A More Deserving Blackness (14 page)

             
“Hey.” He grabs my arm and I pull it from his grasp hard enough that I topple over in the dirt.

             
“Damn it!”

             
Logan pushes to his feet and hauls me to mine.  Then he’s reaching around my body, and he smells like wood and fire and his hand is on my butt digging in my pocket and then he smacks my phone into my hands and pulls me roughly onto my toes. 

             
“
Talk to me!
  Ask me whatever you want, tell me to get the fuck out of your life, just
say
something!”

             
He’s breathing hard and there’s black smeared on his face and a muscle is ticking in his jaw and all the sudden I’m blasted with the realization that I’d hurt him.  Inadvertently, but still, I’d hurt him.

             
Logan’s hands drop me abruptly.  I stumble off balance and he whips around, stomping up the sidewalk, vaulting the steps to the porch in one jump and slamming his front door closed behind him.

             
I’m too stunned even to cry.

             
But then my phone beeps, and I look down.  My stomach is still bottomless as I read the screen.

             
Is this easier?

             
My hands are trembling too hard to type.

             
Please,
he says.

             
Turning, I sink down shakily onto the front steps.  My legs feel like jello, and I wonder if he knows the stab of unadulterated panic that had just sliced through my body at seeing him leave like that.

             
I type the first thing that comes to my mind. 
I don’t want you to get the fuck out of my life.

             
His response beeps through almost immediately. 
What do you want?

             
I can’t give him the answer I want to, because what I want is him.  His hands holding mine, his voice at my ear, his eyes on my face, his fingers in my hair, his arm around me while I sleep, his chest moving with mine.

             
Not to be afraid,
I tell him honestly. 
Trish didn’t tell me anything.  She told me to ask you.

             
Then ask.  Anything.

             
I hesitate. 
Why?

             
Because you’re the first person in over two years that it actually matters.

             
I stare at the message on the phone and feel like a coward, hiding out here, so I push up from the steps and open the door.  Logan is sitting against the wall, just opposite the front door, his feet flat on the floor, forearms braced on his knees and his phone in his hands, hanging between them.  He looks up at me when I come inside, motionlessly watching me as I kneel down between his black boots on the tile.

             
When I reach for his hands Logan just pulls, shifting me around when I fall against him so that I’m sitting between his legs, leaning back against his chest.  His soot-covered boots bracket my grey canvas sneakers, and I can feel his heartbeat thrumming steadily against my back.  His arms are around me and it doesn’t feel confining, it feels safe.  Protected.

             
Logan dips his head, burying his nose, his lips in my hair.  I can feel his breath tickle the strands, his unshaven chin scratching ever so slightly at the juncture of my shoulder and neck.  When I shiver, Logan freezes.  His arms loosen, but I press a hand over his, staying his retreat. 

             
And suddenly I know what I can do for him, how I can help him.  I can listen.  And I can stay. 

             
No one else ever had.

             
I stick my phone up over his hands at my waist so I can see the screen and type,
Tell me.

             
I don’t bother to send it, as he’s reading it over my shoulder as I press the keys.

             
“What do you want to know?”

             
All of it.  Anything.

             
“Okay,” Logan says simply when I’m done typing, but he lowers his head, pressing his face into my hair again.  “You smell good,” he murmurs softly.

             
So does he.  Like wood and smoke and dirt and sweat and
him
.  I rest my head back on his shoulder and close my eyes, absently playing with the hairs on his forearm, pushing them around on his skin.  Automatically I find myself matching my breathing to his, our chests rising and falling together.  With the whisper of his exhale on my neck, goosebumps race down my arms.

             
“I didn’t know it at the time,” he starts suddenly, “but when she’d sneak me outside to watch for shooting stars I think my mom used to wish to be in love again.  She’d never tell me what she wished for, and she demanded I didn’t tell her, like it was some kind of fairy tale or something, but I knew she was lonely.”

             
Logan stops, thinking.  This close to my ear, I can hear that his voice is slightly roughened, as if from lack of use, even though he’d just been shouting at me in the yard.

             
“I’m sure it was hard,” he continues, “raising a kid by herself, but she was a good mom, she always saw right through my crap, and we were happy.  She didn’t remarry until I was twelve.”

             
I can hear Logan swallow by my ear, and when he resumes, his voice is different somehow.  Tighter.

             
“Lieutenant Ryan Dawson.  A cop.  A good one – actually cared about his job.  Everyone liked this guy.  One day he and my mom were chatting after the Memorial Day parade and a year later they were married.  She loved him.  I think, right up until the end, she loved him.”

             
This time, Logan waits so long I turn slightly in his arms to look at his face.  His eyes are haggard, like he’d aged ten years since I’d walked in to find him sitting there.  Carefully I touch his cheek, just reminding him that I’m there.  His lips pull up in a ghost of a smile, but it doesn’t reach his eyes.

             
“It’s a tired story, so I won’t go into the details.  It started slow.  He wasn’t a drinker, he’d just have a hard day and come home mad as hell.  My mom kept it from me as long as she could, but after a while I just knew.  He never did it in front of me.  I was always gone a lot with friends and . . . I think sometimes he’d hit her when I was in bed but she never made a sound.” He bites down hard, clenching his teeth together.  “Mom made me promise not to say anything.  She was happy, she said.  She’d handle it.  And I believed her.

             
“When I was sixteen I came home a little early and I could hear him shouting at her from the driveway.  I went in and saw her holding her stomach, and she was trying to hide her bloody lip from me, and I just snapped.  I hit him.  I wanted to kill him so fucking bad, but I just grabbed him and threw him out the door, because my mom was begging me not to.”

             
Under my hands, I feel his forearms turn rigid as he balls his hands into fists and then immediately relaxes them.  He’s breathing slowly and evenly through his nose, his face inexpressive, his eyes dead.  Pulling my legs under me, I shift so I’m facing him fully and take his hands, weaving our fingers together.

             
Logan watches his thumbs drawing circles in my skin for a few moments before raising his eyes back to mine.  His voice is crumbling ash.

             
“A few nights later she’s still pretending everything is fine and I’m still pissed at the world so I leave, go hang out with a friend. We played
Halo
,” he says bitterly.  Then, with hesitation, “I get . . . this feeling like I should go home, but I’m still furious that she’d let this happen and I ignore it, and then I’m too late.  I go home, and - fuck, Bree – it’s bad.  He’s beating her and she’s just crumpled there silent and I swear to fucking Christ, I just blacked out.” 

             
His eyes drop away for a second and he licks his lips.  “I don’t remember all of it, but when I come back around I’m sitting on his chest and he doesn’t have a face left.  I shattered most the bones in his face and there’s blood everywhere.  I called an ambulance but he died a few hours later.  Which is longer than my mom had.  Ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm.  This crazy, fluke thing.  Really rare.  She bled out internally in a few minutes.”

             
God.

             
Logan breathes out, hard, dropping his head back against the wall again, and a tear rolls down the side of his face and disappears in his dark hair.  He inhales deeply and finishes it.

             
“So apparently I was temporarily insane, or at least the juvenile court and their shrinks thought so, and with the added plea of defense of another and my mother’s death brought on by physical trauma to the abdominal aneurysm, I was acquitted.  But I was made a ward of the state for a few months before I could push the life insurance money through to make myself an emancipated minor, so after everything settled I was just gone for a while.  And because I was a minor the details of the case were kept pretty quiet, so now everyone just thinks I’m a murderer, and I got away with killing a cop.” 

             
It takes me a second to realize he means the abuse his mother suffered, that people don’t know about the years of abuse, as would’ve been evident by the official autopsy, and I feel slightly nauseated.  I blink back the moisture in my eyes, knowing that, like usual, it’s two years late and it won’t help.

             
“I don’t know if they’re right, maybe they are, but I do know I don’t regret it.  And I’d do it again in a fucking second.”

             
He’s finally done, he’s stopped talking, just sitting there with red, empty eyes staring at me like he’s expecting something, but I find it hard to look at him, afraid of what he might see there.  I feel exhausted and sick hearing all of that, ugly things from his potent voice, and he looks just as bad. 

             
I want to tell him that I believe him, that it doesn’t matter to me, that I think he’s brave as hell for looking me in the eyes and telling me that.  Really tell him, not just send him a text, and the thought makes my stomach seize in fear, a metallic taste rising on the back of my tongue.

             
Instead I work on instinct, taking his hands and flattening them against my upper chest, holding them there with my own as I breathe as steadily as I can manage, in and out.

             
Logan watches me do this almost detachedly, but there’s a flicker in his eyes, something else, and then the pads of his fingers tighten just slightly, gripping around my shoulders.  I fold into him, hugging him tightly in my arms, and his come around my waist and then we’re just sitting there huddled on his foyer floor, silently entwined. 

             
When he releases me he looks shocked at my tears, and wipes them away with gentle fingers.

             
“Say something.”

             
I reach for my phone, lying on the floor by my leg.  I feel helpless, and I realize, oddly, that this must be what my parents feel, every time they look at me.

             
I’ve seen evil, Logan.  You’re not a murderer. 

             
Though I can see the questions in his eyes, mercifully, he doesn’t ask.  “Maybe not, but I killed a cop.  That’s not forgiven easily.”

             
Why don’t you tell people the truth?

             
“Does it matter?  Everyone’s dead.”

             
Except you.

             
He pulls a hand down over his face, sighing deeply.  “Yeah well, that was doubtful until quite recently.”

             
The words make me go cold. 
Don’t say that.

             
“What?”

             
Don’t talk like that.  Like you’re getting ready to kill yourself.

             
“No,” he says, shaking his head and holding my gaze.  “No, Love, that’s . . . actually the furthest thing from my mind.”

              Logan insists on cleaning up the rest of the fence debris himself, citing rusted nails as the culprit, though in truth I think I concerned him more than he’s letting on with what he called my “Hulk smash impression.”  We sweep up the sidewalk and then wash up, and Logan drives us to The Home Depot to buy the boards and paint needed to repair the railing on the porch.  He takes my hand as we walk through the doors, and although I notice more than one head turning in our direction, glaring at Logan with unmitigated resentment, Logan is, as usual, indifferent.