I can get there on my own. you can leave me here alone.
He has never thought about love.
Not love like the love she proposes, at least.
The love he’d chased in his youth was the love of a mother. Someone who might hold him against the breadth of their chest and tell him that he was worth something and that the world was so fortunate to have him. Someone to kiss his downy head and nurse the wounds that came along with the folly of youth. But he never found it, didn’t look hard enough, didn’t walk far enough. But this is the only love he has ever craved and it has been so long now since he last pined for it that he’d all but forgotten about it.
He knows that she does not love him. He knows it in the marrow of his bones and the murky depths of whatever soul he has salvaged, whatever part of his soul he has not run absolutely ragged in his dogged pursuit of something he’d never catch.
She looks away from him but he goes on studying her. She apologizes and he shakes his head but it is a mournful thing and eventually he looks away, too. He grits his teeth so that the muscle in his jaw pulses, studies the shadows with a narrowed gaze. The child stirs but does not awaken and he thinks this is probably the closest he will ever get to love, the love she thinks she might someday feel for him.
“Your energy would be better spent elsewhere,” he murmurs, the tone soft without being dismissive. He does not scoff or laugh, does not mock her. He has never been deliberately cruel, Bethlehem, but he knows beyond the shadow of a doubt that he is not fit for whatever love – undoubtedly large and whole and unhinged – she has to give. "Save your heart for someone who deserves it, Adna."
BETHLEHEM
I'm just tryin' to do what's right. oh, a man ain't a man unless he's fought the fight.
