A More Deserving Blackness

by Wolbert, Angela

  “Stay away from him, before you get hurt.”

  There’s something in his low tone, the ruthlessness of his eyes; it feels like a threat and I’m only partially aware of clamping my hand tightly over my opposite wrist. I want the pain, bad, but -

  Logan.

  My back arches to put some distance between myself and Dylan, but then he steps back, and I can breathe again.

  “Hey, Baby,” a female voice calls out from down the hall. Her thin pump heels click as she approaches us. “What’s going on?”

  Dylan wraps an arm around her waist and I see it’s the blonde girl from the other day, who’d asked me what it was like to date a murderer. They make a lovely couple.

  “Nothing,” he says offhand, but when he dips his head to kiss her hair he sends me what can only be described as a concerned look over the top of her head. And then he’s walking away, catching up with a group of his friends a little further up the hall.

  The girl hovers.

  Damn it.

  Her blonde hair is pulled into a high ponytail, highlighting the aristocratic cheekbones she probably worked very hard at every day, puking up everything she ate. She’s smiling nastily at me, and it strikes me that I clearly did something to personally offend her in a past life, like break the purple crayon or run over the family Persian with my car, but I can’t think – oh. Of course. The rumors after the party. I’d almost forgotten. She was jealous. It would almost be humorous, but then she opens her mouth.

  “Your boyfriend ask you to homecoming yet?”

  Homecoming?

  I blink at her, once, and then turn and start to walk away, but she calls after me – “Make sure you bring your rape whistle!” - and I don’t think about it, I just whirl around and march back to her, appalled that she’d actually just implied that Logan would hurt me - rape me - at a school dance. I take a breath and my mouth opens and the girl’s eyes widen with surprise.

  But I gag, instantly slamming the back of my hand over my mouth. No. The urge to tell her off is gurgling in my throat, but I can’t. Everything, all of the filth I’d shoved down inside me for over two years would come spewing up from my lungs. I can’t. I can’t, and suddenly my hand drops, it’s choking off all circulation in my opposite wrist, I can feel the throb in my fingertips, and she’s smiling again.

  “‘Course, maybe you’re already fucking him.” She sidles up closer to me, and I feel like vomiting all over her pink scoop-neck top. “Sorry, I’m just curious, ‘cause, you know, Dylan’s never killed anyone with his bare fists like Psycho, so I wouldn’t know.” She cocks her head at me. “When he hits you does it turn you on?”

  “Give it a rest, Savanna.”

  Logan’s tired voice comes from behind me and I step back - once, twice, until my elbow bumps his chest. He cups it, whether in comfort or to pull me away I never find out, because Savanna lurches back, genuine fear howling from her heavily made-up eyes, as if Logan had tried to attack her.

  Dylan is suddenly there, planting both hands in the middle of Logan’s chest and shoving him back into the wall. One hand fists in the shoulder of Logan’s shirt and he braces his forearm against Logan’s collar bone, leaning down, muscles tight.

  “Don’t you fucking come near her!” Dylan spits in Logan’s face, and Logan doesn’t struggle. He doesn’t turn his face away, doesn’t point out that he wasn’t anyfuckingwhere near dear little trembling Savanna in the first place, doesn’t do anything but hold Dylan’s malevolent glare, inches from his nose, hurt and anger simmering in his dark eyes.

  “Stay the fuck away from her, and stay the fuck away from me,” Dylan snarls.

  I’ve had enough.

  I tear my bag off my back with my English lit. and pre-calc books still in it and swing it, as hard as I can, at Dylan’s ribs.

  Asshole.

  He blows air at the unexpected impact and stumbles back, his eyes wide in his head. Logan’s boots shuffle as he catches his balance when Dylan releases him, his face blank but tension in his broad frame. He’s breathing heavy, his hands in fists at his sides, watching Dylan’s every move.

  Suddenly Dylan laughs, shaking his head.

  Savanna’s smiling too as she takes his arm, and Dylan flashes Logan a malevolent look that promises things left unfinished, then glances at me.

  “Just remember I warned you.”

  Logan watches them leave, silently grinding his jaw, until they’re swallowed into the crowd of Dylan’s friends and head for the parking lot.

  He’s still on edge when he turns back to me, searching my face before his eyes drop and he exhales, hard. Softly he reaches out, prying my fingers off my wrist and clasping our hands together. His eyes only scan the old scar there for a second before raising back to mine, but I already know.

  I didn’t break the skin.

  “Okay?”

  I nod.

  “What’d Dylan warn you about?”

  Scowling, I motion with my head at his chest.

  “Is that all?”

  I nod, but he’s still watching me carefully, and I can tell he’s worried. About me. Because people despise him so much for something they know nothing about, it’s unsafe just to be associated with him.

  He turns, much more relaxed now, and starts walking, still holding my hand.

  “So,” he begins casually, “I was thinking. Homecoming is this Saturday, in the gym.”

  Horrified, I gape at him, and he stops and looks at me.

  “You wanna be my date to anywhere else?”

  I laugh, nodding as he leads me out to his car.

  We drive in comfortable silence, Logan’s thumb drawing those soothing little circles on the back of my hand. But I can’t focus on it. All I can think about is back in that hallway, how close I’d come to completely losing it, losing everything.

  He slows the car as we approach the stretch of road where our driveways branch off in opposite directions.

  “Left or right?” he asks, and I immediately point out his window. He nods impassively and pulls the car up in front of his house.

  But when he shuts off the engine he just sits there, staring at his hands on the wheel.

  “I saw you in the hall with Savanna.” He looks over at me. “You were about to say something to her, weren’t you? You were going to talk.” He doesn’t wait for an answer, because he doesn’t need one. He knows what he saw. “It scared you.”

  Scared. Yes, it scared me. What a childlike word to explain paralyzing terror.

  “Don’t do that, Love. Not for me.”

  But I hadn’t meant to. I never meant to. Ever.

  Logan just searches my face for a minute before making a noise of frustration in his throat and shoving open the car door, rounding the front to toss my bag over his shoulder and take my hand. He pulls me inside, leaving me in his sparse living room as he disappears down the hall, and I find myself staring at the clean beige carpet. Two people had died on that floor.

  When he comes back he’s holding the same pad of paper and pen I’d used before and places them in my hands, lifting his brows slightly.

  But I don’t know what to say.

  I can’t tell him about the screams in my head, threatening to break through the wall and never stop - never stop coming, never stop screaming, never stop breaking. The wall. Me. All of it.

  I can’t tell him why.

  “Bree?”

  Sinking onto the edge of his couch, I take a breath and write, Why does Dylan hate you so much?

  If my avoidance bothers him, Logan doesn’t show it. He lowers himself to the seat next to me and sighs.

  “Because we were friends since middle school. And I killed his father’s partner.”

  He lays back into the cushion, dragging his hands over his face with a scrape of stubble he clearly hadn’t shaved that morning before coming to pick me up. He’s slouching down far enough that his knees angle up from his hips, the bottom of his shirt bunched under where he lets his hands fall to rest on his stom
ach. “People liked him. Ryan. They liked what they saw. They didn’t know about the rest.”

  Logan grabs my hand and flattens it over the center of his chest as he talks, the gesture familiar, but this time it isn’t for me, it’s for him.

  “Dylan’s mom left when he was eight and his dad doesn’t cook any better than I do. They’d come over and we’d all watch the game together, and my mom would smack us with the kitchen towel and complain about how loud the TV was but I could tell she was glad I had more than just her. She always worried about that, like she wasn’t enough.”

  I wish I don’t have to pull my hand away from him to write, but I do.

  Did you ever tell Dylan the truth?

  Logan’s staring straight ahead as I replace my hand on his chest. He answers slowly, “Dylan’s dad was one of the first responders. He’s the one who took me in, covered in his partner’s blood.”

  My chest hurts and I close my eyes. But it doesn’t help because then I just see him, splattered in blood and bent over his lifeless mother on the floor and Dylan’s father dragging him back, slapping handcuffs over his wrists. He hadn’t just lost his mother that night, he’d lost every last person he’d ever considered family, all at once.

  “Dylan’s dad told him what he saw that night,” Logan says emotionlessly. “Yeah, I tried, but he wouldn’t talk to me, and I don’t think it matters if he knows the truth. Dylan and his dad didn’t even come to the funeral. They’re not alone. The department was too small to have an official school liaison officer, but Ryan was there all the time. A lot of the kids at school were close to him. I killed one of their own. Dylan can’t forgive me for doing what I did and getting away with it.”

  The indignant revulsion I feel must show on my face, because he explains.

  “I didn’t go to prison, didn’t get the punishment I deserved for killing a cop. Doesn’t matter what the evidence says. I should’ve been strung up for killing one of the good guys, and I wasn’t. For a while Dylan didn’t want to see me at all. But more than that he didn’t want to see me moving on, living my life, scott-free and happy.”

  Scott-free and happy.

  The words leave a horrible, bitter taste in my mouth. What a fucked up little world we live in. Where Logan is guilty for a crime he was acquitted of and the real monsters slip away and leave you bleeding and broken with no one to blame but yourself.

  I can hear wisps of that blackness seeping out with my thoughts, so I press my hands into Logan’s chest and he lifts them suddenly, covering his eyes and pressing the heels of my hands against them, hard.

  “Doesn’t matter,” he says, his voice behind my wrists. “Dylan isn’t even the same person lately.”

  Lately. Lately? I’m hung up on that word, until I realize what it means.

  I tug my hands slightly to get Logan to release them and he does, dipping his chin to this chest to read what I write.

  Because of me.

  “Like I said,” Logan tells me, “he doesn’t want me to be happy.”

  The rest of our afternoon is spent rebuilding and painting the damaged section of the porch out front. Logan is quietly content and I’m just watching him, the hot sun on his back making him sweat through his plain white shirt as he works. He squints and smiles at me past the pencil held between his teeth, crouching to measure a board, and laughs unapologetically when I miss the nail I’m trying to hammer into place, my wild swings repeatedly flying awry.

  “You’re mutilating my railing,” he mutters crossly, and then breaks out laughing again at my look of dismay. He touches my nose with the tip of one finger, chuckling. “It doesn’t matter. You can paint over it.”

  After coercing me into sharing a turkey sandwich with him, which actually tastes good, the sun warming my face as I chew, Logan angles a look at my striped grey and white top.

  “You can’t wear that,” he says, pushing up from the grass and pulling me with him. “Come on.”

  So I change in his room into a huge, faded t-shirt that smells amazing, like him, and when I come back out he’s standing in the kitchen putting the sandwich stuff away and he just stops, looking at me. I resist the urge to tug at the hem because it’s a t-shirt, not Victoria’s Secret, and I can’t help the way my curves fill it out. He’s still looking at me though, all dark and intense.

  “Yeah,” he says tightly. “That’ll do.”

  Chapter 10

  I sit straight up in bed, my arms thrashing out in the darkness, screaming my throat raw. I’m kicking in the blankets and they’re holding me down, pressing on my hips, my thighs, pushing on me, and my lungs are going to explode because I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe.

  The door to my bedroom crashes open, slamming into the wall behind it. Bright light splashes over the dark and Trish tears across the room, vaulting onto the bed with me and grabbing for my flailing arms.

  “Bree! Bree!”

  The scream cuts off in a wet gurgle, like the rattling death of something less than human. My stomach heaves and my dry lips snap shut, my chest battling for oxygen, and Trish expels a heavy breath of air. She immediately loosens her bruising grip on my arms, though her brown eyes stay wide and gaping, wild with concern.

  “What is it? What’s wrong?” she pants, scraping the damp strings of my hair from my cheeks.

  My heart is slamming in my chest and every time I close my eyes the nightmare starts again, bright and stifling. Agony.

  When she touches my hand clenched over the comforter I wrench back, yanking away from her and wheezing; tiny, shallow breaths that don’t reach my burning lungs.

  “Honey, stop. You’re okay. You’re safe.”

  But I’m shaking my head. No. No, I’m not okay.

  “Bree? Honey? You were screaming. Can you – can you talk to me? Can you -”

  I’m shaking my head harder, scooting away from her.

  “Okay.”

  My wrist hurts and I look down to see my own hand clamped over it like a vice, knuckles white, my body desperately searching for oblivion. The wound there had all but healed, leaving just a faint pink smudge of tender skin, but I know what it would feel like to bite my nail into that softest valley between the tendons, the rush of silence that would soothe away the aching residue of fear with that first hot blast of pain.

  Trish reaches for me feebly when I scuttle off the bed, her eyes sad. I hadn’t wanted to hurt her. I hadn’t wanted to do this to her. She wasn’t supposed to know how broken I really was, and here she was, perched, tense on the edge of my bed, staring at the jagged pieces of me.

  I snatch a pair of jeans from the floor and stuff my legs in, yanking them up under the large t-shirt I’d worn to bed – his t-shirt. I leave that on and slip into the jacket, tugging my hair out from the collar and shaking it free.

  “Bree?”

  Desperately I look around the room, then wrest a notebook from my school bag and slap it onto the desk. Impatiently fishing around for a pen, my hand shaking too badly and it slips from my fingers and then – finally – I scribble the words and hold it up for Trish.

  I need to see him.

  “Logan,” she says knowingly.

  She smiles shakily and nods, but I wasn’t asking her permission, I was just letting her know where I’d be. Where I needed to be.

  I swipe my phone from the edge of the bookshelf, dig my keys from my bag and stuff them into the pocket of the coat.

  “Have you told him?”

  I stop, glancing back at her. My sister’s sitting there on that bed in a tank top and red sweatpants that clash fantastically with the reddish-brown hair we both share, her face devoid of accusation. But I still recoil at the question, punctuating it with a single, sharp movement of my head before I turn back to the door.

  “Maybe you should,” I hear her say softly behind me as I rush down the hall.

  Cold air slaps my face as I march brusquely across the street, my footsteps slapping an urgent rhythm across the pavement. Logan’s porch light isn’t on, but i
t never is. He’s home. I need him to be home.

  I knock on the door, feeling ruined and raw.

  Logan doesn’t answer right away, and my stomach starts rolling with nerves. The porch smells of the fresh paint we’d finished applying only a few hours earlier. The cold is whispering over my spine like walking fingers and I knock again, fighting the urge to flee, to take my wrist in my hand and gouge my nail into it, to open my mouth and scream Logan’s name.

  I hear a clattering behind the door and then it’s pulled open only an inch, clanging against the edge of a metal bar lock. A glimpse of his face in a slice of light and I hear his voice, almost relieved. “Bree.”

  The door slams shut with another jangle and then is flung open fully. Logan is searching my face, brows furrowed, standing there in the same grey drawstring pants, feet and chest bare, arms at his sides.

  I step into the house as he steps back and then I freeze at the sight of the gun in his right hand.

  “Whoa,” he says. “Hey.”

  But I can’t focus on anything but that gun, and my throat closes up and I’m shaking.

  Logan moves so quickly I barely register it, snapping the gun up to his shoulder and releasing the clip, his other hand wrenching back on the top of the weapon to unchamber the round. Both clatter loudly across the tile at his feet and then he hunches slightly to skid the disarmed gun across the floor with them, flinging it behind him, away from me.

  “Hey.” His hands are on my arms and he’s hunched slightly so he can look in my eyes. “It’s okay. I’m not going to hurt you. It’s okay.”

  His voice. Logan’s voice, whispering to me brokenly. It’s okay, he’d said that night, two years ago, again and again, a whispering solace through my silent hell. Shhh. It’s okay.

  The rain was splattering my face, blurring the lights overhead and the cold metal barrel was pressed just under my jaw but Logan’s voice was in my head. Soft. Soothing. Safe.

  My legs give out beneath me and I’m falling. I stumble backward, crashing violently into the small table just inside the door and bouncing off, my arms flinging wide to stop my fall. Logan lurches forward onto his knees, catching me awkwardly, his hand at my neck to keep my head from cracking against the floor.