I can get there on my own. you can leave me here alone.
This doesn’t feel like forgiveness.
This sinks like a stone in the pit of his gut.
It hardens that worthless heart in the cavern of his chest.
You didn’t do anything wrong, she says, but he knows that’s not true. He knows it in the way she does not close up the space between them. She does not curl herself around him or press her mouth against the curve of his shoulder. She is aloof, cold. Detached. And he stands there and he takes it because he doesn’t deserve for her to be anything else. He knows this, of course, he just doesn’t know why.
And she won’t tell him. This much is evident. He’d been foolish to even ask. Things are never that simple, though he wishes so desperately that they were. This is his punishment and he grits his teeth and he nods.
But what she says next plunges him into a peculiar kind of darkness. The brow furrows and he lifts his head sharply. It is confusion that passes across his face then, but an angry kind of confusion. He takes one step toward her and then stops short. “That’s not what I said,” he counters, the tone insistent. That hadn’t been what he’d said at all. He remembers it well. Remembers all of the nerve it had taken for him to say it at all.
She looks away then and he is powerless to do anything but watch, study the downturned face, the way her own forelock tangles around her eyes. The furrow in his brow remains. A neat knit as the seconds march past them in absolute silence. He should do more to prove that’s not what he’d said and that it’s not true at all, but there is that same old vise tightened around his throat and he doesn’t even try to speak. Waits instead for her to reveal more of what she’s kept under lock and key.
Were he any smarter, he would have immediately made the connection, would have immediately understood what she meant. But, were he any smarter, they would not be in this situation in the first place.
The furrow deepens.
“Who?”
BETHLEHEM
I'm just tryin' to do what's right. oh, a man ain't a man unless he's fought the fight.
