Page 21 of Sting of Sin

"I hear you," I got out, behind my hand.

"There she is. Breathe with me. In through your nose. That's it."

He talked me down through three inches of open door, his voice the rope I climbed back up, and when my breathing finally evened he went quiet again, and I lay in the dark and listened to him settle back against the wall on the floor where he'd slept every night since I came, and I felt safe enough, eventually, to close my eyes.

The next night it came again. And the night after.

The third night was the one that broke the door open.

I don't know what I did, Eli told me later I'd screamed, a real one, the kind that gets past every door, and I came up out of the woods thrashing, fighting hands that weren't there, so deep in it I didn't know the room, didn't know the bed, didn't know anything but they have me, they have me, and the door came open, all the way, and a big shape was in it, and for one white blind second the dream and the room were the same thing and I scrambled back against the headboard with a sound I'd never heard myself make.

"It's me." He didn't come closer. He stopped just inside and put his hands up where I could see them, open, empty, and didn't move another inch. "Bee. It's Eli. It's just Eli. Nobody's got you. Look—look, it's my room, there's your window, there's the lamp. It's me."

The lamp. The window. The dog-eared books. The shape in the door resolving, slow, out of the nightmare and into the only safe face I had. Eli. Not them. Eli.

"Eli," I said, and it broke in half coming out.

"Yeah. Yeah, it's me." Still he didn't come to me. He waited, hands open, until I was the one who reached, until I put my hand out into the dark toward him, shaking, because I could not be alone with the woods one more second. Only then did he move, slow, and crossed the room and lowered himself down to sit on the floor right against the side of the bed, close, his back to the mattress, near enough that I could've touched his hair.

I took his hand instead. Two fingers, then his whole hand, then both of mine wrapped around it, and I held on like it was the handrail on a bridge in a high wind.

He didn't get in the bed. He didn't try. He just sat on the floor beside me in the dark with my hands clamped around his one, his thumb moving slow over my knuckles, and he stayed there the rest of the night, I'd feel him every time I surfaced, still there, still holding on, a man folded up uncomfortable on a hard floor because the only thing that quieted the woods was knowing he was inside arm's reach of them.

"You don't have to tell me what it was," he said, sometime in the smallest hour. "But you can. If it helps to put it out of you. I'll just hold it. I won't do a thing with it but hold it."

And I gave him a piece. Not the worst. I couldn't reach the worst, the wall wouldn't let me, and even what I could reach came out in broken bits with no order to them.

"He walked me out there," I whispered. "It wasn't… I didn't just end up in those woods. Somebody took me. Somebody I—" My throat closed and I made it open. "I trusted him. He had my hand. And there were others I didn't know, waiting, and he knew. He knew they were there the whole time he was telling me to come a little farther." My hands tightened on his. "More than one. It was never just one bad thing that found me. It was a plan, and the person I trusted was the front door of it."

For so long I'd refused to say a word of that to anybody. Letting them think whatever they thought, because saying it out loud meant standing in it, and I couldn't stand in it and keep breathing both. And now it was out, in the dark, in pieces, and the sky didn't fall.

I felt Eli go still around my hands.

“I hear you," he said. Low. Rougher than before, like it cost him to keep it that level. "He walked you into it, and he wasn't alone, and you didn't do one thing wrong but trust somebody you had every right to trust. I hear you, Bee. I've got it. I'm holding it."

There was something he wasn't saying. Even that deep in the woods I could feel the shape of the not saying, a whole dark room of it behind his quiet, a door he held shut with his back. I didn't have it in me to wonder what was behind it. I just knew it was there, and that holding it shut was costing him, and that he did it anyway, for me, the way he did everything.

I don't think he knew what the I hear you did to me, that it was a different country than hush, it's not real, the words I'd been starving for while he kept feeding me the other. That night he was too close to the dark himself to do anything but take it straight.

But I knew. I lay in the morning coming up in the window with my hands still locked around his and the woods finally letting go their grip, and I thought: he heard me. This once, he heard me.

I told Wren a piece of it the next afternoon, on the porch, both of us with coffee going cold. He took me there. There were others. It was a plan. She didn't flinch and she didn't soothe. She just nodded, slow, and turned it over in her steady hands the way she turned everything, and said, "That's what we hold… memories. The person you trusted handed you to people who were waiting. That's not a nightmare making things up, Bee. That's the shape of it coming back to you because you're finally strong enough to look." She held my eyes. "Bodies don't lie about who walked them into the dark."

Two people, now, holding the same true ugly piece of me without trying to fix it back into something smaller.

It should have made the nights easier.

It made them worse, because now that somebody would catch the pieces, my body started throwing them faster, and every night Eli was closer, the floor by the bed his now, the dark hours his, my hand in his the bridge I crossed back over before dawn. We weren't talking about it, what was happening between us in those black hours, the way his thumb learned my knuckles and my breathing learned his. We didn't have words for it and we didn't reach for them. It was just growing, in the worst place and the worst hours, the way the toughest green things do, up through a crack, in the dark, because that's where the light finally was.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

THERE ARE HARDER things than wanting a woman you can't have.

I learned that on the floor of my own room, in the dark, a few feet from the only woman I ever truly wanted, holding her hand through the door of sleep while she fought men I'd already put in the ground.

That's the part she doesn't know. That's the part I carry down into those black hours every night and never set down, not for a second, that the men in her woods aren't out there anymore. The one who walked her in, the pretty lying boyfriend who held her hand and talked sweet and delivered her like a wrapped present, we got him first. Got the truth out of him in a barn off the county road, every name, every face, before Throttle did what a brother does. And then we rode the rest of that summer like the devil's own and we got the others, one at a time, and there is not a man left walking who put his hands on Beatrice in those trees. I know that the way I know my own name.

She doesn't know it. She can't. Because to tell her what we did with our hands the summer she lost her mind, and that's a weight I won't lay on a woman who's barely holding the one she's already got. So I hold it instead. I lie on the floor by her bed and I listen to her fight ghosts, and every cell in me is screaming they can't touch you, they're dead, I killed them for you, and I say none of it. I just say I'm here. It's the truest small thing I've got that won't break her.