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“I don’t think you have to worry about that right now.”
She didn’t turn around. Still speaking to the empty room, she answered, “I don’t have a choice but to worry about it. My father killed himself today.” Her shoulders started to sag, but then she went ramrod straight, obviously rejecting the sadness. Keeping the ‘persona’ in place. Being tougher than she felt.
Seeing that, Jay wasn’t entirely surprised by what happened next. She turned and faced him. “I need you to go.”
Normally, he wouldn’t stay where he wasn’t wanted. Normally, the woman he loved saying those words to him would hurt like a knife in his gut. But he thought he knew what was going on here; he thought heunderstoodit.
So he said, “No. I’m not going anywhere.”
A fierce frown overtook her face, almost eagerly, and Jay understood that, too. Anger was so much easier than sadness or fear. Anger was arush. It feltstrong. It feltgood—or at least better than the others.
“What?” she demanded. “I want you to go.”
“I’m not leaving, babe.”
“Get outta here,” she snarled.
Jay shook his head.
Then Petra leapt at him, shoved at him, yelling, “GET OUT! I WANT YOU OUT!”
Jay let her yell and scream, locked his legs and let her shove ineffectually at him. He withstood it all, fighting an interior battle not to let his feelings get hurt.I know what this is, he told himself.It’s not about me.
He knew, because it was what he did: lashing out when his weakness was too close to the surface. When it could be seen by anyone who might look.
When he’d found her in the grass, she’d been too stunned by what her father had done to recognize anything about herself. But in the hours since, she’d seen she had to be strong to get through it.
She didn’t want anyone around who knew how badly she’d been hurt by this. How deep her grief, and her anger, went.
But Jay also knew that she needed him here now more than ever. So he withstood her outburst and didn’t try to quell it. He let her lash out. He took what she needed to get rid of.
Soon enough, it faded out on its own. She stopped shoving, her yells became sobs, and what she was saying changed. She added “Please” to her demand that he go, and then at some point, she was saying something completely different.
It happened gradually, and through her tears he couldn’t make out the words at first, but as she settled enough that he could get his arms around her without force and pull her close, he heard “Please. Please don’t go. Please.”
“I’m not,” he assured her, finally tucking her close, feeling her sag against his chest, feeling her hands dragging at his kutte, trying to get as tight a hold on him as she could. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m with you, Petra. I love you.”
Grief was a lead weight pulling her down. Her legs gave out. At first he took her weight and kept her upright, but then he followed her to the floor and pulled her onto his lap. The sorrow that had been leaking out in slow, soft bursts all afternoon had finally broken fully through. She wept deep, loud, wrenching sobs. Jay held her and kissed her and gave her whatever strength he had. It was hers as long as she needed it.
They sat on the floor, wound together, long after her sobs gave out. They didn’t speak. Twilight ceded the sky to the night, the apartment went dark, and still they sat on the floor.
In that dark quiet, Jay thought about grief and death and loss. He was angry at her father for causing her pain, but he also kind of understood why he’d done it. Her father had been fucking up his life, he’d been deeply unhappy, and he’d faced a very hard, painful future. He wasn’t strong enough to live his life, and he was causing Petra pain while he was alive, too. A different, maybe softer kind of pain, but maybe also more constant.
Jay thought, too, about strength and vulnerability, and he realized that vulnerability wasn’t really weakness. Or at least it wasn’t always weakness. Her father had been a weak kind of vulnerable, putting himself and others in harm’s way because he wasn’t strong enough to face the challenges of his life. But a soldier was vulnerable when he left cover to protect one of his own, and there was nothing weak in that. Vulnerability could mean taking a risk to reach for something good or necessary or honorable.
Vulnerability could mean asking for help when you needed it. It could mean being honest about who you were and what you wanted, even if it wasn’t exactly like who the people you cared about were or what they wanted.
Maybe the real weakness was pretending you were just like everybody else.
“I’m so tired,” Petra slurred, sounding half asleep.
The sound of her voice after so long in quiet jolted Jay from his thoughts.
“Then let’s go to bed.”
She nodded against his chest. Jay gathered her up close, got his feet under him, and stood. He carried her through her apartment, helped her take her clothes off, settled her in bed, and slid in beside her.
Immediately she rolled to him, tucking herself against his body again, pressing her face to his throat.
