Any time.
He’d sent it after he’d dropped me off last; I hadn’t even taken off my – his – my coat when it had beeped through. A reminder, because he must’ve sensed my reluctance at leaving him. I needed him and I couldn’t hide it.
Glancing back up at his house, my heart leaps into my throat as I press once, firmly, on the icon next to his name. I don’t look at the screen, don’t even hold the phone up to my ear. But I can hear it ringing from where I hold it in my lap and then it just . . . stops. Nothing.
Disappointment sickens me.
Suddenly the phone is something vile and I toss it away from me. It lands softly somewhere out it the dark. I pull my knees up, letting my head fall forward onto them and feeling my shallow breaths warm the thighs of my jeans. I feel lost.
A small sound whips my head up. Across the street, a shadowed figure emerges from the house, pulling the door closed behind him and then pausing, just a second, on the darkened front porch. His footfalls are silent down the length of the drive, his stride uncommonly fast. He walks along the edge of his yard and across the street and then climbs the slope of my sister’s lawn, stopping only when he’s right in front of me and I see that his feet are bare beneath those jeans before he drops to his knees in the grass.
Logan doesn’t hesitate, he just scoops up my hands and places them on his chest, holding them there while he searches my face.
He knows just what to do, just how to comfort me. He’d done it enough that it is second nature now, so when I slip my hands from his chest and wrap my arms around him, falling against the solid wall of him, I can feel his surprise. He pauses, one breath, two, before his arms come around me. Then he pulls me even closer, his nose buried in the tumble of my long hair, still tangled from restless sleep.
Logan holds me until I stop shaking and just a little longer, his hands rubbing up and down my back. When I finally pull away I feel the scrape of his cheek across mine and he reaches up, hooking one finger over the few strands of my hair caught on the stubble of his face, gently pulling them free. He still hasn’t spoken, and though I feel the burning hypocrisy of it, it bothers me, the need to hear his voice a raw yearning in my chest.
I reach up, touching his lower lip with one finger, and feel his sharp inhale on my skin.
But his eyes are waiting and he still doesn’t say anything and I sigh in frustration, which only makes that spot between his brows wrinkle in confusion.
I automatically pat my pockets for my phone but he’s shaking his head.
“I don’t have it,” he says regretfully. As close as we are, I feel the muscles of his thighs tense as he prepares to stand. “I didn’t bring it. But I can -”
He stops when I make fists in the seams of his shirt over his broad shoulders, holding him with me, shaking my head.
“What?”
I half consider telling him. Just opening my mouth and asking for what I need. I let my lips fall open and almost gag on the funnel of screams roaring up my throat.
Clenching my eyes shut, I breathe through my nose, swallowing back the tastes of bile and rain. When my eyes open Logan is watching me carefully so I touch his mouth again, gesture with my fingers like something coming out from my own, tap my ear, urging him to understand what I need.
“You want me to talk to you?”
I nod, feeling oddly self-conscious.
Logan settles himself next to me, threading his fingers through mine and resting our linked hands atop his thigh. He leans back on his other hand in the grass and I wrap my free arm around my bent legs, watching him.
“I was reading when you called,” he tells the stars overhead. He angles a look over at me. “Don’t even bother asking me what, it’s embarrassing.”
I send him a look and a smile spreads slowly over his lips.
“You scared me,” he admits, serious again. “I wasn’t sure you’d ever call, and when you did . . .” He squeezes my hand but doesn’t ask why, doesn’t ask what prompted the call. “I’m glad you did.”
Then he stops, as if just considering something, and lifts my left arm to the light, pushing up the overly long sleeve of his jacket. “Did you . . . ?”
I shake my head.
“Good,” he says, tucking my hand in his again. “Good.”
We sit in silence for a second, him watching the night sky and me watching the way his nostrils flare slightly when he breathes, the soft flutter of his hair in the nearly non-existent breeze. It looks black out here, his hair. So do his eyes.
“Have you ever seen a shooting star?”
I shake my head.
“Really? Never?” He’s appalled, but his thumb is making circles in the back of my hand, that small motion working the last of the tension from my sleep-deprived muscles. “My mother used to have me sit up with her at night and we’d watch for them, so we could make a wish. I’d pretend I didn’t want to because eleven-year-old boys are too cool to hang out with their moms, and she’d pretend not to know how much bullshit that was.
“Can I ask you something?” he asks.
I nod.
“How old are you?”
Even though I know there’s nothing there I glance around for something to help and then settle for pulling his hand into my lap, laying the knuckles down on my leg and smoothing his fingers flat. He lets me, just watching, relaxed. I draw the number in his palm with the tip of my index finger.
“Nineteen.”
I nod my affirmation, waiting for the inevitable. But he doesn’t ask why a nineteen year old girl is just starting her senior year in a new school, so I don’t have to explain the hospital and the specialists and the investigation and the therapists and the year I’d lost to all of it.
Instead, he surprises me by falling back in the grass, folding his free arm up behind him and pillowing his head on his hand.
“Come here,” he says with a tug on my hand.
I do, scooting down, carefully laying my head on his shoulder as his arm wraps around me, fitting me perfectly against him. He feels warm and safe and I can’t stop myself from greedily inhaling the scent of him.
“Now at least I’ll be comfortable while you drill me.”
I sigh with mock exasperation and his silent laughter shakes us both.
“It wasn’t about you, you know,” he muses aloud, rapidly changing the subject. “Those girls at school. Their problem is me, they just took it out on you.”
I shrug, my head rising and falling with his breathing, at once both intimate and reassuring. Those girls, the school, it all feels so far away from this moment.
“No, seriously, Bree. People don’t . . . like me.”
I shake my head. It doesn’t matter. What does it matter what other people think of him when he’s the difference between breathing and suffocating? When his is the only voice that can silence the screaming?
“Actually that’s a grave understatement. I don’t want to cause you any more grief.”
He isn’t getting the hint so I reach my hand up and press my fingertips over his mouth, silencing him. His lips depress slightly under my touch, dry and warm, his breath bathing over the pads of my fingers, swirling like warm smoke through the gaps. And then Logan wraps his fingers around mine and pulls our hands down, entwined, to his chest.
“So what’s your favorite color?”
I can’t help it. I smile, amazed at the emotion he can draw from me so easily, tucking into his chest even though there’s no way he could see me in the dark.
“Let me guess. Blue?” I shake my head, no. “Pink?” No. “Green?”
I’m still for too long, tensing at the sight of the colors spinning and blurring behind my lids, and he asks softly, “Bree?”
I push up on his chest and he grunts. Using my middle finger to tug down my lower lid I point to the outer edge of my eye.
“Gold? No, not gold. White? White.” I rest back against him, part of me undeservedly pleased that he’d said gold instead of plain old brown. “Okay, white.
So what’s your favorite movie?”
He carries on like this, offering bits of information about himself and collecting whatever from me that he can from guessing, steering clear of anything that would make me uncomfortable. I learn that as a boy he had a dog named Bosco for eight years before his mother told him they’d brought the dog to live out the rest of his long doggy life on a farm. She’d told him it was so Bosco could run and chase chickens in his old age, but as he got older Logan was beginning to suspect that that might have been a lie. I learn that his favorite color is black, that his father died when he was a baby and he doesn’t remember him, that he loves peanut butter and pickles - “Yes, even together,” and that while he sometimes likes to watch movies, he’d rather catch one of his favorite programs on TV.
“Don’t even ask,” he tells me firmly, “because I’m not going to tell you.”
He manages to guess very few other things about me, but doesn’t seem to mind the game.
“So your favorite color is white and you like tea and your favorite season is winter even though you apparently don’t own a single warm coat of your own.” He squeezes my shoulder through the worn leather of his jacket. “And you’ve never seen a shooting star.”
We stay just like that, watching for shooting stars in the grass of the front yard but not finding any until, just before eight in the morning, the sun comes up. It’s soft at first, a small yellow yoke breaking over the tree line, and I wish I could reach a hand out and push it back.
I feel Logan press his cheek against my head and I close my eyes. “Better?” he whispers, and I nod.
Then, expectantly, “Bree?”
I push up off him, self-conscious when he sits up and stretches and shakes his arm, and I belatedly realize it had probably been totally numb for the past hour at least.
“It’s fine,” he says simply when he catches me looking.
I’m still sitting in the grass, only just then feeling the wet that had seeped into the backs of my jeans from the dew. Logan’s jaw is darkened with a sandpaper-like shadow, his hair messy, his burgundy shirt wrinkled from where I’d pressed against it all morning long. He’s looking at me closely and I should probably care that I’m wearing yesterday’s clothes and I haven’t brushed my hair or my teeth in at least eight hours, but I don’t.
I feel empty without touching him, like the very last of a dying echo, and he reaches across, twisting just one of his fingers with mine.
“Can you sleep now?”
Yes, probably. The memory of the nightmare had bled away through the morning, rinsed by the feel of his touch, the sound of his voice. But I just shrug. I don’t want him to leave.
He’s considering me. “I keep telling myself I should walk away, let you sleep, but I don’t want to. Do you want to have breakfast with me?”
It’s only a few minutes later when I walk back outside, having found Trish just coming out of her bathroom, simultaneously brushing her teeth and talking to someone on the phone. I’d held up a note, telling her where I’d be, and though I saw a flash of concern in her eyes she’d just nodded and mouthed, “Be careful.”
When I return outside, I gather my phone from where it is now clearly visible in the grass and slip my hand into his. Logan walks with me down the drive and across the road, looking sideways at me as we climb the front steps, hesitating before he opens the door.
“I don’t have tea,” he says evenly, and then pushes open the door and leads me inside, flicking on the lights.
His house is even emptier, barer than Trish’s. Just inside the door is a small table with a single drawer underneath and nothing to clutter its face, not a single piece of mail or paper or any other odds and ends. On the wall is a long wooden plaque of silver hooks, only one of which holds a battered black leather coat, similar to the one I am wearing except obviously older, the leather slightly weathered and grayed. The rest of the hooks stand empty.
We pass the living room and I get a glimpse of a large dark wood bookshelf and two brown suede couches centered around a low coffee table. There’s a modest-sized flat-screen TV mounted on the wall with a shelf to either side that each hold nothing, completely bare. No pictures or mirrors or blankets or dirty socks anywhere.
Logan pulls me toward the kitchen and there, finally, on the wall between the two rooms is a series of photographs in wooden frames stained such a dark brown they’re almost black. Like his eyes. A few of the pictures are of him and a woman I assume is his mother. A thin, pretty face, same eyes, same dark hair. Her arms are hugged around the shoulders of a younger version of him and they’re both laughing, their heads together. Others are just her. Her face mostly hidden behind a huge, grey furry hood but her eyes crinkled with a smile. Smirking over a book lying flat over her knees, sitting sideways on a wooden porch swing. Another is of her in a wedding dress holding hands with the father Logan had never known. I stare at them greedily, searching for answers in faces as silent as my own.
Patiently Logan waits, just watching me as I drink in this small sliver of his past, and when I’m done he guides me by our linked hands to the kitchen. It’s more of the same. Square table with only two chairs shoved in the corner by the window, the surface bare but for a few dents and scratches from years of use. Other than a small black four-cup coffee maker, a knife block, and a wooden salad bowl holding exactly one red apple, there’s nothing else to clutter the slate colored countertops. A simple black and white clock on the wall but nothing else, no magnets on the fridge, no other tidbits to give me any more clues to his past or about him in general.
Logan releases my hand to lean back against the counter in front of the sink, bending his elbows and resting the heels of his hands to either side of his hips on the edge. “I have a confession. I intentionally misled you.” He doesn’t look apologetic, just stating a fact. “I don’t cook.”
I give him a look that says it doesn’t matter. I’d actually forgotten why he’d invited me over in the first place. The reason hadn’t really mattered that much to me.
“Not hungry?”
I shrug.
“When’s the last time you ate something?”
Last night? I look at him, thinking. I had to have eaten dinner before I went to bed. Didn’t I?
He sighs. “Look, I’m an eighteen year old guy and I haven’t eaten since the slice of pizza at lunch yesterday, but my Momma raised me so I’d never be able to eat with you just standing there looking all sad and hungry.”
I try to screw up my face into something happy and sated, but I have no idea what that even looks like and I have a pretty good feeling he’d see through it, even if I nailed it. For never having heard me speak to him, Logan’s ability to read me, to know me, is uncanny.
Reaching behind him, Logan grabs the single apple out of the bowl and offers it to me. I don’t really feel hungry but I accept it from him, taking a small bite and chewing slowly as I hand it back. The fruit is juicy and sweet and I find myself almost enjoying it. There’s a loud crunch as he sinks his teeth through the crisp red skin, ripping off a large chunk and pocketing in it his cheek, watching me overtop of it as he chews. We swallow at the same time and he places it back in my hands, not really asking, so I obediently take another bite.
When nothing is left but the core Logan tosses it into the trash under the sink and turns back, reaching for my left hand. I give it to him without pause, but instead of merely holding it he flips it over, studying the red welt on the underside of my wrist.
“Do you have any more?”
I stare down at it, trying to see it from his eyes. The pink skin puckered and angry from having been broken open so many times, the scab in the center raised and uneven and ugly. My thumb nail is dull and short; it doesn’t make a clean wound.
I blink up at him, trying to understand his meaning.
“Do you have anything like this,” he asks, bending my hand back gently to expose my wrist to the light, “anywhere else?”
And I get it. Of course. He thou
ght I was a cutter, that I had scabs like this all over my body, hidden under my clothes. The truth was the idea didn’t disgust me, didn’t shock me. The pain I felt when I hurt myself was a welcome pain, driving back the sights and sounds of that night, but it wasn’t something I planned. It just happened. Taking a razor blade to my forearms would take forethought, and I just didn’t care that much. Not until the screams started.
“Bree?” he presses me, and I wonder why. Why does he want to know so badly? What difference does it make? He’d already seen me at my worst.
At my worst.
And just like that, I know. He’d seen all of it. After everything, the refusal to speak and the panic attacks and the slash on my wrist, he’d seen enough that any sane person would back away. Enough to make a difficult decision in my best interest. To save me, or some such bullshit.
I slip my hand from his, covering my wrist with my opposite palm, hiding it from his all too perceptive eyes.
“Wait.”
He sees me close off and reaches for me but I flinch back, slamming into the edge of the table behind me. His hands hover in the air between us, waiting to be sure I’m not going to crash down onto the middle of his kitchen floor. Then he slowly pulls them back, chest level, palms out, fingers splayed, holding my gaze.
Lightening fast, he reaches over his shoulder and tears his shirt over his head in one fluid motion, tossing it onto the counter behind him.
Then he’s just watching me, bare-chested, gauging my reaction.
To say I’m shocked is a gross understatement.
“Look,” he commands, which is obtuse, because that’s all I am doing. Logically I suppose I should be afraid of him, in this house alone with him and him wearing only those dark jeans, so I can see the width of his shoulders, the strength in his chest, the lines of his arms; visual proof that he could easily overpower me should he choose.
But then I notice something else. High on either side of his chest are three pale, raised lines beneath the fine, dark hair. Each is about three inches in length, clean but thick. Each set is perfectly parallel; the scars had obviously been carved with something much sharper than a thumbnail, cutting much deeper.
A More Deserving Blackness Page 8
