A death knell pealing right beside us.
“Okay, but I…” I don’t know where I’m going with this. I’m so lost. I just know that I don’t want this to end right when I finally got to meet this woman.
I didn’t want to, but I dreamed about her.
She’s been my one constant for years. My hope, my bright light, my guide, a whisper in all the painful silence and a soft quiet in the noise. Her words burrowed under my skin. They worked their way straight down to my soul.
She’s been family when I had none. She was a bright spot in my day. As much as I didn’t want to bring her into that place, she was the reason Isurvived. She gave me the will to get through some of my darkest moments, when I just wanted to give up, or when the panic at being locked up for another fewyears, when I didn’t think I could stand anotherminute, set in.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers again. She shouldn’t be apologizing. She shouldn’t hang her head and collapse inward. “It means that I can’t go outside. I can’t leave this building. I haven’t since before I started writing to you.”
That’swhat her sickness is? That she won’t go outside? I don’t want to be an ass, and I quickly blank my face before she looks up. I don’t want to be insensitive, but I just don’t get it.
“Why would you choose to live like that?” I ask eventually, when she’s not going to volunteer anything else. I want to tilt her chin up and force her to look at me. I want to breathe the life back into her lungs.
Her head snaps up all on its own. Twin flames burn in the depths of her eyes.
Fuck.Choosewas the wrong word.
Just as quick as it came, the fire dies. I feel the bitter tang of ash on the back of my tongue. I’d rather her spitting mad and ready to fight than defeated.
“I know this isn’t how you pictured me. I know that you’re disappointed. I thought that I could be here for you when you gotout. I still want to, but it’s mostly going to have to be like it was before. I can’t offer anything more right now.”
I was never supposed to imagine what this woman would be like. I shouldn’t have wanted to meet her as badly as I did. Even if there was nothing wrong in that itself, I judged her to be around my age, from everything she wrote. I imagined she was single, or she wouldn’t be writing to a prisoner. I could have been wrong about all of it, but I got this sense that I wasn’t. I shouldn’t have harbored a secret hope all these years that we could be friends. Or more than friends. The writing wasn’t a romantic thing, but I thought maybe, since she understood me so well, since she’d looked inside my soul, since she was my person, that more could mean anything.
She’s the one thing I’ve allowed myself to hope for, and now she wants to stand here and tear it away from me because of some stupid fear?
I know that’s not fair and it’s not right, but I can’t help the tight fist of anger that grips my gut. Everyone says lightning doesn’t strike twice, but this feels so fucking unjust.
Loreena raises her head and shivers when she looks at my face and sees what I can’t hide. The anger deflates like she just pricked me. Slipped another knife between my ribs. The last thing I should be doing is making assumptions. They’re all probably dead fucking wrong.
“If it’s just a phobia, you can get over it. People do.” I feel like a total asshole trying to point that out. “If you’re afraid of spiders, they put you in a tank and put them on you, and you have to just deal. When your brain finally understands that you’re going to make it out, and maybe it’s more that you don’t like spiders, you can chill. It stops sending all those bad brainsignals out to your body, telling you to panic or go into shock or overreact.”
“Overreact.” She grasps her cardigan and pulls it more tightly around herself, wrapping her arms over her thin frame.
“Not overreact. That’s not how I meant it.” I should stop floundering. Take the time to get educated. Tell her I’m not going anywhere. It’s not what comes out. “If you were like this before you started writing to me, was I just some side project? Did you do it out of pity? Were you interested in hearing what someone on the inside had to say because you were studying to be a lawyer? Was I just an escape and some fantasy world for you?”
My voice keeps rising. Not yelling. Not mean. The questions just aren’t all that nice. They’re too heated. Even if she said yes to everything, I could never hate her.
“I told you things that I’ve never told anyone.” Her eyes swim with a haze of moisture.
She’s going to cry because of me. I’m doing the one thing I promised myself I’d never do. Hurt her.
“When I said that the only time I could truly be me was when I was writing to you, I was being honest. We had something beautiful.”
Had. Had means the past. Had is bad. I didn’t know it was possible for a brain to go into cardiac arrest, but look at that.
“Why did you leave your address then?” The question comes out wounded and accusatory.
She doesn’t respond. She already has. She’s unravelling right in front of me. All I want to do is wrap her in my arms andhold her, but it’s not my right. She doesn’t want to be mine. She could be making all of this up, letting me down easy because I was just a prison project for her.
She’s not.
A rough shiver wracks her body. She’s thin. Not too thin but built slight. She’s not short. I’m six two, so I’d judge her to be around five ten. I knew that she’d be pretty, but the mental picture I’d painted in my head didn’t prepare me for just how gorgeous she is. All her features are so delicate and finely shaped. It’s not her beauty that could shatter. It’s her spirit. It’s already been broken.
I want to know who hurt her. I want to pick up the pieces and glue her back together, but that’s not what she wants. She wants to be noble. She wants to save me from the world that she lives in.
“You’re missing so much. You could step out that front door right now if you wanted to.” Again, not what I wanted to say.
