He goes. The Bronco’s lights swing away down Cradle Hill, red taillights smearing in the snow, the ordinary world driving itself home, and I stand there until they’re gone and then I go back inside to the wolf.
CHAPTER 27
WREN
He’s exactly where I left him, in the blaze of all my lights, and he watched the whole thing through the front window. I can tell, the snow-melt of him, the stillness, and he knows what I did. He knows I stepped between him and the door. He knows I lied to a cop’s face to keep him out of the dark.
And the thing in him that has held a line for twelve years finally, quietly, lets go.
“You lied for me,” he says. His voice isn’t steady anymore. None of him is steady anymore. “You stood on that porch and you lied to a man who’d have saved you, to keep them from taking me.”
“Don’t.” My back’s against the door. The flashlight’s still in my hand. “Don’t make it mean something. I lied because the truth ruins me too, I lied because —”
And then it doesn’t come out as words. Six years of it doesn’t fit through a sentence.
It comes out as my fists on his chest. I drop the flashlight and I go at him, both hands, hitting that wall of a man with everything I buried under a grey dress, and the words come ragged and ugly between the blows — “Why did you come back. I had alife,do you understand, I built a whole life out of nothing, out of owing no one, out of a quiet I made with my own hands, and youwalked down off that mountain and youruinedit, you ruined the quiet, you made me feel it all again —” I hit him and he lets me, he doesn’t catch my wrists, he doesn’t step back, he stands there and takes it the way he took a beating in a hallway when I was fifteen, arms open, face open, absorbing me. “Six years I made myself hate you, six years, I worked at it, it was the hardest thing I ever did and I wasso good at it,and you ruin it infour days, and you won’t even fight, you never fight, you juststand thereand let me destroy you, you let me put you on a stand and bury you and youwrote back like it was nothing,you —” My voice breaks in half. “Why didn’t you hate me. I gave you everything you needed to hate me. I built you a perfect reason.Why didn’t you take it.”
“Because it wasn’t true.” Quiet. Unmoved. My blows landing on him like snow on a roof. “And I don’t lie to myself, little lamb. It’s the one thing I never learned how to do. That was always your gift, not mine.”
I hit him once more, and the fight goes out of my hands, and the last blow turns into a fist twisted in his shirt, holding on, and I’m shaking against him, six years of careful hatred coming apart in my chest like rotten thread, and I hate that it’s a relief, I hate that being held up by the thing I tried to bury is the safest I’ve felt since I was eighteen.
“There she is,” he murmurs, into my hair, still not closing his arms, still letting me be the one who decides. “Get it all out. I’ve got nowhere to be. I waited six years. I can wait through this too.”
“I’m not crying because I forgive you,” I say into his chest, furious, wrecked. “I haven’t forgiven you. You don’t get to beforgiven, you arrogant, you decided my whole life for me in ninety seconds and called it love —”
“I know.”
“You don’t get to be the good one. I won’t let you be the good one.”
“I know, Wren.” And there’s the ghost of the almost-smile in it, the terrible gentle patience of him. “You’re still doing it, though.”
I go still. “Doing what.”
“Putting something between us. It was the debt, and then it was the cage, and now it’s the rage, and the rage is true, God knows you’ve earned every swing, but it’s still a wall, little lamb. You’ll stack anything you can find in the gap between us rather than say the one thing.” His open hands hover at my back, warm, not landing. “Six years. Tell me I built you out of a sound through a wall for nothing. Tell me to walk back up that hill and I’ll go, I’ll go right now, I’ll mind the rules, I’ll —”
“Shut up,” I say, and I drop the flashlight, and I kiss him.
It isn’t like the stairs. The stairs were two children deciding to be brave. This is two ruined adults who have already lost everything they were trying to protect, kissing like it’s the last honest act left to either of us, and he makes that sound again, the one from six years ago,mine, finally, mine,low and broken against my mouth, and his hands are everywhere at once like he can’t decide which six years of starving to feed first. I feel him shaking. This enormous changed man, shaking, because he’s finally allowed to touch the thing he came back from the dead for.
“Say it,” he breathes, walking me back against the door, his mouth at my jaw, my throat, the wild jump of my pulse. “I don’t want your body, Wren, I can take a body, I want the thing you’ve never given anyone, say you were mine first. Before the lie. Before the dress.”
“I was yours first.” It comes up out of the padlocked room and it’s such a relief to say that my knees go again, and he catches me, he always catches me. “On the stairs. When you said the house went quiet. I was yours before I knew there was a word for it and I have been yours every single day you were gone, I counted my own breaths so you’d have something to listen f—”
He kisses the rest of it out of my mouth.
What happens then is six years and twelve years and a whole sunk life coming up for air at once. He lifts me like I weigh nothing and I wrap around him and he carries me, not to the bedroom, he doesn’t make it that far, just down to the rug in the blaze of all my lights because neither of us can stand the dark anymore, not with each other, the dark was always the thing that kept us apart. He undresses me like he’s defusing something, slow and reverent and shaking, pressing his mouth to every inch he uncovers like he’s checking I’m real, like he’s been told too many times in a cell that I wasn’t. When his hands find the old thin scar on my hip he stops and presses his lips to it and I feel him say something against my skin that isn’t words, that’s just breath, and I understand it anyway, the way I always understood him through plaster:I know. I know what that’s from. I’m here. He’s gone. I made sure he’s gone.
And when there’s nothing left between us, when I’m bare under him in the light with the snow coming down outside and the whole town asleep and not one living soul who’d believe what we are to each other, he holds himself over me and looks at me like the first night on the stairs, like he’sdeciding,and he says, rough, wrecked, half a question: “Mine.”
“Yours,” I say. “I was always yours. Stop asking.”
He stops asking.
He takes me slow, at first, too slow, careful, like he still can’t believe he’s allowed, until I dig my heels into him and tell him I’m not made of glass, I’m made of the same thing that killed his father, and something in him snaps clean and he stops being careful. He’s everywhere, all of him, the weight and the cold-gone-hot of him, one hand splayed over my racing heart like he’s reading it,there it is, there’s my girl, still running too fast,and he says my name like it’s the only word he kept through six years of silence, over and over,Wren, Wren, little lamb,and I come apart under the man I buried with my own mouth, in the light, saying yes, saying his name, saying the true thing finally with my whole body since I was always too much of a coward to trust it to words.
After, the first time, neither of us speaks. We lie tangled on the rug in the blaze of all my lights, both of us wrecked, his heart slamming against my back and mine still running too fast under the hand he won’t take off it, and the snow comes down soundless outside and the house ticks as it warms and for one whole minute there is nothing in the world to be afraid of, whichis so rare for me that I don’t recognize it at first and mistake it for something wrong.
“Stop bracing,” he murmurs into my hair, reading me the way he reads everything. “I can feel you waiting for the bad thing. There’s no bad thing tonight, little lamb. Tonight there’s just this.” His mouth moves to the curve of my shoulder, to the old thin scar, and lingers. “Six years I built you out of a sound. You’re so much warmer than the version I made. I keep —” his voice catches, this enormous man, undone — “I keep having to check you’re real.”
