Chapter Twenty-One #2
“You don’t get it, Daisy. When I love things I make a mess.
I always, always make a mess. It burns too hot and bright in me; I can’t afford to indulge it.
It makes me half mad, it makes me wild. I can’t just do it like you and be so free and passionate and not fuck up.
It’s part of why I used to be mad sometimes when you would do something and it seemed so reckless.
I would think about how it would end for me—a fight with my father because I loved my sister too much to let him say the things he did to her, a lost job my family needed, stealing something sweet from the store because I was so ravenous for it.
And I would be frightened for you. But you always knew how to handle it.
To switch it on and off, to indulge in a way that wasn’t so dangerous, so unpleasant. ”
He looked away once he had finished, and she could see why.
He was thinking about everything he had just described, clearly.
Going over it all, in a way he probably had all his life.
If I let myself love something, I’ll make another kiss on my fist in a fight I shouldn’t have, she imagined him saying to himself, about that scar on his hand.
Over and over until it was screwed tight inside him.
But it wasn’t, inside her.
She could see it as it really was.
She saw it all the way back at the beginning, in the stairwell, him talking to someone about the girl. His sister, of course. His sister who it seemed he had wanted to keep safe, just as he wanted for her.
“Caleb, I would do all of those same things. If I had been so denied I would have done the same. I am you, if you hadn’t had to learn the lesson so harshly, so early.
Smaller measures of the same poison, that’s the thing.
That’s it, that’s all it is,” she said, and in answer he looked at her, haunted.
Wanting to accept it, she thought. But still unable to.
“I don’t even see her now. I’m too afraid to,” he whispered.
So she climbed onto the bed, within reaching distance of him.
“You don’t have to be. I’m with you, it’ll be all right.”
“Don’t you even care that I thought first with my fists? That I left you?”
“Not when I know that’s just something you’re telling yourself. Something you’re using to try and convince me. Because I remember now. I remember you kneeling next to me. I remember you saying my name,” she said, half sure it was just a thing to say. Half feeling it flooding back.
She’d thought it was Christian who had been there.
But behind her eyes, the image was shifting.
Still, it stole her breath when he didn’t deny it.
“You were completely out. I had to try something.”
“And then you lifted me into your arms.”
“The ambulance was taking too long, they wanted to put you in a cab.”
“You carried me out to your truck, laid me in the passenger seat,” she said, and oh, the memory was strong now.
Rich with sensation. She drifted into it all, as if on a wave.
“I knew that smell, you know. That warm cedar smell that is still in it now, the shipping forecast on the radio, the stars going by outside the window. I think you said something to me. I think your voice broke in the middle when you did.”
“I was scared. It was just your lip, but it seemed like so much blood.”
“It was all down my dress, like an apron.”
He swallowed thickly. “Yes. Yes.”
“And your words were—” she started.
Then listened to him finish in a voice made high and wavery by the strain.
“Please don’t leave me alone in this hell,” he said. He confessed.
Because that was what it felt like, a confession of his guilt.
Instead of her own.
“But I did leave you alone anyway, didn’t I.”
“Don’t say it like it was your fault. You can’t leave someone you don’t love.”
“But that’s the thing, darling. I do. I love you, Caleb.
I always have. I did from the first moment I saw you, I loved you through every moment since.
It’s why it crushed me. Not because you were so awful, you weren’t.
I just longed for you so much that everything that said you didn’t love me back was like a knife in my heart,” she said, all of her knowing she had him.
She had him. His expression was so open, so suddenly struck by wonder, by hope.
All she had to do was finish the thought.
All the terrible messes he thought he had made with his love, making something more lovely than anything she had ever known.
“Feels so strange to know it’s no longer there.
I’ve lived with it so long I’m used to the ache.
I don’t know how to be, with it healed.”
“I don’t even know how to be, hearing that it is. Hearing that you love me.”
“Hopefully happy. You deserve to be happy, my dearest one. My Jim, turning himself and everything he knows upside down, just to save me. Just to save his Selena.” She reached forward then.
Touched his face, gently, and watched his eyes drift closed.
“Because you’re wrong, you know. Your love isn’t out of control and cruel.
It’s a thing people have forgotten. Fierce, in the face of injustice.
Ready to fight, if the fight is for something good.
You love the way I wish everyone did. The way I wished you would, when I didn’t know. ”
“What if I lose my way again?”
“We’ll find you together. We’ll always find our true selves, together,” she said, then watched him not even hesitate.
He reached down, and drew her into his arms. And he kissed her with everything in him.
All the love lost, all the love found. Everything forgotten and not.
Each regret, each passion he’d forced himself not to indulge—she felt it all.
She gave it to him right back.