Chapter Twenty-Two
SHE CAME BACK the next night, and the night after that, and by the fourth one I quit pretending to myself that I was surprised.
I’d leave the door unlocked around ten. Not sitting there waiting on her.
I wouldn’t do that to her, she’d have felt it the second she walked in, and the thing only worked because it cost her nothing to come.
So I’d go about my business. Clean the kit.
Sort the drying racks. Work the mortar until my hands hurt.
And around eleven, sometimes midnight, there’d be boots on my gravel.
Every damn time, my heart would kick hard once before I could stop it, and every damn time I’d keep my back to the door, give her a minute to come in on her own, and say something ordinary about the kettle.
That was the deal we never made out loud. She got to come, and I got to not make it a thing.
The first few nights she slept on the floor.
I’d get the blanket down and she’d curl up on it like a stray that wanted the fire but not the hand, and I’d sit against the couch a few feet off and breathe slow, and she’d match it without knowing she was doing it, and she’d be gone inside of ten minutes.
Never longer than ten. Nine days without sleep does that to a body. It stops negotiating. It just falls.
That night I said, “Take the bed.”
“No.”
“Amy. Your back’s going to seize up on that floor.”
“I’m not taking your bed.”
“You are, or I’m going to spend the night listening to you not-sleep because your hip hurts, and then neither one of us gets anything.
” I dropped the pillow on the mattress and went and sat on the floor with my back against the bedframe, in reach and out of reach, the same distance I’d sat outside her door for months a lifetime ago.
“There. Same as always. You’re up there, I’m down here, and nothing on this earth is getting past me. ”
She stood in the middle of the cabin working that over, and I could damn near see the argument happening behind her eyes, pride on one side and exhaustion on the other. Exhaustion won. She climbed onto the bed in her clothes, turned her back to me, and pulled the blanket up.
“This doesn’t mean anything.”
“Alright.”
“I mean it.”
“I heard you.”
“Rune.”
“Go to sleep, Amy.”
She was asleep in six minutes. I sat on the floor by that bed and listened to her breathe until the sun came up.
* * *
By the second week she’d stopped coming down dressed to sleep. She’d bring a T-shirt with her, disappear into the bathroom, and come back barefoot with her hair piled up and her face scrubbed clean, toothbrush in one hand like there was nothing strange about any of it.
That damn toothbrush nearly finished me.
It’s not the big things that get a man. You think it will be. You think it’ll be a woman asleep in your bed, or the first time she comes through your door after midnight, or knowing there’s a shirt of yours against skin you’ve spent months trying not to think about.
It’s not.
It’s her toothbrush beside yours in the morning.
It’s a hair tie she forgot by the sink and a cup she used still sitting beside the kettle.
It’s opening your bathroom door and seeing little pieces of her lying around your house like they belong there, then realizing somewhere along the way you quit thinking of them as things you’re supposed to give back.
I liked having her there.
That was the truth of it, and there wasn’t much use lying to myself anymore.
I liked hearing her feet on my floor. Liked knowing which tea she’d reach for without asking.
Liked the way she’d steal the good pillow and deny she’d done it, liked finding one purple hair stuck to the towel and knowing exactly whose it was.
She started talking.
Never about the big thing. Never about where she’d come from or what she’d seen in that parking garage, and I didn’t ask.
But the little things started coming when we lay in the dark, when she could talk without anybody looking at her face.
She’d be lying in my bed, I’d be down on the floor and she’d tell me about a professor she couldn’t stand, or something stupid Sawyer had done, or a woman in one of her classes who ate tuna out of a bag and ought to be arrested for it.
Sometimes she’d start telling me a memory, cut it off halfway through, and I’d let it die where she left it.
Entire conversations happened that way, scattered across a dark room with ten minutes of nothing between pieces.
I’d never talked to anybody like that in my life.
One night, somewhere past one, she said, “Tell me about your mother.”
I didn’t answer right away.
“You don’t have to,” she said.
“No, I—” I stared up at the dark ceiling, turning it over. “Nobody’s asked me that in a long time.”
So I told her.
Not about the plants. She’d worked that garden beside me long enough to know where most of those came from.
I told her the rest, the parts I’d never handed anybody: that my mother was the kind of woman who’d sit all night with somebody else’s sick kid and never once think to doctor herself, that my father rode with the club back when it was rotten clear through and stayed gone more than he stayed home, and that she wouldn’t leave him.
Not for anything. Not once. Didn’t matter what it cost her.
I told Amy I’d patched into that same club at nineteen for one reason, and it wasn’t brotherhood. I wanted to be close enough to keep an eye on my mother.
Then I told her about the last year.
About brewing things that didn’t work and reading every book I could get my hands on, digging through my mother’s own notebooks and mixing what she’d written down, changing one thing and then another like maybe the right combination was hiding somewhere and I just hadn’t been smart enough to find it yet.
I told her what it was to watch a woman who’d spent her life fixing everybody else go slow in a house with the curtains drawn while the man who’d promised to love her was off doing whatever the hell he was doing.
“I couldn’t fix her,” I said to the ceiling.
“I’ve fixed damn near everybody who’s come through that door since.
Dug bullets out of men. Set bones. Got Chain breathing again on my kitchen floor.
” I swallowed against something that hadn’t gotten easier in all these years. “Couldn’t fix the one that mattered.”
Amy didn’t say anything for so long I thought she’d fallen asleep.
Then, softly, from the bed, “That’s why.”
“That’s why what.”
“The garden.” Her voice was thick, half-asleep and she didn’t know what she was doing to me. “That’s why you never once let a thing grow out there just to be pretty. Everything’s got a job.” A pause. “You’re still trying to save her.”
I lay there on the floor of my cabin and couldn’t speak.
“That’s the saddest thing I ever heard,” she said, and then she was asleep, I stayed awake till dawn, because nobody in thirty-five years had looked at that garden and seen what it was meant to be.
* * *
By the third week, the cabin had become dangerous in a different way.
Devil had sat me down in his office and told me plain that a wall didn’t get to have hands, and I’d understood him. She was scared, I was the thing standing closest, and there were lines a man didn’t get to blur just because he loved the woman on the other side of them.
So I didn’t touch her. Not the way I wanted to.
Problem was, nobody’d said a damn thing about looking.
I’d stopped being able to look at her mouth, which was inconvenient as hell because apparently Amy did everything with it.
Bit the corner when she was thinking. Pressed her lips together when she was trying not to laugh at me.
Licked tea off the bottom one without knowing she was doing it and nearly sent me out into the garden twice in one week.
She wasn’t doing any of it for me.
That made it worse.
And somewhere in there, she started looking too.
I’d catch her eyes on my hands when I rolled my sleeves up, or on my chest when I came in from the garden with my shirt stuck to me from the heat.
Once I caught her looking at my mouth and her eyes snapped away so fast she damn near hurt herself, and I spent the next hour sitting on that floor trying not to grin like some sixteen-year-old fool who’d just figured out a girl liked him.
Neither one of us said a word about any of it.
Didn’t need to.
She’d hand me a cup, our fingers would brush, and I’d feel that little bit of contact all the way up my arm; then I’d look at her and catch the same hitch in her, the tiny pause before she pulled away, and we’d both go right back to pretending tea was the most interesting thing happening in the room.
Three weeks of that will do something to the air.
By then, that cabin had gotten so full of wanting you could’ve struck a match to it.
* * *
And under all of it. Under every good hour. Under the toothbrush, the tea and the girl asleep in my bed with her hand in my shirt.
I knew what her father did to her.
Brenda told me everything. Took her fifty minutes, and she cried damn near all fifty while I stood in that room and didn’t move, didn’t make a sound, just listened while the instinct to kill ran through me.
She used the plain words for it because Brenda’s not a woman who dresses things up, and I haven’t slept through a night since.
I can’t tell Amy I know.
That’s the thing that sits on my chest at three in the morning while she’s finally sleeping.
Because one day she’s going to look at me and understand that Brenda told me everything.
That the worst thing that ever happened to her got told without her knowing, by the one person she made promise never to tell anybody.
And when she finds out I knew and let her believe I didn’t, I don’t know if she’ll ever trust me the same way again.
But I still hold it. Every night while she lies there talking to me in the dark.
I told her three weeks ago in this room that I would never run another play on her as long as I lived, I meant it with everything in me, and I’m lying to her every single night, and I’d do it again tomorrow, because the alternative is taking from her the last thing on this earth that’s still hers to give.
That’s the damn trap. There’s no clean way out. I’ve turned it over a hundred nights and there isn’t one.
She has to tell me herself.
She has to hand it to me, in her own words, in her own time, and I have to sit there and take it like it’s the first time I’m hearing any of it, and God knows what that’ll cost me, and I don’t care, I’ll pay it. It’s hers, and I’d cut my own tongue out before I’d take it.
* * *
Last night she came down at eleven with her hair wet from the shower and her eyes already half-gone, and she didn’t say much of anything at all.
Drank the tea I put in front of her. Made some small joke about her chemistry professor that neither of us laughed at.
Then she went and lay down on my bed with her back to the room, the way she always did, and I put the light out and got down on the floor against the frame, the way I always did.
And that should have been that.
She got comfortable above me. I heard her breathing start to stretch out, and I lay there listening to the moths tapping at the screen while I did what I’d gotten real good at doing, kept my hands to myself and thought about everything except the woman in my bed.
Then the bed moved.
Not much. Just the shift of her sitting up, careful about it. I heard her come up on one elbow, heard her go still, listening, and I understood exactly what she was doing.
She was checking if I was asleep.
I didn’t move a muscle. Kept my breathing slow, deep and even, the same rhythm I’d been giving her for weeks, I did it on purpose, and I knew what I was doing when I did it.
The covers pulled back. The mattress creaked.
And then there were two bare feet coming down beside my shoulder, and a small weight lowering itself onto the floor, and Amy lay down on that hard floor behind me in the dark, in my shirt, and fit herself along my back like she was hiding from something.
Fucking hell.
Her forehead nestled between my shoulder blades.
I forgot how to breathe.
Then her hand came around me. Slow. Slow enough that I felt every inch of the decision before her palm finally stopped over the middle of my chest. Right over my heart.
Every muscle in my body locked.
She went still behind me too, and I understood what she was doing. Waiting to see if she’d woken me. Giving herself one last chance to get up, climb back into that bed and pretend none of this had happened.
I kept my eyes shut and made my chest rise under her hand.
After a minute, when she believed it, something in her loosened against me, and that’s when I understood.
She hadn’t come down because of a nightmare.
There hadn’t been a sound out of her, no bad breathing, no jerk awake, none of the things I’d learned to hear before she did.
She’d been lying awake in my bed. Then she’d climbed down onto a hard floor because she wanted to be close to me.
Wanted.
Christ Almighty.
Her nose brushed once against the back of my neck as she settled in, probably an accident, probably nothing, and every part of me that was a man came awake so hard and fast I had to clench my jaw against it.
I could feel the warmth of her from shoulders to knees. Feel her breath through my shirt. Feel each one of her fingers where they rested over my heart, and there wasn’t one damn part of me that didn’t know exactly how easy it would be to turn over.
If I did, she’d have died of it. She’d have been up and out that door and back in her own bed with her jaw set and she would never, ever have come down that path again.
So I didn’t move.
Hardest damn thing I’ve ever done.
I lay there on the floor aching, her hand over my heart and let her believe, all night long, that I was asleep and didn’t know.
She went out about twenty minutes later. Her fingers curled slowly into my shirt as she went under. I felt every one of them.
And God help me, I wanted to turn over.