Page 20 of Sting of Sin

"Not happening."

"It used to happen plenty. You sure as hell were attracted to me."

"It was just letting off steam, and it didn't mean a thing, not to me, and you knew that walking into it." I kept it flat. I don't have a soft way to say a thing like that and I wasn't about to dig one up, not with another woman still sitting warm in my chest. "A good time, gone by morning. That's the whole of what it was, Holly. Don't go building it into something it never was. I thought we had already cleared this shit up."

Her face pulled tight, and she took her hand back and folded her arms like the cold had got worse.

"Wow." A little laugh with no air behind it. "You know, I think I could almost take it if you were a bastard about it. But you're not even that. You're just done. Like I'm a chore you’re crossing off."

I didn't say anything. There's nothing to say to a true thing.

She straightened up, and pulled her pride back on over the hurt like a jacket, and when she spoke again it was steadier. "Fine. It doesn't matter. I didn't come out here to beg, whatever this looks like. I'm done hanging around. I've met somebody, a man who actually sees me, who wants the things I want. And if it works out, I'm taking it. So you can stop ducking me in the clubhouse like I'm a problem."

She turned to go. Then she stopped, and looked back at me over her shoulder, and the look wasn't cruel. It was certain.

"You felt something for me once, Maul. Call it a couple of nights if that's what gets you to sleep. But it's going to get quiet on you one of these days, and you're going to know exactly what you let walk off this lot, and I'll be long gone by then, someplace I'm actually wanted, and there won't be a thing in this world you can do about it." The smallest, tiredest smile. "Hope she's worth what you're throwing out. I mean that."

And she went inside and shut the door soft behind her

I finished my smoke in the cold.

She was wrong, is the thing, and I stood out there and turned it over honest, because you owe a person at least that much before you set them down for good. There was nothing. Not a flicker, not a buried beat, not one inch of me that had ever belonged to Holly or ever would. What I felt watching that door close was a low, no-account relief that whatever she'd been hauling around all this time had finally found a road out that didn't run through me. Some man off the compound was welcome to the whole of it. I even hoped, the dumb way you hope about a stranger you'll never meet, that he'd be decent to her. I'd handed her careless nights and let her make a life out of them in her own head, and that's not a kindness, even when it never quite adds up to a crime.

Then I put her out of my mind, and I went back inside to the only thing in that whole loud clubhouse that ever carried the real and total weight of me.

She was right where I'd left her, folded into the end of the couch, and she found my eyes before I'd even cleared the door and gave me that small private smile, the new one, the one that's only ever mine. And Holly, and her someone new, went out of my head like smoke off the end of a cigarette.

One woman. That's all I've got in me. All I ever had.

And there she sat in the lamplight wearing it, not even knowing she had it on. So I crossed the room and went to her, and let the rest of the world wait out in the cold where I'd left it.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

THE DRUG HAD been a lid, and the lid was gone.

Crestwood had kept me dosed down into a flat world of nothing, and I'd hated it, hated the fog, hated waking already tired, but the fog had been a lid on a pot, and under it the thing I keep behind the wall had stayed down in the dark where it couldn't get its hands on me. No dreams. Or none I remembered. They'd taken even that from me and I'd thought it was one more cruelty, and it was, but it was also a mercy, and I hadn't known the difference until the dosing stopped and the lid came off and the pot began, night after night, to boil.

The dreams came.

They always start good. That's the cruelty built into them, the trap of it. They start on a beautiful day, a sunny ordinary afternoon, me younger and lighter and whole, and I'm not alone, there's a hand in mine, a familiar one, a face I trusted, a voice I'd have followed anywhere telling me there's something out here he wants to show me, just a little farther, come on. And under the happy, faint, there's the feeling. The alarm with no fire. Something's wrong. Go back. Don't. And in the dream, like in the life, I hear it and I pat it down and I tell myself I'm being silly, because it's such a pretty day, because the hand in mine belonged to someone I trusted, because why would you be afraid of the person walking you into the trees.

Then the hand lets go.

Then the light goes, and it's the woods, and the dream stops being a memory and becomes the thing itself, and I'm there, I'm in it, the cold and the smell of the ground and the dark coming down through the branches, and the one who brought me has stepped back, stepped aside, and I understand in one falling-through-the-floor instant that he didn't walk me out here to show me anything. He walked me out here to hand me over. And I'm not alone in the trees, and I never was going to be, because there's more than one of them. The one I knew, and others I didn't, shapes between the trunks, a voice low to another voice, strangers where no men should be, and the dream me finally understands, way too late, always too late, what the feeling had been screaming the whole gold afternoon: they're here. They were always going to be here. He brought you right to them.

And the thing that's worse than the hands, worse than the dark, the thing I can never explain to myself when I claw back up out of it, it isn't the hands at all. The hands grabbed, and grabbing is a simple, ugly thing; a person can almost hold a thing that simple. It's what stands behind the hands. Because in the dream the men aren't the beginning of it, they're already set when I get there, already placed, like pieces somebody put down on a board before I ever walked out under those trees.

And I can feel him.

Every time.

Off at the edge of it, back where the dream won't let me turn my head and look—someone. Not reaching, not rushing, not part of the scramble of them at all. Someone standing still and patient in the dark, apart from all of it, the way a man stands when he's watching a thing he set in motion a long time ago finally come true. I never see him. No face, no name, nothing my waking mind can carry back out into the light. Just the unbearable fact of him being there—still, easy, the cold center the whole night turns around, the one who marked the day and the place and only had to send the one I trusted to keep hold of my hand and walk me to the spot. That's the part I wake up unable to hold. Not the hands. Him. The watching one. It slips through my fingers the second my eyes open.

The first bad one, I woke up with my own hand jammed against my mouth.

That was the old training. Years of learning that sound brings them, nurses, the dark, him, whoever, years of swallowing every cry, and even tearing up out of the worst dream there is my body kept the rule and clamped my own scream down behind my hand. I lay there shaking, soaked through, the woods still closer than the room.

"Bee." Eli's voice, low through the gap in the door where he slept. "You're alright. I'm here. You're at the clubhouse. It was a dream." A pause, careful. "Talk to me a second. Tell me you hear me."