Chapter 6 #2
"Why?" she asks when she's got hold of herself. "Njal. Why are you doing all of this? You don't know me. I keep waiting for the part where it costs something. Where there's a price. And I can't find it, and that scares me worse than if there was one."
There it is.
The worst thing in her life, slid across this same table last night, because I was the only one who hadn't already decided what she was.
She gave me hers. It isn't right to keep mine in my pocket.
"There's no price," I tell her. "But I'll give you something, so it's even between us."
She goes still and watchful.
"You told me about Hannah. What they did to her—the praying, the laying on of hands. All those years they called a sickness a sin." I keep my eyes on the table, because it's easier to say to the wood. "I know everything you’re saying. Not from beside it, the way you do. From inside it."
I make myself look up at her.
"I'm bipolar. Same as your sister." My hands want a job, so I give them the water glass, turn it a quarter turn on the wood.
"I came apart a few years back. Bad. They put me in a hospital.
Locked ward, the whole thing. Took eight months and a bunch of medication switches before I was anything like a person again. "
She doesn't move.
"That's why I sip the wine and never finish it. The meds and the drink don't get along." I turn the glass back the other way. "You noticed. I saw you notice."
She doesn't say any of the things people say.
She doesn't flinch back from the table. She doesn't reach for my hand to tell me how brave I am, or how she'd never have guessed. She doesn't reach for a Bible the way the people around her sister did.
She just looks at me, steady, her whole face open.
"Then you're the only person in this town who actually knows what my life has been."
For years, I've kept this thing pulled tight in my chest. It works itself loose, right there at the table.
"Yeah," I say. "I guess I am."
I don't know which of us moves first.
I'd like to say it was her. She's the one who's been wrecked, raw, and grateful. A better man would've held the line harder.
But it might've been me. It might've been me the second she said the only person who actually knows.
Because nobody has ever looked at the worst of me and named it the thing that made me useful to them instead of the thing that made me dangerous.
She doesn't stand up right away. She sits there across the table from me, where the empty plate still is, the one I filled with my mother's cooking an hour ago and watched her clean because she'd forgotten to eat all day.
She's looking at me like I'm a problem she doesn't have the equation for.
"You're staring," I tell her.
"I am." She doesn't look away. Her thumb finds the inside of her own wrist and works a slow circle there.
"I keep waiting to be afraid of you. You're exactly what my mother spent my whole life warning me about.
And I sat in your kitchen and ate your mother's food, and I'm not afraid of a single thing… except how much I'm not afraid."
"Sophie."
"I want to tell you something." She says it fast, like ripping off a bandage, and her eyes drop to the table, to the grain of the wood, to anywhere but me.
"I already told you I've never done this.
I don't think I said it plain enough. I'm a virgin.
I'm twenty-six, and I'm the deacon's daughter, and I've never—and I know how that?—"
"It's not a problem."
"I didn't say it was a problem." Her jaw sets. "I said it so you'd know I don't have the first idea what I'm doing. So when I mess it up, you'll know why."
"You won't mess it up."
"You don't know that."
"I know you." I reach across the table and cover her hand with mine.
Her fingers are cold. "I know you showed up at my door in a rainstorm with nothing but the clothes on your back and you still tried to apologize for dripping on my floor.
I know you think you've got to earn every single thing you get.
Including this." I press my palm flat to hers. "You don't."
Her breath goes uneven.
"Come here," I say.
She pushes back from the table and stands, and I stand too, and I don't close the distance. Not yet.
"Tell me what you want." I keep my voice low. "Not what you think I want. Not what you think you're supposed to want. Just you."
Her mouth opens. Closes. I watch her fight it—the years of being told what she was allowed to feel, what she was allowed to ask for, lined up behind her teeth.
"I want you to kiss me," she says finally. "And I want to know what it feels like to want something and not be ashamed of it."
I close the distance.
I do it slowly, so she sees it coming, so she's got room to step back. She doesn't step back.
Her chin lifts, and her breath catches when my hand comes up to cup her jaw—same as that first night on the porch, except that night I was stopping us, and tonight I'm not.
"Eyes on me," I murmur.
She opens them.
I kiss her.
I kiss her the way I've wanted to since she stood on my porch with rain in her hair and ruin at her back—slow, thorough, every ounce of patience I've got in it.
Her lips part on a soft sound, and I take my time learning the shape of her mouth, the way she sighs into it like she's been holding that breath for years.
Her hands fist in my shirt. She's trembling, and it isn't fear.
It's the sheer newness of being touched like she's something a man would slow down for.
"Don't be careful with me like I'll break," she says against my mouth. "You promised."
"I'm not." I get a hand into her hair. "Bedroom. I'll show you the difference."
I take her hand and lead her, because she's never been past my kitchen and she doesn't know the way.
There's something in walking her back through my own dark house that settles me—her hand in mine, her bare feet quiet on the floorboards behind me, trusting me to know where we're going when she doesn't.
The bedroom's plain. A bed, a lamp, the window cracked to the pines.
She stops in the doorway and takes it in, and I give her the moment to change her mind.
She doesn't.
She steps in.
I take my time with her, because time is the one thing every person in her life has refused her.
The whole world has rushed this woman. Rushed her into composure. Into silence. Into being good and quiet and small. So I do the opposite of rushing.