He hums but doesn’t speak. I blow on the lash, and it flutters into the air, disappearing. His satisfied smile deepens. There are creases at the corners of his eyes. I touch them, tracing each line, and wonder how he got them. I know his background was rough. I know about his accident, the pills. But I’d love to hear it from his lips, in his words, the way he wants to tell it.
“What did you wish for?” I ask.
He rolls on his back. “Nothing.”
The word comes out on a sigh. It’s not a barrier. He’s not cutting me off or blocking me out. Rolling to my side, I study his profile. He’s got such a nice face, handsome in a rough, country kind of way. His nose is straight-bridged, with a little bump in the middle and a soft hook at the tip. He’s got a face that feels like coming home, even more than being back from the city.
“Is you wishing for nothing a good thing?” I whisper.
His jaw works. “How much did they tell you about my background?”
I push myself up against the pillows. He stays on his back, looking up at me. “I know you had an accident, that your dad got you hooked on pills, but not much else. I kinda felt like that was your business to tell me.”
“Thank you.”
The words are feather light. I let him sit for a while, thinking. It’s clear Bittern’s a smart person, but he’s careful and doesn’t use a lot of extra words. Finally, he sits up against the headboard with me. The sheet slips a little, tumbling down the hard ridgesof his lower stomach. God, he really must have been hitting the gym hard in rehab.
“Back home…in Kentucky, we were pretty hard up,” he drawls, eyes on the opposite wall. “Our house wasn’t even half as nice as the employee housing out here. The town we lived in didn’t have much to do. There was a factory, and we made cabinets at night. It was about the only thing you could do around there unless you wanted to mine fucking coal.”
His words flow a little easier now. There’s a pause, but I keep quiet.
“Aiden did what he could, but the recession hit, and everything went to shit. Up until then, I thought the cabinet factory was the worst fucking place in the world. Then, me and my brother Wayland had to go up and get a job in one of the mines. That…that was the worst fucking place I’d ever been. Just hell. Every morning, they put us in these tiny elevators, packed together, and shot us straight down into the dark. Or we’d be with the big machines, which sometimes weren’t any better. We worked for hours, on our backs, bellies, in tiny dirty wet spaces. Then, you get shot back up, go home for a few hours to sleep, and go back down. Sometimes, I can’t remember how many days I spent working there. Might have been one year, might have been twenty.”
The tingle in my stomach is cold. I don’t like the images he’s painting.
“I thought a lot about dying,” he says, voice very low. “Most of the guys I worked with drank a lot. I did too. I didn’t know how to handle being a human living like a cave cricket from dawn to dusk. Hell, I barely saw the sun.”
The way he talks about this is different than I’d have expected. His voice is sad but calm, like he’s turned over the whole situation many times over already.
“Can I touch you?” I whisper.
His gold lashes flicker, eyes fixing on me. “I reckon you can. I’m alright. This is shit they helped me process.”
Gently, I meld into the side of his body. My hand rests on his forearm.
“It’s still pretty heavy shit,” I say.
“I know.”
“You don’t have to keep talking.”
He sighs, chest rising, falling. “May as well pull the Band-Aid off quickly. We were down there one day. It was hard to tell time, but I think it was about five in the afternoon. I remember being able to feel if the work day was about to be over by how bad my arms were burning. I was excited, ready to be up top. Now, I always reckoned a collapse was quick, but this, I felt coming.
“Everything kinda bumped, and I lost my balance, fell on my ass. Wayland was working about twenty-five feet from me, and he stayed up, but it was like he was surfing the ground. The other guys were yelling, Wayland was yelling at me, the whole damn Earth making this grinding sound. I got up and got chucked on my back again.”
He falls quiet. His fingers move, tapping together. I can feel it through his forearms.
“It’s really okay not to talk.”
He waves a hand. “Nah, it’s fine.”
“Is it?”
He slides his arm up, like he’s trying to remove it, but then he stops beneath mine and weaves his fingers through. My chest is pooled with warmth, trickling through my veins. My heart picks up.
“It is,” he says, but he sounds tired.
I wonder how many times he had to tell this story in rehab and therapy. Probably a lot. There’s a little disconnect in his eyes as they meet mine. I lean in and kiss him—I think it’s time to get up. Even though I hate to let his hand go, I wriggle out of bedand get to my feet. I’m not naked. I got up last night to use the bathroom and put one of his t-shirts and my panties on, just in case I didn’t feel comfortable come morning, but his eyes still move over my body. Despite the heaviness of the conversation, a crackle of tension hangs in the air.
