Chapter 3 #3
Calder sets the wire down. "Don't move," he says, and steps to the shed door, and half-turns his back to answer.
The door is open. His back is turned. Past him the yard runs green and empty to a black line of trees, close, so close, and everything in me goes very quiet and very still and pulls tight toward that gap—
Then something inside me snaps.
There's no active decision in it. One second I'm holding a log and the next my hands are empty and I'm sprinting past Calder and out the door, flat out across the cold grass toward the tree line, and some far-off part of me is screaming what are you doing, there's nowhere to go, you couldn't climb the stairs a few hours ago—but the rest of me is already running, the way an animal runs when a door opens.
Behind me Calder shouts—"Hey!"—and then I hear the heavy fast crash of him coming after me.
It makes me run harder, lungs on fire, arms pumping. I hit the trees and the branches tear at me, but I don't slow down because the second I do I'll feel my heart slamming and my legs shaking and how little either of them has left.
My heart stops skipping.
It just opens up into one long roaring note with no gaps in it at all, and the gray comes in from the sides, fast, faster than it's ever come, the trees smearing into each other and the ground going soft and far away.
I know this feeling. I know exactly what it is and exactly what comes next. I've run myself clean off the edge of my own body and my legs slow—
—and then the ground drops out.
I skid to a stop as the earth just ends, opening onto a gully full of rock and dark water somewhere far below, and I'm already tipping into it, legs folding, nothing left to catch myself with, the edge tilting up to meet me—
A hand clamps around my arm and hauls back so hard my shoulder tears a sound out of me.
I don't fall. I get slammed down instead, onto my knees in the leaves right at the lip of the drop, Calder's fist locked around my bicep and his other arm banded across my chest from behind, dragging me back off the edge.
My vision's a black tunnel with a pinhole of light at the end. My heart's trying to climb out of my throat. I can't breathe—I keep trying and nothing comes, just short useless sips of air, and my hands scrabble at his forearm with no strength in them at all.
"Stop—stop it, you're done, you're not going anywhere." His voice is low and hard against the top of my head.
He drags me back another foot from the edge and turns me around, and I feel the exact moment he feels it: the way I'm shaking, the way my heart is slamming against his arm like something dying, the sweat gone cold all over me, the fact that I still, ten seconds later, can't pull a full breath.
For half a second his face does something that isn't anger.
Then it's gone.
Because I ran. Because he had to chase me. Because I nearly took us both over the edge, and his knees are in the dirt now too, and men like him don't like being made to scramble.
"Look at you." He's breathing hard, but it's nothing, he could do this all day, and the difference between us has never been so obvious.
His hand stays clamped on my arm, holding me upright because we both know I can't do it myself.
"You didn't even clear fifty yards. Fifty yards, and you fold up like a wet coat and nearly go headfirst into a ravine. "
His eyes go over me—the shaking, the gray skin, the open-mouthed way I'm still fighting for air—and I watch it happen, watch him take every symptom of a heart quitting and hand it to the story he already believes.
"You're a coward. You ran because you panicked, and now you've gone and scared yourself half to death, like a rabbit that bolts into the road." His lip curls. "Pathetic."
I couldn't answer if I wanted to. There's no air in me for a single word. So I kneel there in the leaves and shake under his hands and let him build the wrong idea out of a true one.
I am a coward. But that’s not what this is.
"Kill had you pegged." Disgust, quiet, final. "Guilty men run. And you—" he tips my chin up with two fingers, studies my face like he's confirming something, "—you're just a scared little liar who can't even do that right."
He lets go. I blink back the haze as I gasp for breath.
"Nothing to say. Course not."
Yes, I think. Fine. Coward. Liar. Whatever you need me to be. Just let me sit down before my heart stops for good. But saying it would cost air I don't have and neither he, nor his fucked up family are going to give a shit about my health issues, so I stay quiet.
He hauls me up by the arm. My legs don't want it, and he takes the weight without seeming to notice he's doing it. It's the one thing all morning that isn't cruel, and he doesn't even know he's doing it.
I hate how much my body wants to lean in.
"Come on." He gets a fist in the back of my shirt and points me at the house. "Before I have to carry you and we both feel stupid about it."
He walks me back across the long green yard, and I go quiet. I spend every scrap of air I've got left on the single job of staying on my feet.