He disappeared into the washroom and braced his arms on either side the basin. He tasted bile at the back of his throat. His stomach roiled. Waves of nausea came and went. His hands curled into fists.
He was peripherally aware of light coming from the bedroom and realized Jane must have lit a lamp. He could hear her moving around. He imagined she was looking for her nightgown. He pushed away from the washstand long enough to find a towel and hitch it around his waist. She was holding the lamp in one hand when she came to the doorway, and he was leaning over the basin again.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
He laughed, albeit without humor. “That’s the question I should be asking you.”
“Then let me answer it. I am fine. You frightened me, but I am fine. Look.” She parted the neckline of her gown to reveal all of her throat. “See? I looked in my hand mirror. There is not a single mark.”
He did not turn his head. “Show me tomorrow.”
Jane closed her gown. “It does not matter if my throat is purple tomorrow. You were dreaming. You did not know what you were doing.”
“I did know,” he said. “But I wasn’t doing it to you.”
“Morgan,” she said, her tone gently admonishing. “I never thought you were. It happened very quickly. You were talking in your sleep. It woke me, and then I tried to wake you. Perhaps I should not have done. I think I precipitated what followed.”
“It’s not your fault.” He closed his eyes tightly, trying to make sense of what he had been dreaming. It was already vague in his mind, disjointed in the way his dreams often were. He did not know that he talked in his sleep. “What was I saying?”
“ ‘No,’ ” she said. “You were saying ‘no.’ I don’t know how many times you said it before the sound of your voice woke me. I could tell you were troubled. I think you might have been frightened. You said it louder. I thought you would wake yourself. When you didn’t, I tried.”
Morgan nodded slowly. It was coming back to him. Scenes from his life appeared randomly, the years folding back on themselves. “She’s still alive,” he said, straightening. There was enough light from Jane’s lamp for Morgan to see his reflection in the mirror above the basin. He looked weary, he thought, and older than his twenty-nine years. His shoulders were hunched from the weight of the secrets he kept. His own and Zetta Lee’s. He bore them like a punishment, the consequence of being made Zetta Lee’s ginger pie man at eleven.
“The last I knew,” he said, looking at Jane and no longer at himself, “she was still alive.”
“She?”
“The woman I was choking. She liked that sometimes. She would tell me to put my hands around her neck and squeeze while I was fucking her. She’d say ‘harder,’ but she wasn’t talking about the fucking. She was talking about my hands, and I would have to tighten my fingers, press harder with my thumbs, and she would buck and arch like a feral mare that I was trying to ride for the first time. I could barely keep my seat, but I never—” He stopped, put up a hand as the lamp Jane was holding started to waver. “You told me you were strong, Jane. You have to show me now. Do you have the stomach for this or not, because I’m not sure I do. You say you want me to tell you things, and this is it. This is what I want to tell you, and most of what’s inside of me is rotten ugly.”
Jane stared at him. She held the lamp as steady as she held her gaze. “Go on,” she said.
Her calm was no salve for his open wound, but oddly, it gave him the confidence that she would not allow him to bleed to death. The urge to say it all at once had passed, and he spoke quietly, gravely. “I never let go until she told me I could. That was her hold on me. Everything was the opposite of how it looked. No one knew. I never once tried to kill her. She gave me so many opportunities, almost dared me, I think now, and I never took her up on it. Tonight, though, dreaming about her the way I was, I was doing what I couldn’t when I was lying with her. Tonight, I was going to kill her. She had me so twisted up inside, I was finally going to kill her.”
He saw Jane swallow. He gave her full marks for not putting a hand to her throat. She had to be thinking that he could have strangled her, so he said it aloud. “I could have killed you tonight, Jane.”
Jane shook her head. “Who is she?”
“Zetta Lee Welling,” he said after a long moment. “The woman who called herself my mother.”
“Of course,” Jane said. Her voice was no more than a whisper. “That’s why you sounded so young.”
Morgan watched her set the lamp on the seat of the chair. He knew what she would do. “Stay there, Jane. Stay where you are.” She came to him anyway. She was fearless. He had been right about her, had always been right about her, and he had been right to be afraid.
He did not know what to do when she put her arms around him. His hands remained at his sides. She pressed her face into the curve of his neck and held on. She was the only person who ever held him in just that way, giving comfort but also finding it. He could hardly bear it that she was touching him, and he thought he would die if she stopped.
He did not know he was crying until she laid her fingertips against his cheek and wiped his tears away. He put his arms around her then and rested his damp cheek against her hair. They did not move until she took his hand and led him to bed.
Jane returned the lamp to the table. “Dark?” she asked.
“No. Let it burn.”
She left the wick as it was and slipped into bed but did not draw the covers up until he was beside her.
“Did you think I was going to run?” he asked.
“I think you still might.”
Morgan lay back and made a cradle for her head with the crook of his shoulder. She did not hesitate to pin him in place. “Better?” he asked when she was done burrowing.
