Chapter Forty-Seven
The weight of Laiken’s truth had crushed me.
I knew how it felt to want to die, the need to end it all, to want to drift to a quiet place.
A place where every snapped rib could be melded back together without any heavy lifting.
Where you could blunt the shard that had incessantly driven trauma to your heart.
And I knew how it felt to bleed against the barrel of a gun.
Knowing that Laiken had taken the same turn as me, tasted the same bitter metal, and I was too blinded by my own pain to see her hiding beneath the striations, proves just how goddamn selfish I’d been.
I had convinced myself that if she still had Harlen, she would be okay. I didn’t think to wonder what she might have been hiding from him in the dark, that she could be wandering down the same decaying path.
I lift the bottle of whiskey to my mouth, adding pressure against my lips. The liquor blows fuel against the flames in my chest.
When I watched her from my truck early this morning, disappearing for a short second too long toward the back of Devil’s Diner, something debilitating came over me. It was fear, the palpable pressure of losing another person who meant the whole goddamn world to me.
And tonight, without the coke to alleviate that pain, I felt like a complete fraud.
I only watched her the one day of the year that I thought mattered. For the other three-hundred-and-sixty-four days, I’d left her on her own.
“Shit looked serious in there,” Harlen says from beside me.
We are sitting at the large glass table on the deck. The foreboding clouds overhead had just opened up, casting a light sprinkle of rain around us.
“Mmmm,” I counter.
“You wanna talk about it?” he asks.
My chest squeezes as tightly as my fist around the bottle. I don’t look at Harlen when I tell him, “She just told me she’s spent three years wanting to kill herself…” I return the bottle to my lips, take a pull.
He stays silent and I don’t turn to look at him; I’m staring at the lake in a guilt inflicted stupor when something runs from my nose.
Touching my fingers to my top lip, I draw them back to see the crimson smear of a nosebleed.
I press my nose into the crook of my arm and drag it back across my bicep, wiping it away.
I’d never had nosebleeds, not until I started using coke.
“You know what else she told me?” I rasp, wiping the blood from my fingers across the front of my jeans. My knee jerks up and down.
When Harlen doesn’t reply, I tell him, “That every time she tried to squeeze the trigger she couldn’t do it…
” I pause. Blood thuds against my eardrums. “Because she kept seeing me.” Clenching my teeth, I seethe, “Do you know how it fucking feels to know that me, the person that fucked her up so bad…” I slam my hand to my chest. “Was her flinch?” I’m shaking my head.
“She told me herself…that I fucked her so hard she couldn’t remove me. ”
My pain, the depth of my guilt, stills the air around us, turning it rotten.
The rain falls harder now, dimpling the obsidian surface in the distance when Harlen rasps, “Fuck.”
I close my eyes, and push the bottle flush against my lips. “Yeah, fuck.” I sink way too much liquor, catching the spillage at the crook of my elbow when I turn to look at him, begging for some clarity, “What do I do?”
Harlen is leaning over his knees, his palms chasing rain from his face.
“What the fuck do I do with that?” I repeat, taking another swig.
“Gimme that.” Harlen reaches out, snatching the bottle from me, taking it to his mouth.
I drill my palms back through my soaked hair, massaging my fingers into my scalp.
“What happens if I do this, if I let myself be in her life, and she finds something good inside, something she trusts, and I fuck her up again? What if I find myself in another hole? But one…one that’s just way too fucking deep and dark to get out of? ”
“I’ll drag your ass out,” Harlen says, his cadence telling me it’s not up for discussion. “I won’t let you hurt her, man.”
Silence hangs a beat, wraps itself around us at the same time lightning zig-zags across the sky.
“But what if I do?”
My question is weak, a whisper beneath my breath, but Harlen’s reply is harder, like stone.
“Not gonna happen.”
I sniff, hang my head. “That’s a lot of belief you got in me,” I tell him.
I feel his hand wrap around my shoulder, his fingers squeeze. I glance back at him.
He blinks, then rasps, “We all gotta believe in something, right?”
I palm my face. “What does that even mean?”
Harlen looks away.
So do I.
We exhale at the same time.
I stare ahead at the thick film of water, rain drumming down like bullets against my shoulders.
“What does that even mean?” I repeat.
When there’s a lull in the rain, Harlen turns his eyes on me.
“Motherfucker, it means I’m choosing to believe in you.”