to get out. I can feel it in my hands, in the back of my throat, in the space behind my eyes, and there is not one single thing I can do about it.
"That’s why I like you."
Like.
It goes through me like a hit I didn't see coming.
Because nobody has said that to me. Ever.
In nineteen years. People have kept me, fed me, driven me places, signed forms with my name on them, and a woman in a kitchen taught me how to breathe at two in the morning and a man gripped the back of my neck in a doorway and told me I earned it — and not one of them, not one single person in my entire life, has ever said out loud that they liked me.
I didn't know it could be given to me. I didn’t know it was something that I had to barely work for.
The tears in her eyes are burning me to my core.
I don’t know if I get to touch her, but I want to wipe her tears away and kiss her and tell her that I like her back.
The feeling rushes through my entire body so big and fast that I have to lock my jaw against it.
My heart is trying to break through my ribs.
It’s fucking forcing itself out of my body.
And I finally understand what it means to want.
Because hell, I want her so fucking bad it hurts.
I don’t know where to put this pain. My heart’s climbing up my throat.
Everything feels dried up in me. I have nothing left to hide.
She looks at my lips, so I swallow. I’ve never been someone to know what he’s wanted.
All my life, it’s never been about what I wanted.
Fuck, I wasn’t allowed to want, so I didn’t even know what it felt like.
And now that she’s facing me, now that I can see her face, I can’t think of a single reason why this is a bad idea.
If I close this space, it's real.
But the wanting is the only thing I still can't afford.
I watch her stop in the same second I do.
I see it go through her — the shoulders coming back down, the thing she does.
She stops so fast and so cleanly that I know she'd been holding herself there the whole time too, waiting on me, and the fact that she stops for the same reason and won't say it either is somehow worse than everything else in this entire night.
Her hand's on the blanket.
I put mine down next to it.
Not on it. An inch off, close enough that I can feel the heat coming off her skin against the side of my little finger, and I sit there in the dark with my heart going like a fist on a door and I count.
In for four.
Hold for four.
Out for six.
It doesn't work.