Chapter Thirty-Five #3
He swayed a little. I reached out and took his arm because that’s what you did when someone was falling. I steered him toward the couch and sat him down hard enough that he grunted.
“Shoes,” I said. He didn’t move. I dropped to a knee and untied them because rage and love are apparently cousins.
The laces were wet. Mud flaked and stuck to my fingers.
He watched my hands like they belonged to someone else.
“You don’t get to do this to me,” I whispered when I got the second boot off.
The words fell out like a secret I didn’t want to keep.
He didn’t seem to hear me, just tapped his forehead. Hard enough to leave a red mark on the skin. “I can’t turn them off,” he said.
I think I heard my heart shatter on the floor. I was losing a good man to his demons. And I couldn’t do a damn thing to stop it. You couldn’t stop a soul hellbent on its own destruction.
I covered him with the throw blanket we kept at the edge of the couch and started to walk away. But when I glanced behind me and saw him watching me, I couldn’t stop myself.
“You used to tell me you wouldn’t be like her. You promised yourself you wouldn’t end up like your mother. You fought every day of your life to prove you were stronger than that.”
Even in the dim light, I saw him tense. When he spoke next, his words sounded terrifyingly sober. “Don’t go there, Holly.”
“I didn’t,” I shot back. “You did.”
“You don’t get it.”
A laugh ripped out of me. Broken. Sharp.
“Really? I don’t get it?” I stepped closer. “After they found him not guilty all those years ago, I swore I would never let a man touch me again. Ever. Then you showed up.”
My voice wavered but I didn’t let it fall.
“I tried so hard not to love you. So fucking hard. But you climbed every wall I built. Letters and stolen kisses and promises.”
I swallowed.
“Then I buried you. I mourned you. I let that grief almost kill me. So don’t stand there and tell me I don’t get it.”
“Malibu—”
“You survived a war,” I cut him off. “You survived a crash. You dragged yourself across a desert to get home.”
My throat tightened.
“And now you’re in our home with the same glassy eyes she had.”
I paused, swallowing and clenching my jaw so hard it hurt.
“I am not going to sit here and watch you disappear one drink at a time,” I said. “I love you too much for that.”
I turned and forced myself toward the bedroom without looking back.
I didn’t sleep. Not then. Eventually I went back out into the living room and sat on the floor with my back against the wall until my legs went numb and my lower back throbbed.
I watched him. I watched his chest for the rise and fall.
And realized this was almost as bad as watching them fold that flag over an empty grave.
The rain kept at the balcony. The clock did its job.
Around dawn, the apartment turned the color of dish water.
Every surface went from sharp to smudged as the morning rays fought their way through the closed curtains.
His face looked younger when he slept and I hated it for a second because it made me want to forgive him faster than was good for either of us.
I stood and walked to the kitchen. I had left my sobriety coin on the counter and I palmed it, running my fingers over the familiar edges around the rim. I couldn’t go back there.
When I went back to the living room, he’d turned on his side and curled a little like his ribs remembered something his mind refused to. I touched his shoulder and he startled, then settled. “Jackson,” I said.
He didn’t open his eyes.
“If you won’t fight for yourself,” I said, and the steadiness in my voice came from someone I didn’t recognize, “I can’t keep fighting for both of us.”
He made a small sound that wasn’t a word.
I waited. A tiny, silly part of me hoped he would wake up.
Beg for forgiveness. Promise to change. Something.
But his breath just evened out again. I watched his fingers twitch and thought of the first night he’d slept in my bed like it might explode under him.
I thought about the fire he’d ignited under my skin when he touched me.
I fought back the tears as I remembered the way he’d said my name like a promise.
About how he’d made me feel safe, loveable, and cherished when I thought that part of me had been broken forever.
I went to the bedroom and pulled out his duffel, putting clothes in it without folding them. I put his toothbrush in the pocket with the dog tag he never wore, and then I took the dog tag out and set it on the table beside my coin. They looked wrong together and exactly right.
My phone was on the charger. Hannah’s name sat near the top of recent calls because fate had a sense of humor. I tapped it. The line rang twice.
“Morning, darling.”
“Hannah.” The word came out half sob, half question.
“It’s ok,” she said. Not a question. She knew. “I’m coming.”
The sun climbed a half inch. The rain stopped like someone remembered to turn off the hose. He slept through the knock that wasn’t a knock, just the handle turning because she still had a spare key.
Hannah came in with her hair pulled back and the expression of a woman who had already buried too much and refused to do it again. She looked at me first, not him. I handed her the bag. She took it without looking inside. “Do you want me to wake him?”
“I don’t think I can hear his voice right now,” I said, and that was the truest thing I’d said all week.
“I’ve got him.” She put a hand on my arm in a way that didn’t ask me to crumble. “I’ll call when—” She changed her mind about the sentence and let it end there.
She went to the couch and crouched. She touched his shoulder the way I had, light but enough to carry meaning.
He flinched and then sat up with the guilty look of a kid caught sleeping in church.
He saw her, and confusion washed over his face before the other thing did—the thing like a weather front. Understanding. Resignation. Shame.
“What did I do?” he started.
“Enough,” Hannah said. “Get your shoes.”
He looked at me. I stared at the window and counted the streaks the rain had left on the glass. He stood, didn’t meet my eyes. Hannah picked up the duffel and didn’t say anything else because there was nothing left in the room that language could fix.
At the door, he paused like he’d forgotten his wallet.
I knew if I turned, I would undo whatever resolve I had managed to build in the last hour.
I stared at the table instead. My nostrils flared.
My jaw clenched. My eyes burned. Don’t you dare cry.
My coin shone a little in the watery light. The dog tag didn’t.
The door opened. Closed. The hallway gave back the sound of their footsteps, then swallowed it. The truck outside coughed and settled. A second later it backed out. The tires made that wet hiss as they rolled over the last of the rain.
The roof held. The couch sat in the same place it always sat.
The cups waited on the counter. The light on the ceiling shifted and didn’t mean anything yet.
I sat down at the table and put both hands flat on the wood.
I didn’t touch the coin or the tag. I didn’t call anyone.
I didn’t cry. I listened to the quiet until it wasn’t quiet anymore, just a thing with weight.
I’d buried him once and walked away with a folded flag and a hole that didn’t understand geometry.
Now I stared at a shut door and felt the same ache rearrange my lungs.
No sirens. No speeches. Just the sound of a car that had already turned the corner, and a room that remembered how to be empty.