by Malcom, Anne
“I reasoned that might change it all. Make the life more substantial. And it did. My son made it all lighter. Easier. Even though he cried all the time and tired us both out. We fought more, of course, as lack of sleep and all of that made new parents crazy. But we made it through and Nick settled down when he got older. Was a good kid. The best. Of course every parent thinks that.” He smiled at me.
Smiled.
I’d wished for his smile for so very long.
But now I hoped I’d never see this smile again.
“Nick really was the best,” he said. Voice cracking. Only slightly. Hairline fracture.
But it was there.
I held it together.
For Lance.
Because he wasn’t done.
“I was working,” he continued, eyes not on me but out the window. He shook his head. “I was always working then. Mortgage was more than I could afford since we got a new house, bigger one, for the sisters and brothers we planned on givin’ him.”
I almost lost it right there, thinking of Lance’s lost future, of that big empty house. But I held it together. Lance was, under something a lot more considerable than my imagining of a lost future, he was in a lost past.
“We were overextended, ‘cause Sandra wanted to stay home with the baby. I wanted her to be happy, straight up. She wanted to go back to work, we would’ve made that fly too. But she wanted to be a mom. Full time. Hardest job in the world, she was one of the best at it I’ve seen.” His eyes touched mine for less than a second and I bit my tongue until I tasted blood so I didn’t break down.
“No matter how good she was at it, pay was shit.” He paused. “Well, the rewards were fuckin’ priceless, but they didn’t help with utilities, car payments, diapers. Strollers. I was drowning under it all but not enough of a man to tell anyone. Even my fuckin’ parents, who would’ve helped out in a second. Who wanted to. Fuck—” He cut himself off, the only inclination I got that the sudden pause was from emotion was the tiny change in tenor of the curse.
He took a breath. A visible one. “Didn’t want to admit that I couldn’t provide for my family, ‘cause I was brainwashed like the rest of them. To think struggle was normal. Those nights you stay up unable to sleep ‘cause you’re thinkin’ of bills, credit, shit like that. I was working on Christmas Eve. My parents were staying with us for the holidays. Helping with the baby. Keeping Sandra company. She enjoyed it. We both did. My parents were good people. The best.”
He had good parents.
I should be happy about that.
Lance having people to love him. Teach him love.
But I wasn’t.
Because I remembered the conversation we’d had on the sofa. Him asking me how I loved like I did, like such a concept was foreign. He loved his parents. His child. His wife. He had loved them. He had known how, in the past. But something had happened. So terrible, so horrible, that it erased it all. It killed it all.
“They had me late in life, didn’t think they could conceive,” Lance kept speaking. “They were getting up there. We knew it. They knew it. Didn’t know how many grandchildren they’d see born or grow up.”
Lance’s mouth twitched, not that full-on, terrible grin from before, but something more genuine, something that might’ve been born from real happiness.
“I reasoned quite a few, since my father’s diet of steak and cigars seemed to somehow be balanced by my mother’s strict vegetarianism and yoga regime. Regardless, they didn’t take life for granted, didn’t take family for granted. So they were with Sandra, Christmas Eve.”
He looked out the window again.
Back to me.
“She was driving. They were going to a cheap diner we went to every Christmas Eve. A tradition. I was meant to be home.”
A pause.
A violent one.
He ran his hand through his hair in a gesture I’d never seen him make. A common gesture that most people made daily, out of frustration, habit, whatever. Lance didn’t make gestures like that.
But he was right now.
“Fuck, I was supposed to be driving,” he hissed, tearing his hand from his hair. “But shit came up at work that was more important. I said I’d meet them there.”
He paused. A lost future loaded into the silence. A tragic past was a bullet that he was about to blast through my chest. “Sandra knew how to drive in the snow. She grew up in the Rockies, for fuck’s sake. We both did.”
Another thing I hadn’t known about the man I loved. Apart from he had a wife, a son, a family.
He grew up in Colorado.
“Truck was good,” he said. “Made sure of that. Was in crippling debt because I wanted my wife and son in the safest vehicle they could be in. I wasn’t there enough. Always working. We’d fought about that earlier in the day. Over the phone. But she didn’t even really fight me on it. She was too tired. Tired of this being the regular. I was too. But I didn’t see a way out. She didn’t understand. I was the one that didn’t fucking understand. Didn’t understand why they all weren’t at our regular table when I arrived fifteen minutes late. Why they still hadn’t arrived fifteen minutes after that.”
My hands started to shake at this point.
I knew where this was going.
I knew and I couldn’t stop the hurt. Because it was already done. Despite the fact his cuts were still bleeding, it was done.
“No one answered the phone,” he said, voice no longer blank. “I made excuses about that as I drank shitty coffee and stared at the door covered in cheap decorations. The baby got sick. Needed a diaper change. Outfit change, whatever. That’s something you learn with kids, they always fuck up best laid plans. You’re never on time with them. I convinced myself of that right up until the two cops walked through the front door. They knew me. Small town. Which was why they knew to find me at that diner. Tell me that my wife, son, mother, and father had all died on the scene of a wreck ten minutes away.”
“Lance,” I choked out, unable to fathom what he’d gone through. Unable to fathom the fact he was still standing, recounting this story.
“Need to get this out, cupcake,” he said, he whispered.
With great effort, I stayed where I was, his eyes were willing me not to go to him. Then I nodded. “Okay.”
“I developed ways of coping,” he said, not wasting a second of silence. “Of surviving, I guess. First way to survive was to kill the man I was before. Simple enough.”
I swallowed glass.
Lance kept going.
“It’s not like I knew anyone in my hometown who specialized in creating new identities, but a man is desperate enough, determined enough, he figures it out. I did. Quick. Also figured out that in order to truly kill the man I had been, I had to do things that were unrecognizable. That would disgust my wife, make my parents disappointed, my son hate me. I did all those things.”
“Lance, they would never hate you,” I said, unable to stay silent. “Never.”
His eyes were cruel and vulnerable at the same time. “You don’t know what I’ve done.”
I didn’t break his gaze. “I don’t need to know what you’ve done. I know who you are.”
I wanted to go to him. Needed to. The last two months, my anger, hurt. It was nothing in the face of this. But I sensed a distance. He was still in the past.
I couldn’t reach him there.
He had to keep going.
“There wasn’t anyone to punish,” he said, his voice a whisper. “I don’t know if that’s what set me over the edge. The fact that there was no one for me to blame for it all. No evil. Just life.”
Just life.
Fuck.
“I was weak,” he admitted, something I knew he had never said out loud before, something he told himself every day. “Worse things have happened to better people and they were able to pick up. Carry on with a life where they don’t turn into monsters. But that wasn’t me. Isn’t me. I couldn’t find anyone to punish for ruining my life, so I deci
ded I’d punish people who did ruin others. Found out I excelled at it. Punishing people. Killing them.”
He threw these words out like weapons. I knew he was trying to scare me off, show me how ugly he was.
I jutted my chin up, refusing to turn away from him as he was trying to get me to do.
“It wasn’t for a noble cause, the killing,” he continued with a glint in his eye. Maybe hope. “Like everything I do in my life, it was for selfish reasons. That’s why I came back. Not because it would be better for you, Nathan. But because it would be better for me.”
“Lance,” I whispered.
“Still not done, Elena,” he replied.
I waited. Braced.
“I can’t stand snow,” he said, looking out the window at the cloudless sky. “The look of it, the feel of it, the sight of it. Everything about it covers me in the fucking memory of that moment. That exact moment when the door opened in the diner with the men that were about to tell me my world was destroyed and I didn’t even look up from my fucking phone.” He sounded angry now. Furious. With himself.
I wanted to tell him it wasn’t his fault. None of it.
But I couldn’t. Because I was a mother. I knew that if anything happened to Nathan, I would find a way to blame myself. I had done that. Nothing that anyone could say would stop that. It was an ugly truth I despised with all my soul at this moment.
“I learned ways to cope. To survive,” Lance said, no longer looking out the window. “A stockbroker descending into the underworld and learning everything about death and killing would be classified as the worst way to cope, wouldn’t it?”
He didn’t wait for me to answer the question.
“I surrounded myself with death in order to trick myself into thinking I understood it. That I had faced it. Fuck, if I delivered it, didn’t it mean something?” He ran his hand through his hair again.
“Seeing someone take their last breath, bein’ the reason for that, it doesn’t bother me. But snow. Fucking snow unravels me. Hence the relocation to one of the few states where I’m never gonna have to feel the bite of the worst day of my life ever again.” His eyes were even on me now. “Didn’t tell you all this for your pity, Elena. Didn’t do it for any other reason than so you knew everything about me. Everything that’s wrong and there’s a lot of wrong. Almost all of me. I’m doin’ this ‘cause I want you. I want Nathan. There is no way I can have you, truly have you like I want unless you know it all. Unless you make the decision to let me into your life, your son’s life, despite what I am. I’m not gonna change. The cut is too deep. Too permanent. Fuck, if I could, I would. For you. For Nathan. That’s why I walked away in the first place, ‘cause I knew I wouldn’t and I wasn’t gonna ask you to let a monster into your life.”
“Stop,” I whispered, the word a plea and a command.
He blinked, and stopped talking, obviously hearing something in my voice.
“I know monsters,” I said. “I came out of one. Was raised by two. Married another one. Made an angel with a monster. I’m sure this cruel, evil world has produced so many different kinds of monsters that there’s no way to truly know what one is. To define one. Because the world turns us all into different kinds of monsters. It doesn’t matter. Because the kind of monster you are, it’s one I’m in love with. One my son is in love with. One I know that would cut himself to the bone before he saw either of us take a scratch.”
Lance jerked like I struck him with that four-letter word that had been lead in my stomach the past months.
I wanted to kiss him now.
For his arms to circle my body.
His lips to explore every part of me.
But I couldn’t.
Lance was laying out his ugly truth. I had to lay out mine. Right now. So I could breathe. So we had a chance.
He expected it.
I could tell that. Because his hands were at his sides, clenched into fists. He was shaking with the effort it took for him to stay standing there.
“I need to tell you how much I hurt for you before I say anything else,” I whispered. “I’m not going to tell you I’m sorry because that feels so weak. It’s not enough. I know there’s nothing that I can say that’s enough.”
There it was. Another ugly truth.
It was time for more.
“I had a husband that hurt me,” I said, my voice was flat. Blank. Dead. Like his had been. “He beat me until I passed out. Until my bones broke. He raped me.”
Lance flinched at this, I kept going.
“He raped me so he could hurt me inside and out, so he could hurt me in every way it was possible for a man to hurt a woman.” I paused. “You hurt me worse than anyone ever has, and in my life, with my history, that’s saying something.”
His eyes shimmered, his entire body shook with the force of my words, his pain, guilt. A single tear trailed down his cheek and I stared, shocked into feeling something more than the numbness that had overcome me since he left.
Lance didn’t even give me a moment, a second to breathe through the pain his single tear brought on. No, he just surged forward to give me more.
“I hurt you more than anyone else, I can’t change that,” he said, gripping my neck and forcing my eyes to glue to his. “But I’m also gonna heal you more than anyone else. I hurt you because I thought it was better than hurtin’ you worse down the road when we were more attached... more—”
“We already were more,” I choked out.
His grip tightened and his face moved with misery. He rested his forehead against my own, leaning into me as if he couldn’t hold his own strength.
It was a huge thing when a strong person relied on you to share the load.
He leaned back to give me his eyes, the eyes that had followed me into my dreams and my nightmares every night since he’d been gone.
I drank up his gaze like it was liquid.
“You taught me how to be... something more than I was,” he murmured. “Something more than I thought I was capable of. I’m not worthy of you, of Nathan. But I’ll protect you from hurt, from everything I can. And everything I can’t protect you from, I’ll be there.” He paused, there was a lifetime in that pause. The promise of a lifetime.
Tears were trailing down my own cheeks now.
“You have to earn back my trust,” I said.
“I will,” he promised.
“More importantly, you have to earn back my son’s trust,” I continued, instantly trusting his promise.
Lance winced. He knew he’d hurt Nathan, I hadn’t explained how much, he hadn’t seen it, but he winced at the bare idea of hurting my son.
That was why I was giving him the opportunity to earn both mine and Nathan’s trust back, because of that wince.
And, not to be outdone, because I loved him.
“First,” I said. “You have to kiss me.”
The words were barely out of my mouth before he did that.
And more.
He made love to me on the living room floor.
* * *
Nathan had not had any kind of heart to heart with Lance when I texted Karen the all clear to bring him home.
He hadn’t even hesitated to run into his arms.
Lance didn’t hesitate to not only catch Nathan, but lift him up, and hold him.
I could only imagine how much pain such a simple gesture was for him. What it felt like to hold a child that adored you, that wasn’t yours. Knowing you’d never hold your child. Watch them grow.
I didn’t cry, as much as I wanted to, watching that moment. Mostly because Nathan was babbling on about everything Captain had missed.
Also because Karen was staring at Lance like she might try to scalp him.
I didn’t blame her.
She had seen my hurt. My pain.
She was a good friend.
Family.
But, while Nathan and Lance were ‘catching up,’ I managed to talk her down. She must have seen something in my eyes, because she didn’
t yell curses at Lance when he gave her a chin lift greeting.
Then again, with what Karen and Eliza had gone through, I guessed she knew that this was never simple.
But that first night was, somehow.
With all the complicated we’d laid out, it turned simple. It turned into making dinner together. Eating together. Watching some stupid movie Nathan was obsessed with. Putting him to bed.
Putting ourselves to bed, making slow, desperate love to each other.
Complicated crept in sometime after midnight.
We weren’t sleeping.
I didn’t want to. I needed to soak up Lance, this reality more than I needed any kind of dream.
He was idly tracing patterns on my back, my cheek on his chest.
“I abandoned normal a long time ago,” he said, breaking the silence we’d adopted.
“It was the only fuckin’ way I could survive. Normal had to die so I could live. The history of normal and the possibility of a future with it. Every choice I’ve made in the past ten years has been to make sure I’m not even close to normal. Normal is death to me.”
He moved me so he could grasp my face with a roughness that was his version of soft. “Now, I’ve never wanted normal more in my fuckin’ life. Normal with you. Wakin’ up on a Saturday morning with you, eatin’ your pussy for breakfast, getting up and makin’ pancakes with Nathan while you sleep in ‘cause you deserve it and ‘cause you won’t physically be able after what I do with you.”
My stomach dipped. Like all the way down. Knees quivered. Pretty much all the clichés you could think of in regards to what a hot man’s words could do to a woman.
And he wasn’t done.
“Fuckin’ grocery shoppin’ with you, arguing with you about thirty buck bottles of wine, buyin’ them for you because it’s actually for me, since I’m the one that gets to fuck you tipsy after you’ve had two glasses. Then either going to church with you and Nathan on Sunday, or takin’ you fishing because I believe he needs to see two versions of worship to become a man.” He paused, laid his head against mine. “Fuck, I want to teach him to be a man. Show him how to treat a woman.”