Chapter Nineteen #3
She swallowed at the starkness of it. The honesty of it. It’s what she’d wanted him to admit to her last night, on that street where everything had felt so true between them, but now that he’d said it, something inside her turned over.
She didn’t want him to have pain. She didn’t want this to be true for him.
“They look to be in pain, right? This one—” He took a hand from his pocket, gestured to the figure on the far left. “The way he’s holding his body. This whole side of him, bent. Like he’s trying to get away from himself.”
Her heart thudded. She felt as frozen in space and time as one of these sculptures.
“And their hands and feet,” he said. “They look so big. That—that looks like pain. To me, it does.”
For what felt like a long time, she simply looked: paid attention to what he said he saw in these figures.
Let her eyes linger on the long, brutally stretched shoulder of the figure on the left.
Let herself study every curled finger and exaggerated knuckle, six separate feet stuck permanently to a hard, crooked ground.
She thought it was what he wanted her—what he was asking her—to do.
“I have neuropathic pain,” he said, and she let her eyes go to him again, though he wasn’t looking back at her.
“From burns that cover…a lot of me. I also have contracture scarring. That’s painful, too, though it’s not—it’s not like the nerve pain. Which is difficult to predict. Confusing. Not well controlled.”
She almost said, I’ve seen it before, but thought better of it. Thought better of blurting out something clinical, something that had nothing to do with him, specifically.
“I don’t have many pharmaceutical options,” he said, making himself sound like the clinician.
“Opioids were…not well tolerated. Anticonvulsants gave me severe vertigo. I use compression wraps on the worst of the contracture scarring, sometimes. Sometimes silicone patches on other areas. Temporary relief.”
Automatically, a flood of information she wished she didn’t have access to came to her: images, case studies, drug lists, treatment protocols. A professional hazard.
She turned her face back to the statue. Looked at it like it wasn’t any kind of med school slide deck, any kind of textbook.
“When it happens,” he continued, quieter now, so she had to strain to hear him, “when I get pain, it feels the way this looks. Twisting, deforming. I’d tear myself in half to get away from it.
And it—” He paused, shifted on his feet.
“It makes all the parts of me feel out of proportion. Those big hands. This stretched-out neck. I get disoriented. I don’t—I don’t feel sure of myself, in space. ”
She closed her eyes briefly, thinking of the way he backed away from her. His hands in his pockets, his unwillingness to touch even the car door.
“How long ago was it?” she finally asked, when she thought she could make her voice sound normal.
He took a breath in, and she thought he might be holding it. Counting.
“A long time,” he eventually answered, and she tried to graciously accept the distance he was still keeping. She could tell how hard even this disclosure was for him.
“I’m an unusual case,” he continued. “In terms of the neuropathy, at least. They say by now it should be better than it is.”
Not necessarily, the physician in her wanted to say.
But she was not standing here as his doctor.
She was standing here as the woman who’d kissed him last night.
Who’d hurt him.
“They say some of it is probably psychological. Obviously, as you saw at dinner—I have some struggles in that area, too. But with the pain…when the pain hits, I—”
“I’m so sorry,” she blurted, because it felt impossible not to—not to think again about all the ways she’d touched him, how many times it had hurt. “I didn’t mean to—”
“Please don’t apologize,” he interrupted gruffly, and once again, the Please did it, sealing her lips shut. This one sounded less broken, more determined.
“I wasn’t sure what I’d say to you today when I saw you. If I’d say anything, or—try to ignore what I’d done. What I said to you last night. But on the way over here I was looking up this place on my phone. Reading about the sculptures.”
Neither of them was looking at the sculpture before them anymore. They’d turned to face each other now, the three figures looming but frozen in disinterest.
“This one, it’s called The Three Shades,” he said. “I don’t know much beyond that. But they’re also over there.” He tipped his head to the side, toward a huge, stone-surrounded bronze door, covered in figures. “At the top. A smaller version. They stand over the entrance to The Gates of Hell.”
“Griffin,” she said, barely a whisper.
“You should call me Griff,” he replied. “Considering.”
She thought of all the things Considering could mean. Considering that you talked me out of a panic attack. Considering that we had a whole dinner together, alone. Considering I’m the only one on this trip that truly sees you. Considering I had my tongue in your mouth, my hands on your body.
Considering that I looked at this piece of art, and now I’m using it to tell you something about me.
“Griff,” she repeated, and was rewarded with the way his mouth curved, even if it fell again only a second later.
“If that pain hits me…when it hits me. Because it’s always when. I’m—I’m through that doorway. I am in hell. I don’t know how else to describe it. I have to find my way out. Over and over again.”
“I’m sorry,” she said again, but this time, she hoped he knew she wasn’t apologizing for herself.
Only for him, and for the pain he was describing.
He acknowledged it. One brief but meaningful nod, and then his gaze left hers, going to the top of that doorway.
He was quiet, looking at it for so long that Layla started to think he might finally have finished, that he might’ve said all he would say.
That now he would get on with ignoring what he’d done, what they had done.
That now—with this new knowledge he’d given her—she would understand why last night was a mistake.
That they’d silently agree to go find the group and get on with it in the way they had yesterday.
Two new friends who were privately guarding the bride and groom.
She didn’t want that, though.
She did not want to ignore it or say it was a mistake; she did not want to go back and find the group of people who saw her all wrong.
She wanted to say, Griff, I saw a piece of art, too. I saw The Kiss, and let me tell you what it made me think about.
Before she could get up the courage, though, he finally looked back at her.
“I’m sorry, too. For how I acted last night. Once those gates opened for me, I mean.”
His eyes dropped to her mouth, to her now-covered neck. A slow perusal that made her leftover beard-burn tingle anew. He must be closer now; he felt closer, though she hadn’t noticed him move.
“Because before that,” he said, low and quiet, “before that, for me—it was heaven.”