“I don’t understand anything of the kind. You’re being ridiculous.”
“I tell you that I beat a man half to death out of some kind of deranged sense of ownership over a woman who doesn’t even like me, and all you’ve got to say is that I’m being ridiculous? Think we’re gonna need a recount on that one. The numbers are off. Check the tapes,” he said.
He didn’t sell it, though.
Not like the poem. Not like any of this.
“I’ll checkyourtapes, you massive prawn.”
“That doesn’t refute anything I said. It’s just silliness.”
“Because silly is exactly what you are. Jesus Christ, Caleb. Did you really come all this way to give me everything in the world, while still thinking you deserve nothing? Still thinking that I would believe that? And based on something so flimsy, my god. You know how good I am at this and you honestly think I don’t know how heavily you’ve edited events in favor of whatever this is?”
“I didn’t edit a goddamn thing.”
“Oh, I think you’ll find you very fucking did. Acting like it was an accident.”
That got him. He jerked back so hard his shoulder cracked the drawn-up window above him. She almost screamed and jumped onto the bed to grab him before she remembered he was wedged.
And that she had just thrown him.
For a second he looked so busted she thought she had won.
Then he got it back together. “Even if it wasn’t, it doesn’t matter.”
“Are you shitting me right now? Of course it does. You saw someone hit a woman from across a bar, on purpose. While being the kind of person who doesn’t even like a man interrupting one.” She shook her head, marveling. “Pretending I should be horrified that you punched him. I wouldn’t have been horrified if you’d produced a sniper rifle out of your ass and taken the top of his head off.”
“I would never keep a sniper rifle in my ass. It’s damp in there.”
“Oh mygod, that’s not the point. None of this is the point.”
“Then what is? What is?”
“That you did something so good and you think it’s rotten. Possessive, even, when it’s the opposite. You don’t even expect gratitude for all the things you do and want to do for me. You knew I had no idea why you did half the things on that trip, and you did them anyway. Just for the joy of doing them,” she said, yet somehow even that didn’t sway him. He just blew out a frustrated breath.
“You don’t get it, Daisy. When I love things I make amess. I always, always make a mess. It burns too hot and bright in me; I can’t afford to indulge it. It makes me half mad, it makes me wild. I can’t just do it like you and be so free and passionate and not fuck up. It’s part of why I used to be mad sometimes when you would do something and it seemed so reckless. I would think about how it would end for me—a fight with my father because I loved my sister too much to let him say the things he did to her, a lost job my family needed, stealing something sweet from the store because I was so ravenous for it. And I would be frightened for you. But you always knew how to handle it. To switch it on and off, to indulge in a way that wasn’t so dangerous, so unpleasant.”
He looked away once he had finished, and she could see why.
He was thinking about everything he had just described, clearly. Going over it all, in a way he probably had all his life.If I let myself love something, I’ll make another kiss on my fist in a fight I shouldn’t have, she imagined him saying to himself, about that scar on his hand. Over and over until it was screwed tight inside him.
But it wasn’t, inside her.
She could see it as it really was.
She saw it all the way back at the beginning, in the stairwell, him talking to someone about the girl. His sister, of course. His sister who it seemed he had wanted to keep safe, just as he wanted for her.
“Caleb, I would do all of those same things. If I had been so denied I would have done the same. I am you, if you hadn’t had to learn the lesson so harshly, so early. Smaller measures of the same poison, that’s the thing.That’s it, that’s all it is,” she said, and in answer he looked at her, haunted.
Wanting to accept it, she thought. But still unable to.
“I don’t even see her now. I’m too afraid to,” he whispered.
So she climbed onto the bed, within reaching distance of him.
“You don’t have to be. I’m with you, it’ll be all right.”
“Don’t you even care that I thought first with my fists? That I left you?”
