Chapter 4 #3
I do not break it. I want to be clear about this also.
I do not break it. I close my hand around his wrist with a grip I have used four times in my life on men who were hurting women in my line of sight, a grip that compresses the radial and ulnar nerves at the same time, a grip that does not leave marks but that makes the hand below it go cold and clumsy and useless in about two seconds.
He makes a small sound. The fingers around her arm spring open. He drops her.
I do not let go of his wrist.
I lower my mouth, just slightly, toward his ear.
I do not look at him while I do it. I look at her.
She has stepped backward. Her face is white.
Her hand is at her sternum. Her eyes are on mine, and her eyes are wide, and her eyes are not afraid of me.
I will hold that fact in my chest later, in the days that follow, like a small warm coin: she was not afraid of me.
I say, into the side of his head, in a voice low enough that the homeschool boys reading in the periodicals corner cannot hear me but loud enough that he absolutely will:
"You touch her again and I will break every finger on that hand."
I let his wrist go.
He stumbles back a half-step. He grabs his right hand with his left and rubs the wrist. The color of his face has done two things at once — gone pink in fury and white in fear, in two different parts of his face, like a watercolor that has not dried. His mouth opens. It shuts.
I say, "Walk out the door, sir. Get in your car. Drive back to Richmond."
He says, "You — you assaulted me. You — I will —"
I say, "Walk."
He looks at her. He looks at me. He looks at her again.
He says, with the last small thread of authority a man like that ever has, "Lenora. This is what I am talking about. This." He gestures at me. "This is —"
I take one half-step toward him.
I do not do anything else. I just take a half-step.
He walks.
The bell on the front door jangles. The door swings shut. The library is quiet.
I stand for a second in the place where he had been standing.
The purr is in my chest. I let it pass. I let it pass the way I have learned to let it pass — by counting backward from ten, by feeling the air move in and out of my lungs, by reminding myself that the worst thing I could do for the woman behind me right now would be to chase him out into the parking lot.
I turn around.
She is two feet behind me. She is white. Her right hand, the one that had been at her sternum, is hanging loose at her side, and it is shaking. The same fine small shake I saw her do on the day I helped her shelve books and never asked why.
I say, "Are you okay?"
She nods.
The nod is too quick.
I say, gentler, "Nora."
I do not think I have called her by her first name out loud before.
I will tell you, honestly, that I have not.
I have called her ma'am and librarian and once Miss Ashby by accident, and I have said her name a hundred times inside my own head, but I have not said it to her. I say it now. Quiet. Once.
"Nora."
She lifts her face. She meets my eyes.
She says, in a voice that is steady around the edges and broken in the middle, "I am okay."
I look at her right hand. It is still shaking.
I reach down.
I take her hand.
I do not — I want to make this clear because of what it will mean for both of us, later — I do not pull it toward me.
I do not grip it. I do not do anything possessive.
I just close my hand around hers. Both of my hands around the one of hers.
Big and warm around small and shaking. I hold her hand between my palms the way you would hold a small bird that has flown into a window and is not, yet, sure whether it is going to fly again.
She does not pull away.
I stand there with her hand between mine.
The shake goes through her wrist into my palms. I hold it.
I do not speak. I do not move. The library is very quiet around us — the soft tick of the wall clock, the rustle of one of the homeschool boys turning a page over in the periodicals corner, the small sound of an engine starting in the parking lot and pulling away — and I stand there and I hold her hand in mine until the shaking, very slowly, very gradually, stops.
When her hand is still, I do not let go.
I look at her face.
She is looking at me.
She says, very quietly, "Rhett."
I say, "Yes."
She does not say anything else.
She just keeps her hand in mine.
We stand like that for a long time.
In my chest, the purr has gone. In its place is something I do not have a word for — something quieter, something heavier, something that does not feel like the wiring of a weapon at all. Something that feels, for the first time in twelve years, like the wiring of a man.
I will lie awake that night, on the roof of the clubhouse, with the late-May stars overhead and the white blossoms of the late dogwoods catching the moonlight on Main, and I will think about the shape of her hand inside mine, and I will think — for the first time, in real words, in real sentences — I am in love with her.
I do not know what to do with it.
I do not know if I am allowed.
But the question I have been asking myself for twelve years at sunrise — will I ever be more than a weapon — has, somewhere on the carpet of the Clover Ridge Public Library between a circulation desk and a wingback chair, gotten its first quiet partial answer.