by Chloe Cox
He catches the tone in my voice and reacts, the way he always does, when I need something. He stands up, wiping his eyes so no one would ever be able to tell he’d shed a tear, and leans his head against mine. He puts his arms around me again, as though he can’t bear to let go.
“Harlow, I—”
“Wait,” I say. I’m struggling to find the words. I want to tell the truth, but this is one of those things that’s so complicated that there are many parts to the truth. I don’t know how to do all of them justice. “I’ve dealt with it, Marcus. I was so, so lucky, all things considered, and Shantha intervened, and…it didn’t happen the way it could have. I’m over it, I think. I don’t know. As much as anyone’s ever over anything. I don’t know the guy’s last name, or where to find him, or anything, and I don’t want to. It’s just, it’s something that happens to people, and I don’t want it to have changed me, but it did, and now…”
I trail off. Do I tell him this? Do I let him in?
What’s the point in denying the truth?
“What?” he asks me.
I take a deep breath, close my eyes, and feel his arms around me. It shouldn’t help me feel better, it shouldn’t make it feel safer to say what I’m about to say, but it does. Damn him, it does.
“I didn’t want anybody, after that. Even before, I never really felt special about anyone, but afterwards, I couldn’t…I couldn’t feel that way about another person, not even physically. Not until you came back.” I swallow, and force myself to look up at him. “It’s always been you. I thought that part of my life was over. And now I want you so much…”
Marcus brushes against my cheek with the back of his hand while I blink back tears. The look of love on his face is so cosmically unfair, it just reminds me of what we don’t have right now, just because I don’t have any reason to trust him.
“Why does it have to be you? Why is it only you who makes me feel this way? You make me feel alive again, and you are such an asshole!”
I want to push away from him, but I can’t. Instead I just watch my words hurt him.
“Why can’t you tell me?” I ask again. “Why can’t you just tell me so I know it wasn’t my fault? Why can’t you tell me so I know it wasn’t that you stopped loving me, it wasn’t that I didn’t matter, that I wasn’t…”
Right here, my heart just gives out. This whole night, this whole week, this whole conversation, it’s just become too much. I start to cry, great, big, racking heaves, and Marcus holds me tight and I can’t handle how good it feels. I can’t handle that I want this, that I want him to hold me, to make me safe.
Now I really do push away from him, because I can’t bear it, I can’t bear anymore contact. I feel like if he keeps touching me I will lose all will, all discipline, and I will be lost. I will be head over heels in love, in need, with him, and then it will only be a matter of time before he breaks me all over again.
“Why can’t you just say something?” I scream at him.
Marcus has looked as close to beaten down as I’ve ever seen him, right up until this moment. He’s been in such obvious pain, and he’s been looking at me like I’m the only thing in his universe, but he hasn’t done anything—until now.
“Because you won’t believe me!” he shouts back. He puts both hands on top of his head like he’s going to rip his hair out, every large muscle in his huge body flexing, and he lets out a growl. His eyes still look like he’s about to cry, like he wants to just pick me up and hold me for the rest of his life, but his body…
“Why won’t you fucking believe me?” he asks again. “You think you’re the only one who hurt? You don’t know the things I’ve done, Lo, you don’t know what I’ve become for you. You don’t know…”
“What are you talking about?” I say. “Please just tell me what you’re talking about!”
“Fuck!” he shouts, and turns around, slamming his fist down on the kitchen table. It rattles, and for a moment I think it will splinter down the middle, but it holds.
“I can’t fucking tell you!” he shouts again, and he’s angry, angrier than I’ve ever, ever seen him—but not at me. It’s like he’s just mad at the world, at life, looking around for something to take it out on.
“I can’t fucking tell you, and you won’t believe me no matter what I say, and I would have died,” he says, turning back to look at me, those laser eyes spearing me, holding me in place, “I would have died to keep that from happening to you, Lo. I would have come back and killed him myself. I would have…Jesus, Lo, I would have done anything, anything…”
The worst part is that I do believe him. I believe that he would have died, rather than let Dylan follow me into that bathroom. I believe that he would have hunted Dylan down. That he still would, if I let him.
I don’t want to believe him about this. It makes the rest too confusing.
“Why can’t you tell me so I’ll stop thinking it was my fault? That I just wasn’t good enough? Why do you have to be so fucking cruel?”
Marcus catches my hand right as I’m about to shove him in the chest again, and his eyes flash at me. He’s got a crease in his forehead, and the muscles in his jaw are pulsing. He looks like he’s about to explode.
“Why can’t you believe me when I say I’ll tell you as soon as I can?” he rasps. “That the reason I can’t is because I fucking love you?”
This stops me. He says it like that, and it sounds so simple.
I stop thinking about how much he hurt me, and think instead about all he did before that. Hasn’t he earned that from me? The benefit of the doubt?
“Fuck!” he shouts, and releases me. He turns away from me, running a hand through his hair the way he does, and grabs his ruined briefcase from the corner, where it’s been resting on a towel. He slams it on the kitchen table and flips it open, revealing a plain manila folder. He turns back to me and points at it.
“Here. Look at this. See what I’ve been doing with my miserable fucking life the past five years, and then tell me it was because you weren’t good enough.”
I look from him to the briefcase, not really comprehending. He’d said he would prove it, that he never forgot about me, but I kind of thought that wasn’t meant to be taken literally. I mean, who has documented evidence of…whatever this is? I don’t know where my driver’s license is half the time. He has a briefcase of his life.
I look back at Marcus, and he’s just this simmering tower of pent-up emotion. He’s tense, his hands gripping the back of the chair I’d been sitting in, his arms flexing, his shoulders rolled forward. He’s glowering ahead, almost like he’s uncertain of what will happen next.
Marcus is almost never uncertain. Definitely not ever nervous.
I walk toward the folder he’s put on the table, my curiosity overtaking my own apprehension. What I find seems inconsequential at first. A bunch of reports, typed out by an old fashioned typewriter, the kind of thing you never see anymore. They’re styled like memos, written from some guy called M. Winslow to Mr. Roma. Then I see the fine print in the header: “Matthias Winslow, licensed Private Investigator.”
Now I dig through the papers.
I finally manage to focus my eyes on one of these reports long enough to actually read a few lines. “Meanwhile, Dillinger continues to adjust to his new school, and their financial situation is stable. On a personal note, Harlow seems happier. Again, let me know if you’d like me to look further into her personal life; it’s an easy add-on.”
What.
I feel Marcus behind me, his abs to my back, his arms nearly around me. I can tell he wants to hold me. His breathing is fast, shallow.
“What is this?” I say.
“What it looks like.”
“You really did spy on me?” I say, grabbing the folder and moving away from him, turning around, walking backwards into the living room. I need distance. “That wasn’t an exaggeration? You paid someone else to spy on me?”
“No,” he says, his voice catching. I watch his
hands ball into fists, then release again. “Not like that. I didn’t spy on you; I just needed to know that you were ok. That you had everything you needed.”
I stare at him. That I had everything I needed? What kind of bullshit is that? He wanted to make sure providence somehow rained luck and money down upon me?
“What would you have done if I didn’t have everything I need?” I ask, hardly believing this. My head is spinning.
“I would have made sure you did,” he says, his expression changing. “I would have taken care of it.”
I laugh. I can’t help it. It’s too absurd. “So you can leave—that’s cool, right? You can just break my heart and leave, but God forbid I can’t make the electricity bill. That would have been the last straw. That’s totally reasonable.”
Marcus takes a deep breath. “It’s not that simple.”
“Oh, good. Because I was going to say that maybe you should have just asked me which thing I preferred. Having you around, or having you pay someone to tell you I wasn’t starving to death.”
He’s just standing there, taking this from me, not offering up any more explanation. He’s seething, like he has so much he wants to say but won’t. Like why he would have to do this instead of actually stick around. I blow out the air in my lungs in an exasperated puff.
“Marcus, I don’t even know where to begin with how screwed up this is,” I say, and I rifle through the papers, pulling out another one at random. This one catches my eye because of the P.S. on the bottom. “I made the donation to Dillinger’s school, as discussed, from an anonymous benefactor.”
Oh, are you freaking kidding me?
Dill’s school has only had one donation from an anonymous benefactor, and it was a big one. I wave the paper around. “You? You bought Dill’s school a computer lab?”
I can’t even look at him anymore. I collapse on the couch, put the folder down on the floor next to me, and rest my head in my hands.
He’s taken away my ability to be mad at him and feel good about it, is the thing. It’s not any more satisfying to know he was watching me, thinking about me, trying to find ways to provide for us the whole time. I thought it would help to know what he’d been up to, but it just makes me realize how much I really needed him. Just him.
Just. Him.
He comes and sits next to me, his weight dipping the couch, pulling me toward him. I don’t fight it.
“Are you upset?” he asks. His own voice is still shaky. He’s not making me talk about the attempted rape, but I can tell he’s still thinking about it. That he doesn’t want to let me out of his sight, his arms. It might take him awhile.
“Lo, are you ok?” he asks again.
I shake my head. I don’t know. I don’t know if I feel violated by his spying, just frustrated, or humiliated that Marcus knows these things about me. I’m thinking about all the dark times, the times when I really did struggle, when I was terrified, when I needed him most of all. I missed him and I was furious with him, and I was brokenhearted and betrayed, but at least I had the solace of knowing that all that suffering was in secret. At least I still had my pride.
And now I know he saw all of that. I mean, it’s one thing to tell him. I still control that. It’s another to know someone was watching.
“I don’t know,” I say.
He puts his hand on my back, and damn it, there it is again. That feeling, the longing for him—it swells right back up with no regard to what’s happening. To the fact that my head is spinning, that I should be beyond freaked out to find out Marcus watched me all those years. To find that out on the same night he somehow happened to be here to protect me from a freaking home invasion. His fingers burn a brand into me into me anyway, and his scent, the warmth of him, pulls me into the hollow underneath his arm.
I have so little self-control with him.
And for some reason, I like that.
“I wish I knew what to say to make it better,” he says.
He doesn’t finish. I wouldn’t know what to fill in there, either. Instead I stand up, pulling myself away from his touch, like pulling against an elastic band, and make my way toward the stairs.
“You can have the couch,” I say.
chapter 14
HARLOW
Sometimes all you need is time to put things in perspective. Sometimes a memory helps, too.
I’m lying awake in the relative dark of my bedroom, the only light coming in from the window by my bed and falling softly on me in a square of pale light against the darkness. It probably looks pretty, but it means I can’t quite see into the shadows of my room. Shouldn’t matter, right? I’m a grown up. I shouldn’t be afraid of the dark.
Except once I get over the shock of Marcus’s briefcase revelations and my own emotional meltdown, I’m right back to being in shock about the attempted home invasion. And those shadows are terrifying.
I start to think about whether I could have called 911 in time. I start to think about whether I could have used any of the skills Marcus taught me, whether I could have kicked the guy’s ass before the cops got here, and it’s horrible to have to admit that I couldn’t. Even without the weak ankle, I’m out of shape, and I was never good enough to take on a fully grown man. I already have ample evidence of that, thanks to one horrible night in a bar.
Weirdly, the only thing that gives me some comfort is that, whether Marcus admits it or not, I’m convinced it had to do with this stupid real estate development. If it had been random, if it had been someone out to attack a woman alone in her house, that’s a whole different order of scary. It can’t be that.
Not that this isn’t terrifying enough. Because that’s what happens; the anxiety slowly grows, builds, takes on different shades, gathers weight, until it’s full-blown terror. Until it’s terror wrapped in anger that someone would do this to me, and for such a stupid, shallow reason.
The only other time in my life I’ve been this scared was right after my parents died, and I couldn’t sleep because of it.
It’s so strange to think back on how drastically grief and depression affected me. I’ve never really tried to explain it to anyone else, because every time I try to put it into words, it sounds so delusional, so truly ill, that I just give up. It’s hard for me to understand it now, because even then I knew it was irrational, but it didn’t matter. Only the fear mattered. I would lie awake, rigid with that fear, unable to move because I thought that if I did it might somehow disturb the order of the universe, that it might somehow anger fate, and the end result of this in my grief-crazed mind was always something terrible happening to Dill.
It really made no sense at all.
I couldn’t move because Dill might choke in his sleep. I couldn’t let myself fall asleep because Dill might fall down the stairs. I couldn’t tell anyone because it might get back to my Aunt Jill, and she would take Dill away forever.
I couldn’t even talk, couldn’t explain what was happening to me. I was too afraid.
And it was Marcus who figured it out.
It was Marcus who realized I wasn’t sleeping. I don’t know, maybe other people noticed. But he was the only one who did something about it.
That’s when he started sneaking into my bedroom at the Mankowskis at night, just a few days after the accident. The first time he tapped on my window, standing on a milk crate at the side of the house, I was actually relieved. I mean, I felt a jolt of terror at any kind of stimuli, any creak of the floorboards, any screech of tires, anything at all. But part of me was relieved that something was happening, that I had something—anything—to focus on besides the horrible scenarios that kept playing themselves out in my head.
Marcus climbing through my window was the only thing that got me to stop living those nightmares over and over again until my mind burned out on itself.
I think most people, myself included, would have taken one look at me and backed away slowly, because what was happening to me was overwhelming. I had bitten my fingernails until they bled; I had
scratched holes in my sheets. I was sweaty with the effort of holding myself completely, rigidly still, my whole body one giant knot.
I haven’t been able to remember what it actually felt like to be that scared in so long, like my body wouldn’t let me. Like there was a block. I could talk about it, I knew the facts, but I couldn’t feel it. Like it happened to someone else, some other version of me, and I was mostly grateful that I didn’t have to be her anymore.
Until tonight. Tonight, it’s coming back.
And the only thing that helped all those years ago was Marcus. He didn’t say anything or do anything special, there wasn’t some magic word or anything. He just climbed in through that window and stayed.
I remember him touching my cheek.
I remember him lying down next to me, so gently, trying not to disturb me.
I remember him taking my hands in his when I tried to scratch at them.
I remember the first time he held me when I cried like that, not about anything, just from the frustration of constantly being afraid. He was careful, leaning up on one elbow, gently lifting up my head until he could get his arm around me. And then he pulled me against his chest, which was the safest place I’d ever been.
I think it was his silence that allowed me to eventually speak. It wasn’t the first night he came in through that window that I could talk about it. And I don’t remember sleeping that night, though Marcus told me later that I did a little bit. I don’t even know if it was the second night he was with me that I could talk about it. I just remember the terror slowly receding, the knowledge of Marcus lying next to me, calm, steady, certain, slowly replacing the looping visions of my little brother’s death in my mind.
Until one night I just spoke out loud. I told him. I told him, and I wasn’t afraid that saying it out loud would make it come true.
I just said, “I’m afraid that she won’t watch him and Dill will smother in his sleep.”
I think most people, in that situation, might try to get me to talk about it. Or they would try to reason with me, to convince me that nothing was going to happen to Dill, that it was a totally irrational fear. But I knew all of that already. I knew it was completely irrational, and I didn’t want to talk about it anymore because I’d been thinking about it nonstop for hours already. The last thing in the world I needed to do was talk about it some more.
