Chapter 6 #2
Nora is still at the desk. Her hands are still on the counter. Her chin is still up.
I do not move.
Hawk, in the back, lifts his copy of Field and Stream slightly, the way you lift a glass at a toast you are not formally part of. He sets the magazine down. He gives Nora a small grave nod across the room. He walks out the side door without saying anything to anyone.
It is just the two of us.
I cross the floor to the desk.
I stop in front of her. I do not touch her. I do not reach for her hand. I just stand on my side of the counter with my hands at my sides.
I say, "Are you okay?"
She looks up at me.
Her eyes are full.
She says, "I have never said that to her in my life."
I say, "I know."
She presses her fingertips to the corners of her eyes. She does not actually cry. She just presses. Then she lifts her hands away. She takes a long breath in through her nose. She lets it out.
She says, "I think I need to sit down."
I say, "Yeah."
I do not move. I do not pull her around the desk.
I let her come at her own pace. She does.
She comes around the end of the counter.
She walks past me to the wingback chairs.
She sits in hers — the one with the worn spot — and she folds her knees up under her the way she does, and she puts her hands flat on her thighs.
I sit in the other chair.
I look at her.
She looks at the south windows. The light is high. It is late morning. There is no slant in it yet.
She says, "I want to know."
I say, "Know what."
She says, "Whatever you have not told me. About you. About what you are afraid of. I want to know it. I am tired of being protected from things, Rhett. By everyone."
I look at her.
I look at her for a long time.
I have known I would have to tell her, eventually, since the morning after Graham came into the library.
I had told myself I would tell her when I was ready.
I had not, in the two weeks since, become ready.
I had been hoping she would not ask. I had been hoping she would let it be enough that I had not yet given her cause.
I should have known better. Nora does not let things be enough.
Nora reads the front matter and the appendix and every footnote. Nora was always going to ask.
I close my hands on my knees. I open them.
I say, "Okay."
I tell her.
I tell her about Grady. The first part. The trailer.
The drywall. The whiskey bottle. The motel Bible.
My mother's mouth bleeding. The way I broke him and the way I felt while I was doing it.
I do not pretty it up. I do not soften it.
I tell her — and this is the thing I have told approximately three living humans, and Knox is two of them — that the worst part of that night was not what I did to him.
The worst part of that night was that I was good at it.
The worst part of that night was the warm low purr in my chest while I did it.
The worst part was that some part of me — some part I cannot get rid of, no matter how many years I have spent on the road or at this club or at the bottom of a bottle — some part of me has been waiting, ever since, for the next chance.
I tell her about the parking lot in Lexington.
The three men. Knox at the mouth of the alley.
The plate of eggs. I tell her about the two arrests in my twenties that did not stick.
I tell her about Graham. About the half-second when his hand was on her arm, when I felt the switch click on so quietly I did not hear it happen, and I tell her — and this is the part I have not told anyone, including Knox, including myself — that if she had not been standing right there, if there had not been her in the room to hold me, I am not certain Graham would have walked out of this library on his own feet.
I am not certain.
I tell her I am not certain.
I say, in a voice I cannot quite get to the volume I would like, "I am dangerous, Nora. Not in a story way. Not in a romance-novel way. In a way that you should be careful about. I want you to know that before — before this goes any further. I want you to know what you are getting."
I stop.
I look at my hands.
They have, while I was talking, closed into fists in my lap. I do not remember closing them. I do not remember when. They are sitting on my thighs in the small bunched curls of two men I have not been on speaking terms with in twelve years.
She looks at my hands.
She looks at me.
She reaches across the small round table between our chairs.
She puts her hand over my right fist.
She does not pull. She does not pry. She just lays her palm over my knuckles and waits, and her hand is small enough that it does not cover the whole fist, only the back of it, and her fingertips rest on the edges of my knuckles and her thumb tucks in under my pinkie finger.
She says, "Open."
I do not open right away.
She does not push.
She says, after a few seconds, very gently, "Rhett. Open."
I open my fist.
My fingers come uncurled slowly. The way they come uncurled when they have been clenched for a long time. The skin across the knuckles is white. There is a small red half-moon on each palm where my fingernails had been.
She lifts my hand.
She lifts it off my thigh.
She does not say anything.
She brings my open hand to her face.
She presses my palm flat against her cheek.
I — I do not have a word for what happens to me when she does that.
I will say it as cleanly as I can: it is the gentlest thing that has ever happened to my body.
Her cheek is warm. Her skin is so soft I cannot believe it under the pad of my thumb.
She has a small fine line of freckles I had not noticed under her eye.
She holds my hand against her face with both of her own hands, one over my wrist and one over my palm to keep mine there, and she closes her eyes.
She says, with her eyes closed, "You're not dangerous to me."
She says, "You are the safest place I have ever been."
I cannot — I cannot speak for a long moment. I sit in the wingback with my hand on her face and her hands over mine and my chest doing some new thing I have not been taught to do, and I let her hold my hand to her cheek for as long as she wants to hold it there.
She opens her eyes.
She is looking at me.
She says, "Rhett. I know what you told me.
I know all of it. I am not going to argue with you about any of it.
I am not going to tell you that you are wrong about yourself.
I do not think you are wrong about yourself.
I think there is a switch inside you that does what you said it does, and I think you are right to be careful with it, and I think you have been carrying it your whole life with a discipline that nobody — nobody — has ever given you credit for. "
She pauses.
She lets the next part land slow.
She says, "But the man who walked into this library twenty minutes ago and stood in the doorway and let me speak — that man is not a weapon.
That man is somebody I have never had standing in a room with me before.
That man is somebody I am not going anywhere away from, Rhett.
So you can be careful with yourself all you want.
You can be careful with me. But you cannot get rid of me with what you just told me.
You cannot get rid of me with anything you tell me. I am not going."
I do not have words.
I have never had words.
She has them. She is — and I am only beginning to learn this — she is the one of us with words. I am the one with hands. She uses hers to spell out the world. I use mine to hold it open.
She lifts my hand off her cheek.
She turns my palm up in both of hers.
She traces, with one fingertip, the line that runs across the middle of my hand from one side to the other.
She says, "This is your heart line."
I say, "Nora."
She says, "It's the longest one I have ever seen on a hand."
She lifts my hand to her mouth.
She presses her lips to the center of my palm. Once. Light. The kind of small careful kiss you would put on a child's scrape. She closes my fingers gently around the kiss, as if she has put a small private object there that she wants me to hold on to.
She lowers my hand back down to my thigh.
She does not let go.
She holds my hand on my own thigh, with both of hers, and she sits across from me in the wingback chair with her knees still tucked under her, and we sit like that for a long, long time.
The sun moves on the carpet.
The library is empty around us. There is only the soft tick of the wall clock and the small clean rustle of a maple leaf at the south window and the slow synchronized breathing of two people sitting across from each other in a pair of mismatched wingback chairs in a small public library in a small town in the Blue Ridge, in the last week of May.
I think, with my hand under hers and the kiss closed inside my fingers:
I am going to spend the rest of my life learning how to deserve this.
I do not say it out loud.
I do not have to.
She is already looking at me like she has heard me.