That same blood marred the tattoos on his forearms. She knew on instinct the blood wasn’t his and, by that same instinct, backed away.
“See, this is the problem with you and me,” he said. “You think you know what you want when it’s far away. The closer I get to you, the less you want of me. I don’t go by halves. You get all or nothing. I’m not built for the in-between.”
Under different circumstances, Amelia might’ve appreciated his brutal honesty. He made clear what kind of man he was, and Amelia wondered what kind of women he’d had before, if they were anything like her. How could they be? Emory promised a zero-sum game where his love was the prize for total surrender. What kind of woman accepted that?
Plenty, it seemed.
Emory opened his bedroom door and stood with his back against one side of the frame and his hand casually propped on the other.
“You in or out?” he asked and tipped his head to the inside of his bedroom.
Amelia studied him and sifted through his outward apathy for a shred of anything else. Backlit by moonlight, his intentions were harder than ever to decipher. She didn’t know what he was offering—sex or something more—and made no move in either direction.
Indecision would be her answer because he demanded to know what she wanted but said nothing of his own desire. Night after night, she had laid herself bare. It was his turn to do the same.
He wouldn’t, of course. Not Emory Holt. He’d keep the high ground to remain out of reach.
“I’m not that kind of girl,” Amelia told him but came closer. That she contradicted herself confused him, she knew. It confused her too, the need to be near him then the urge to pull away. It came in waves she failed to predict.
“That’s not what I want from you,” Emory said as Amelia stood in front of her bedroom door.
She sensed a lie or perhaps his own contradictions. He’d brought her there for one thing but held onto her for another, and neither knew the reason anymore.
“Then what do you want?” Amelia asked as they faced one another on either side of the hall.
It wasn’t an accusation of anything, just a simple question that she’d asked countless times before. And countless times, he’d given her some version of the same answer—for her to come clean, spill her guts, sing.
With his hands in his pockets, Emory leaned against the doorframe and contemplated her. His eyes drifted down her body, skimming her hair tousled from sleep, her breasts in a thin t-shirt, the length of her bare legs. His gaze settled with some weight to the floor between them. Brows knit, he thought it over with a shake of his head.
“I don’t know anymore.”
Emory looked deeply troubled to be at a loss. His uncertainty gentled something in him, though. Drenched in lunar light, Amelia spied the cracks in his resistance too.
For tonight, that was all she wanted. She stepped into the hall, and Emory did the same until only moonbeams remained between them. When he freed his hands from his pockets, Amelia wondered if he meant to hold her and if she might let him. On either side, the answer never seemed clear.
“Maybe that’s our problem, you and me,” she said with another step closer until they met in the middle, close enough to touch. “That neither of us know anymore.”
Emory peered down at her, his boots adding to his height as she stood barefoot before him. Up close again, his presence consumed with less of a threat, and his chest rose and fell with quick exchanges of breath.
“Maybe,” he replied off-beat and distracted, as if he’d just found his answer but still refused to confess.
Whatever it was, he carried it with him across the hall in backwards steps, and Amelia did the same. They paused momentarily, each at their door, but the distance between them remained. How long it’d last, Amelia couldn’t say.
It was dangerous, the incessant talk of wants and needs. Neither could help themselves, though, so they kept coming back to disturb the space they shared, the only common ground between them.
“I don’t need you,”they’d each declared at one point or another but barreled toward the day they no longer meant it.
SEVENTEEN
EMORY
Emory woke with the sun. It wasn’t ritual, just memoriam. In the quiet respite of morning, he’d think of his father, but the memories were forged in absolutes. He remembered everything or nothing; the recollections larger than life next to the lost years.
Even at thirty-one, he could still taste the cold winter mornings of his childhood when the sun hadn’t yet warmed the sky and frost coated the windows. In the kitchen, Emory would sit atop the air vent billowing heat as his father tugged on work boots.
And he could still feel the swampy heat of summer nights helping his dad in the garage. With his father elbow deep in a Pontiac GTO, Emory would hand off tools until Ivan wandered in.
By then, his older brother had taken an interest in torturing small animals with their father’s tools. In the room they shared, Ivan would torture Emory too with the grotesque details of his new hobby. Emory slept on the couch thereafter until his mother made good use of the switch. Then he didn’t sleep much at all, sometimes at school, but that landed him in trouble too.
