Chapter Twenty
SOMEBODY CAME UP my path at midnight, and my hand was on the gun before I knew who it was. Boots, quick, no care taken. Nobody hunting anybody walks up a gravel path like they’ve got a right to.
I put the piece away and stepped into the doorway, lamp behind me, then she came out of the pines and I damn near forgot how to breathe.
She looked bad.
Worse than bad.
Skin pale under the dim bulb, shadows under her eyes deep enough to look bruised, thinner than she’d been a few weeks ago, and shaking hard enough I could see it from the top step.
Wasn’t cold. July in South Carolina didn’t know cold.
This was a body running on fumes and starting to lose the argument.
Six days, Sawyer had said. She looked like it had been six weeks.
And under all of that, blazing out of a face six days past the end of itself, the maddest eyes I’ve ever seen.
“Amy — ”
“You didn’t sleep with her.”
Everything in me stopped.
She said it matter of factly. Standing at the bottom of my steps in the dark with her hands in fists at her sides. Not a question. She was watching my face when she said it, waiting for the thing my face was going to do. I’d spent most of my life learning not to give anything away.
Didn’t help worth a damn.
She saw it.
“There it is,” she said, and her voice broke apart on it. “There it is.”
“Who told you.”
“Does it matter?” She came up one step. “You’re not even going to lie? Not even a little? You’d think a man who built an entire play would have a second act ready — ”
“Sable,” I said. It wasn’t a guess. She’d been at the clubhouse that last night, before they moved her and the kids out, and I remember seeing her in the shadows.
“Yep.” Another step. “She saw you heading back to your cabin, about ten minutes after you paraded that woman down the hall. She saw you alone, Rune.” She was on the porch now, close enough that I could see how bad the shaking was, she tipped her chin up at me and didn’t back off one inch.
“So say it. Out loud. Right now. Say the thing you did.”
There wasn’t anything left to hide behind. Truth was, I was tired of hiding behind it anyway. “I didn’t touch her.”
Amy went still.
“Walked her to the end of the hall, gave her forty dollars to keep her mouth shut, and went outside.”
She made a sound like the words had hit somewhere physical.
“There,” she whispered. “There it is.”
* * *
She came inside because I stepped back and left the door open, and there wasn’t anywhere else for this to go. She didn’t sit. Just stood in the middle of my front room with her arms wrapped around herself, and for the first time that cabin felt too damn small.
“Why.”
“Amy—”
“Why.” She spun on me. “You kissed me. Then for two days you let me walk around that compound thinking—” Her voice broke and she stopped, swallowed, got it back.
“Then you did that. In front of everybody. In front of Brenda. Do you know what that felt like? Standing there while every person I knew watched me figure out I meant nothing to you?”
“You were never nothing.” Came out low and mean enough that she blinked. “Don’t say that about yourself in my house.”
“Then why?”
So I told her.
No fixing it. No making it sound better than it was.
“Because I’m thirty-five and you were eighteen when you got here.
Because I’ve put men in the ground, Amy.
Because these hands you trusted to make tea and pull splinters and show you what grows where have done things I don’t ever want touching your life.
” I looked down at them because I couldn’t look at her for that part.
“You came to us broken and marked up, and the first man reaching for you after that should’ve been somebody better than me. ”
“You don’t get to decide that.”
“I know.”
She went still.
“Know it now,” I said. “Didn’t then.”
I dragged a hand over my face. “I’d sat outside your door for months. Watched you jump every time some man got too close. Watched you learn how to breathe in this place one inch at a time. Then one night you looked at me and I wanted you.”
“You what?”
“Wanted you.” No sense softening it. “Bad. Worse than I had any business wanting anybody. Then I kissed you and every damn excuse I’d been holding onto disappeared.”
Her eyes didn’t leave mine.
“I thought if I kept going, I’d turn into one more man taking something from you because I wanted it.”
“You humiliated me.”
“Yeah.”
“You made me watch.”
“Yeah.” And I made myself say the ugly rest of it, because she’d walked down that path in the dark and she was owed every word.
“Because a kind lie you’d have argued with.
You’d have come back at me, and you’d have said the right things, you always say the right things, and I would have caved, Amy, I’d have caved inside of a week, because of how much I wanted you.
So I didn’t give you anything to argue with.
I gave you something you’d never forgive.
” My throat closed up. “I needed you to hate me. It was the only thing strong enough to hold.”
She stared at me.
And then, almost a whisper, she said the thing that took the ground out from under me.
“You decided what I could survive.”
I didn’t say anything.
“You looked at me — ” and she was crying now, and furious about it, swiping at her face like the tears were something crawling on her — “you looked at me and you decided I couldn’t be told the truth.
That I was too fragile for one hard sentence.
So you managed me. You made a decision about my life without me in the room, because you figured you knew better than I did what I could carry.
” She was shaking so hard she had to grab the back of a chair. “Do you know what this does to me?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I do.”
And that stopped her cold, because she hadn’t expected it.
“I’ve known it since the night in Brenda’s room,” I said.
“I stood over that woman and I watched what fifteen years of a man deciding what’s best for her did to her, and I finally saw myself plain.
I was doing the same thing to the girl I loved.
And I haven’t slept worth a damn one night since.
” I made myself hold her eyes. “My old man spent his life deciding what everybody else could take. Left my mother alone and called her tough enough to handle it. Walked away and told himself that made it alright.” I shook my head.
“I built my life around not being him, but here we are.”
She was very still.
“Say it again,” she said.
“Say what?”
“The middle part.”
And I looked at her, at this girl, shaking, hollow-eyed, half-dead on her feet and still refusing to go down, and I understood exactly which part she meant and exactly what it was going to cost me to say it, and I said it anyway. I was done. There was nothing left in me to hold the line with.
“A girl I loved,” I said.
“Loved.”
“Love.” It came out of me broken. “Love, Amy. Present tense. Every day. Every single day since before I had any right to, every day after I threw it away, every day I’ve sat forty feet behind your car pretending it was a job.
” I put my hands up and dropped them, useless.
“There. That’s the rest of it. That’s everything I’ve got.
I love you, and I’m too old for you, and I’ve got blood under my nails, and I hurt you worse than any man ever should have, and if you walk out that door right now, I will still be sitting out there behind you tomorrow morning at seven, because there is not one thing on this earth that could make me stop. ”
The cabin was so quiet I could hear the moths at the window.
She stood there in the middle of my floor with tears running down a face, six days without sleep, holding onto the back of a chair like it was the only thing keeping her upright.
And she said: “I hate you.”
“I know.”
“I hate you.” She was shaking. “You broke something in me that nobody else had gotten to yet. I let you in. You were the only one. You were the only man I ever — ” She stopped and put a hand over her mouth. “And you knew that. You knew it and you used it. You knew exactly where to hit me.”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t just agree with me!”
“What do you want me to do?” I took a step toward her and stopped myself before it was a step too far. “You’re right. Every damn word. I’m not going to stand here and defend it just because hearing it hurts.”
She stared at me.
“You can hate me as long as you need to,” I said. “I’m not going anywhere.”
And that broke her.
I watched it happen. The fury went out of her all at once, like a rope cut, and everything holding her up went with it.
Her knees gave. She went down and I got to her before the floor did, on my knees with her in my arms, and she was crying, crying so hard it didn’t make any sound at first, this awful silent heaving, months of it, months of it coming up out of her all at once, and she was hitting me.
Open hand, no strength left in it, hitting my chest and my shoulder while she cried.
And I let her. I held on and I let her hit me and I didn’t say one word.
Then the hitting turned into holding.
I felt it turn. Felt her hands stop striking and start gripping, felt her fist a handful of my shirt, haul herself in against me instead of away, and she pressed her face into my chest, hung on like I was the only thing between her and a long way down, I put my arms around her all the way, shut my eyes and knew I was going to hell for how good it felt.
“I can’t sleep,” she said, into my shirt, with almost nothing left to say it with. “Rune, I can’t sleep, I haven’t slept, I close my eyes and he’s there, and I can’t — I can’t do it anymore, I can’t do another night, I can’t — ”
“I know.”
“I didn’t want to come here.” She was still crying. “I didn’t want it to be you.”
“I know that too.”
“I still hate you.”
“That’s alright.” I got a hand up and put it on the back of her head, careful, the way you’d handle something that had already been broken once. “You can hate me and sleep at the same time. People do it all the time.”
And she made a sound that was almost a laugh, it about killed me, her fingers tightened in my shirt, and she didn’t let go.
I sat down on the floor of my own front room with my back against the couch, this girl in my lap, I left the lamp on, and I did the only thing I have ever been any good at where she’s concerned.
I breathed slow, and I let her follow it.
She was out within minutes.
* * *
I didn’t move for a long time.
She slept hard, heavy and boneless, all the way under, her hand still knotted in my shirt like she’d drop if she let go.
Her breathing went deep. The shaking stopped.
Somewhere in the first hour her face came unclenched and she looked, for the first time since I’d known her, like a girl of nineteen.
I sat on that floor and held her and did not sleep, because there was a man out there with a tattoo scratched into his throat, and because Devil had told me not two days ago that a wall doesn’t get to have hands, because he was right, because I was going to fail at that, and I knew it already, sitting there in the dark with her heart going slow and even against my ribs.
She’d come to me. After everything. She’d walked down a dark path in the middle of the night, stood in my house and told me she hated me, and then she’d fallen asleep on my chest.
I’d take it. God forgive me, I’d take whatever she gave me, for as long as she’d give it.
And in the morning I was going to have to look her in the eye and keep the other thing from her, the thing Brenda told me in that kitchen, the thing I hadn’t slept a full night since hearing, the thing that made me want to put a man in the ground and sleep fine after.
I held her, and I watched the window, and I waited for the sun.