8. Carve You Out My Chest
Carve You Out My Chest
Aurelia wasn't in the kitchen when I went back there.
Candles were still burning, wax pooled thick in their dishes, and for one bad second the whole house felt like she'd never been in it at all.
Maybe I'd dreamt the ferry, the speech, the counter and everything that happened between them.
Then I saw the broken glass on the floor and light under the guest room door.
Yes, Dillion. She's really here.
I blew the candles out one by one, swept up the glass and vacuumed the floor to make sure that it picked up anything I couldn’t see.
I washed up all the dishes, wiped the counter down twice even though once would've done it.
Didn't matter what kind of night it had been, what kind of hell I'd just put two women through, the kitchen still needed closing before I put my head on a pillow.
Besides, some part of me needed the ritual of it tonight more than any night before, hands busy, moving through motions I'd done ten thousand times, the one thing in that house I could still do right without thinking too hard about it.
Once everything was to cleaned to my standards, I stopped in the powder room to wash my face and clean myself up.
I looked crazy in that mirror. My best friend's release drying in my beard, chest and abs like I'd lost a fight I actually won. All I could do was chuckle, shake my head at the turn the night had taken. What the hell, Dillon? For real.
I ran the water hot and washed my face, still not believing it, a little salty I had to scrub Aurelia off me this soon, my body wanted to keep the evidence a while longer.
Gargled some mouthwash. Wet a cloth and wiped her off my chest, my stomach, took my time doing it too, in no rush to erase what we’d left behind.
Rubbed a little lotion into my hands and face after, straightened my pajama collar in the mirror like a man about to walk into a meeting instead of down a hallway.
Then I knocked on her door with one knuckle.
"It's open."
She was sitting on the far side of the bed looking out the open window.
The storm had circled back around, a second band coming in off the water the way they do out here.
Lightning was working the horizon, the exact kind that normally sent her under a blanket, into my arms, or onto the phone at 2 a.m. She just sat there in a different nightgown than earlier with her head tilted toward the window like she was finally ready to face the things that had spent months chasing her.
She was growing. I could see it in the set of her shoulders. In the fact that she'd waded through this weather to get to me. In the fact that she was still here at all, in this room, after everything the last hour had cost every person in this house.
I sat down on the other side of the bed. My back to her, back to the window, because I couldn't watch the storm and couldn't watch her watching it. A few feet of mattress between us felt wider than the crossing she'd made to get here.
"I didn't mean to cause you trouble," she said, calmly. "When I got on that ferry, I thought you'd be here alone."
I looked at the wall, then at my hands.
"I been trying to carve you out my chest. You know that?
That's what this week was. I brought her out here trying to not think about you.
Didn't work. She felt it. She knew something was off all week, sat me down at dinner tonight and asked me straight out once she had a name, and I looked her in her face and lied.
Dressed it up pretty, but it was a lie, and she knew it.
I made her feel crazy for knowing it." I swallowed my guilt, hard.
"You heard everything that happened on the stairs.
I know you did. This house carries sound like a dining room. "
She didn't deny it. The rain picked up against the glass.
"I spent February angry," I kept on, because if I stopped I'd lose the nerve, and tonight was for finishing things. "At you. At myself. At a door that never got knocked on. I was impossible at the restaurant. Made mistakes I hadn't made since Paris."
I ran a hand down my face.
"March, I was learning the texts. 'How you doing?' 'You good?' Telling myself the watered-down version of you was something a man could live on. Like adjusting your palate to stock cubes and calling it soup." I shook my head slow. "It wasn't. It was never going to be."
The storm leaned on the windows. Neither of us moved.
"April was the fundraiser. You across that tent with your mama, looking beautiful and pretending I was an acquaintance instead of the man who spilled his guts to you, broke a man down for you.
Eleven minutes we talked. I counted. That month was like cooking on a broken stove, Ru, everything off, temperature wrong, timing wrong, whole operation compromised, and I was the only one in the building who knew where the crack was. "
I felt her shift on the mattress behind me, but I didn't turn.
"May, I got a little footing. Learned to function without my best friend, which I don't recommend to nobody.
And Madeline sat down at my bar one night, and I knew her from when we were kids.
She told me what she wanted and I felt I could be that.
" I paused, and gave the next part to the wall out of embarrassment.
"I knew by day two out here it was a mistake though.
Stayed the course anyway and called it being a gentleman.
It wasn't. She's a good woman and I was using her like white noise.
A sound to sleep to in a house I couldn't get quiet. "
"She's very beautiful," Aurelia said, gently.
"She is…and intelligent and funny…she reminds me of you.
Which is why tonight's going to sit in me a long time, and I need you to know that now, because you're going to see me carrying it, and I don’t want you reading it wrong.
" I finally turned and looked at her, the line of her back, the window past her, the lightning walking the water.
"The regret is about how, Aurelia. It has not once, not for one second of this whole night, been about who. "
She turned then to face me across her bed, as the lightning came again, watching me instead of it.
"June, I figured distance would finish the job.
Get off the mainland, away from every corner of Westonberry that's got you standing in it.
I broke my own solo week for it, that's how bad I wanted it to work.
Wanted to just make it work with her and move on and be a happy man.
And it was starting to work, Ru. That's the part I have to say out loud.
It was working. And then you rang my doorbell in a storm, and four months went in four seconds.
Everything I'd built to stay away from you turned out to be a tarp. First real storm, gone."
I sighed real long from somewhere down in the foundation.
"And that's not fair to Madeline, or fair to you…it's not fair to me either, to keep pretending I can be anybody other than exactly what I am. A man who loves his best friend. A man who's been in love with his best friend."
She looked at me, and I watched the question form before it reached her mouth. "So now what, Dilly?"
I looked at her sitting there in that bed and something in my chest finally settled, came together the way a sauce does after it's been threatening to break for months, all of it, finally, emulsifying into the thing it was always trying to be.
"In the morning I'm making breakfast," I said, holding her eyes.
"Then I'm driving Madeline to her family's place, and on that drive I'm going to apologize the way a man should, better than what she got on those stairs.
If she wants answers, she gets them, all of them.
If she wants to cuss me the whole ride across the island, she gets that too.
However she needs it. She's owed that much and more. "
"That sounds like the right thing to do." She forced a smile, but exhaustion was written all over it.
"You need rest, Ru."
I stood up to go. Made it about one step.
"You gon' be all right sleeping through this weather by yourself?" I turned back and asked.
"I keep having to remind you that I'm grown."
"Mm... so you want me to lay with you till you fall asleep." I said, not even asking a question.
"Yes," she said, already diving under the covers like I might change my mind, and the laugh that came out of me was the tired, wrung-out, grateful kind, the last one of the longest night of my life.
I climbed in beside her and her head found that spot on my chest she loved.
My arms came around her without consulting me.
She exhaled against my skin, long and slow, like she'd been holding that particular breath since February.
I pressed a kiss into the top of her hair, feeling like I could finally breathe.
"February I was numb," she said finally, her voice so soft I almost missed it.
"I remember sitting at my mama's kitchen table the morning after you dropped me off and just staring at nothing.
My hands were shaking so bad I couldn't hold a cup of coffee.
Mama kept asking if I was sick and I couldn't tell her the truth. "
I tightened my arms around her.
"I spent that whole month angry too," she continued.
"Angry at you for being right. Angry at myself for needing you to be the one to make the hard choice because I couldn't. Angry at Asher for showing up at the restaurant and forcing the whole thing into the light.
Angry at myself for putting you in the position for having to defend me… at your place of business."
Lightning flickered across her face and I watched her eyes track it.