Chapter 31 #2
I look around the room, mystified. The truth has exploded between us, and there should be bloody brain matter on the rough rug and the log walls, fragments of my skull.
My mind has been blown out. The truth is a bomb site, severed electrical lines at your feet, the long and daunting labor ahead of rebuilding, rewiring.
Henry is so far from the first person to suggest I have an issue with intimacy, but until now it has always seemed to be an abstract and numberless problem.
How can I say what it all adds up to when the figures have been concealed from me?
When I am the one doing the concealing?
I come around the corner of the bed so I am facing Henry, though I keep my distance from him.
I am shaking, surging with adrenaline and knowledge that feels new but is actually very, very old.
Henry looks up at me, his face warm with fire and cool with moonlight.
Both things. He is both things. “I have to tell you something,” I say.
The thing that happened at the daycare. The thing we laughed about while watching my show projected onto the wall of PT’s cabin. That’s not it. That’s part of it, but it’s not the root that needs to be yanked so the weed stops growing back.
When I was about nine or ten years old, I told my parents.
I don’t remember what possessed me to confide in them, what must have presented as the proper segue to someone who still preferred her Velveteen Rabbit with the silk-lined ears to a pillow, but I remember they were furious, which is what I was afraid they might be, only to my complete shock, their anger was not directed at me.
They were stomping around, talking about making calls to lawyers and congresspeople and other parents.
But first they wanted to know, they needed to understand, why I did not tell them what was happening while it was happening.
I had paused, not because I needed time to think about my answer but because the answer seemed so obvious I could not understand why they needed to ask at all.
I was being punished because I had misbehaved, I managed to convey to them in my nine-year-old’s way, and I was afraid of being punished a second time at home. Why would I tell them that someone was hurting me when I deserved to be hurt?
But, they had said, as befuddled as I was, we are the ones to decide what you deserve.
We are your parents, and so we are the ones to slap your soft cheeks when you leave your wet towels on the carpet, to give you the silent treatment when you get a bad grade, to berate you and call you selfish and ungrateful when you fail to recognize all that we have done for you, to wash your mouth out with soap when you sass us and when we march you to the bathroom only to discover that the Irish Spring bar is too big to fit in your small mouth, we are the ones who get to tell you to take a bite of it, to chew and swallow instead.
We get to do all this to you because we love you.
Henry’s face is still but for small flickers of movement in his jawline.
There is an angry, sensual energy coming off him, and it has rearranged the molecules in the air, sparked a brushfire of goose bumps along the backs of my arms, the tops of my thighs.
Whatever is about to happen, whatever Henry is about to say, it will be new for us.
“Hearing that,” Henry says in a husky voice, like he has been startled awake by the garbage trucks too early in the morning, looked down, realized his cock was swollen against his leg, reached over to wake me too, “makes me fucking crazy.”
Blood booms from my heart.
“Crazy, Faye. It makes me crazy.”
I stare at him, feeling like there is a button at my throat that needs undoing. Illuminated by the wrath of the fire, Henry has never looked more terrifying.
“I’ll kill them,” he continues in a soft and maniacal voice.
“When we get out of here, I’m killing them.
Anyone who put their hands on little you.
I don’t care if you tell me not to. I don’t care if you tell me no.
” He is watching me as he says this, observing me, breathing hard through his mouth.
I say nothing. I do nothing. But I signal him anyhow.
He gets up slow, unfurling himself inch by exhilarating inch, and then he begins to approach me in his graceful, wolfish way.
I am frozen to the spot. When Henry has set eyes on you, it is too late to run.
“Do you hear me?” he says, coming nearer.
I nod. Behind me, a piece of burning wood splits and steams.
“Do you understand?”
Again I nod.
“Full sentences, sweetheart.”
“I understand.”
Henry stops before me, above me. His hair is wild from the boat ride over here.
Little devil horns, all over his head. His lips are an unbelievable bright cherry red, and when he puts them on mine, he tastes like a blast of cinnamon.
I grind my pelvis into his, filled with strange, tender aggression, and Henry’s groan rumbles the walls of my throat.
He kisses the bridge of my nose, my eyelids, he bites the divot in my upper lip, telling me that only he gets to put his hands on me, and only because I ask, and because he will do anything I ask, until we are eighty years old and rocking in our rocking chairs on our front porch, watching our grandchildren shoot each other dead with water guns.
If that’s what I need, that’s what I fucking need.
“Stop,” I tell him, but he doesn’t. “Henry, stop.” I twist my face away; I push him off. He takes me by the wrists and begins to back me into the bed and he only stops when I tell him to give me his phone.