Damage - A. M. Jenkins [39]
You unlock the door. You can’t manage to lift your head enough to see Becky’s face, but you can feel the long startled look she’s giving you.
“Here he is,” she whispers into the phone, and holds it out. You take it from her, shut the door, and lock again. The phone now hangs in your hand.
“Austin?” Heather’s voice is thin and tinny, but you can hear every word. “Don’t hang up.”
You look at the phone. You look at it the way look back toward land as the current pulls you slowly to sea.
“I’m so sorry,” you hear her say. “Can you hear me?”
You bring the phone to your mouth. “Yeah,” you say and now all you have to do is listen.
It’s all about control, Heather says. It’s all about knowing exactly what’s going to happen to her, and when, and where. It’s all about having a plan. And knowing the future. And not handing her life over to somebody else.
She’s never trusted anybody before, she says. You’re the only guy who’s ever really liked her as a person. knows that because you’ve always followed her rules, never pushed her to do something she doesn’t want to and you don’t tell everybody everything that happens in private. But what you did today freaked her out for second. It was like her body put on a performance you, while you stood there enjoying the show.
“It wasn’t a show,” you tell her, the first words you’ve said besides yeah. “It was just…us.”
“I know. I know. God, I can’t do this on the phone. I can’t tell what you’re thinking. I need to see you. I want make everything right, Austin. Can you come over Please?”
You already know you’re going to go. You knew the moment you took the phone in your hand.
“Yeah,” you tell Heather. And with the other hand you shut the lid of the razor’s box.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“Are you okay?” Heather asks.
She’s sitting beside you on her couch. You hadn’t noticed. “Uh-huh,” you answer.
She lays her head on your chest. “I can hear your heart beating,” she says, nuzzling the cloth of your shirt.
She’s said how sorry she is about a thousand times. And you can tell she meant it. It’s not her fault that every apology fell off you like rain running down a roof. Alarms are going off in the back of your mind, warning that you shouldn’t have come over, no matter how sorry she is. But the rest of you is afraid not to be here. Your pride has fallen in tangles somewhere around your ankles, but the rest of you is still clutching at the edge of that cliff.
“Do you remember the time we fell asleep together on the couch? That’s the only time I ever did that. I can never sleep around anybody, much less a guy.”
When you don’t say anything, she raises up, examines you for a moment, before leaning in to kiss you.
“I love you,” she says—and seals your mouth so that you can’t say anything, even if you wanted to. A light flutter of her tongue, and then she pulls back to tuck herself into your side again. And plants yet another kiss on your chest.
It all feels vaguely pleasant. Sort of like background music, the kind that will leave absolute silence behind if it is gone.
“After you left—I’ve never felt like that. Like I was really completely alone. I thought, I’ve got to hear his voice. I wasn’t going to say anything—just hear your voice and hang up. But all the time the phone was ringing, I was so…”
She doesn’t finish. The TV is on, but the sound is down so low all the voices are just punctuated hums.
“You’re still mad, aren’t you?”
“No.”
“You are. You’re acting like you’re not even here. You hate me, don’t you?”
“I don’t hate you.”
“I wasn’t ready—I hadn’t planned to do that yet. Let you do that to me, I mean.” She takes a deep breath. “You can touch me right now, if you want.”
It’s the last thing you want to do at this moment. You could almost feel sorry for her—Heather Mackenzie, scrambling to make things up to a guy who’s too empty and exhausted to respond. She gutted you, and now she thinks she can sew you up with one hand while handing you her heart with the other. What she doesn’t know is that you were already only half a person, before this evening even started.
When you don