Page 62 of Her Rival

For a long moment neither of us moved.

The room was quiet except for both of us breathing.

I thought about the scars I'd seen at the small of her back and the backs of her thighs an hour ago. I thought about the man in a motel off Boulder Highway who'd given a child those scars. I thought about the way her body had braced when I flipped her over, the way the woman underneath me had spent her whole life waiting for somebody to flip her over and find them, the way nobody had until tonight. And I thought, with the small clean cold-blooded clarity I'd always thought through hockey plays with, about the many small efficient ways I was going to make sure that man never had access to her again.

I would not, I'd decided in the kitchen on Friday night, do anything to him she hadn't asked me to do. That was the deal.

But the thinking about it was mine. The thinking about it was free.

I held her.

She started to cry.

It wasn't the small contained crying of a woman who'd cried at her best friend's mother's office that morning, in a chair with a coffee cup in her hands. This was a different kind. The kind that comes out of a body that hasn't been allowed to cry in front of another body for a long time. Her shoulders moved. She tried to stammer something out. Words. I caught the first letter of each one and laid my fingers gently against her mouth to stop them.

"Ssshh," I muttered. "Sh, sh, sh."

She stammered against my fingers.

"You're fine," I said. "You're safe. I've got you."

"I-I-I don't. deserve. to be."

I pressed my fingers to her mouth again, and she went quiet, and her shoulders kept going.

My hand went back to stroking her hair. My knuckles brushed her cheeks, wiping away tears that dried up after a while. Her body shivered and shook like she was running a fever. I pulled the duvet up over both of us and held her against me and let her be in the wreck of it.

I did not say anything she could push back on.

I did not say yes you do.

I did not say don't be sorry.

I did not say you've already apologized enough.

I'd learned in my mid-twenties, from a therapist in San Diego I'd paid two summers in cash so my agent's office wouldn't see the receipts, that the worst thing you can do for a woman who's told you she doesn't deserve to be cared for is tell her she does. The telling is a thing the woman has to do for herself. The job of the man with his arms around her is to be a wall her saying so can land against without bouncing back.

So I let it land.

I let her cry.

I let her shake.

I let her say the words she'd been telling herself her whole life into the side of my chest at one in the morning, in a bed in a glass house in the desert, and I did not answer them, because the answering wasn't mine to do.

She quieted, eventually.

She lay against me with her body slack and her breath evening out and her hand flat against my sternum, the way a hand goes flat against something a person is grateful is still there.

When she'd been quiet a long minute, I felt her start to settle. The tenderness arriving the way it does after, the body softening, the chemistry doing the thing chemistry does.

I felt her notice the wet of me leaking out from between her legs.

"Great," she muttered.

I almost laughed.

I didn't laugh, but I almost did, and she felt the almost-laugh in my chest, and she was unfortunately the kind of woman who'd know exactly what that almost-laugh meant.