Virginia trudged up Jason’s driveway in the pouring rain. The gun dug into her waist, her sneakers slipped in the mud, and the trees clashed in the dark overhead. By the time Virginia climbed up the steps and banged her fist on the door, she stood trembling from the cold, drenched, muddy, and exhausted.
The wind shifted, pelting rain in her face. Turning her back, she pounded on the door again.
“Hang the fuck on!” Jason yelled.
She tried the door, found it unlocked, and slid inside.
He was still pulling on his pants. The scarring she’d only ever seen on his arm continued on his chest, on his stomach, running into his waistband. Burns from an explosion, scars of shrapnel, she could see it now.
Virginia leaned against the door, too tired to react.
He started to say something, but his eyes flickered over her—from the wet bra to the T-shirt-wrapped bulge stuck in her skirt—and he clenched his teeth tight and groaned. Turning, he disappeared back down the hall. “Put that somewhere I won’t see it,” he called before a door shut. “I know nothing about whatever you don’t have.”
She almost wanted to smile. He knew not to ask and hadn’t immediately told her to leave. The hope fluttered alive in her heartbeat until she remembered her father.
Pulling the gun out, she looked around. Where would Jason never go in his own home? She moved into the kitchen area, opening cupboards; when she found an empty one, she put the gun on the shelf.
Voices drifted down the hall. Not just Jason. But a girl.
She wanted to care about that, but there were so many other things to care about—her history, her future—that there was simply no space for it. No wonder he’d been annoyed.
That’s something you get to care about. Tourmaline’s words echoed in her head. But Tourmaline didn’t understand: Virginia knew that people cared about those things. She knew that if she were a whole person, instead of just a shell of one, she would feel more than an easily ignored twitch of jealousy or frustration at discovering that the boy she loved was sleeping with someone else.
“Oh. You,” Aubrey said, stopping in the kitchen doorway and smoothing her curls. Her shirt was still twisted, half tucked into jeans. “What are you doing here?”
“Just. Uh . . .” Virginia ruffled her hair and looked out the window, but only her bedraggled reflection stared back at her. The fact that she was standing in Jason’s kitchen wearing only dripping jeans and a bra communicated something far more petty and silly than the truth. She shrugged. “Did I interrupt?”
“I have work to do,” Jason said to Aubrey. “I told you that.”
“So she’s staying?” Aubrey asked.
He just stood there, looking wholly unapologetic. “Until I can get her out of my hair.”
“Mm-hmm.” Aubrey raised an eyebrow and hooked her finger into the back of her sandal.
“I have to take care of this before it becomes bigger trouble than it is right now.”
“Yeah, I know the kind of trouble she’s in.” Aubrey rolled her eyes and picked up her purse. She laughed. “We’ll see if you pick up the next time I’m in trouble.” She opened the door and winked at Virginia. “Have fun.”
“Will do,” Virginia said, just to drive home the point.
Jason shut the door and glared at her. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“Hmm.” She pursed her lips and stared at the floor. “What do you want to hear?”
“You’re a mess.”
She nodded. “Yep.”
“You need a place to stay?”
She kept nodding, looking around the kitchen. Everyplace but at him. Feeling small and vulnerable, and empty—terrified to go looking for feelings about this man and what had happened to her father, let alone feelings about what had just happened between him and Aubrey. “Yep.”
“I’ll put a towel and some clothes in the bathroom for you.” He walked away.
Maybe I should just leave. But hope beat against her ribs, and Aubrey was already gone, so she followed him down the hall.
He carried a neatly folded towel and a pile of clothes into the bathroom and dropped them on the sink. Starting the water, he turned and tried to look very stern. “Don’t use all the hot water. I still need a shower.”
Tucking her chin, Virginia waited until he left, closing and locking the door after him.
Her reflection looked back at her in the mirror.
What now, Virginia Campbell?
The parts of her that looked like her father looked back and told her she was not worth anything at all. His eyes. His chin. His handiwork that had given her the permanent angle of her jaw. She’d been born softer. He’d remade her harder. To see the reminder of violence so clearly written in her features made her stomach plummet. Virginia forced herself to look past it, to ignore it, to remember she’d been worth eighteen hundred—
Hazard echoed back to her. I’m done with her. Make it look like they did it. The summation of all she was and all she’d done.
Virginia turned away. She did not ask herself what was next or what she wanted; she simply peeled off her skirt and underwear and ducked into the water before she looked too hard. One day at a time. She’d show up to mow lawns in the sunrise with Tourmaline. She’d help Tourmaline get Wayne back into prison. Hazard would go, too—if Wayne was surrounded by Hazard’s drugs and had Hazard’s gun, how could Hazard not take a fall?
Then maybe she could care about who Jason fucked, what had happened to her father, and what this had all done to her deep inside. Then maybe she could find something beyond the rusted edge of anger to keep her eyes open.
But not right now.
Quickly, she showered and dressed in the T-shirt and shorts Jason had left for her. They smelled like him, comforting, and her body felt safe inside them, despite the stiffness and aching when she headed down the hall.
Jason sat in the main room, still shirtless, computer open in his lap and the TV on. A blanket and pillow were laid out on the couch. She was glad to see it, but her throat ached with longing to slide into his lap, push her head into his chest, and cry in his arms.
“There should be hot water left,” she said.
“Good.” He didn’t look up from the computer. “There’s some food in the kitchen if you’re hungry.”
Food turned out to be a plate and napkin set on the table with a couple of slices of buttered bread, a can of cheap beer, and a thick hunk of pan-fried venison. She sat down and started eating, gaze flickering to Jason as he stayed focused on the computer. “What are you working on?”
“School.”
She startled. “Huh?”
He lifted a heavy book she hadn’t seen. The light from the TV reflected on the cover, but she couldn’t make out the title.
“Pharmacology,” he said.
“For what?”
“I’m in nursing school,” he said, putting the book back.
She stared at her plate, head spinning as if she were turning for Hazard. Shoving another bite into her mouth, she forced herself not to look back at Jason. It was hard to tell whether she hated him, or whether this information gave her hope that she’d eventually make it.
“I’m getting a shower.” He put down the computer and stood, hiking up his jeans. “Put whatever you want on the TV.”
She finished eating in silence, listening to the water hit the shower walls. Putting her plate in the sink, she glanced down the hall, at the light coming out from under the door. The water turned off.
Virginia stared down the hall, mind blank.
NASCAR droned on the TV. Eventually, she forced herself to sit on the couch. It’d look weird if Jason came out of the shower to see her frozen in place. She tucked the pillow under her arm and tried to look as if she belonged, but the night was thin, and deep down she was worth nothing and had no place anywhere, not even on Jason’s couch. And here he’d made her bed.
The wind had died down outside, but the rain pattered on the windows and the roof. The only other sounds were the dull drone of racing and commentators.
Jason came back in the room, in shorts and with wet hair, smelling like damp skin and soap. The blue cast of the television reflected off his bare skin. Off the scars and tattoos.
Did he put my old man down? She didn’t need to know, but she wanted to know. Needed to know he would tell her. She swallowed and looked away. “Nursing school, huh?”
“Can’t just be a drunk forever.” He opened a beer and settled back into the chair.
“Oh, but you’re so gifted in that area.”
He chuckled and opened the computer back up. “You planning on school?”
She looked to the TV. “We’ll see.”
It was quiet. The TV flickered with a crash replay and engines revved.
“I saw you at the Covington Walmart once,” she said, keeping her eyes on the circling cars. “When I was seventeen. You made me feel like I was just like all the other girls.”
“What do you mean?” he asked cautiously.
She smiled, still looking at the screen while her stomach tightened with nervousness. “You made me feel seventeen and like I didn’t know a thing in the world, not the least of which was my name or anything that had happened to me. And then you made me irritated because you didn’t notice me at all.” She laughed softly. That memory summed up their entire relationship, still.
“I was probably fucked up. If you think I didn’t notice you. What was I doing?”
“Buying Oreos.”
He chuckled. “Yeah, I was definitely fucked up.”
“I like you that way, Jason.” She looked at him now. “I like that it’s this front you work hard to make people believe.”
He gave a short, bitter laugh.
She raised her eyebrow slightly. “I think I almost love you more for it.”
His expression froze, strangled and frightened. He opened his mouth but then closed it and looked back to the computer. “You need to find someone different to love.”
“I know . . .” But she couldn’t keep going. What if she ruined any life she might have by bringing the dead back? “I know, but then again, maybe you don’t have to work so hard with me. Maybe I love you because I don’t have to work so hard with you.”
He pinched his lips and clicked on something. “I didn’t remember you until that day at Tourmaline’s, when you ducked like I was about to hit you. I met you a long time ago, and you did the same thing, even though you didn’t know me. You just happened to be walking behind me.”
“He was a rough and rowdy man,” she said, keeping her voice clean of emotion, though her stomach rolled with it.
Jason looked straight at her then, clear understanding on his face. “No, honey,” he said softly, his voice low and smooth and right. “I’m a rough and rowdy man. Your old man was just an evil sumbitch who liked to hit things smaller than him.”
She rested her head on the back of the couch and closed her eyes, letting herself sink into the rest that was calling her. “Did you do it?”
“It wasn’t like we didn’t warn him.” He sounded nervous. “He had chances. He was offered grace. He was offered a way out. But he didn’t want any of those things. When evil is beyond itself in a person there’s nothing left but to put it down.”
“That was him,” she said. “Did you do it?”
“I didn’t. But I knew it was done. And . . .” He shook his head, mouth tightening into a thin line.
“And you’ve done it since,” she finished for him. “That’s what you all do. After the court runs and the charity fund-raising rides and past all the girls and the alcohol and shit everyone likes to talk about a lot more than hurt kids or women, there you are. You watch at the edges of everything and intervene when no one else will.”
Jason looked at her, something different in his expression—more open, less guarded, something nearing vulnerable. “I always felt like I could do just about anything as long as I knew it was the right thing to do. But I’m afraid, when I close my eyes at night—”
“On the floor?” Virginia interrupted. “Next to your mattress?”
He closed his eyes. Smiled. Tried to stop smiling. Smiled again. “On the floor.” He swallowed, eyes still closed in the reflected light. “I’m afraid that instead of putting down abusers, I’ve only taken fathers. Instead of making places for goodness and grace, I’ve only made space for a different shade of darkness to slip in. That everything I’ve done, is just. Nothing.”
Never had Virginia wanted to take him in her hands as she did then. But she only swallowed and clutched the pillow. “Y’all couldn’t save me.”
“I see that now.”
“But you gave me a chance. You and Tourmaline. And each time the effort is made, I feel like maybe, someday, I might actually find my way out.”
He gave a soft chuckle-sigh, as if he didn’t want to be comforted.
“I’m afraid.” The words felt clumsy and awful, where the brush of her hand, or her mouth on his, could have said more. “For you.”
“About what?”
“That you’ll finally find the way to stop breathing.”
He rolled his eyes.
“I need you to keep breathing. I need you to make me more venison and . . .” She forced herself to act on what she knew instead of what she felt. “I need you . . .” To love me back, to not love anyone else. But she couldn’t finish, and she stared at him with all of it unsaid, hoping he could read her mind.
He was silent for a moment. “I’m breathing. I’m here.”
Her eyes felt heavy, but she didn’t notice she had fallen asleep until Jason gently shook her shoulder. Virginia jolted awake, panicking until she remembered where she was and how she got there.
Jason didn’t seem to notice, or he pretended he didn’t. “I’m going to bed. Want the blanket?”
After the food and the little bit of sleep, feeling warm and clean inside his soft T-shirt, Virginia was also feeling more like herself. More like she had space in this world instead of being just a wet shadow that showed up on doorsteps when she wasn’t wanted. Bringing her arms up, she sleepily pulled on his shoulders.
Even in her sleep, she noticed it didn’t take much for him to sigh and drop down beside her. They moved around for a minute, arranging themselves as if they’d done this before. He folded the pillow under his arm and she snuggled into the crook of his shoulder. Until they both came to rest, her body tucked along his. Instantly, something inside her relaxed.
“God almighty this is dumb,” he whispered, as if to himself. But he chuckled and shook his head, pulling her tighter. As if it were much easier, for both of them, to breathe, as long as they did it together. “I’m not really a blanket,” Jason said, fingers warm and rough as he smoothed the hair away from her temple. “I’ll just finish watching the race.” He said it as if to himself.
She tucked her face deep into the crook of his arm and breathed the fresh smell of soap on his skin and the hard life of the couch beneath them. She was going to make herself a home here.