I can get there on my own. you can leave me here alone.
He lets her have this.
He lets her believe it, if that’s what she wants.
He sees no use in bringing her to rage again.
He does not want to wake their daughter so that she might spit her poison in his direction again.
The last thing he wants is both of their venom.
So, he just smiles serenely and allows her to think him wonderful, if only for the moment. Because he knows beyond the shadow of a doubt that there will come a time – perhaps soon – when she eats her words, when she regrets saying them, when she remembers that she does not think him wonderful at all. When she remembers that the walls he has built around himself are more or less impenetrable, no matter how he has exhausted himself trying to tear them down. For her. For their daughter. Still, they remain. Indestructible. Even in the fury of her storms.
She starts a thought but does not finish it. She shakes her head instead, swallows whatever question she was going to ask him. He ponders the first. Will he ever believe her? No, probably not. Because he will always remember how she had loathed him for the way he did not let her fury consume him, the way he refused to let it destroy him, too. He will never forget how fiercely she had tried to make him be anything other than what he was.
But he tells her none of this. Instead, he dips his head and presses his mouth – dark and plain – against her shoulder and sighs. “Ask me,” he says, gently. “When you tell me that you think what?” he coaxes, lifting his head then to look her in the eye. His eyes honest, as they have always been. The one thing about him that has always remained unguarded.
BETHLEHEM
I'm just tryin' to do what's right. oh, a man ain't a man unless he's fought the fight.
