A More Deserving Blackness (24 page)

             
“LOGAAAN!”

             
Dylan jerks around at the shrill sound that rips from inside me, his eyes wide with shock.

             
I’m struggling hysterically against the hands that hold me, the sound excruciating as I scream again, loud enough that my throat should be torn to ribbons.

             
“Help me!”
 

             
Logan isn’t moving.

             
“Somebody help me!”

              From somewhere back toward the muted glow of the fair I hear voices yelling, and then I a muttered,
“Shit,”
from Carter.  His hands drop me and suddenly they’re all running, barely pausing to help their fallen comrade up from where he was still lying on his back, bleeding out over the parking lot.

             
I smack forward without the bruising restraint of those arms and sob, scrambling on all fours to Logan’s motionless form.  Tears are pouring, useless, from my eyes, and I’m dragging air into my lungs in loud, ugly gasps when he finally stirs with a low, weak groan, rolling to his side.  He braces one hand against the pavement and pushes up shakily, his body sagging, barely able to hold his own weight.  His head lifts and he searches for a second before finding me, pulling one knee up to try to get to me but collapsing, falling painfully back to his side.

             
I crawl over to him and he grips the blacktop with both hands and drags himself across the ground to meet me.  He reaches one hand out to cup the back of my head and hauls me against him, my face against his throat, before his arms fold beneath him and he falls to his back.  I barely catch myself before landing on top of him, tears mixing with the blood on his face. 

             
A wet sob strangles me at the sight of him; the swollen, discolored flesh around his eye, the blood leaking steadily from his nose, the wide, gaping split in his cheek like a grisly red smile pouring red down over his face, off his chin.  His shirt and pants are covered in it and there’s a dark, wet splash across the pavement.  His blood everywhere.

             
Somewhere past the soundless, frantic screaming and the gagging need to puke is the slap of running feet slapping across the pavement.

             
Logan’s hand is still tight around the back of my neck and he pulls me down over him, pressing his face into my throat.  His voice is rough, rasping in my ear. “Are you -” but then he coughs, his body jerking convulsively, wrenching away with a spray of blood.

             
“Hey!”  I hear a man’s voice call out.  “Are you all right?”

             
Logan spits a last mouthful of blood and rolls back to face me, arm around his ribs, breathing in pained, hitching gasps.  “Are you okay?  Are you hurt?”

             
His other hand gropes over the pavement toward me, knuckles grisly with splattered blood, and I find it with mine, tangling our fingers together, his warm with wet.  I don’t know if I should nod or shake my head or just throw it back and exorcise the shrieking, serrated blade that is twisting inside me so I don’t do any of it, I just cry and hold his hand while he struggles to breathe.

             
A man in a yellow baseball hat and a navy blue hooded sweatshirt drops to his knees at my side.  “Is he all right?  Should I call an ambulance?”

             
“No,” Logan grates, levering a hand beneath him and pushing tremulously up, trying to sit, but his torso sags in a hollowed bow from the broad line of his shoulders.  He hasn’t let go of my hand, gripping it so hard it’s almost painful, like he’s afraid they’re going to rip me away from him.  “No.”

             
“Are you sure, man?  It looks . . . pretty bad.”

             
But Logan just shakes his head and then groans at the pain from that small motion, bowing his head, blood dribbling onto his jeans.

             
“You know him?” the guys asks me, and I nod, suddenly aware of the small crowd of people gathered around us, hovering and staring.  I feel a compelling urge to throw my body over Logan, to cover him, hide him from their gawking eyes; these people that would sneer and shake their heads if only they could recognize him past the brutality of his face.

             
“Hey, guy, take it easy,” someone else says as Logan twists around onto one hand and his knees.  Head hanging, the other arm wrapped protectively around his ribs, he pauses and exhales a growl through gritted teeth.  In the muddy light from the carnival I can see him shaking, muscles jumping under his skin.

             
I reach for him, unsure where to touch him without causing more pain.

             
The man still kneeling beside us turns to me.  “You need to take him to the hospital.”

             
I just nod again, stiff with shock. 

             
“He’s gonna need stitches for that cut.  At the very least.”

             
With excruciating, slow movements, Logan pushes up, sitting back on his heels.  He leans in to me, grabbing my forearms, running his hands up over my elbows, my shoulders, cupping my neck with his back bowed, like sitting upright is taking every ounce of strength he has left.  He tips unsteadily against me, his forehead dropping to mine, and his skin is hot and damp.  I wrap my arms around him, feeling helpless.

             
Logan’s fingers are in my hair, along my jaw, on my face, touching me restlessly, searching for an injury.

             
“Did they hurt you?  Did they -”

             
I shake my head, stilling his hands in mine and pulling back.  I wait until his eyes meet mine to shake my head a second time, slowly, making sure he sees it. 

             
Logan holds my gaze, just breathing for a second.  Then he leans forward, dropping his other hand to the ground, painfully getting his feet under him.  When he falters, his skin paling, I grab him under his arm and help to pull him to his feet.  And then we’re just standing there in a circle of spectators, my arm around his waist and his over my shoulders, his back bowed as he leans against me, bent almost double. 

             
“Can I help you take him somewhere?” someone asks, but I don’t even pay attention to where the voice comes from as Logan shakes his head.

             
“Fine,” he pants, but his eyes are shut so tightly his brow is caving in on itself and his face is ashen.

             
Breathing in jerking gasps, Logan whispers to me, “Car.  Please.”

             
I feel eyes watching us as we leave. 

             
It’s a grueling walk back to his car, slow and brutal; me straining to hold him on his feet while he staggers along beside me, his body vibrating in pain at every torturous step.  We’re almost there when he collapses, tripping and dropping to his hands and knees with a sharp sound of pain. 

             
I drop next to him and dig through his pockets until I find his keys, pressing the button with my thumb as I lurch back up, crossing to the car and tearing open the passenger side door.  With my back turned I hear the wet, gagging sound of him vomiting into the long grass of the field and I close my eyes, giving him space until the retching stops.  When I come back to him he’s wiping his mouth on his wrist, his face pallid and colorless beneath the bright red of his blood.  He pushes up again and makes his way to the car without help, bracing a hand on the frame and lowering gingerly into the seat.

             
Quickly I close the door behind him and run around to the other side, stabbing the keys into the ignition with hands that won’t stay still.

             
“Bree.”

             
I look over at him in the unnatural yellow of the dome light, the sight of his face a lead ball in my gut.  Leaning back against the headrest, he’s staring at my hands on the wheel.

             
“Sorry.”

             
But I just shake my head.  I didn’t give a shit about driving.  Not now.

             
The seat cranks forward when I adjust it for my shorter height and then I slam the car into drive, yanking the wheel hard to point it back to the road.  I’m crying as I drive us to the hospital, trying to be quiet about it as I wipe my fingers over my cheeks when the tears overflow.

             
Logan reaches unsteadily across the car to clasp my hand in his, pulling weakly until I let him thread his fingers through mine, resting them on his thigh.

             
“It’s okay now,” he says tiredly, closing his eyes.

             
But I just bite down hard on my lip, tasting the cold sting of my tears rolling into my mouth.

             
Nothing is okay.

Chapter 14

It’s Monday morning before
Logan is released.  Sometime over the night I texted Trish,
explaining to her as briefly as possible about the attack, reassuring her twice that I was fine and leaving out the part where I’d spoken again for the first time in over two years. 

             
I move Logan’s car to the small Patient Discharge lot and tuck the keys into my pocket, once again entering the building where I’d spent the last night in the Emergency Department sitting silent at Logan’s side.  They’d cleaned him up, done their scans and their tests, and when the plump grandmotherly nurse had asked what had happened he’d lied to her face, flatly informing her that he had no idea who it had been, that he hadn’t recognized any of them.  Holding his bruised hand, his blood already washed from mine down the sink, I’d met her eyes and hadn’t said word.

             
I make my way down the hall, focused on my destination, trying not to think of another hospital, another time.  The nice young nurse with her gloved hands, her touch gentle as I’d stared up at another set of lights, endless tears pouring down onto the white sheets. 

             
A nurse pushes an elderly woman in a wheelchair past me and she smiles at me with watery eyes past the oxygen tube under her nose.  She’s wearing a mint green gown, the same kind Logan had worn all night, after I’d helped peel his t-shirt from his body.  The fibers had been stuck to him with sticky, drying blood.

             
At the door to his room, I pause.  Logan hadn’t questioned me about last night, other than to ask how I was doing.  He’d asked if I was okay, he’d asked if they’d hurt me, he’d asked it a million different ways and I’d just nodded repeatedly, not speaking.  And though the questions had been loud in his eyes, he hadn’t pressed me for more.  When I’d slid from the chair and crawled up onto the bed with him, careful not to jostle him too much, he’d scooted over and lifted an arm, tucking it around me.

             
It was as close as I could’ve gotten without causing him pain, but not nearly close enough.  I’d wanted to sneak under his skin and disappear.  I’d wanted to dissolve inside him.

             
“I love you,” he’d said into my hair, and I’d breathed shallow and even against his chest, like my heart wasn’t breaking.

             
I hadn’t lied to him.  They hadn’t hurt me, not really.  Not like they had him.  All they’d wanted with me was to keep me out of the way; his girl, the mute freak.  But in beating him they’d broken something inside of me, something unrestrained and terrible, and now I can’t put it back together, no matter how hard I try. 

             
I am splintering.

             
Logan looks up with a drawn half smile when I enter the room.  His face is badly beaten, one eye swollen and dark, his lower lip slightly puffy, the tear in his cheek from the bite of that chain sown shut with ten tiny stitches and held together with stark white steri-strips.  He’s sitting on the edge of the bed, gingerly stuffing his hands down the sleeves of his ruined shirt, spotted with dark stains.  I cross the room quickly to help.  Though he tries to hide it, Logan’s breathing catches several times as I work the shirt over his head.  As gently as I can, I pull it down over his bruised body, the fabric, stiff with dried blood, slowly covering the landscape of pale, old scars and newly discolored flesh. 

             
Badly bruised ribs, the doctor had told us.  Not broken.  But Logan is still breathing shallow like every inhale is agonizing and I’m not sure what the difference is.

             
“Thank you.”

             
I can feel his eyes on me as I nod and grab the small stack of prescription orders from beside him on the bed.

             
He watches me as I grab his hand and we walk together out the door, down the hall and into the crisp fall morning.  Some of my unease lessens as we leave the hospital behind us, but not much.

             
Logan doesn’t argue when I slip behind the wheel again, for once not opening the door for me.  In my hands the steering wheel feels almost ordinary, like I’d never spent so much time hiding at home.  He closes his eyes with his head back against the rest as I drive, the muscle in his jaw tightening, holding his breath at each tiny bump in the road. 

             
“Do you want to talk about it?” Logan asks at a stoplight and I tightly shake my head.  He doesn’t ask again, but as the light turns and I press the pedal I can feel his eyes on me.  The silence stretches between us.

             
We stop in the drive-thru at the pharmacy to fill his prescriptions, and thirty minutes later I’m pulling the car up into his driveway and he’s asleep in the passenger seat next to me.

             
My hands are gripping the steering wheel in bloodless fists and I forcibly relax them, but they shake as I turn the key to kill the engine. 

             
“Okay?” Logan asks quietly, clearly not as asleep as I’d thought.

             
I force a smile at his broken face.  It shouldn’t be possible to keep hurting like this, when everything inside me is already crushed and ruined.

             
“It happened again,” he says, and when I look back at him he’s staring out the windshield, his eyes unfocused.  “I blacked out.  He went for you and I just - I don’t remember a lot of it.”

             
I reach for my phone. 
You were trying to protect me.

             
“Is he -?”

             
I scowl.  I couldn’t care less about any of them. 
He’s fine.  He’s not any worse than you are.

             
Logan considers this, his bruised eyes heavy and half closed.  “They got what they wanted from me.”

             
Blood, I think bitterly.  But he continues.

             
“I won’t get off this time.”

             
No one’s going to the police
, I type, shaking my head.
Not with Dylan involved.
  The cop’s son.

             
In my head I see Dylan’s dad like he’d been last night, the sounds of his son’s fists sinking into Logan’s body as he’d dispassionately turned away.  Maybe now his wife-beating asshole of a partner was rightfully avenged.

             
Logan doesn’t seem convinced, or maybe he’s just too bone-weary to care.

             
As I grab the keys and turn to get out Logan stops me with a hand on my arm.  “Thank you.”

             
I’m not sure what he’s thanking me for exactly but I nod anyway and practically leap from the car.  Logan follows more slowly, moving tentatively with an arm around his ribs.  I meet him at the other side, letting him lean on me as we torturously climb the front steps, muffled sounds of discomfort slipping from him as his boots scrape over the cement.

             
Once inside the house I help Logan back to the bedroom and out of his soiled shirt, tossing it directly into the trash, still warm from his body.  I kneel down and untie his boots and swipe off his socks.  His jeans are stained too but not as bad, and besides he’s already lying back atop the covers with a tight, pained sort of exhale.

             
“Come ‘ere,” he mumbles, his voice slurred from the painkillers I’d given him in the car, from his body’s self-preservationist slide into total exhaustion. 

             
I hesitate.  I want to run, to flee from that house and his blood and those dark eyes that I know better than my own, looking at me with such love and trust, saturated with pain.  I want to, but I just slip out of my shoes and socks and jeans and coat, all still splattered with his blood, and climb onto the bed beside him.  I’m careful not to hurt him as I lower myself to his side, my head on one of the few areas of his chest not darkened with bruises.

             
But when I close my eyes I see his knees giving out beneath him, see him collapsing to the ground with a spray of blood.

             
“Shh, Love,” Logan murmurs against my hair, and I realize I’m crying again, silently.  Tears are trickling the length of the raised, white scars on his chest, cutting wet paths down over his discolored ribs.  “It’s okay.  Shh.  It’s okay.”

              I awake with a scream trembling, silent on my lips.  As softly as I can I slide out from the curve of Logan’s arm, my skin crawling and my heart in my throat.  Silently I stumble from the room and down the hall, catching myself on the back of the couch in the living room and hanging my head, dragging air in deeply, stirring the embers of my lungs.  They are scorched, burnt from overuse, and I can’t erase that, can’t make everything go back to the way it was.

             
There’s too much inside me that I can’t hold back anymore, and I’m suffocating on the purge.

             
My arms are shaking and I want to throw my head back and scream myself raw, want to pound my fists against the wall until I can’t lift them anymore.  I want to draw blood, draw pain up from the unholy depths within me before it slices me to pieces.

             
I drop my chin to my chest, my breathing labored and loud, raking my fingers back through my hair, pulling to feel the sting in my scalp.

             
God, I’m going crazy.

             
I can’t make it stop, can’t stop the feeling that I’m crawling out of my own skin, that something sick and twisted is emerging from within me behind the echo of my own scream.

             
I’d done it.  I’d used my voice.  And now I couldn’t stop the memories, the flashes of pain and shame and terror that slap at me.  Memories of that night two years ago mixing now with new ones, ones of Logan, blood-splattered and broken, the wet slapping sound of flesh pounding into flesh, the dark horror in his eyes when he’d looked at me.

             
I stumble into a run, only barely making it to the bathroom by the front door before dropping to my knees in front of the toilet and heaving violently.  I hadn’t eaten anything since the ice cream the previous afternoon so very little comes up, but even still my stomach twists painfully, squeezing for more.

             
When it’s finally done wringing itself out I stand and flush, wiping my mouth on a washcloth by the sink and staring at myself in the mirror.  There’s a small fleck of Logan’s blood on the side of my jaw still and I reach up with one trembling finger and scratch it off with my nail.  It flakes away easily.  And then I’m just gawking at this girl in front of me, naked but for her grey t-shirt and underwear, sickly pale and covered in clammy sweat.  Her long hair is hanging stringy down her back and she’s shaking, wracked with fear. 

             
Always the fear. 

             
It makes me sick.  I feel my right hand slide instinctually over my left wrist and close my eyes, willing myself to stop.  But Logan is the only one who can make this feeling go away and I refuse to wake him, not after last night.

             
I just want it to stop.  An oblivion of terror, and I’m lost in it. 

             
Twisting away from the mirror, I’m not sure where I’m headed until I’m already walking past the doorway to the kitchen, through to the entryway, hovering at the threshold there and staring at that little table.

             
Such a small thing.  This cold object, just big enough to grip in one’s hand, and it had controlled me so easily; controls me still.

             
I step forward, my bare feet silent against the chilly tile floor.  I’m shivering violently as I reach out, slipping the drawer open with just a whisper of sound and staring down at its dark contents.  Logan’s handgun, resting there, a solitary black shape against the blonde wood of the drawer.  I reach for it and my hand closes around it.  It’s surprisingly heavy as I lift it out.

             
Grasping it in my right hand I hold it in front of my belly, reaching with the other to touch a finger to the muzzle, the hammer, to slide it along the sleek edge of the barrel.  My pulse pounding in my veins I adjust the thing in my grip, staring at it from some distant part of me, my hand slick with sweat around its hard shape.  I’ve never been on this side of a gun before and I’m not sure what to do.  I slide my last three fingers and thumb around the handle, grasping it in a choking grip, my first finger stretched alongside the cool metal length of the barrel.