He holds me so tight it feels like something new breaks in me. A flood that I didn’t know was in there. And I’m tired. Of holding it in. So he holds, and I cry.
I cry for all the things I can’t say. For the loss, and the naked parts of me, and the shame. For the tenderness of his touch, that may never do anything but bring the darkness to wake. For being a child.
When Kurt finally releases me, the sheets are a puddle beside my head. He touches my shoulder, my spine, my hip, and then lets me lie here in the sheets. I stay still, breathing, for what seems like an hour, and the shadows grow dim.
Then there’s music.
Fragile acoustic music. It comes with the brush of his arm on my back. Soft. Meant to comfort. It comes with his heart, and his secrets, and his him. And I should love this. I want to love this.
But I can’t.
Love means trust, and trust means letting it rise—the silence that I don’t talk about, the invisible that is only allowed to be shimmering half-truths and not really seen. He’s not allowed to make those parts of me become solid in the light. I won’t let him. I won’t let him coax it out of me. It’s too dark and black, and all the oceans and rain can’t wash it out. My shame is too messy, and love is supposed to be clean.
“I have to go,” I say, sitting up and collecting my clothes.
Kurt stops strumming, and I have to turn away from his concerned eyes, wanting all of me. The room goes quiet and I slide on my shirt. My jeans. My socks. The sun is almost gone and a tiny bow of orange is all that’s left rimming the window.
His hands press into his guitar strings and the tiny vibrations cut out.
“Are you sure?” he asks, as I walk to the door, my whole face puffy from crying. I look back, and for the first time he looks naked—vulnerable—with only his guitar over his lap. His knees press awkwardly together and his toes dig under the sheets.
“You don’t have to tell me,” he says, running a hand over his arm, covering his chest. I unhook the chair and move it back to the desk. “Whatever it is,” he insists. “You never have to tell me.”
But that’s not how this works. Of course I have to tell him for this to be what he thinks that it is. For us to be what he wants. My hand falls on the doorknob and he’s up.
Guitar left behind him on the bed.
“Don’t,” he says, putting his hand on the door, and I can’t ignore the way my body reacts when he’s as close as he is. How my skin knows his skin.
“Kurt . . .” I barely get the word out. All of this caught in my throat. I step away from him, needing distance. Everything too near the surface.
“Stay, please,” he says. “I don’t have to know.”
I glare at him, anger slicing through me, furious at him for wanting me to pretend. The fact that he knows there’s anything to tell, is the problem. Nothing real, nothing important can start like this! Not with this secret sitting between us. And the fact that he wants to pretend it isn’t there—like Lilith, like my father—infuriates me.
“I have to go!” I say, whipping my hair off my neck.
“You don’t.” He presses himself against the door to keep it shut. “You can—”
But his voice drops out and gets raspy, unguarded in a way that scares me more than anything else about him. I can hardly breathe and the room smells like sweat and dust and I wish he had something to cover himself with.
“This . . . ,” he says, his voice trembling. “You, me . . .”
He struggles for the words, fidgeting with his hands, and his eyes flick to the bed, like he wants the sheet to cover his legs. But he looks at it for so long, it scares me to think perhaps I’m the only one he’s ever taken to that bed. That everyone else gets the car and the ridge.
“Marion, I . . .”
My chest squeezes and I know what he’s going to say before he says it. Only, I don’t want to hear it out loud, because it’s not true. It can’t be true when he doesn’t know all of me. Not with the shame and shitty parts that are filled with mud and darkness.
No one can love those parts.
“Marion, I lo—”
“I’m not your mother!” The words splinter out of me. It’s a low blow, and it scares me with how harsh it comes out. But I needed something to stop him—anything. I couldn’t hear him say it.
I cough, and try to glare at him like I mean it.
“I’m not some girl you’re supposed to save,” I say, and everything about him goes rigid, the softness in his eyes turning to ice.
“Fuck you.” His glare hits me hard, and the sun is gone. His words are pained and angry, and I know I’ve used something he’s trusted me with. A secret. But he should never have trusted me with it. He shouldn’t have told me about his mother. Sharing those parts only makes him vulnerable, gives other people ammunition. People like me. Only, I know it was shitty and I shouldn’t have used it.
But this is what I do when I’m backed into a corner.
Shame crawls through me and I can’t bear to face him. I reach for the doorknob, my knuckles brushing his side, and he jets away from me. He stalks to the far end of the room and yanks the sheet off the bed to cover himself.
I stare at his back, knowing I’ve broken something. I wanted to walk out of this room unscathed, but that isn’t the nature of things. Lake water or ocean, if you touch the surface, it will ripple. If you dive under, it will never be the same.
There’s only one way to fix this. But I can’t give him that grenade. No one’s allowed to have that part of me.
* * *
I get in my car and drive. Drive away from Kurt’s house. From his arms. From his skin.
Away.
Away from what knowing too much of me brings.
I roll down all the car’s windows and the cab turns into a whipping air-tunnel of night and hair. It slashes around me uncaged. And I need this wildness out of me. I need to believe I’m not this person, this mean and angry girl, lashing out.
Kurt is all wrong for me. He’s been wrong from the beginning. No one starts a relationship half-naked and crying. Not like on the ridge. That’s not how anything important is supposed to start. Love stories begin with daydreams and wishes, and sweet kisses on the back of your hand. Not mud. Not sand.
I press the gas, and black trees streak past. Too close. I need someone else. Someone whose touch doesn’t dissolve into rose hips and beach peas and feet drowned in the sand. Of course Kurt wakes those things. How could he not? Our first kiss was on the ridge, with his hands in my hair, wanting nothing but to take things from me, and force—
I hit a pothole and my car swerves. Metal rattles and the weight of this threatens to swallow me. My knuckles grip. I smell burned rubber and my instincts kick in, realigning the tires between the double yellows and the white.
I drive, trees blurring on both sides of me. Hair blocking my vision.
I need to believe that skin can be skin and nothing else. That skin can be silent, and not wake with memories that pull me into their current to drown. I need to believe there is another side of this, where you can have a relationship with someone who doesn’t need to get that close to you. That there can be clean slates, and apple trees, and beginning again.
So, I drive.
Because there’s only one person who’s supposed to be my Prince Charming. One person who will release the bad magic. The person who knows me. The person I can trust. The one who started all this as my friend, and liked me because I was smart, not because of my pretty blond hair.
So, I drive.
And I don’t stop until I’m at Abe’s house.