A More Deserving Blackness

by Wolbert, Angela

  I open my eyes to see Logan’s face. Watchful, almost black eyes, with a clump of dark hair hanging forgotten on his forehead. His eyes keep flicking down to my lips and I can see the black feather of his eyelashes, the tiny burst of lines fanning out from the corners of his eyes. But I’m dreaming, I know I’m dreaming, because he’s never looked at me like that before. There’s a restless hunger in his eyes and he leans toward me in slow motion, his breath on my mouth.

  The second his lips touch mine he wrenches back abruptly, horror and disgust plain on his face. There is blood smeared across his mouth, in his teeth, dribbling down his chin. When I reach for him he shoves me back with both hands against my chest and I fall with a hard thud, the back of my head cracking the ground. Above me the lights are whirling and twinkling, buzzing merrily like dancing sprites into the shape of a sunburst, a star, back to a sunburst, always blinking and revolving, around and around, sickening me.

  Something is pressing down on me, crushing me. Pain explodes over my body, tearing at my throat, my wrists; my body on fire.

  I can’t scream. The silence is overpowering as the rain splatters my face, quiet scorching my ears.

  I can’t scream and it should be coming now, that voice, his voice. I should hear it soon, hushing me and whispering to me brokenly that it’s okay, but it doesn’t. It doesn’t and I’m left alone in the silence with the devil’s fireworks bursting overhead.

  “Bree!”

  Huge hands are shaking me from the nightmare, gripped over my arms just below the shoulders, tightly enough that they wrap all the way around.

  “BREE!”

  Logan. His face warped with fear, inches from my own.

  I grab wildly for him, my violently trembling hands fumbling against his shoulders, making their way to his neck. His skin is hot under my palms and his eyes are wide and alarmed and I’m terrified something else has happened, some other attack, that he’s hurt, but I can’t focus, can barely think past the ear-splitting screaming in my head.

  And then my stomach jerks and I wrench away from Logan’s hands because, dear God, the screams aren’t inside my head anymore, they’re mine. That hideous, inhuman sound is clawing its way out of my throat and I can’t believe I still have lips the sound is so wrong.

  I lurch off the couch, land hard on my hip on the floor. Logan reaches for me but I scuttle backward, clamp a hand over my open mouth and then stumble away, spinning and running toward the front of the house. I make it to the bathroom, crashing through the door just in time to drop to my knees and vomit painfully into the toilet.

  I feel Logan behind me as I heave, clenching my eyes shut over tears that drip from my chin into the vile bowl below. But at least the screaming has stopped.

  He doesn’t say anything as he gathers my long hair with feather-light fingers, his other hand reaching into the cupboard below the sink and pulling out a washcloth, pushing up to wet it under the faucet and then handing it to me. As I’m wiping my mouth he softly smoothes my hair out and then gently weaves it into a loose braid and it feels wonderful.

  Miserably, I reach up to flush the toilet with a hand that is still far from steady. Logan helps me up and walks beside me with an arm around my waist, pausing in the kitchen only long enough to grab the pad of paper and pen from the table before guiding me right past the living room where we’d awoken and down the hall. He uses his free hand to push open a plain wooden door and I see more bookshelves, filled just like the others, and bare grey/blue walls. A single chair in front of a simple, wooden desk. He’d left his closet hanging open, though inside it are shirts in bright, vivid colors, blue and red and white; shirts he never wore. There’s a tall dresser, a single bedside lamp on a squat table, and a queen-sized bed covered in rumpled, mismatched blankets.

  He lowers me gently to the edge of that bed and kneels down in front of me, sitting back on his heels, studying me. His eyes are probing but haunted, his face white, like he’d seen a ghost.

  “How can I help you?”

  Oddly, this makes me laugh. An ugly, strangled laugh. I shake my head.

  “Do you get nightmares like that a lot?”

  My fingers idly plucking at the blankets beneath me, I nod.

  “Do you always wake up screaming?”

  Shocked shake of my head. My fingers searching, and Logan slips the pen and paper into my hands.

  Never, I scribble, underlining it with a dark slash. I hadn’t made a sound in over two years.

  “Do you want me to take you home?”

  No. But then, because shame is a heavy thing, I’m sorry.

  “For what?”

  I didn’t mean to need you like this.

  “I’m not complaining,” he says easily, and then just stares, his eyes roving over every minute detail of my face, flitting from one random feature to the next. In the dim light from the lamp his irises have plunged right over the edge into total black.

  What are you looking for?

  “Answers.”

  You can ask, I write, but my shaking hand betrays my fear.

  “You’ll tell me when you’re ready. But I didn’t just mean answers about you.” He reaches up, swiping away the last remnants of my tears with his fingers, and I catch a look in his eyes I’ve never seen before. Guarded, uncertain.

  “Do you want to sleep?”

  I shrug, but he frowns at it.

  “You’re hand broken?” When I furrow my brows at him he gestures at the paper. “Talk to me.”

  I don’t think I can sleep but I don’t want to be the reason you lose sleep either.

  “I wouldn’t be losing anything I would’ve had without you here,” he tells me seriously, and then pushes up from the floor, crawling onto the bed beside me and sitting back against the headboard, stretching his legs out over the rumpled covers and crossing them at the ankles. When he’s settled, he opens his arm in invitation and I scoot over to him, my head fitting perfectly against his shoulder, over the thick slashes of his scars I knew were there beneath his shirt. His other clasps one of my hands in his over his belly, fiddling with my fingers, tracing my nails, idly touching me.

  But the silence makes me want to crawl out of my skin.

  “Am I making you uncomfortable?”

  I grope blindly behind me and then feel it, slapping the pad of paper onto his thigh to scribble, When you cut yourself, did it help?

  He stills, but other than that, if he’s surprised by the question he doesn’t show it. “Yes,” he admits. “It was easier.”

  Easier. Yes, it’s easier. So much easier than everything that bursts from the depths of my mind to devour me.

  He senses my hesitation. “Just ask.”

  When did you start?

  “Two months after my mother was murdered.”

  God.

  I close my eyes against his chest, my hand lifting automatically to trace the scars through his shirt. The words bring a memory to mind, that ugly, red word scrawled over his garage door, but I shove it away, disgusted. That wasn’t possible.

  “Why did you ask about that right now?”

  If it helped then why did you stop?

  “Because I was building up a tolerance.” He shifts, tucking his chin to look down at my face. “Why are you asking?”

  I sit up to look at him and feel the slip of my shirt over my chest. Suddenly I remember I’m only wearing that thin Gone With the Wind t-shirt and a pair of shorts and wish I could cross my arms over myself but I have to write.

  I can’t talk.

  “I know.”

  No, I mean I can’t, I repeat, underling that last word with a dark stroke of the pen. My hand is shaking and the line squiggles a little. I can’t let myself.

  “It’s okay.”

  For a second the nightmare flashes in my mind; the lights and the rain and that awful pressure on my chest, all to the sound of Logan telling me “It’s okay,” but then as quickly as it had come, it’s gone.

  It must’ve shown on my face though bec
ause Logan’s brows are furrowed when I blink the nightmare from my eyes. He doesn’t say anything, just reaches over and drags me back down to his chest, wrapping me in his arms.

  “You can spend the rest of your life not talking to me but I need you to promise me one thing.”

  What?

  “Promise.”

  I can’t until you tell me what it is.

  “Promise me that next time one of those nightmares wakes you up you’ll call me. Or better yet just walk over here because God knows I won’t be asleep.”

  His voice is stern and uncompromising and I nod my head.

  “Promise,” he says again, almost irritably.

  I don’t know what makes me do it. Maybe it’s guilt for not texting him yesterday when I’d told him I would, or maybe it’s just the hint of petulance in his tone, but this time I forgo the paper and grab his wrist, holding it up as I write carefully and clearly down the meat of his left thumb, I promise.

  “Good.”

  He kisses my hair and when I shiver he starts rubbing my arm, chaffing it to warm me, as if it were from cold and not from him.

  “I meant what I said. You don’t have to talk to me. Ever, if you don’t want to.” He rests his cheek against my head, his voice rough. “I can’t say I haven’t thought about it, though. What it would be like, to hear your voice. I just never thought the fist time would be you screaming in terror.”

  I feel embarrassment and that surprises me. Fear, pain, anger, apathy - all these I am familiar with. But embarrassment, gratitude, compassion . . . need? These are new and unsettling.

  Logan reaches over to the table by his bed and plucks up the novel there (a nonfiction retelling of the rescue of 500 downed airmen during World War II) and begins reading it aloud to me, right in the middle of a sentence where presumably he’d left off when “a few assholes from school” had lit his house on fire.

  I nestle into his shoulder, not really listening to the words so much as his voice. The easy confidence of it, the rumble of it through his chest; it’s comforting.

  Which is the problem, really. Before Logan, I never had the desire to speak. Before Logan, I’d never openly invited anyone to ask about my past. Before Logan, everything was tightly controlled. The screaming stayed locked in my head and for over two years I’d never made a single sound. But he was tearing down the walls I’d built, one by one, without even realizing he was doing it.

  And I can’t let that happen. Not if I want to survive.

  At some point I must’ve drifted back to sleep because when I wake up I’m lying on my side in the middle of Logan’s unmade bed, the book he’d been reading flipped on its face on the pillow next to mine. The paperback cover is bent slightly from his hands, both sides curling away from the heavier pages like the first petals to break from a tightly coiled bud. The page he’s keeping is considerably further along than he was last night, and I know just from looking at it that he’d never fallen back to sleep with me.

  I hardly have time to wonder what I’m supposed to do, if I should go look for him, before I hear him padding softly down the hall. He slips through the door quietly but then, seeing me awake, his face breaks into a smile. Three steps and he’s sitting next to me on the bed, handing me a bagel and a steaming mug of . . . tea?

  “Eat,” is all he says, and I take a sip of the tea, tasting sharp citrus and spice. Earl Grey.

  He’s watching me enjoy it and all I can think is that at some point in the last twenty-four hours when he’d been away from me he’d gone to the store and actually bought me tea, which is incredibly sweet and thoughtful and I am a grisly mess of a girl and what the hell could I possibly offer someone like him?

  “Woah. Hey. I wouldn’t have given it to you if I’d known it would make you cry.”

  He’s exaggerating, of course. I’m not really crying, not yet. I blink the moisture back and point at the tea and mouth, “Hot.” I’m lying to his face and we both know it, but just like a gentleman, he lets me.

  Logan wolfs down the bagel in his hand while I sip at the tea, both of us watching the other in silence before he points to my untouched breakfast and tells me dryly, “If you don’t take a bite soon you’re going to force my mother to be ashamed of her only son.”

  After what he’d told me the night before, there is really no other option but to take a bite, so I do.

  I chew and swallow and my stomach objects, so I take another sip of tea. He sees me staring at it darkly and lifts my hand with the bagel to his mouth, holding my hand steady in his while he takes a decent sized bite from the opposite side. Then he pushes it toward my mouth again. We trade off like this, back and forth, and though he ends up eating more of it than I do, by the times it’s gone I feel full.

  Logan glances at his phone by the bed.

  “Won’t your sister be missing you?”

  Crap.

  I shove the empty mug into his hands, pushing up from the bed and rushing for the door. Trish. She wasn’t overly vigilant as to my whereabouts, choosing to more closely play the role of sister than mother, and technically I was a legal adult and could spend my time anywhere I chose. But if she’d noticed me missing she’d be over there worried, thinking something awful had happened. Again. And of course she couldn’t even text me because in my rush out the door last night I’d completely forgotten to grab my phone. Damn it. I’d sworn when she’d let me move out of my parents’ house and in with her that I wouldn’t cause any of them any more pain.

  “Woah. Bree. Wait. I’ll come with you.”

  This is quite possibly the very first time I can honestly say I don’t want him with me. Being properly introduced to my . . . whatever he was, with me standing there in my tiny shorts and complete lack of bra was not what Trish had signed on for. She didn’t need this. I shake my head.

  Logan glances down at himself. “Well, obviously I’d have to get dressed first.”

  I’m still shaking my head.

  “I probably shouldn’t look like I’m sleeping with you, just because I was sleeping with you.”

  He’s trying to make a joke but I just shake my head at him again. Vehemently.

  “Just wait a second.”

  I want to ask him why, why this is so important to him when I just need to get over there before I ruin Trish’s perfect little world even further, but then he just turns his back to me and – shit! – drops his pants. I jerk my eyes away but not before I see that at least he’s wearing boxer shorts this time. He yanks a pair of jeans over them and changes his shirt, shoving his feet into his black boots in record time, all while I look firmly elsewhere. He’s trying to be quick for me, in case I decide to leave without him.

  When he’s done he just takes my hand without a word and walks me out the front door.

  Grimly, I take in the charred remains of the fence from last night. The wooden salad/fruit bowl lies overturned where I’d dropped it by the steps, the ground around it scorched and sodden, but Logan doesn’t even pause. He walks past it like it means nothing, only adjusting his course for the sake of my bare feet in the muck.

  We cross the street to that sunny yellow house and then we’re walking up my sister’s steps and it feels like the first time, all that dread and guilt and debt crashing over me at the threshold like some kind of invisible force field.

  Logan squeezes my hand. “Okay?”

  I nod and open the door.

  Chapter 8

  We barely make it inside when I hear Trish from the kitchen and hastily drop Logan’s hand. He lets me, but I can feel the weight of his eyes on me.

  “Bree, Honey? Is that you? Where did you – oh.”

  She comes to a stop in the hall, her expectant smile freezing in place at the sight of us, Logan with his dark clothes and dark eyes and dark look, and me barefoot and still in the pajamas I’d worn to bed last night that hid all too few of my generous curves.

  “What happened?”

  I’m taken aback at the unexpected severity of her tone, but besi
de me, Logan’s calm expression is unchanged.

  “Ms. McCaffrey,” he says politely, unflinching under her stare. “We met the other day, I’m -”

  “I know who you are,” she says guardedly, but at least her voice has lost some of its uncharacteristic edge. “Hello again, Logan.”

  “We didn’t want you to worry. I had a . . . problem last night that Bree was helping me with.”

  “Yes, I’m sure you did,” Trish says, her voice at once cryptic and sad, and for the first time I find myself wondering how much more she knows about him than I do, which is stupid because she’s a reporter, a good one, and there’s probably very little about this town she doesn’t know.

  “She’s fine,” Logan adds, and I look over at him curiously.

  I don’t like them talking around me, like I’m not in the room, but there isn’t really anything I can do about it.

  “Thank you, Logan. I’m sorry, I thought Bree was still asleep. I was just . . . surprised. Why don’t you come in and take a seat? Bree, can I talk to you for a minute?”

  I don’t like the way she’s looking at him, like she wants to protect me from the Mr. Jekyll lurking beneath his perfect Dr. Hyde civility, but I follow her, turning and pointing insistently at the floor at Logan’s feet. Don’t go anywhere.

  Following Trish down the hall, I can feel his eyes on my back. I can’t help but look back at him before I disappear into her bedroom, and wish, intensely, that I hadn’t. Logan hasn’t moved from where we’d left him, still standing dark and forsaken on the tiled entryway, a black rook at a game of marbles. He’d shoved his hands in his pockets, but it’s his eyes that give me that Lot’s wife pit of dread in my stomach. Heavy with remorse, they look almost resignedly wistful, as if he somehow knows this will be the last time he’ll ever see me.

  Trish quietly clicks the door to her bedroom shut behind us. “Bree . . .” she starts hesitantly, and I can tell she’s not overly thrilled about the upcoming conversation, one-sided or not. “How much do you know about him?”

  I know he’d take a punch to the face to protect a perfect stranger from being hurt. I know he still worries about what his mother thinks of him, even though she’s dead. I know he reads mountains of historical nonfiction every night because he can’t sleep.