A More Deserving Blackness (13 page)

             
“Woah.  Hey.  I wouldn’t have given it to you if I’d known it would make you cry.”

             
He’s exaggerating, of course.  I’m not really crying, not yet.  I blink the moisture back and point at the tea and mouth, “Hot.”  I’m lying to his face and we both know it, but just like a gentleman, he lets me.

             
Logan wolfs down the bagel in his hand while I sip at the tea, both of us watching the other in silence before he points to my untouched breakfast and tells me dryly, “If you don’t take a bite soon you’re going to force my mother to be ashamed of her only son.”

             
After what he’d told me the night before, there is really no other option but to take a bite, so I do.

             
I chew and swallow and my stomach objects, so I take another sip of tea.  He sees me staring at it darkly and lifts my hand with the bagel to his mouth, holding my hand steady in his while he takes a decent sized bite from the opposite side.  Then he pushes it toward my mouth again.  We trade off like this, back and forth, and though he ends up eating more of it than I do, by the times it’s gone I feel full.

             
Logan glances at his phone by the bed.

             
“Won’t your sister be missing you?”

             
Crap.

             
I shove the empty mug into his hands, pushing up from the bed and rushing for the door.
Trish
.  She wasn’t overly vigilant as to my whereabouts, choosing to more closely play the role of sister than mother, and technically I was a legal adult and could spend my time anywhere I chose.  But if she’d noticed me missing she’d be over there worried, thinking something awful had happened.  Again.  And of course she couldn’t even text me because in my rush out the door last night I’d completely forgotten to grab my phone. 
Damn
it.  I’d sworn when she’d let me move out of my parents’ house and in with her that I wouldn’t cause any of them any more pain.

             
“Woah.  Bree.  Wait.  I’ll come with you.”

             
This is quite possibly the very first time I can honestly say I don’t want him with me.  Being properly introduced to my . . . whatever he was, with me standing there in my tiny shorts and complete lack of bra was not what Trish had signed on for.  She didn’t need this.  I shake my head.

             
Logan glances down at himself.  “Well, obviously I’d have to get dressed first.”

             
I’m still shaking my head.

             
“I probably shouldn’t look like I’m sleeping with you, just because I was sleeping with you.”

             
He’s trying to make a joke but I just shake my head at him again.  Vehemently.

             
“Just wait a second.”

             
I want to ask him why, why this is so important to him when I just need to get over there before I ruin Trish’s perfect little world even further, but then he just turns his back to me and –
shit!
– drops his pants.  I jerk my eyes away but not before I see that at least he’s wearing boxer shorts this time.  He yanks a pair of jeans over them and changes his shirt, shoving his feet into his black boots in record time, all while I look firmly elsewhere.  He’s trying to be quick for me, in case I decide to leave without him.

             
When he’s done he just takes my hand without a word and walks me out the front door.

             
Grimly, I take in the charred remains of the fence from last night.  The wooden salad/fruit bowl lies overturned where I’d dropped it by the steps, the ground around it scorched and sodden, but Logan doesn’t even pause.  He walks past it like it means nothing, only adjusting his course for the sake of my bare feet in the muck.

             
We cross the street to that sunny yellow house and then we’re walking up my sister’s steps and it feels like the first time, all that dread and guilt and debt crashing over me at the threshold like some kind of invisible force field.

             
Logan squeezes my hand.  “Okay?”

             
I nod and open the door.

Chapter 8

We barely make it inside when I hear Trish
from the kitchen and hastily drop Logan’s hand.
  He lets me, but I can feel the weight of his eyes on me.

             
“Bree, Honey?  Is that you?  Where did you – oh.”

             
She comes to a stop in the hall, her expectant smile freezing in place at the sight of us, Logan with his dark clothes and dark eyes and dark look, and me barefoot and still in the pajamas I’d worn to bed last night that hid all too few of my generous curves.

             
“What happened?”

             
I’m taken aback at the unexpected severity of her tone, but beside me, Logan’s calm expression is unchanged.

             
“Ms. McCaffrey,” he says politely, unflinching under her stare.  “We met the other day, I’m -”

             
“I know who you are,” she says guardedly, but at least her voice has lost some of its uncharacteristic edge.  “Hello again, Logan.”

             
“We didn’t want you to worry.  I had a . . . problem last night that Bree was helping me with.”

             
“Yes, I’m sure you did,” Trish says, her voice at once cryptic and sad, and for the first time I find myself wondering how much more she knows about him than I do, which is stupid because she’s a reporter, a good one, and there’s probably very little about this town she doesn’t know.

             
“She’s fine,” Logan adds, and I look over at him curiously.

             
I don’t like them talking around me, like I’m not in the room, but there isn’t really anything I can do about it.

             
“Thank you, Logan.  I’m sorry, I thought Bree was still asleep.  I was just . . . surprised.  Why don’t you come in and take a seat?  Bree, can I talk to you for a minute?”

             
I don’t like the way she’s looking at him, like she wants to protect me from the Mr. Jekyll lurking beneath his perfect Dr. Hyde civility, but I follow her, turning and pointing insistently at the floor at Logan’s feet. 
Don’t go anywhere.

             
Following Trish down the hall, I can feel his eyes on my back.  I can’t help but look back at him before I disappear into her bedroom, and wish, intensely, that I hadn’t.  Logan hasn’t moved from where we’d left him, still standing dark and forsaken on the tiled entryway, a black rook at a game of marbles.  He’d shoved his hands in his pockets, but it’s his eyes that give me that Lot’s wife pit of dread in my stomach.  Heavy with remorse, they look almost resignedly wistful, as if he somehow knows this will be the last time he’ll ever see me.

             
Trish quietly clicks the door to her bedroom shut behind us.  “Bree . . .” she starts hesitantly, and I can tell she’s not overly thrilled about the upcoming conversation, one-sided or not.  “How much do you know about him?”

             
I know he’d take a punch to the face to protect a perfect stranger from being hurt.  I know he still worries about what his mother thinks of him, even though she’s dead.  I know he reads mountains of historical nonfiction every night because he can’t sleep. 

             
I know it’s easier to breathe with him around.

             
I can’t say any of that though, so I settle on a shrug, and Trish sighs.

             
“I don’t know him, not really, and I might be wrong, but I do think he’s a good kid.  Don’t believe everything you hear about him.”

             
I scan the room and cross to her computer, tapping my finger on the touchpad to wake up the screen. 

             
People don’t talk to me,
I type.

             
“Well, maybe they would if you’d show them you wanted them to, open up a little.  Smile sometimes?”

             
I stare at her. 

             
“Look, you’re nineteen going on forty.  I’m not going to tell you to stay away from him.  Besides that, I’m not even sure it’s necessary.  I just want you to be careful.”

             
I thought he was a good kid
.

             
“He is, a good kid whose life exploded in his face . . . about the same time yours did.  I remember the story, Honey, and it was horrible.  Really brutal and just – really violent.”

             
Brutal.  Violent.  I feel a flicker of something unpleasant in my gut.  These aren’t words I associate with Logan.

             
Some kids from school tried to burn down his house last night.  I went over to help.

             
Trish’s eyes widen, and she shakes her head in disgust.  “I was afraid it might’ve been something like that.  Some people . . . are having a hard time forgiving and forgetting.  Is he all right?”

             
I nod.

             
“Are you?”

             
Another nod.

             
“Maybe you should ask him why he hasn’t told you about any of this.”

             
That would be offensive and hypocritical, and my expression is apparently articulate enough that I don’t even have to type it.

             
“What happened to you wasn’t your fault.”

             
And his was?

             
She sighs and tucks a curl of hair the exact same color as mine behind her ear.  “Just talk to him.  And Bree?  Just . . . just leave me a note or something next time so I know where you are, okay?”

             
I nod, feeling guilty.  She shouldn’t have to ask me to do something that simple.  Especially after before, after the last time I’d been missing for a while.  Trish had just moved out of my parents’ house earlier that summer, but I know they’d called her, panicking, when Samantha couldn’t find me.  And afterward, from the hospital, when they’d told her what had happened.               

             
Trish moves closer to me, never missing the opportunity for a casual touch.  She rests a hand on the upper part of my arm when she asks with uncharacteristic reserve, “Do you like him?”

             
I reach behind me and type with my free hand,
He makes it better.

             
Almost like she’s expecting that answer, or maybe just hoping for it, she nods neatly.  “Then I like him too.”  She drops her hand and moves to the door but stops and turns back with her hand on the knob.  “He could probably use a friend,” she tells me, and opens the door.

             
I don’t immediately head back to Logan. 

             
My mind is scattered like dice across a thousand different things, and I can’t seem to focus on any of them.  Everything I’d heard at school, what Logan had told me, everything that Trish
hadn’t
said; it’s all jumbled together in my head and no matter how I switch the pieces around the picture still doesn’t make sense.  I want to know what happened to him, what had been so awful to make people hate him so much, to fill his life with so much pain that he’s now content to spend it totally alone.  The need to know, to somehow help him like he’s helping me, seeps into every part of me.

             
But I’m terrified.  How can I ask him to show me his demons without expecting to reveal some of my own?  He won’t ask, that I already know, and somehow that’s even worse.  How can I let him share with me something that personal and then deny him the same?  But I’m scared and weak and broken and I can’t imagine telling him something that awful.  I don’t want him to know.

             
It only takes a few minutes.  I brush my teeth and my hair, weaving it back into a braid, yank on a pair of jeans and a modest, lace-trimmed shirt, apply the smallest amount of makeup, and slip on Logan’s leather coat.  Then, as an afterthought, I type a quick text to Trish telling her where I’ll be, and tuck the phone into my back pocket. 

             
Just a few minutes, and it’s not enough to come to terms with anything save one absolute certainty.  It still doesn’t matter.  Even more so now, Logan’s past – this brutal, violent secret – it doesn’t matter.  Not to me.

             
When I step back into the living room, at first all I am is grateful that he’d waited, that he’d stayed.  And then I really see him.

             
He’s sitting on the couch, his elbows on his bent knees and his hands dangling between them.  His head is hanging, so that the fabric of the back of his shirt is bowed slightly between the peaks of his broad shoulders.  Completely silent and utterly still.

             
He hears my approach and lifts his head just barely, just enough, looking up at me from the tops of his eyes past a clump of hair that has fallen over his forehead, just like in my dream.  Logan watches me, his face a blank curtain, as I go to him and sit down on the coffee table directly opposite his knees.

             
Like an addict, my hands are shaking slightly.  I reach for his, and he glances down, rubbing the pads of his thumbs over my skin.  I wait for his vacant eyes to drag back to mine before I deliberately lift one of his hands and then the other, pressing a slow kiss to each palm.  Smudged across the lower part of his left thumb are the words I’d written there the night before;
I promise.

             
Logan watches all of this carefully, like he’s searching for a fissure in the enamel.

             
“Okay?”

             
I don’t know how to answer that so I push to my feet, pulling him with me.  I stop in the kitchen just long enough to tear a few heavy duty trash bags from the roll under the sink and then I lead him out the front door and across the street.  He follows, unresisting, but I can feel the questions rolling off of him.

             
When we get to his house I drop the trash bags and turn immediately to the burnt fence, ripping up the still slightly soggy, blackened planks of wood and tossing them into a pile on the sidewalk.  He hesitates at my back for a minute before squatting beside me, grabbing one of the longer boards and snapping it in half before dropping it on top of mine.

             
We work in silence, breaking down the fence, and then Logan disappears into his garage and comes back with a shovel and starts attacking the bushes that were claimed by the fire as well, their leaves burnt away to leave brittle, black skeletons lining his drive.  He loosens them from the soil and I pull them up, loading them into a wheelbarrow so he can dump them at the back edge of his property. 

             
Logan doesn’t speak, doesn’t press me, but his eyes watch me the whole time. 

             
When he rounds the house with the wheelbarrow for a second time, I force myself to focus on the work, shoving the broken planks of wood into a bag.  With each piece, I can feel myself getting angrier.  The senseless destruction, Logan’s doubtful silence, so used to mistrust and aversion, my fear and guilt and the futile, aching need . . . it all boils inside me until I’m shaking with fury.

             
One of the pieces is too long to fit in the bag and I try to break it with my hands but the wood holds strong.  I knock it against the pavement but that doesn’t work either, and I feel useless and helpless and frail.  Unable to help myself.  Unable to help him.

             
Fuming, I grip the unyielding thing in both hands and swing it at the pavement, feeling the impact jar up my arms and rattle in my shoulders.  But the damn thing still doesn’t break so I cock it high over my shoulder again and –

             
Logan’s hand closes over the plank just as I start to swing.  I whirl around and he just stares, squatting next to me, holding the wood in one soot and dirt-coated hand. 

             
“What?”

             
When he pulls I release the wood and he tosses it away without even looking where it lands.  I hear the wood splinter against the cement behind him, a loud pop.  Logan is reaching to touch my face but I’m too raw, too enraged, and I spin back to grab another chunk of the mutilated fence, almost desperately heaving it into the bag.

             
“Bree, stop.” 

             
I don’t, and when he reaches for me I flinch away, maniacally shoving broken bits of wood into the bag as fast as I can.