He turns toward me slowly. “Know what?”
“That I was wrong.”
That is not enough, but it is all I have at first.
His face gives away almost nothing. That should not surprise me now. But there is something in his eyes I have not seen turned on me quite this way before. Not anger exactly. Something older. More wounded.
“You were,” he says.
The bluntness should sting. It doesn’t. I have already said worse to myself.
“I should have come in.”
“Yes.”
“I thought...” I stop, because the truth sounds stupid now in the quiet after nearly dying. Thought what. That one more half-basket of roots would make the women respect me. That standing out there in the rising storm would somehow prove I belonged. That defying him would prove I was not small.
Kaiven waits. He is very good at waiting when he wants the truth.
I drag in a breath. “I thought if I stopped working and ran back with everyone staring at me, it would prove exactly what I was afraid of.”
His jaw shifts once. “Which was.”
“That I’m only something to be kept out of the way.”
There. The whole ugly thing.
The words hang between us in the warm tent air. Kaiven does not answer immediately. He looks at me in a way that makes the skin over my arms tighten under the wrap. Not because I think he will lash out. Because he is seeing too much.
“I told you to go inside because the storm would cut your skin open,” he says at last, his voice low and rough from strain and swallowed anger. “Not because I wanted you small.”
“I know that now.”
“No.” The word lands hard. “You know it after I carried you back. That is not the same as when I said it.”
I have no answer to that. Because it is true. Because I heard everything through the wound first. Through the fear of being controlled, handled, sent away from the real work and the real world and the real women because I am too soft to survive it.
Kaiven takes one step closer. Then another. This time, I don’t flinch. Not because I deserve kindness after what I did. Because some part of me has already learned that when he comes close like this, it means he has decided silence is no longer enough.
“The storm was not the argument,” he says. “You know that too.”
My throat tightens. “No.”
“Yes.”
He stops in front of me, not touching yet. “You heard me say inside and heard useless. Heard me say shelter and heard weakness. Heard me say obey and heard disappear.”
The accuracy of it hurts worse than being misunderstood would have. I look down at my hands. “Maybe.”
“Not maybe.”
I press my lips together. Then, because the whole thing is already stripped bare, I make myself look at him again. “You tell me to eat. To rest. To stay near the tent. To leave the hard work to others. You pull me out of danger, correct what I don’t know, and step between me and everything sharp in this world.” My voice shakes once and steadies. “I know you call that care. But sometimes it feels like if I let myself lean into it, I’ll disappear inside it.”
Kaiven stops moving. “And then,” I say, because if I stop now I will never say the rest, “you talk about children and daughters and sons and what my body can give you, and it all comes together in my head in the ugliest way.”
There. The other wound. The deeper one.
He says nothing at first. The silence stretches long enough that I begin to hate myself for speaking it aloud. For dragging all this human mess into the center of his clean brutal world and expecting him to know what to do with it.
