A More Deserving Blackness (26 page)

             
I’m sorry,
I type, and shove it under his nose.

             
He barely looks at it before he laughs; an ugly, tortured sound.  He shakes his head derisively, turning away from me and interlocking his fingers behind his head, bowing it and hanging his arms from his linked hands at the base of his skull.  I feel like I’m grasping at eroding sand as I type again quickly, my chest aching and my hands unsteady.  When I offer it to him he pretends not to notice, his face hidden by his raised arms, and I prod him with it.  Logan flinches like I’ve stabbed him and turns away, exhaling hard, and I pick up the nearest thing, the paperback novel he’d been reading to me just the other night, and fling it at him. 

             
“
Shit!”
  It bounces off the back of his head and he wheels around angrily, throwing his hands up.  “
Fine!
  You want to talk?  Talk. 
Talk
to me, Bree.”

             
He’s glaring at me and I can’t make a sound.

             
“Tell me what the hell
that
was!” he yells, stabbing a finger back toward the front of the house.  “Tell me why you’d rather
die
than come to me!”

             
Tears in my eyes, I lift the phone in my hand but Logan swipes at it viciously, smacking it from my grip to clatter across the floor.

             
“
NO
, damn it! 
Talk
to me!”

             
He’s glaring at me, breathing hard, infuriated, and I stare back at him mutely.  I can feel it, everything I can’t hold inside, a yawning wasteland trembling beneath the surface.  It will level me.

             
With him watching me like that, so obviously furious behind the glaring bruises of his face, it takes me several tries before I’m able to open my mouth and speak.

             
“You said you didn’t care if I ever talked to you.”

             
He barely even blinks at the sound of my voice, like I’d been speaking to him for weeks.

             
“Yeah, well, you did talk,” he says bitterly.  “And then you put a fucking gun to your head, and that changes things.”

             
“I wasn’t trying to kill myself.”

             
“Well, what the hell were you trying to do?  Because it looked like you were doing a pretty fucking good job for not trying!”

             
Something snaps under his hostility and suddenly I’m shouting at him. 

             
“I just want it to
stop!”

             
“What?”

             
“I can’t keep feeling like this!”  My arms wrap around my middle, my chest jerking and tears pouring down my cheeks.  “I don’t want to be afraid anymore!”  My voice is shaking and the only air slipping down to my lungs wheezes through a tiny crack in my throat.  “I – I can’t m-make it s-stop!”

             
“Bree,
Jesus.”
  Logan closes the distance between us in two steps, reaching for me.  “Okay,” he murmurs, like he always does.  “It’s okay.”

             
I shove him away from me and he winces.  “Stop saying that!” I screech at him.  “It’s not okay! 
I’m
not okay!  I don’t even know what that means anymore!”

             
Logan’s staring at me, his hands up and open in front of the dark damage Dylan’s chain-wrapped fist had done to his chest, and I’m sobbing, my words garbled and shrill.

             
“What part of this is okay?  Last night, watching them beat you like that?  That I can barely live without cutting myself because everything hurts too much?  Or than I’m so broken and, and
ruined
that it feels good to put a gun to my head because at least it makes the screaming stop?!”

             
“Is that what you think?” Logan asks tensely, his eyes narrowed.  “That what happened to you ruined you?”

             
“No.”  Shaking my head.  “I did.”

             
Logan blinks.  “That’s bullshit.”

             
“You don’t know anything!  You don’t -”

             
“NO!”
he roars over me.  “I
don’t
know, because you won’t
tell
me!  You let me fumble around just trying not to screw up again and put that look in your eyes like you’re
burning alive
, but I never know what the hell I did because you won’t fucking
tell
me!  You’re finally talking to me and you still won’t
talk
to me!”

             
“Maybe I don’t want you to know!”

             
“Maybe you need to!  You think I wanted you to know I killed a man with my bare hands and I don’t even remember doing it?!”

             
“You were protecting your mother!”

             
“I wanted him dead!”

             
“Fine!” I scream at him, holding my arms around myself because it’s all shaking loose.  Everything.                “
Yes,
I’m ruined.  And
yes
, I did it to myself.  He told me to be quiet and I
did
.  I didn’t make a single sound the whole time he was
raping
me!  Is that what you want to hear?”

             
Logan recoils at my words, looking ill.  He closes his eyes, exhaling forcefully through his nose, his jaw clenched.  But when he opens his eyes again, there’s no anger there.  They’re hollowed with sorrow.

             
I’m breathing in fits and jerks, clinging to the shivering pieces of myself, dangling there like shattered glass still quivering in the frame.

             
“And this - this doesn’t help,” I continue brokenly.  “
God
– this is so much
worse!”

             
The pieces finally crash down around me, scattering over the floor, and I fold in half and slap a hand over my mouth because I’m crying and it’s jagged and horrible; inhuman noises wrenching out of me.

             
Logan reaches for me and I flinch back wildly, slamming into the wall at my back.  “Don’t touch me!”

             
He stops, his mournful eyes measuring me carefully as I struggle to breathe.  Silently he waits, close but not touching me, until my breaths even out, until my strangled sobs disintegrate to quiet weeping.

             
“What screaming?” Logan asks.  “You said it made the screaming stop.  What screaming?”

             
“Mine,” I answer dully.  “Everything I wouldn’t let myself – because he said if I did he’d pull the trigger and maybe – maybe that would’ve been better.”

             
Logan jerks back, eyes widening.  “Fuck
that.
”

             
I push off the wall, rearing at him.  “At least I wouldn’t have to feel like this anymore!”

             
“Feel
what?
  Fear?  Pain?  That’s
life.
”

             
But he’s wrong.  The fear and the pain, those I could live with, have lived with, for years.  It’s the love that’s killing me, the love that’s rupturing everything else.

             
“I let him ruin me!” I cry, pressing a hand to my chest where the ache is worst, like a steel rebar through my ribcage.  How could anything hurt this much?

             
“You’re not -”

             
“You can’t save me, Logan.”

             
“
Damn it
, Bree, you
survived!”

             
“Because of you!” I spit at him, and he stops.  He just goes perfectly still.

             
He’s gaping at me, all pallid skin and red, dark eyes in his battered face.  “What?”

             
“I heard you that night,” I tell him hoarsely, and his eyes narrow.  “Two years before I met you.  I heard your voice, when he was . . .  You told me it was okay -” my voice breaks and I swallow, tears swelling and spilling endlessly.  “You hushed me, and you told me it was okay.  It’s the only way I was able to stay quiet.”

             
“You heard me?”

             
Logan’s face is ashen.  He’s staring at me as I cry, but he doesn’t ask me how that’s possible, and he doesn’t tell me I’m crazy, and, because I asked him not to, he doesn’t touch me.  And I can’t help but realize how wrong it feels, for him not to touch me.  How deeply he’d rooted himself in me in such a short time. 

             
How excruciating every single second will be without him.

             
I take a breath, but it doesn’t help the crushing pain.  “I can’t feel like this, Logan.  I can’t
do
this.”

             
“Do what?” he asks, but then I see it.  I see the second he understands, the second my meaning crashes down over him.  He stiffens.  “So, what?  That’s it?”

             
“I’m sorry.”

             
“
Fuck
sorry!”

             
“You don’t understand.”

             
“No, I
don’t!
” he barks in my face, then pulls back sharply, stabbing his fingers into his eyes, pushing hard.  He drops his hands and his voice comes low and lifeless.  “I don’t understand what the hell just happened.”
              “Nothing.  Nothing happened.”

             
“So this was always the plan then?  Make me fall in love with you, fuck me so I don’t ask you anything you don’t want to answer, and then leave?”

             
I flinch but meet his eyes.  “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

             
“Then why am I losing you?”

             
“It’s too hard.” I can barely see him through the tears.  “It hurts too much.”

             
“So you deal with it,” he snaps. “We deal with it together.  You don’t just walk away.”

             
“I can’t.”

             
“So you just give up?  That shit you told me, that’s -” he looks away, the muscle in his jaw ticking, his voice hoarse.  “I want – Christ, I want to curl into a ball and cry for a fucking
week
for what happened you but, damn it, running away?  It won’t fix it!”

             
“Nothing will fix it.”

             
“Because you’re broken,” Logan mocks scathingly.  “Well, guess what, Bree?  We’re all fucking broken!  Everyone! But maybe it could all be just a little less fucking
horrible
to be broken with someone who loves you!”

             
“I
can’t.”

             
Logan presses his lips together, glaring at me.  His hands are in fists and his whole body is tightly wound, like he wants to attack or flee and he can’t do either.

             
“I never meant for you to love me,” I tell him.

             
He laughs bitterly, and it sounds harsh and wrong. 

             
“You didn’t let him ruin you.  Some piece of shit assaulted you, and took something from you.  That’s it.  But this?  This is all you, Love.”  The anguish in his voice twists his endearment for me into something cold and ugly. 

             
His eyes are bleak when they look at me.  Empty.

             
“You know, nobody else could do it.  The trial, afterward.  None of that shit.  They damn sure tried, but-” he shakes his head. “You didn’t ruin yourself but you’re doing one hell of a job of ruining me.”

             
Then he turns away from me, snatching up the coat he’d given me and my jeans and shoes from the floor and shoving them all into my arms. 

             
“Get the fuck out.”

Chapter 15

Somehow I
get my clothes back on and cross the street.  Use my key to open the front door.
  Close it behind me.  Find my bedroom, lower myself to the edge of the bed. 

             
Numb.

             
The loss of him is an echoing void inside me.  I don’t know how a person can withstand this much pain.  It shouldn’t be possible.

             
I want him with a ferocity that shocks me.  I can’t think of anything else.  I just cut him away and yet he consumes me, every broken, bleeding part of me.  It’s all his.

             
Out of habit, I reach for my phone in my pocket and find nothing.  I’d left it at Logan’s, somewhere on the floor of his bedroom.

             
Left it like I’d left him.

             
That small thing, the loss of even that contact with him, the memories, the old messages stored in my phone, wrecks me.  Suddenly I’m shaking with silent sobs, my body jerking and shuddering, but no tears fall.  Maybe there aren’t any left.  Maybe I’d used them all on him.

             
I didn’t deserve them.

             
Curling into myself, I crumple like a piece of paper tossed into a fire, dropping back onto the bed with my arms pressed tightly to my chest and my knees drawn up to my chin. 

             
That’s how Trish finds me, some immeasurable time later, wrapped in a ball against blistering tongues of pain.

             
“Bree?”

             
Her voice comes from the hallway, hesitant at first, and then I hear her rush inside.  I must not have closed the door because she’s beside the bed, a hand on my back.

             
“What happened?  What’s wrong?  Is it Logan?  Did something -?”

             
She stops when I shake my head.

             
Hunkering down at the side of the bed, Trish gently combs my hair from my face, and I close my eyes on a silent sob.

             
“Bree . . .”

             
I feel the shift of the quilt as she lays her head next to mine on the mattress, our noses almost touching, her fingers never stopping in my hair.  It feels good, what she’s doing; soothing.  It feels good to have her touching me.

             
“He loved me,” I whisper to her with my eyes closed, and her hand stills against my temple.  I open my eyes and look right at her, and there are tears trembling in her awed eyes.  “He loved me.”

             
Her blink sends those tears spilling down her face, soaking into the quilt under her cheek.  “Oh, Honey.  I know he did.”

              Trish drives me to school on Tuesday.  I purposely dig a thick, gray hooded sweatshirt from the back of my closet and pull it on over my simple black t-shirt, leaving his jacket in my room.  I’d wiped it clean of his blood sometime in the early morning, when time was nothing but an endless stretch of oblivion.  I should give the coat back to him.  It’s not mine anymore. 

             
After finding me broken, Trish had stayed with me most of the rest of the night, curled up next to me on the bed.  And when she’d told me I didn’t have to go to school if I didn’t want to, I’d just shrugged.  School was a distraction. 

             
And the only excuse I had left to check on Logan, to see how he was doing.  Just to see him at all.

             
Now that she knows I’m talking again, Trish finds little excuses to get me to respond to her, asking mundane questions and delighting in hearing the answers.  She talks to me as she hands me a Cliff bar and I eat it mutely, not even sure when I’d eaten last, and hardly caring.  Mercifully, she doesn’t ask about the incident two years ago, and she doesn’t ask about Logan. 

             
The day passes in painful increments.  I miss Logan every second he’s not with me.  Simple things, just going to my locker, walking to class, are impossible without him.  I feel like some vital part of me is missing and I’m walking around, this living dead thing, without lungs or a heart or a
soul
.

             
Rumors of Sunday night are rampant.  I hear musings of who did it and who started it and who saw it, but nobody has to ask why.  Why is obvious.  Some of them are even laughing about it, high-fiving each other, reveling in some shared victory.  The Psycho got what was coming to him. 

             
I want to kick in all their smiling faces. 

             
Silent, I move through the halls, meeting their stares evenly, blankly, not caring what people think.  As common as the stories of Logan going crazy and attacking a classmate for no reason are stories of our breakup, how he’d hit me and cussed at me.  How I’m terrified of him.

             
By the time I force myself to health class I’m exhausted from not screaming at them.  Screaming how wrong they were, how he’d saved me, how I didn’t even know how to live without him because he’d gone so deep inside me he’d come out with my fucking soul in his hands.

             
The irony is almost humorous.

             
I feel sick when I enter the classroom.  Not figuratively sick, but real sick, like I might puke at any second.  Though, I know he won’t be there.  Not yet.  Not this soon before the bell.

             
My feet weigh a thousand pounds as I slog to the back of the room and take my seat, my original seat, at my own table, ignoring the gaping eyes that follow me.  I glance up with a nauseating mix of hope and dread every time someone enters the room, but Logan never shows.  The bell rings, and a minute later Apligian starts class, and Logan isn’t there.

             
I feel meaningless.

             
I shouldn’t be so disappointed he’s not there, should’ve known he’d be out of school for a while.  As badly as he was hurt, it makes sense that Logan wouldn’t come, so soon after everything.  He needs to rest, to heal.  I shouldn’t be so disappointed, but I am.  I’d wanted so badly to see him, to shamefully soak up that little time with him.  Anything more than that I’d already denied myself.

             
It should be better.  It was supposed to be better.  Without him making me open too far, feel too much – it should’ve been better. 

             
It wasn’t.

             
I don’t hear anything Apligian says, so I’m surprised when the bell rings announcing the end of class.  I woodenly shove my notebook – the page blank – back into my bag and throw it over my shoulder, standing up and then jumping back when Erik is suddenly standing there in front of me.  I’d almost planted my face directly in the center of his plaid-covered chest.

             
His hands are shoved in the pockets of his jeans and he’s looking at me somberly. I have to crane my neck to see his face.

             
“I didn’t know,” he tells me.  “What they were gonna do.  I swear.”

             
I believe him, so I nod.

             
“Did you get hurt?”

             
It’s a lie, but I shake my head. 

             
Hurt?  No.  Hurt wasn’t the word for it.  Eviscerated, maybe.  But not hurt.

             
Erik nods awkwardly.  “Good, I’m – that’s good.”  Then he’s just standing there in my way and he tips his head toward the door.  “I gotta get going.”

             
He leaves and I follow, but before he slips down the hall he looks back at me and gives me a sad smile, just the faintest trace of those not-really-quarterback dimples on his cheeks.  It makes me ache.

             
I hadn’t even realized I’d missed them. 

             
I take a step and skid to a stop when a massive chest covered in a black zip jacket steps in front of me.  Lurching back, I tilt my head up and instantly recognize one of the guys who’d been holding Logan’s arms that night they’d nearly beaten him to death.  He’d been smiling.  I remember, while Dylan had bloodied Logan with his fists, this guy had been smiling. 

             
The rage is so powerful I feel sick with it.

             
Short brown hair, round, flat nose, a thick tuft of dark hair on his chin, he’s staring down at me with exaggerated, pursed lips. 

             
“Where’s your boyfriend?” he asks in a purposefully slimy voice, edging closer.  “Too scared to come back?”

             
I readjust my bag on my shoulder, glaring at him, but my hands are shaking.

             
“What’s the matter?  Cat got your tongue?”

             
He just grins at me, his lips curling up to show his teeth and then he’s laughing and walking away and I’m still standing there, paralyzed, thinking of all the things I should’ve done, should’ve said, should’ve shouted at him.  Anything but just stand there, the victim again.

             
Dylan isn’t in pre-calc later, which is good, because I don’t know if screaming at him would be enough.

             
  I’m pulling my bag over the unfamiliar bulk of my hoodie after my last class has finally dragged to an end when I realize I’d never asked Trish for a ride home.  And since I’d never actually explained what had happened and I’d never asked and it’s Trish, she probably didn’t even realize of the need for it.

             
I’m already reaching for my pocket before I remember my phone isn’t there.  It’s still at Logan’s.  I had no one to drive me home and no way to text anyone to ask. 

             
Shit.

             
Abruptly, I feel someone standing behind me and my heart sputters and my stomach dives for the floor.  But when I turn it’s only Erik, tall and skinny with his messenger bag already slung over his chest, aviator sunglasses hooked over the collar of his shirt.

             
He smiles, like my world hadn’t just swollen and popped at his feet.

             
“Hey, can I drive you home?”

             
I wait too long to answer and he shrugs.  “You don’t have to, I just thought, you know, since Logan’s not here -”

             
“Okay.”

             
“Holy -!” Erik glances around the emptying hallway like we’re evil spies in a James Bond movie and then lowers his voice to a stage whisper.  “You just
talked.
”

             
“Yeah.  I guess I did.”

             
Erik nods smoothly.  “I like it,” he says approvingly, like he’s reviewing a new outfit I’m trying on just for him.  It almost makes me smile and he motions with his spiky head toward the student lot.  “Come on.”

             
This time Erik helps me up into the cab of his massive truck with a hand at my elbow.  He doesn’t expect me to talk to him on the ride home, and I’m grateful for it.  I feel wrung out.  It’s unnatural, speaking to people after so long, and I feel raw and exposed.

             
When he passes Logan’s house there isn’t much to see – empty driveway, garage closed – but I stare at it anyway. Behind the brown lenses of his glasses, Erik notices but doesn’t comment.  We pull into Trish’s driveway behind her Honda which is parked next to what can only be my mother’s beige SUV, and I shouldn’t even be surprised.  Trish would’ve told them I’d spoken the second she was able. 

             
They’re probably here to celebrate how marvelously healed and improved I am now.  Instant normal daughter.  Just add insufferable anguish.

             
Which isn’t fair, really, because they love me and worry about me and they only want the best for me.  It’s me who can’t handle any of that – the burden of it, the hooks of expectation pulling at me.  I couldn’t handle it then and I can’t handle it now.  Not without Logan. 

             
And I’d shoved him away.

             
My mother is there walking toward us from the porch, like she’d been watching, waiting for me to come home.  In the sun her short, wavy brown hair is streaked with a little more grey than I remember from when I’d lived with them, but her eyes are just the same; loving and heartbroken.