Chapter Fifteen – Lila.95 #2
He came in from the hallway with the particular unhurried quality that was simply how he occupied rooms, and he did not sit.
He crouched in front of me. His dark eyes came level with mine, and he looked at me the way he looked at things he was taking seriously: directly and without flinching, nothing in his gaze that asked me to be anything other than what I was right now, on the floor of my bedroom at dawn with a wet face and someone else’s scent still in the air around me.
He held out his hand, palm up.
Just that. No words. His hand open in the space between us, his eyes steady, and the offer entirely without condition.
I looked at his hand for one second.
Then I gripped it.
My fingers closed around his and I held on, and whatever thin structural thing had been keeping the last of it contained gave way completely.
The sound that came out of me was not what any of the contained, managed crying had been, it was the thing underneath all of that, the grief that had been waiting since the truck didn’t come back through the gate, since the bathroom floor with the stick in my hand, since every morning I had gotten up and chosen to keep moving rather than stop and feel what stopping would mean.
It came out of me in a single, body-wide collapse, my forehead dropping forward, my free hand pressed flat against my belly, my fingers white around Wade’s and my shoulders shaking hard.
None of them moved to fix it.
Cole sat with his shoulder close to mine and did not reach for me, did not offer words, did not shift in the way of a person who needed the crying to stop in order to manage his own discomfort.
He was simply there, a solid, patient fact on my right side.
Rhett’s thigh was warm against mine and his breathing was slow and even, the particular slowness of a man who has matched his breathing to the rhythm he wants someone else to find, and I felt it without making a decision about it.
Wade held my hand and his grip answered mine without pulling or pressing, just holding.
His thumb moved once across my knuckles, barely a movement, and then went still.
The grief went on as long as it needed to.
When the worst of it passed, it passed the way hard things passed: not all at once but in sections, the sharpest edges going first, the weight of it becoming something closer to exhaustion than agony.
My breathing ragged out into something slower, the gulps giving way to long, unsteady exhales.
I kept my head down for a moment after the shaking stopped, staring at the floorboards, the grain of the old wood, the particular cold of it.
Then I lifted the back of my free wrist and dragged it across my face.
The room was quiet around all four of us.
I stared at the floor.
“He was my first.” My voice came out in a register I had not heard from myself, hoarse, stripped of its usual measured quality, nothing protecting it.
“He was my only one.” I stopped. My fingers tightened once around Wade’s and then released slightly.
“And I don’t, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with last night. ”
Nobody moved to answer me.
Not Cole, who I could feel considering something at my right shoulder with the careful, unhurried quality that meant he was choosing his words and had decided not to offer the wrong ones.
Not Rhett, whose warmth was close and steady on my left, holding the silence the way he held the serious things, without the escape route of humor, without needing to be somewhere it was easier.
Not Wade, whose eyes I could feel on my face and who was, in the particular way he had, simply present.
Cole reached up.
His arm came across me and his hand closed around the mug on the nightstand. He brought it down and pressed it into my free hand, the right one, the one that wasn’t still folded inside Wade’s. His hand held mine for a moment around the ceramic, long enough to transfer the warmth, and then let go.
The coffee was the right temperature. Not hot anymore.
Warm, in the way of something that had been made with intention and carried across a cold house in the dark of pre-dawn, and the warmth came through the ceramic and into my palms and into the joints of my fingers that had gone stiff from the cold floor.
I sat there with it.
Both hands eventually, my fingers wrapped around the mug, and Wade’s hand still warm in my right, so the mug was held between us without either of us making anything of it.
Hope shifted once beneath my wrist where it rested against my belly.
The slow, deliberate turn of her, the way she moved when she was settling, when she knew my voice and wanted it known that she was present. I pressed my wrist a fraction closer.
The silence that followed was not the silence I had been living inside for months.
That silence had been mine alone, the silence of a single person in a house too large for one, of grief too large to fit anywhere available, of every unanswered question that I had been carrying by myself in the cold hours before the rest of the world woke up.
It had been a silence I had grown so accustomed to that I had stopped noticing its specific weight the way you stopped noticing the weight of something you had been carrying long enough.
This was different.
The cold pressed in at the frost-edged windows and the lamp gave its small circle of warmth on the nightstand and the four of us sat on the floor of my bedroom in the grey of the Montana morning, and the silence had them in it.
It had Cole’s shoulder almost against mine and Rhett’s warmth on my other side and Wade’s hand and the coffee and the particular quality of a room occupied by people who had decided to stay.
I did not have answers.
I did not have the first clear idea what last night had been, or what it meant, or what it made me.
I did not know how to hold the grief for Ethan alongside the warmth still clinging to the pillow and the air of this room, and I was not going to be able to work that out in the cold pre-dawn with my face still swollen from crying.
The questions were real and they were not going anywhere and I would have to find my way to them eventually.
But eventually was not right now.
Right now there was the mug warm in my hands and the cold floor solid beneath me and the steady, undemanding presence of three men who had gotten down on the floor with me and had not gotten back up.
Outside the window the grey was lightening by small degrees, the frost at the corners of the glass beginning to lose its hard edge as the first thin warmth of morning found it.
The mountains were visible, barely, in the dark above the fields.
My thumb moved in a slow arc against the ceramic.
The ceiling was still the ceiling. The room was still the room. Nothing had been fixed, nothing had been resolved, nothing had been answered. But the silence around me was not empty, and for the first time in longer than I could honestly name, that made a difference.