I frowned. “He was drunk. And frustrated, about I don’t even know what.”
“I beat a grown man, sober. One who goddamn well saw it coming. One who deserved it.”
“So you keep saying.”
“I’m no saint, but I’m not your ex, either. I’d never hurt you.” His burning eyes told me this on a level no words ever could.
“Not me, no. I believe that.”
“Who do you see, right now?” he demanded. “The me you met at Cousins? From those letters? Or some violent man from whatever dramatic reenactment you’ve got running in your head, of what I did when I was twenty-six?”
I was tired of this question—the one I’d been asking myself for weeks now. I shut my eyes and rubbed my face, let him see how exhausted the whole thing left me.
“You’re the same woman to me,” he said quietly. “From our letters.”
“I wasn’t the one who was keeping secrets.”
His nostrils flared, exhalation audible. We were quiet for a time, me sipping my drink, Eric staring out the front window at the passing cars. He broke the lull, meeting my gaze.
“I haven’t . . . I haven’t been with anybody. Since I got out.”
Goddamn my heart for rejoicing the way it did. Something inside me gave way, river ice breaking up in a spring thaw. “No? That’s . . . surprising.”
He shrugged, glancing around the bar. “I don’t know anybody in this town.”
“No, I guess not.” Though why should that matter to a man who’d gone without for half a decade? “You’re awful good-looking. I’m sure if you wanted to . . .”
He frowned.
“What?”
His annoyance softened, and when he spoke he sounded defeated. “The way we’d been talking, before I got out . . . That was like we’d been describing a feast. Some amazing gourmet meal I was dying to sit down to, once I got released. Then I do get out, and I can’t have that feast—and that’s fine. But after all that thinking about it, I don’t want to settle for just whatever I might get. I don’t know if I’ll meet a woman anytime soon who’ll make me feel the way you did, but I don’t want just anybody, for the sake of it. I don’t want the first sex I have after five years to be as forgettable as some drive-through hamburger.”
I felt too many things at those words. Touched, to hear I was special. Hurt, to hear he did intend to move on, to look for someone who could replace me. But why shouldn’t he? Why wouldn’t I want him to, if his waiting for me to come around smacked of obsession?
All I managed was, “I could understand that.”
“Plus the places a man might go, to hook up with somebody—bars like this one. Those aren’t places I need to be hanging out at, now. Those sorts of people. It’s too depressing. I’ve spent too long locked up. I don’t want reminding of how people get themselves locked inside their own dead-end lives and bad habits. It’s too much like prison. And it’s too much like home.”
“Sure.”
“Did you . . .” He sighed, an aggravated huff. “Have you been with anybody? Any guys, since we quit writing to each other?”
I blinked. “No. Of course not. Not that it’s your business.” But the bald relief on his face doused any angst I felt.
“I know it’s not,” he said, voice softer. “But I still wanted to know. It’s only natural.”
“It took me five years to meet you and feel ready to even share those thoughts. To have them. I’m not going to jump into bed with somebody and actually do those things.”
“I just wanted to hear that maybe that stuff, everything we said . . . That it was special, I guess.”
My face warmed. “Of course it was. I wouldn’t have risked my job if it weren’t.” Or my heart. Christ, I was aching for him, all over. Want all twisted up with pain. “It was special. But I also don’t know you. I don’t even know how to parse those two things. Part of me feels like I know you inside out, better than any guy I’ve ever been to bed with. But also that you’re a total stranger.”
“A stranger because you don’t trust me?”
“Because I’ve not met so many sides of you. Important ones. The side of you who did that awful thing. The side of you that chose not to tell me you were getting out . . . even though you knew you should. That it would change everything.”
“I was selfish.”
I nodded. “Yeah. You were.” I stirred my drink with my straw. “I was, too. I used you to feel all that stuff again. Alive. And sexual. With somebody I didn’t think I’d ever have to worry about becoming anything real with.”
“I don’t mind being used like that.”
I took a deep breath, let it out slowly.
Eric turned his bottle around and around, thinking before he spoke. “Do you know why I beat him like I did? With a tire iron?”
“You won’t tell me why.”
“No, I mean why a tire iron.”
“No.”
His gaze sought the traffic. “It’s because for that bright, hot moment when I got the news that set me off, I wanted that man dead. Because my bare hands weren’t enough, after what he did. And because I didn’t own a gun, and I didn’t take the time to plan shit out. I just moved my body to where his body was, and on the way I grabbed something I thought maybe I could kill him with—”
“God, stop.” I cringed, fearing a play-by-play.
“What I’m saying is, I’m not the kind of man who designed his world to be violent. I’m white trash—I know that. Where I’m from, that’s just how it is. But I wasn’t the worst man you ever met. I never got into any scary drug shit, or knocked some poor girl up, or stole from anybody. Before I beat that man down, the worst thing I probably did was drive too fast and smoke weed a couple times a month. Get in a scrap now and then. Like I said, I’m not a saint, but I’m not . . . I don’t know what it is you’re worried I might be. But I bet I’m not that bad.”
Except what I knew him to be—an attempted murderer? Not that great, either.
“If you won’t tell me why,” I said, “I don’t think I can ever . . .”
“Ever what?”
“Get back to where we were. In the letters.”
His expression flickered at that. Like he’d not imagined us finding our way back was even the wildest possibility. Like I’d just told him, There’s still a chance. I’m not over you. Like I’d just admitted it to us both. It made me feel dizzy. Or maybe that was the bourbon.
“Even if I did know why,” I added quickly, “that doesn’t mean I’d agree with you doing what you did. But I wish you’d just tell me.”
He shook his head.
I slumped in my seat, weary all over. We were right back where we’d gotten stuck in that donut shop.
Eric thought a minute, drummed the tabletop with his fingertips. “I could make a phone call.”
“To whom?”
He cracked a smile at that. “‘To whom.’ Fuck me, you’re adorable.”
I rolled my eyes.
He changed again, seeming suddenly determined, and calm. A man with a plan. He stood, skirted the bench and headed for the door, fishing his phone from his jeans, coat and gloves and hat left behind. I watched him through the front window, his back to the glass. I could see his shoulder blades through his tee, from the way he held his phone to his ear. The neon sign behind him blinked red to yellow, turning his blue shirt from black to green, black to green.
Wear green. Wear black.
Right now he wore both. I’d worn neither. And if I had that final choice to make again . . . Here I was, still not committed to either option, as fickle as that light. Did this phone call really have the power to change my mind about him? Exonerate him? Invite him upstairs, into my bed? Inside my sheets, inside my body?
I flushed all over, shocked to have even thought those things.
He was talking. I cou
ld tell from how he’d move, then pause. He shoved his free hand in his pocket. I thought about grabbing his coat and bringing it out to him, chose not to. He nodded, shook his head. Looked down the street. I tried to imagine the conclusions I’d jump to about him, if we were strangers. That man beyond the glass, making a desperate phone call in his tee shirt, in the frigid winter air. A guy chasing drugs, maybe? Or a girl?
Suddenly he was gone, out of frame then coming back through the door, phone in hand, still lit up. He sat back down across from me and held it out. On the screen it said, Kristina.
“Go on,” he said, giving it a little shake.
I took it, my warm fingers brushing his icy ones. I held it to my ear and said, “Hello?”
“Yeah?”
“Sorry,” I said, shooting my companion a look. “Eric just gave me his phone. He didn’t tell me who you—”
“I’m Kristina.”
“Oh. Hello. I’m Anne.”
“I know who you are.” She sounded bored and aggressive at once, that rusty voice suggesting she was probably taking long drags off a cigarette between sentences. “Eric told me all about you.”
“Oh,” I said again, stupidly.
“I’m his big sister. He tells me everything. You want to know why he beat that asshole down.”
I swallowed. Did I? I wasn’t so sure anymore. “I’m guessing he did it for you.”
“That shitbag didn’t get any less than he deserved.” She still sounded bored, but I sensed tension behind the tone. A tough girl trying to act hard, to cover up the fact that she felt something.
“I don’t know what Eric and I are,” I admitted, eyeing him. “But we can’t be anything if I don’t know what made him do such a terrible thing.”
A sharp, mean little laugh, one that had me picturing Kristina with a forty at one elbow, a shirtless man passed out on a threadbare couch in the background. Single-wide. Camped in some weedy lot where American dreams went to die.
“You want to hear about the terrible things men do,” she said through a cruel sigh. “Oh, I could tell you all about that. But it’s none of your goddamn business what happened to me. I told my brother and I told that bitch judge of his, but I sure as shit won’t be telling you. Just know there’s ways a man can hurt you, ways that don’t leave marks on the outside. Ways that make a tire iron look honest. That clear enough for you?”
My throat hurt, but she couldn’t see me nodding so I croaked, “Yeah. That’s pretty clear.”
When she spoke next, her tone lost some of its ragged edge. “You think whatever you want about me. But my brother’s a good man. Maybe the only good man to ever come out this place. I don’t know who you think you are, but I can guaran-fucking-tee you, you’d be lucky to deserve him. Not the other way around.” And she hung up on me.
I stared at the phone as her name disappeared and the call duration flashed. Eric reached out and pocketed the thing.
“She’s not a woman whose business you just go around sharing,” he said mildly.
“No. I gathered that.”
He cracked a smile. “She’s wild, my sister. Same as our father.”
“I’m surprised she didn’t do the beat-down herself.”
His smile wilted. “She would’ve. ’Cept he broke her arm.”
My body went cold. “Oh.”
“I’m done dwelling on all this,” he said, sitting back. “But there you go. Whatever she said, that’s all you’re ever gonna hear about why I did what I did. It wasn’t a choice to me. It’s not a question of whether it was justified.”
“Looking back, do you wish you’d killed him?”
“No,” he said. “I’m glad I didn’t kill him.”
I blinked, surprised.
“It was worth five years, showing him what happens when you fuck with my family. But no, he’s probably not worth my sister feeling like I’d forfeited the rest of my life in order to see that guy dead.”
“Did he get put away? For what he did to her?”
“No, for other shit.”
“Not in Cousins, I hope.”
He shook his head. “They wouldn’t allow that.”
“Good . . . Did you know him? Before?”
Eric nodded. “Oh yeah. I knew him. He and my sister had been something, once upon a time. We cooked out together, went down to the lake, worked on cars. My mom let him crash on our couch one summer, when I was maybe sixteen.”
I shivered. That was so much worse to me. For violence to be lurking in someone you thought you knew. It made you question everything. Your own judgment and intuition, why you didn’t see it coming, and if it was your own fault, in a way.
“You trusted him, then?”
He shook his head. “Not by the time he did what he did.”
“No?”
Eric held my gaze. “You’re from a real nice place, aren’t you?”
“We weren’t rich or anything.” Not by Charleston standards. By Darren standards? By that curve, I may as well have grown up in some gated paradise.
“I’m not from a nice place,” he said. “Little nothing-town called Kernsville, an hour east of here. And there’s a plague out there, the way plagues spread through dirty places hundreds of years ago. Only this one gets brewed up out of cough syrup and it’s a pipe or a needle that bites you, not a rat. You follow?”
I nodded.
“I’m not saying what I did was any kind of mercy or anything. But if some infectious animal was going around biting people, nobody would hesitate to put it down.”
“And he’s still in prison now?”
He nodded.
“Is there anybody you have to answer to, back home? Friends of his?”
“No. He’d fucked just about everybody over in one way or another, by the time he got locked up. If he gets out someday and wants to get back on me or my family for what I did to him, he’ll be marching up alone. If he’s got any uncooked brain cells left in his head, he’ll find himself a new town to infest.”
We were quiet for a time, the space between us filled with strangers’ arguments, with hard rock and laughter and the tinkling of bottles and glasses.
I had my chin dipped, attention on the table, and Eric angled his head low to catch my eyes.
“Yeah?” I asked.
“You look sad.”
“I guess I just wish you regretted it,” I said quietly, the words surprising even me.
“I can’t. It was the right thing to do, no matter how wrong the law says it was. I couldn’t live with myself if I hadn’t done that. There’s natural laws that trump the ones you might get arrested over.”
I turned that around in my head. I tried to imagine what my father would have done, if he’d heard about Justin bursting my eardrum, knocking his daughter to the floor, breaking her heart so badly she walled it off for the next half a decade. He served the state. The law. But if he’d known . . . If he’d gone after Justin, hit him as hard as that hand that had struck me . . . I loved my daddy as much as a girl can, but if he’d done that, I’d have hugged him harder than I ever had in my life. Loved him even more, to know what he felt for me went that deep, that it weighed impulse against reason and said fuck you to the latter. I’d not given him a chance to make that decision. I’d protected him, because deep down . . . maybe I knew which he’d have chosen. And Justin wasn’t worthy of endangering my father’s job. He wasn’t worthy of breaking my father’s heart, either. Not on top of mine.
I eyed Eric’s bottle, still full to the neck. “Are you allowed to leave Darren without your parole officer’s permission?”
He nodded. “Yeah, just can’t leave the state.”
“Let’s go somewhere.”
“What, now?”
“Yeah. Let’s drive someplace. Somewhere quiet. With water.” Like that lake he’d mentioned in our letters,
the one I’d imagined us beside so, so many times.
He gave me a look I’d expect from a protective friend. “You want some freshly sprung con to drive you out to someplace quiet?”
“I do.”
He mulled it over a moment, then stood. “All right, then.”
We abandoned his barely tasted beer, my half-drunk cocktail. We abandoned the neon lights and sour smell of the bar and the warmth, pulling on our layers outside the exit. He led me half a block to an old silver truck, went around and unlocked my door.
“Keep your gloves on,” he warned, shutting me inside. He climbed into the driver’s seat. “This piece of shit’s heater’s been broken since before I got put away.” He reached behind his seat for his cap. I donned my scarf and the engine stuttered to life.
“Where’m I taking you?” he asked, easing us away from the curb.
“How far is that lake you told me about? The one you missed when you were locked up?”
“Forty minutes maybe.”
“Let’s go there.”
“If you say so.” He made a U-turn and aimed us toward the highway.
We drove without talking for a long while, until we exited onto a lonely route, leaving industrial Michigan behind, slipping into hibernating farmland, then woods.
His voice shattered the silence. “Why d’you want to see this lake so bad?”
“I’m trying to understand you. I want to see the place you told me about. It seems like . . . It seems like the place that embodied everything prison took away.” And the place where he’d brought our bodies together, in those fantasies he’d written out for me.
“It won’t be anything like what I miss. Frozen, dark. Snow all over.”
“It’ll just have to do.”
I sensed his nod in my periphery.
We passed a sign that advertised parking for a public beach, but a metal gate kept us out, so we drove on. A mile later he slowed to an ice-crunching halt along the roadside, and through a gap in the pines I could see a satin ribbon—the near-full moon on the lake, on a frosted plane the wind had blown bald. Eric shut off the engine and killed the headlights. It was the darkest place I’d been in months. No streetlights, no houses winking in the distance. Just the moon. By its glow our breath steamed in the cold truck cab.
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