Page 42 of Devoured

"Let me get it all out." He said it without heat. "Because here's the part I came to say. The part from last night." He made himself look up, and met her eyes, and held them. "I learned something out of all that, and it's the truest thing I know about myself, and you need to hear it from me before this goes one inch further. Women aren't suited to a life with me. I'm not… I don't have the thing. The being-there thing. The making-somebody-happy thing. I had a good woman and I made her so unhappy she drank herself into a ravine, and I'm not going to do that to another one. So."

He set the mug down, squared it, the way she'd watched Nathan Greene square a page when he was buying himself a breath.

"I'll say it plain, so there's no mistaking it later and no one gets hurt who didn't have to. I'm not going to marry again. I'm not having more kids. I decided that four years ago and it's not a wound talking, it's settled, it's the one thing I'm sure of. I've got two kids who already lost their mother and they are the whole of what I've got to give. I'm not offering forever, Lara, because I don't have a forever in me that's safe to give anybody." His voice didn't shake. That was the worst of it, how level it was, how long he'd lived with it. "I want you. I think you know exactly how much. But I won't lie to you about what I can and can't give to get you into my bed. You deserve the plain version. That's the plain version."

And there it was, on the little table between the two cooling mugs, laid out flat and final: everything, and its ceiling, in the same breath.

Lara was quiet for a long moment.

She'd spent five years being handed men's terms. She knew the shape of this, the part where the man tells you what he is and what he isn't, and you're meant to nod and make yourself smaller around the gap, to take what's offered and quietly bury the rest of what you wanted in a hole out back and never mention it again. She'd done it. She'd done it for years, with a man who'd never once said his terms out loud the way this one just had, who'd simply taken and taken and let her shrink to fit the taking until there was almost nothing of her left to walk out the door when she finally walked.

This was different, and she made herself sit with how it was different before she answered.

He'd told her. Up front, plainly, at a kitchen table at nine in the morning with his hat turned to rags in his hands, before she'd given him anything, when lying would have been so much easier and would have worked. He had looked at her and decided she deserved the truth more than he deserved the having of her. No man had ever once done that. Not one.

"Okay," she said. "Now you hear mine."

He went still.

"I want to be married someday." She said it as evenly as he'd said his, because he'd earned the same plainness back. "I want children. Not because anybody told me to want them. I spent a long time not letting myself want anything out loud, and I'm done with that, so I'm telling you the truth the way you told me yours. I want a whole life. The big one. The one with a person in it who stays." She turned her own mug. "I had a man once who let me make myself small. Who never said a single honest word about what he wanted, just let me keep folding myself down to fit the space he left me, until I found him with someone else and realized there was almost nothing left of me to be cheated on. I came out here to find whatever was left of myself. I'm not going to fold down again. Not for anybody. Not even…" she stopped and let it be true "…not even for somebody I want as much as I want you."

His eyes closed for a second, like wanting her cost him something, like hearing exactly what she wanted, and wanting her anyway, was its own kind of injury.

"Then we want different things," he said. Rough. "And I just told you the one I can't move on."

"You did."

"So you should send me out that door."

"I should."

Neither of them said anything.

And this was the moment, she'd know it later for exactly what it was, the hinge her whole next year turned on, the moment where the sane woman, the recovered woman, the woman who'd driven two thousand miles specifically so she'd never do this again, stood up and opened the door and said thank you for your honesty and saved herself.

She looked at him across the little table. At the hat in his hands. At the grief he'd just laid open on her kitchen table like a man setting down something he'd carried too far alone. At the man who'd told her the truth when the lie would have been easy, which was the one thing, the only thing she had never been given by any man who'd had the chance to give it.

She wasn't going to fix him. She heard her own clear mind tell her that, and she agreed with it: she wasn’t going to argue him out of his terms, not going to pity him, not going to set herself the project of being the woman who proved him wrong. That was the old disease, and she knew its taste, and this wasn't that. He'd told her what he was. She believed him.

She was just going to have him anyway, on the terms he'd named, with her eyes wide open, and keep her own terms too, the way she should have learned to a long time ago.

"I'm not going to send you out the door," she said.

"Lara."

"I heard you, Dean. Every word. No marriage. No more kids. Not offering forever." She held his eyes. "So here's mine, and you're going to hear it as plain as I heard yours. I'm not folding myself down around what you can't give. I'm not going to spend years pretending I don't want the whole life so you'll feel better about not giving it to me. I want you, and I'm going to have you, for as long as this is good and true, and the day a man comes along who can give me all of it, the marriage and the babies and the staying, I'm going to take it. Or the day this starts costing me more than it gives, whichever lands first." Her voice stayed level, and she was distantly amazed at it. "I'll go. Eyes open, no scene, no blaming you for telling me the truth up front. But I'll go. That's my plain version."

Something crossed his face that she couldn't name, relief and dread and wanting, all at once, the look of a man handed exactly the deal he asked for and finding it cut both ways.

"That's fair," he said, low.

"It's more than fair. It's the only way I do this." She picked her mug back up, mostly to have something to do with her hands.

And here was the part she didn't say out loud, the part she kept off her level face by main force: that she already knew this might be the thing that finally finished her. She wasn't a fool. She'd just looked at a man tell her there was a wall at the end of every road they'd walk together, and she'd felt her own heart go toward him anyway, hard, the whole reckless weight of it, and she knew, the way you know weather coming, that a woman who let herself fall all the way into a man with a ceiling like that one stood a real chance of not getting back up when it ended. That this could cost her more than Boston had. That she might be standing in her own little kitchen choosing the wound that would actually do it.

She was choosing it anyway. That was the part that would have frightened the old Lara, the one who fled. This one looked at the risk dead on and decided he was worth it, worth the having now, worth whatever the going later cost.

"I'm a grown woman," she said, and her voice didn't shake, and only she knew what that cost. "You told me the truth. I get to decide what I do with it. And I'm deciding, for now, with the door I just described standing wide open the whole time."