17. Stay #3
Tara calls at nine-fifteen. She calls most Tuesdays and Thursdays, a rhythm we'd established without discussing it, like most of the architecture of our friendship.
I almost don't answer. Then I pick up because not answering would require explaining, and explaining would cost more than I have left tonight.
"Hi," I say.
A pause. Tara has known me for eleven years. She hears things I don't say.
"Hi yourself." Her voice is careful in the specific way it gets careful when she's trying not to alarm me. "How's the great romantic adventure?"
"Fine."
"Uh huh."
"It's fine, Tara."
"You sound like someone who just discovered their apartment has been robbed and is trying to decide if it counts." A beat. "What happened?"
I don't tell her about Marcus. I don't know how to say it without making it real in a new way, without watching all the progress I've made here become a story about him again. Marcus is very good at becoming the story. He's been the story for three years, and I'm tired of that being true.
So I talk around it; about the studio, about Lila's fabric swatches, about the coffee shop, Eli's tea, Jasper's hands, and the deadbolt I've turned three times.
Tara listens. She's very good at listening.
"You sound scared," she says finally, "about something that isn't the hot werewolf brothers."
I go very still.
"They're not—" I stop. "What did you say?"
"Hot brothers." A pause that is one beat too long. "I said hot brothers. Why, what did you hear?"
I press my hand over my mouth. Look at the wall. Look at the window where the preserve is a solid block of dark beyond the glass, and somewhere in that dark, three men are doing things I don't have words for yet.
"Nothing," I say. "I didn't hear anything."
"Right." Her voice is careful again. "Serena."
"Tara."
"Whatever you're scared of, the real thing, the thing you're not telling me about, I need you to know that you don't have to handle it the way you've been handling things." A pause. "You've been alone with this stuff for too long. It's okay to let people in."
I think about Jasper saying you're not alone anymore. I think about the warm, heavy pressure of his hand over mine. I think about what happened on the stairs and afterward, about a kind of letting in that Tara doesn't know about yet but would understand if she did.
"I know," I say.
"Do you?"
I don't answer for a moment. Outside, nothing moves. The magnolia tree is hardly distinguishable against a black sky, and the night is very quiet. Somewhere below a light is still on in the main house.
"I'm working on it," I say.
She lets it go. We talk for another twenty minutes about nothing; her job, a film she'd watched, an argument she'd had with her upstairs neighbor about noise ordinances. By the time she says goodnight, I've stopped shaking.
I lie there afterward in the dark and look at the ceiling. I try to separate what I'm actually afraid of from the fear-noise that Marcus trained into me, the background static of waiting for something bad.
Marcus is in town. That's real. That's the thing to be afraid of.
The rest, the locked door, the three-time check, the cold certainty that no lock was ever enough, that's the static. The damage, the part of me that learned helplessness so thoroughly that it keeps performing helplessness even when it's no longer accurate.
I am not helpless.
I said okay to Jasper's offer of help not because I had no other options, but because help, freely given by people who weren't keeping score, was something I was learning to accept. That was different. That was new. That was the two-steps-forward part.
This, the door, the shaking, the phone call I almost didn't answer, is the one step back.
It's still progress, I decide. The step back happens on different ground than it would have a couple months ago.
I fell asleep eventually. Later than I'd like, my mind cycling through versions of tomorrow's contingencies, but eventually the cycling slows and the dark takes me.
I don't dream about Marcus.
I dream about shadows, the preserve; about moving through it in darkness, easy and unafraid, the trees opening ahead of me as if they recognized something. I dream about the howling that felt more and more like a language, one I didn't speak yet but was beginning to hear the shape of.
About three figures moving through shadow ahead of me, and the certainty that I knew where they were going. I dream of touching the shadow. I dream about following them.
I wake up before I see where we arrive. The light through my window is early and gray; morning is still working itself up to something.
I lie there and think about that, about following without fear, in the dream-logic of it.
Then I get up, unlock the deadbolt, and go make coffee.
One step back. Two steps forward. This is how it works.
I know where Marcus is now. And for the first time, that feels less like a trap closing than information I can use.
Tomorrow I'll talk to Eli. He'll know what questions to ask, and how to ask them, and when longer answers are possible.
Tonight I survived.
That's enough.