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It’s me shouting, You don’t fucking know what you need. Stop being so stubborn. Take what I’m trying to give you. Take it.
What I want to do is drop the shovel and walk over to where he is. To slip my arms around him, press myself against him, flatten my breasts into his chest, kiss him until he has no choice but to kiss me back—to kiss me the way he used to, sparks striking into a burn so fast and hot that sometimes we couldn’t get our clothes off quick enough, couldn’t manage to do more than unzip jeans and shove underwear out of the way just far enough to join our bodies together.
It’s unbelievable how badly I want that back. How urgently I wish we could get lost in each other, find joy again.
I understand, though, that it’s not what he wants from me.
I take off my heels, sink the blade into the soil, move it through the air until it hovers over the gleaming black surface of the box West’s father will rot in.
The thump of earth landing on steel gives me a cheap satisfaction.
I’m awkward with the shovel, losing more dirt than I get in, dropping some of it on my feet, where it gets between my toes, moist and muddy. Within a few minutes, my back starts to hurt. Then my hands.
West moves fluidly, his body graceful in action. The blade of his shovel sings.
Still, it takes a long time. I get blisters.
I don’t stop.
The sun drops toward the horizon.
When we finish, he takes my shovel and returns them both to the truck. He stands beside the grave, hands loose and empty.
He looks like a boy—so much like a boy that I understand viscerally that he was as young as Frankie once. He was a kid who wanted a father and got nothing but disappointment. A boy who got punched, kicked, abandoned, and then told to stop holding on to the past. To let it go.
His mother, his grandmother, this whole family—they all asked him, again and again, to give his father one more chance. Maybe this time Wyatt would be different. Maybe this time life would be fair and kind, and happiness would be possible.
It never was, though. Not for West.
I don’t know how he can survive here.
I don’t know how he’s not crushed, because it crushes me just to watch him. This whole place—it’s beautiful, that winding road from the airport, the trees in the mountains, the buttes and the ocean. It’s not fair that it’s beautiful, because it’s so outrageously cruel to the man I love.
If West stays here, this place will kill him.
I step closer, skirt around the grave until I can feel the heat coming off his arm.
I touch him, my hand on the curve of his shoulder. “West.”
It’s not fair to ask him for anything right now, but I don’t want to take from him. I only want him to lean
on me. I want to give him rest, oblivion, escape. Something.
I’ve been trying to give him space, trying not to dig up feelings he can’t handle when he’s already got so much to deal with, but I can’t take it anymore. I can’t believe that this is better—that somehow it’s better for West not to have whatever comfort I can give him, it’s better for me to be three feet away from him and telling myself I can’t get closer, not now, not tomorrow, maybe not ever.
How the fuck is this better? For who? Not for me. Not for West.
Surely not for West.
I move around to his front and insinuate my hands into the space between his arms and his sides. I rest my cheek against his heaving chest.
“If you want me,” I say. “No strings. No anything—just, if you want to forget for an hour. Whatever you want.”
I tighten my arms around him. He’s so much harder than he used to be. All this armor between him and the world. I want him to know that I see it there. I know what it is, and if he wants to take it off with me, he can.
I love him.
I love him so fucking much, and this is all I’ve got to offer that he can possibly take. So I squeeze him as tight as I can until he yields.
