Page 33 of Devoured

The drive back was worse than the drive out, because on the drive out he'd still been pretending.

He was hard the whole way and furious about it, furious in the specific helpless way of a man whose own body has gone over to the other side and left him to do the driving. Forty minutes of dark road and not one mile of it quiet. He thought about her mouth. He thought about the dimple and what it would take to earn it on purpose, with his own hands, in the dark, instead of catching it sideways across a kitchen. He thought about her hand under his on the cabinet and what would have happened if he hadn't taken his back, if he'd turned it over instead, palm to palm, and pulled, and found out what sound she made, and he gripped the wheel and swore at the windshield and made himself watch the white line.

This was the part nobody warned you about. He'd done the grief. He'd done the long grey years and the learning to function and the building of a whole careful life around a hole. What he had not done, not once, not since he was a kid, was this — the stupid blunt animal force of wanting one particular woman so badly that the want followed you down a highway at seventy miles an hour and would not get out of the truck. He'd forgotten it could do that. He'd half-believed that part of him had been buried out on the rise with everything else.

And underneath the fury, when he made himself be honest, was the worse thing. The colder thing.

Relief.

Because the choice had been made for him. He hadn't had to be strong, hadn't had to decide anything noble, hadn't had to sit himself down and resolve to be a better man, his body had simply refused the lie and taken the option off the table, and some low exhausted part of him that had been holding the line for four years felt the line break and thought, traitorously, thank God, I'm so tired. He didn't want to look at that part too closely. It was the part that wanted to drive straight to her garage apartment over Elena's and stand at the bottom of the stairs and call her name up into the dark.

He told himself he could outlast it. Wanting wasn't doing. He'd wanted to lie down in the middle of his own life plenty of times in four years and hadn't; he could want this and not have it the same way. He had practice. He was, if nothing else, a man who knew how to not have things.

He almost believed it. He had it almost all the way believed by the time he turned in off the county road and came up over the cattle guard and saw the one low light still on in the front of the house, and then he came inside, and it fell apart completely.

The house was dark except for the lamp by the couch, turned down low, and the television off, and the particular deep quiet of a place where the children were finally down.

Lara was asleep on the couch.

She hadn't meant to be, he could read it in one look, the way she was half-sitting, an arm along the back of the cushions and her head dropped against it, like she'd been waiting up and lost. There was a book face-down on the floor where it had slid out of her hand. Her hair was all the way down, more of it than he'd ever seen, spilled dark-gold over the arm of his couch, and her face had gone soft and open in sleep in a way it never once was awake around him, the careful office neutrality nowhere on it, just a tired woman gone under in a warm room.

And Levi was curled into her side.

That was the thing that took the legs out from under him. His son, sprawled half across her lap, one fist knotted tight in the hem of her shirt and his face turned in against her ribs, gone so far down into sleep he'd gone boneless with it, the way he only ever did when he felt safe enough to. The loosest, deepest, most unguarded sleep Dean had seen on the boy in two years. Levi, who fought bedtime like a war, who'd spent the grey time after refusing to go under at all unless the light was on and somebody was in the chair. He'd let go like that, in her lap, without anybody coaxing him into it. And Lara's hand, even gone under herself, was resting open on his back.

Dean stood in the doorway of his own living room and could not move.

He'd spent the last hour and a half doing arithmetic on a body. On wanting. On the blunt animal fact of it and how to outlast it. He'd driven eighty miles round trip on the theory that what was happening to him was a problem of the body, the kind of problem he had a system for, the kind you could drive forty minutes and handle and drive home from clean.

And here was the proof, asleep on his couch in the lamplight, that he'd been lying to himself the entire way there and the entire way back.

Because whatever he'd driven to Odessa for and what was asleep on his couch right now, his son tucked into her side, her hair down, her hand open on Levi's back, were not the same problem, and never had been. He'd spent all night pretending what he felt was the kind of thing a man could spend in a parking lot and drive home from clean. It wasn't. You could drive to Odessa to handle a body. There was no version of that, no distance and no stranger, that touched what was happening to him standing in this doorway, which was that he wanted her. Not a body. Her. The specific maddening particular fact of her, asleep in his lamplight with his kid latched onto her like she'd grown there.

And under that, before he could stop it, came something worse, the wanting to not have her leave. To turn the lamp off and carry the boy up and come back down to her still here. It rose up out of nowhere, whole and warm and terrifying, and he shoved it back down hard, because that one he had no business even looking at. That one had a shape he'd sworn off four years ago and wasn't ever picking back up. Wanting her he could maybe survive. The other thing he wouldn't let himself name, standing there in the dark.

That was the trouble. He had a system for a body. He had no system at all for this.

He stood there a long time.

Then, careful, quiet, the way he'd moved through this house ten thousand times in the dark, he crossed the room. He worked his son loose from her shirt one gentle finger at a time so as not to wake either of them, and gathered the boy up against his chest. Levi stirred, mumbled something, fit his face into Dean's neck out of pure animal habit and went heavy again and Dean stood holding his sleeping son over the sleeping woman and looked down at the two of them in the lamplight and felt the whole careful structure of his life shift under him.

He didn’t wake her. He thought about it. He thought about a blanket, even, and didn't trust himself to get that close to her sleeping face. He carried Levi up the stairs and laid him in his bed and stood in the door a second the way he did every night, and then he went back down and turned the lamp off so the dark would tell her, if she woke, that it was late and she should go on home — a coward's kindness, leaving before she opened her eyes — and he went up the stairs again to his own room and sat down on the edge of his own bed in the dark.

His hands were not entirely steady. He looked at them like they belonged to somebody else.

I am in real trouble, he thought.

Not I might be. Not I have to be careful. He'd worn those out weeks ago. This was the plain flat fact of it, arrived at last, sitting on the edge of the bed he'd slept in alone for four years: he was in real trouble, the real kind, the kind there was no driving away from in any direction, and it was asleep on his couch downstairs, and he wanted it with a completeness that frightened him, and somewhere below the fear, getting louder, was the thing he'd heard in the truck and couldn't take back.

Thank God. I'm so tired.

He sat there in the dark a long while.

He heard, after some time, the small sounds of her waking below, the shift of the couch, a pause, the soft confused stillness of a person working out where they were and what time it was and that the lamp was off. He sat very still and listened to her find her shoes, find her bag, find the door. He listened to her stand in his dark kitchen for a moment, and he wondered what she was thinking, and he did not go down. He listened to the screen door, and the engine, and then to the silence she left behind her, which was worse, the apartment over Elena's where she slept in a life that wasn't his suddenly very far away and very specific in his mind.

Then the house was quiet again, the way it had been quiet for four years, except that now the quiet had a shape, and the shape was the lack of her.

Dean Royston lay back on his bed with his boots still on and did not sleep.