Chapter 24 #2
Sage doesn’t move for a moment, and when she speaks again her voice has gone somewhere older, further back than the breakup itself.
“That whole summer, Dawson. Mid-May to mid-July, the second I got back from Cornell that year, we hid it. This porch, the cove, half the fence lines on both our properties. Why? We never said the word out loud back then, but I want to say it now. Did we actually believe our fathers would have ended us over it, or did we just assume it because neither of us had the nerve to test it?”
“I believed it.” I don’t have to search for the answer; it’s been sitting in me for eight years.
“I watched what this family did to men who crossed lines smaller than a Blackwater. I was twenty-four that summer, old enough to know what my father would have done if he’d found out I’d fallen for Gideon’s daughter instead of using her.
I never tested it because I was certain I already knew the answer, and I let that certainty decide for both of us. ”
Sage sets the glass down on the sideboard, hard enough that the whiskey jumps.
“Say that part again.”
“Which part?”
“The part where you say you made it happen. Where you tell me you let me see it on purpose.” Her voice has gone very level, very quiet, the voice she uses right before she destroys someone in a hearing room, except this time I’m the hearing room.
“You didn’t just let me believe a lie, Dawson.
You engineered one. For me. You wanted me to see it. ”
“Yes.”
“Say why.”
I look at the mountain instead of her for one second, because I need somewhere to put my eyes while I say the ugliest part out loud.
“Because if you hated me clean, you’d stop trying.
And I couldn’t survive you trying.” My throat closes around it and I push through anyway.
“I told myself I was protecting you. I’ve told myself that for years.
Standing here right now, I don’t believe it anymore.
I think I was protecting myself from having to watch you decide I wasn’t worth the fight.
It was easier to make you stop wanting me than to find out you already had. ”
She’s quiet long enough that I hear the house settle around us, Cricket’s tags jingling on the stairs and going still again.
“I know what you’re doing right now,” Sage says finally.
“You’re giving me the truth clean and fast because you think if you get through it quick enough it’ll hurt less.
” Her arms tighten across her ribs. “It doesn’t work on me, Dawson.
I need you to slow down and actually let me feel what you just handed me. ”
“Okay.”
“I saw you with her.” Her voice cracks on the word her, the first crack all night, and it cuts deeper than anything sharp she’s said yet.
“I was twenty years old, and I’d already given you everything I had, and I stood outside at the fairgrounds and watched her arms around your neck and I thought, of course.
Of course it’s her. She’s easy. She’s simple.
Loving her never would have taken a single thing from you, not your father, not the family name, not anything you were afraid to lose.
Loving me would have.” Her eyes are wet now, and she doesn’t wipe at them, doesn’t look away from me while they fall.
“I thought I wasn’t enough to keep. I have believed that for years, Dawson.
I built a whole life around not being loved in the daylight, and you’re standing here telling me it was never even true. ”
“Sage.”
“Don’t.” She holds a palm up, her hand trembling.
“Don’t you dare tell me now that I was enough.
You don’t get to hand me years of the opposite and then patch it in one sentence like a receipt.
I need to sit inside this longer than a sentence.
I need you to let me be furious before you try to make it better. ”
“I’m not trying to make it better.” My voice comes out wrecked in a way I don’t think she’s heard from me before.
“There’s no version of tonight where it gets better.
There’s only a version where you finally know the truth instead of the one I built for you, and what you do with that is yours. Not mine to manage anymore.”
She turns back to the window, back to the mountain, and I let her have the silence because taking it from her right now would be one more thing I decided for her instead of one more thing I gave her the room to choose.
“Say the rest,” she says, without turning around. “You said you hid behind my avoidance for two years after you came home. I want that part too.”
I take a stuttering breath and begin again.
“You never once tried to be alone in a room with me. I told myself that meant you were done, and I let it be an excuse instead of a wound I’d caused.
” I cross half the distance toward her, stop myself before I close it all the way, because this isn’t mine to close yet.
“Those two years you skipped the lake day; I told myself you’d finally healed enough to just not care.
I never let myself think it might mean the opposite.
That not showing up was the loudest thing you could do without saying my name out loud. ”
Her shoulders drop, just slightly, some fight going out of them that isn’t surrender, just exhaustion catching up to fury.
“I never accounted for what those eleven weeks did to anyone but you,” I say, quieter now.
“I told myself it was a clean transaction on her side, that she got what she wanted and walked away even. I never once asked what it was for her, or what it made me, letting it run that long without ever telling her the truth of what she was standing next to. I didn’t think about it until right now, saying it to you. ”
“What did it make you?”
“A coward who was good at looking steady.” I say it plain, no flinch in it. “I’ve spent two years reading a room before anyone else in it finishes thinking. I couldn’t read my own. I made a lie and told myself it was mercy.”
Sage finally turns around. Her face in the moonlight is distraught, no sobbing, just tears sitting on her cheeks like she’s forgotten they’re there, and her eyes have gone from armored to raw in the space of one turn.
“Pizza House,” she says, unsteady. “You used to sit in June’s booth with me when nobody was looking.
Teton Pass, the summer we drove up there in your dad’s truck and you got a flat and we sat on the hood for three hours waiting for a tow and you never once seemed to mind.
The Prairie Star, the school bus, the cove.
” Her voice breaks clean in half on the last word.
“Every single place in this whole valley has you standing in it already, Dawson. I’ve spent years trying to find a version of Rimrock that didn’t. ”
“There isn’t one.” I say it like a vow, because it is one.
“I looked. I went to Colorado, I went to Chicago, I spent years trying to find a version of my own life that didn’t have you standing in the middle of it, and every single place I stood, you were already there first. This house, this valley, every fence line I’ve ever ridden.
I let myself believe I had the right to lose you on my own terms instead of yours. I didn’t.”
I set my glass down on the sideboard and go down to my knees in front of her.
There’s no decision in it. My legs just take me there, the hardwood cold under my knees, and I look up at her standing in the moonlight with her glasses left upstairs and her eyes puffy and red.
There’s nothing left of me standing between us.
No strategy. No version of myself I’m managing for her benefit.
It’s the only time in eight years I’ve had nothing planned to say next.
“I’m not doing this so you’ll forgive me,” I say, my voice still as unsteady as it’s been since I started talking.
“I’m doing it because I will not hide behind your silence one more day.
Not the avoidance. Not Ashley. You asked me for the truth, and this is the last of it I have left to give you.
I loved you when I was twenty-four and too much of a coward to say so out loud, and I have loved you every day since, in every city I ever tried to build a life in that wasn’t this one. ”
She’s crying openly now, no attempt left to hide it, breaths coming in ragged gasps.
I reach up, slow enough that she could step back and doesn’t, and take her left hand in both of mine, my thumb and index finger finding the platinum band.
“You weren’t not enough,” I say. “You were never not enough. You were the only thing that ever mattered enough to terrify me, and instead of telling you that, I decided it was easier to let you believe you weren’t worth staying for.
That’s not your wound to carry, Sage. That’s mine.
I built it. I’m the one asking you to let me finally put it down. ”
For a long moment she doesn’t say anything at all. The mountain sits huge and silver behind her, the whole valley gone two-in-the-morning quiet, like even Rimrock is holding still to hear what she says next.
She sinks down in front of me instead of pulling me up, until we’re both on our knees on the living room floor, eye level, her hand still caught in mine, and she reaches out with her other hand and wipes at my jaw like there’s something there that needs wiping away, though there isn’t, not yet, not until she says what she says next.
“You want my truth?” Sage says, her voice breaking clean open on every word. “I never stopped either.”