Chapter Fifteen
THERE ARE HARDER things than wanting a woman you can't have.
I learned that on the floor of my own room, in the dark, a few feet from the only woman I ever truly wanted, holding her hand through the door of sleep while she fought men I'd already put in the ground.
That's the part she doesn't know. That's the part I carry down into those black hours every night and never set down, not for a second, that the men in her woods aren't out there anymore.
The one who walked her in, the pretty lying boyfriend who held her hand and talked sweet and delivered her like a wrapped present, we got him first. Got the truth out of him in a barn off the county road, every name, every face, before Throttle did what a brother does.
And then we rode the rest of that summer like the devil's own and we got the others, one at a time, and there is not a man left walking who put his hands on Beatrice in those trees. I know that the way I know my own name.
She doesn't know it. She can't. Because to tell her what we did with our hands the summer she lost her mind, and that's a weight I won't lay on a woman who's barely holding the one she's already got.
So I hold it instead. I lie on the floor by her bed and I listen to her fight ghosts, and every cell in me is screaming they can't touch you, they're dead, I killed them for you, and I say none of it.
I just say I'm here. It's the truest small thing I've got that won't break her.
Some nights the hand is enough. My hand around hers through the worst of it, my voice low, and she climbs back up and the woods let go.
The night it changed, the hand wasn't enough.
It came up out of her worse than I'd heard yet, not a whimper, not the swallowed kind she'd been trained into, but a real scream, torn loose, the sound of a person being taken, and she was thrashing in the sheets, fighting, her hand ripping out of mine because in the dream my hand wasn't mine, it was theirs.
I came up off the floor and got to the edge of the bed and I didn't grab her.
You don't grab a woman drowning in a dream of being grabbed; you'd just become the thing she's fighting.
I got close and I made my voice the rope.
"Bee. Bee, it's Eli. You're in my room. It's a dream, baby, it's just a dream, come up out of it. Follow my voice. Come up."
She wasn't coming. She was too deep, too far down in the trees, and I watched her fight something that wasn't there and I felt the most useless I have ever felt in my life, a big man at the edge of a bed who could kill anything in the world except the thing actually hurting her.
So I said the only true thing left.
"I'm right here," I said. "I'm not going anywhere. I'm gonna stay right here till you find your way back. You're not alone in there. You hear me? You are not alone."
And something in it reached her. Her eyes came open, wild, blind, still half in the woods, and they found me, found my face in the dark, and for one breath I braced for her to scramble back from me the way she had that first night, to see one more man come out of the dark at her.
She didn't scramble back.
She lunged. Came up off the pillow and into me, both hands fisting my shirt, her whole shaking body trying to climb inside my ribs where nothing could reach it, and she made a sound against my chest that I will hear on my deathbed, a small, broken, please of a sound, no words in it, just don't, stay, hold, please, and her hands hauled at me, pulling, and there was no mistaking what she was asking for, even mostly asleep, even out of her mind with it.
Not my hand. The whole of me. Between her and the dark.
I had about half a second to make the call, and I made it, and I'll stand by it before God and her brother both.
I toed off my boots and I got up onto that bed, on top of the blanket, every stitch of clothing on, careful as a man handling something holy, leaving the covers between us like a line I was drawing for the both of us in the dark, and I gathered her in.
Got my back to the headboard and got her in against my chest and wrapped both arms around all that shaking, and I held her.
Held her the way you'd hold somebody at the edge of a cliff.
Held her so the dark would have to come through me to get to her, which it was welcome to try.
"There," I murmured into her hair. "There. I've got you. I've got you now, all of you, not letting go. Nothing's getting to you tonight. Not a thing in this world."
She came apart against me. All of it, four years of it, shaking it out into my shirt, and I just held on and let her, my hand moving slow on her back, my voice going low and steady and stupid with the same few words over and over—safe, here, got you, safe—until the shaking started, by inches, to ease.
I wanted her. God help me, I'm not made of stone, and I'd wanted this woman through more lonely years than I'll admit to, and now she was in my arms in my bed, soft and warm and holding onto me like I was the last solid thing in the world.
The want was there. It would always be there.
It came up in me sharp and I took it by the throat and I drowned it, held it under, killed it dead, because the woman in my arms was in the worst hour of her life and reaching for shelter, not for a man, and a man who'd let one ounce of his own wanting touch that, who'd take that closeness as anything but the trust it was, isn't a man at all.
He's just one more set of hands in her dark.
So I didn't let it touch her. Not a breath of it.
I made myself nothing but a wall with a heartbeat, the safest place in the world, and I held the wanting down in the same deep hole where I keep the rest of it, the rage, still alive after four years, that I couldn't kill the men twice; the grief that killing them the once hadn't given her back; the secret, the whole barn full of blood I'd never tell her about.
I held all of it down at once and gave her only the warm and the steady and the safe, because that was what she'd reached for, and a woman gets to take exactly what she reaches for and not one thing more.
That's the most I've ever loved anybody. Not a kiss. Not a word. Lying still as stone with everything in me roaring and letting none of it out, so a frightened woman could borrow my body for a harbor and never once have to wonder if there was a price on it.
She surfaced, once, near the end, came up enough to be really there, to know the room, to know it was me and not a dream. I felt her go still in a different way, the awake way, and I braced again for her to pull back, to be embarrassed, to remember to be afraid of being this close to a man.
"Eli," she said. Small. Awake. Sure.
"Yeah. It's me. You're alright."
A long quiet. Her cheek against my chest, right over the loud stupid hammering she had to be able to feel.
"Don't go back to the floor," she whispered. "Stay."
I closed my eyes. Of all the things I'd held down that night, that one nearly took me.
"I'm not going anywhere," I said. "Go to sleep. I've got the door, I've got the dark, I've got you. Go on. I'll be right here when you wake up."
And she believed me, I felt her believe me, felt the last of the fight go out of her, felt her sink down into me trusting and heavy and finally, finally still, and she slept.
On my chest, in my arms, in my bed, the woman I'd loved through every locked year, asleep like she hadn't slept since they took her, because she'd decided I was safe.
I didn't sleep. I lay awake and I held her and I kept my watch, on the door and the dark and the years of want and the barn full of secrets, all of it leashed and silent and pressed down flat so none of it could disturb one hair of her.
Easiest hard thing I ever did.
I'd have done it every night for the rest of my life.