Page 70 of Rage
I look at her because there is no honest way to make this sound sane. “Because you looked like someone who had been surviving alone for too long. And I knew what that felt like.”
And I was in a room where I could not do anything about anything, so I did the only thing I could do, which was decide.”
“You were in a cell,” she says.
“Yes.”
“Deciding, from a white room, about someone you had never met.”
“Yes. I know how that sounds.”
She shakes her head slowly. “It sounds like you,” she says.
The wind moves between us.
“I’m still angry. About the list. About not being told. I’m going to be angry about it for a while longer, and I need you to know that.”
“I understand.”
“And I need you to not manage it. Do not fix it. Don’t arrive at my door with something designed to make it smaller.”
“I won’t.”
She looks at me for a long moment. The gold evening light is across her face, and her eyes are dark and direct, and she is the most honest thing I have looked at in years.
Then she steps forward, and she puts both her hands flat on my chest—not one palm but both hands this time, over my sternum, the way you hold something you are deciding to keep—and she tips her chin up and looks at me.
“I’m not running,” she says. “I want you to know that. I know what this is, and I know what you are, and I am not running.”
Something happens in my chest under her hands.
I reach up and cover her hands with mine.
“Okay.”
She exhales. The campus goes gold below us.
And I tell her about my past.
We stand on the roof in the evening wind. I hold her hands against my chest and look at her. This is what years of waiting for something right feels like from the other side.
It feels like enough to burn the world down for.
And I intend to.
“Does this mean I’m fair game for anyone else?”
I decide to tell her the truth, even if it’s something I’ll have to deal with.
“Yes.”
“And the other women?”
Fuck. This is not a conversation I want to have with her.
“What about them?”
“I’m not an idiot. I also have ears.”
