His hand comes up and knocks the feather out of my grip, and his fist wraps around his own cock, and it takes three strokes. Three. He shouts through his teeth and comes all over himself, thick ropes striping his stomach, his chest, one reaching the tally marks below his collarbone, painting his own testimony white while his heels dig into the mattress and his spine bows and my name tears out of him like it's the only word he's ever learned.
Then quiet. Two people breathing hard, one wrecked bed, one peacock feather lying on the floor like a dropped instrument.
He turns his head. Looks up at me with wet lashes and worshipping eyes and everything in him laid open.
“Hi,” he rasps.
I laugh until I have to sit down on the edge of the bunk, a few careful inches from his hip.
“Hi,” I whisper back.
“Wren.”
I look at him, and the smile melts off my face at the expression I see on his.
“I love you,” he whispers. “God damn it, I love you so much it hurts.”
I'm crying again, tears of love and joy, my body shaking so hard the bed shakes with me. It takes me almost a fullminute until I can speak, Rowe patiently watching me the entire time with love shining in those gray eyes.
“I love you right back, Rowe Holloway,” I finally manage to say. “So fucking much.”
I kiss the tips of my fingers, the ones I used to hold the feather and stroke his ruined body, and bring them close to his face. Soft as a whisper and briefer than a thought, he presses his lips against them.
24
ROWE
Wren's car turned onto the county road forty minutes ago, and I've checked my phone eleven times since.
She kissed her fingers at me in the parking lot the way she always does, then rolled her window down and said,I have to act normal, Rowe. Normal people go to work on Mondays.And she was right, and I nodded, and I stood in the gravel watching her taillights shrink until Logan yelled at me from the haystack that I looked like a dog left at a rest stop.
Normal. She's going to walk into that building. Stand at that exam table. Smile at Paige and see patients in the room where he tore her blouse, and act like nothing happened, because nothing can have happened, because the man it happened with is sitting against a post in his own barn waiting for the mail carrier.
I've spent the whole weekend with her. Every hour of it. Chores and shows and chains and the feather and her laugh filling my trailer like it was built to hold the sound.Two days, and my lungs have forgotten how to work without her in the room.
“Rowe.” Elias falls into step beside me, cane tapping on the dirt. “Walk with me. It's ready.”
I know whatitis before he says another word.
The trailer sits at the far end of the lot, past the equipment storage, past the generator bank, deliberately outside the paths the workers walk. Windowless. Unremarkable. Jonah and Cole have spent five days inside it with a truckload of thrift store furniture and a shopping list Silas wrote from my nightmares.
Elias stops at the door. “You don't have to do this today.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Then breathe first.”
I breathe. Then I climb the two steps and open the door, and 1999 hits me in the face.
Pine cleaner. Lemon polish. The smell reaches down my throat and closes a fist around something twenty years buried, and my hand locks on the doorframe hard enough that the metal edge bites into my palm.
There's a braided rug. A lamp with a green glass shade. Heavy curtains over walls with no windows. A high-backed chair upholstered in cracked oxblood leather, angled toward the center of the room like it's waiting for a man to sit in it and watch.
A radio on a doily-covered side table murmurs gospel, turned down low.
My scars scream. Both forearms, my torso, my thighs, all at once, the old lines lighting up like someone's tracing them with a live wire.
“Too much?” Elias asks quietly from behind me.
