I never cared for anyone so much. I was born with a bomb inside my gut.
She has gotten all she will get out of him, she realizes.
So, she does not ask him for anything more.
And, not for the first time, she resents her weakness. Not for the first time, she wishes she were someone stronger. Someone capable of sidling up to him, forcing him to tell her what had happened. Someone capable of drawing out and vanquishing all the hurt. ‘Let me carry it,’ she wants to be able to say, ‘let me keep you safe.’ But, she cannot and she doesn’t know how to try.
He doesn’t want to talk about it, he says, and she sews her mouth up tight. Exhales an unsteady sigh through her nose as he moves toward her. But he touches her and arrests all of the air in her lungs, knocks the earth off its axis when he pushes the hair out of her eyes, when the mouth lingers there and the heat of his breath nearly takes her to her knees. The eyelids fall heavy closed and she sways almost imperceptibly.
A shudder steals down the length of her spine when he speaks and she forces her eyes open to meet his gaze. There is something different about those eyes that has nothing to do with the things he’s not telling her, she thinks. There are storms there, certainly, but the clouds take on a different shape.
And, because she wants so desperately to be someone else, she conjures up a stilted kind of smile. She draws in a thin breath and says, “I’m sorry I didn’t find you sooner.” It comes out hoarse, raspy, straining against the pressure system building at the very center of her.
For the first time in such a long time, she exhales a breath of laughter. More surprised than mirthful but laughter all the same. She has never believed herself someone worth missing, certainly not by someone like him. The sound fades, though, and so does the faint outline of the smile she’d worn, as she searches his face before nodding with a kind of finality. “I missed you, too.”
lilian
