Chapter 16 #2
He swung once, clean and smooth, and the log split down the center and fell open on either side of the stump. Then he held the axe out to me, handle first.
I took it. The wood was smooth and heavier than I expected, and my hands were still shaking when I wrapped them around it.
“Feet apart. Dominant foot back. Swing through the wood, not at it.”
I swung. The first one was terrible, off-center, the blade glancing sideways, the jolt rattling up through my elbows. I didn’t care.
I set another log and swung again. Better. The blade caught the grain and the wood cracked, and I felt the impact travel from my hands through my shoulders and into my chest where all the rage was still boiling.
Logan corrected my grip once, adjusted my stance. “Go for it.”
He set up another log and stepped back.
The crack of splitting wood filled the yard, and I swung harder, my arms burning, the axe finding a groove I didn’t have to think about.
Each log that split open was Carter’s voice saying Eleanor.
Was his wounded performance, his generous offer, his smooth, practiced concern that covered the rot underneath.
I don’t understand what I did that was so terrible.
Six years of swallowed fury broke the surface one strike at a time.
I lost count. I kept going until my arms were trembling so badly the axe wobbled on the backswing, until my palms were raw and my shoulders were on fire and the pile of split wood at my feet had tripled.
I planted the blade in the stump and stood there, breathing hard, sweat cooling on the back of my neck.
Logan was still standing there. Still watching me with no judgment, no anger of his own despite me being ugly to him earlier.
“That was my ex-husband on the phone.” I said it to the woodpile, not to Logan. My voice was rough from the exertion, but it held. “Carter Hollis.”
I pulled the axe out of the stump and set another log. Swung. The crack of it punctuated the sentence, and I kept talking.
“I married him when I was twenty-two. It was the one thing I could do that my family would actually approve of. His parents and mine were best friends. The great Carter Hollis, the son everyone wanted their daughter to marry. And I was so goddamn desperate to be the daughter they wanted that I walked straight into it.”
Another swing. The wood split clean.
“The problems started small. He was charming and attentive, and he made me feel like the center of everything. But then the charm started to come with conditions. A comment about what I was wearing. An opinion about which friends were worth my time.”
I swung again. “He offered to handle the money so I wouldn’t have to worry about it.
He drove me to appointments so I didn’t have to deal with parking.
He made every decision for me and called it taking care of me, and by the time I could see what it was, I couldn’t name a single thing I still chose for myself. ”
Another log. Another swing. My arms were screaming.
“He monitored my spending. He decided who I talked to and when I left the house. He told me I was stupid so many times I believed him. He made me ask permission for things so small, I eventually stopped wanting things at all.” I set the axe down and turned around.
Looked straight at Logan. “And when I finally told him I was leaving, he picked up a glass and threw it at the wall next to my head. I put my arm up to protect my face.”
I held up my left forearm. The scar ran along the inside, four inches, slightly raised. I didn’t cover it, and I didn’t look away from his face.
“That’s how I got this. Three years of marriage, and the first time he couldn’t control me with words, he used a glass.”
Logan’s jaw was set, and his eyes were on mine. The hardness in his face was aimed at what I was telling him, not at me. Good. I didn’t want soft right now.
“I drove to my parents’ house. Bleeding through a dish towel wrapped around my arm. I stood in their foyer and I told them what happened, and my mother looked at me and said I was being difficult.”
I could hear my own voice, and it sounded like someone I hadn’t met before.
Even, clear, furious. “They told me to go back to Carter and work it out. So I left. But I drove myself to the emergency room. And after that, I went to a women’s shelter, and a woman I’d never met sat beside me and held my hand and asked me my name. ”
My throat tightened.
“I told her my name was Lark. I chose it right there, sitting under fluorescent lights with a bandage on my arm and nothing to my name. I didn’t want to be Eleanor anymore. Eleanor was the woman my family made and Carter unmade. Lark was mine.”
The yard was quiet. The split wood lay scattered around the stump and my arms hung at my sides, and I was standing in the full weight of everything I’d just said without reaching for a joke or a clipboard or something to do with my hands.
Logan pushed off the wall and walked toward me. Stopped close enough that I could feel the heat of him but not close enough to crowd.
“You’re allowed to be angry about that, Lark.” His voice was low and direct. “You’re allowed to be pissed as hell. At him, at your parents, at every single person who should have helped you and didn’t. That rage you’re feeling right now is yours, and you’re entitled to every goddamn bit of it.”
Something in my chest unlocked.
I stood there and felt it happen. A physical sensation, as real as the ache in my arms and the raw skin on my palms. Something that had been sealed shut for years broke open, and I felt it go the way you feel a held breath leave your body when you didn’t know you were holding it.
No one had ever said that to me. I’d spent six years turning every wound into work, every ounce of fury into another fence mended and another animal fed and another person helped, because that was the only thing I knew to do with feelings that had no safe place to land.
My family had called anger difficult. Carter had made it dangerous. I’d learned the lesson so well I’d forgotten the feeling was mine to have. That I was allowed to be angry.
Logan had just given that back to me.
The tears came, and they surprised me because they weren’t the kind I knew. They were hot and fierce and they burned my cheeks, and I let them fall without wiping them away because for the first time in my life, I was crying because I was angry and it was allowed.
“He called me selfish,” I said, and my voice cracked but it held. “He called me selfish for not talking to him. He said he doesn’t understand what he did.”
“He knows exactly what he did.”
“Yeah. He does.” I wiped my face with the back of my hand. “And I’m done carrying it for him.”
Logan’s hand came up, and his knuckles brushed the side of my jaw, rough and careful. He didn’t pull me in. He stood there with his hand against my face and let me be exactly what I was: a woman on fire who’d just discovered she was allowed to burn.
I kissed him. I put my raw, aching hands on his chest and kissed him because I wanted to. I’d just told a man every ugly, broken, furious piece of my history, and he hadn’t flinched and he hadn’t left and he was looking at me like I was the strongest thing he’d ever seen.
We went inside. Through the kitchen door, down the hallway. At the threshold of my bedroom, I stopped and he stopped behind me, and I stood there for one second with his hand on my hip and the afternoon light coming through the window.
I’d told him everything. And he was standing in my house with his hand on my hip and no intention of going anywhere.
The fear was still there. Carter’s voice was still in my ear and the mortgage was still on the table and the world was still the world. But right next to the fear, something stubborn and bright had planted itself and was refusing to move.
I reached back and pulled him through the door.