"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
one touch will make you so nervous you might stop breathing one touch will make you so reckless you might start feeling one touch will finally show to me what you can't hide
Perhaps one day they will tell each other the truth.
Perhaps they will rip it from their tongues and bleed it out. She will show him the ugliest parts of her heart and he will be surprised that there is more to show. She will show him the way that she hungers for things she never should. She will tell him about how she twists herself around pain like worship; how sometimes she thinks that she may be addicted to that too.
But the moment is sweet and they both abide by the white flag they raise.
It will not last forever, she knows.
She will push too far and he will barely react or react too hard and she will snap. They will be at each other’s throats. They will see red. They will walk away.
(But maybe they will walk back, she thinks. Maybe they will.)
“I don’t think it’s lousy at all,” she whispers like it’s a secret. Like he may not know just how deeply she thinks it is wonderful. Like she could unravel just how wonderful she thinks that he is so he could look at it through her eyes and know the truth of it.
She wishes she could give him at least this much.
“Do you think you’ll ever believe me?” her voice quiet as she murmurs this too. “Do you think you’ll ever trust me when I tell you that I think—“ She shakes her head, knowing the words were too close to the heart of it and knowing she could trip over it far too easily.
“Nevermind,” she whispers and curls against him, wishing she hasn’t said anything at all./p>
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.
one touch will make you so nervous you might stop breathing one touch will make you so reckless you might start feeling one touch will finally show to me what you can't hide
And maybe that is the crux of the matter.
Because he will always see her rage as evidence of how she could never think him wonderful while she will always see it as a sign that she does. She will always think of how he brings her to ruin and she lets him. She will always think of his strength and his stoicism in the face of her whipping emotions. She will always consider all of the different ways that a person can come apart and be put back together again.
She will always think of it as a strange kind of wonderful.
His kind of wonderful.
As bruising as it may be.
But they do not ruin each other now. They are calm and sweet and his mouth is on her shoulder. She wants to cry with relief—wants to ask him if it can be like this forever. She wants to tell him that she has dreamt of moments like this with him. Has ached to know what it’s like to see him at his most tender, when the walls do not seem so insurmountable, when the future looks just a little brighter.
When she can look at him and not see all the secrets swirling around them.
He looks her in the eye and there is so much there that she can hardly unpack it. Eye contact with him is like a punch in the gut and she wishes that he didn’t have the kind of eyes that told stories. The kind of soulful eyes that let her know just how much lived underneath the surface of him. Maybe it would be easier if he didn’t. Maybe she could even pretend that he was callous, that he was cruel.
But she knows these things are lies when she looks him in the eye.
She becomes helpless when she looks him in the eye.
And all of the things she would rather guard come tumbling out instead.
“When I tell you that I think I could fall in love with you,” she softens it, adds the ‘could’ instead of the ‘am’ and then sweeps her eyelashes down. “I’m sorry. I told myself I wouldn’t push you.”
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.
one touch will make you so nervous you might stop breathing one touch will make you so reckless you might start feeling one touch will finally show to me what you can't hide
He does not say it like a dismissal, but she feels the rejection all the same. It is sharp and she nearly sucks her breath in. It causes her head to spin and she goes very still, very quiet as she tries to remember where she is and where he is and the fact that there is a tiny sleeping child at her feet. She tries to remember that she cannot fall apart now. She cannot splinter apart. She cannot forget who she is and what she is meant to do. Not now. Not now.
“Oh,” is all she says at first because it is the only sound that her lungs will allow her to make. It is a quiet thing, but she forces it to be whole. She forces it to not completely come apart.
There is another moment and she is acutely aware of the fact that she has been completely quiet. That she hasn’t really responded to him. Her heart constricts painfully.
She can’t ruin this just because she is greedy for things she cannot have.
She can’t ruin this just because she so desperately wants more.
As a girl, she could not be enough to earn Ophie’s love.
As a woman, she must not be enough for Beth.
She wraps herself around the pain and although there is a part of her—as feral and hissing as her daughter—that begs her to run away, she stays instead. She presses into the blade as she remains curled against him and just breathes. “Okay,” she says and she lets that be enough.
Adna wipes her expression clean and swallows the ache down.
She leans her cheek against his shoulder and tells herself it will be enough.
He doesn’t have to love her, she thinks. She will be happy with whatever he can give her.
I can get there on my own. you can leave me here alone.
He expects her to argue.
He anticipates vitriol and venom.
He expects the world to crash down around them, powerless in the face of her rage.
But she goes quiet instead. And perhaps this is worse. Perhaps this is more lethal. Because he has wounded her in a way that too closely resembles defeat. She speaks but she does not say much of anything at all - oh, okay - she says and the distant sound of it slips a blade between his ribs that smarts when he breathes.
He does not know how they arrived here. He does not know how they got from that clearing in the forest where she’d threatened to end his life and he’d all but begged her to do it to this clearing in an altogether different forest, her cheek laid against his shoulder and their child sleeping at her feet. He has always been a simple man, never one to disturb the waters. He has skirted through his life without ever making much of an impression on anyone. Why is this different?
Why is he standing here now, breaking a heart he didn’t deserve to be handed in the first place? Still, he grits his teeth and tries for a steady breath but the ribs smart and the lungs ache and there is a vise that tightens around his throat. He turns and kisses her head and stands there in the thick suffocating silence that follows.
He wants to say something, wants to offer her some sense of relief or solace or consolation. But he does not know how. So, he stands there with his tongue caught between his teeth. (But he does not bleed, not the way their daughter does – at least not physically). The heart thumps out a worthless beat and he exhales a shuddering sigh as the weary eyes drift closed.
BETHLEHEM
I'm just tryin' to do what's right. oh, a man ain't a man unless he's fought the fight.
