Page 46 of Run Rabbit Run

His mouth finds my throat where his hand was.

His hands find the rest, dragging at my torn clothes, and he marks me the way you'd mark territory, mouth and grip and weight, saying my name low against my skin like he's writing it into me, saying rabbit, saying caught, saying mine.

The degradation of it should be the worst part and isn't, because the worst part is my own body, the traitorous thing, the slick unwanted warmth starting to coil low in my belly at a touch I'd cut out of myself if I could reach it.

The hand comes back to my throat as he takes me.

Not to choke. To hold.

His palm reads the frantic jump of my pulse while he moves and my body answers, and my mind stands off to the side, horrified, taking notes it will never be able to burn.

He sinks into me slowly and inexorably wrong, and my body clenches against the intrusion and the clenching only drags him deeper, and a broken sound tears out of me before I can stop it.

I say stop.

He doesn't stop.

He warned me he wouldn't, and he doesn't, and there's no rescue in the word and no conscience in him to reach with it.

Only his weight, his mouth, and his hand at my throat and the gray dawn coming up gold through the cedars while a man takes the one thing my running was supposed to buy back.

I bite my own lip until fresh blood runs, chasing the pain, using it to drown the unwanted spark building under it, because if I can't stop my body from answering him, I can at least refuse to feel it.

Gramps taught me this too, though he never knew he was teaching it. He taught me that when the cold water closes over your head, and you can't fight the current, you stop fighting the current, you go still and let it carry you, and you save everything you have for the one moment it slackens.

He meant rivers.

He meant hypothermia and rapids and the thousand ways the backcountry can kill a person who panics.

He didn't mean this.

But the lesson holds, because a lesson doesn't care what you use it for, and I use it now, floating up and away from my own body while a man writes his name into it, saving myself for the slack water that has to come eventually, because all currents slacken eventually, even his.

I’m somewhere above the cedars when it ends.

It takes a moment to come back down into myself, into the cold, the ache, the wet moss under me and the weight of him.

And then he doesn't let go of me.

That's the last cruelty of it, the one I didn't see coming.

He gathers me up off the cold ground and holds me against his chest in the full light of the morning.

His hand is gentle now in my hair, and his mouth is soft against my temple.

He murmurs into it that I was magnificent, that I was worth every day of the wait, that I'm home now, that the running's done and I never have to run again.

I lie there in the arms of the man who hunted me, in the woods, and I don't cry.

Something goes quiet in me instead.

Not peace. The opposite of peace.

A door swinging shut somewhere far down inside, soft, final, sealing off a room I'm not sure I'll get back into, and behind it the girl who believed the woods could keep her safe goes dark and still.

The sun clears the ridge.

Full dawn, the dawn I ran all night to reach, breaking gold and useless over a woman who lost.