Page 60 of Deviant
I hang up, text Eli something about having a stomach bug, then set my phone face down on the nightstand. I toss and turn for a long time, unable to stop replaying the way his whole body stopped fighting. The sounds he made. The way he looked at me afterward—unguarded and open. Like he didn’t know he was supposed to put the armor back on.
I watched every wall he had come down tonight.
And I don’t know what to do with the fact that I’d do it all over again anyway.
Eventually, I sleep. Not enough, but some.
When the sun comes through the curtains, my phone says 10 a.m., and Halle has already called once and texted.
RHETT
I’m up before the sun.
That’s not unusual, though. What’s unusual is that I never slept in the first place. I lay in this bed for six hours, staring at the dark ceiling, turning last night over and over in my head. By the time the first gray light starts pressing through the curtains, I’ve already catalogued every moment of last night a hundred times.
Downstairs, the kitchen smells like coffee, and Mom is already at the stove. This kitchen. This family. This life that has been built around and inside of me for twenty-three years.
I know who I am in this kitchen—I know exactly who I’msupposedto be.
“Morning,” I say.
Mom turns and smiles. “You’re up early. Big day?”
“Just the usual.”
I pour coffee, sit at the table, eating what Mom puts in front of me, and nod in the right places when Dad comes in and goes over the day’s tasks. By the time everyone disperses to start their morning, I’m so convincingly fine I almost believe it myself.
Almost.
Dad pauses on his way out the back door, saying, “Colt called in sick—stomach bug, apparently. You’ll have to cover his section today.”
Something moves through my chest, and I take a drink of coffee so I don’t have to decide what my face is doing. “Okay.”
“You two get along alright yesterday?” Dad asks, not looking at me, hand on the doorframe.
“Fine,” I say. “No problems.”
He nods, goes outside, and I sit alone in the kitchen, with my coffee getting cold.
Sick.
He called in sick.
I sit with that for a moment. The realization is complicated in a way I don’t have time for right now, so I file it away and go to work.
I cover Colt’s section and mine, keeping me too busy to think, which is a good thing, I guess.Stay busy. Stay in control.That’s always been the only way I know to stay safe from myself.
But the thing about working alone, on a quiet ranch, on a still summer morning, is that the silence has a texture to it. It gets inside your head whether you want it to or not. And somewhere around the second hour, braced against a fence post with sweat soaking through my shirt and the cicadas screaming from the tree line, I stop being able to redirect my thoughts.
I think about his hands on my face, tilting me where he wanted me.
I think about lying in that room afterward, looking at a ceiling I’d never seen before, and feeling, for the first time in twenty-three years, like I was exactly where I was supposed to be.
Then I think about the headlights—about the panic. About grabbing my keys and walking out while he stood in the hallway, watching me go.
I think about his face in the rearview mirror as he stood in the driveway,notchasing me.
And the thing I keep coming back to is that running feels like a mistake in a way that none of the rest of it did. What happened in that room didn’t feel like a mistake, it felt like the first true thing I’ve done in years.
