I can get there on my own. you can leave me here alone.
She does not feel the same relief.
She merely lifts her head and looks at him and it wedges something cold and dark into the space around his heart.
And, for a singular moment, he wishes that it had never returned to him.
That heart. The putrid, worthless thing.
He doesn’t want any of the hurt that goes along with it.
But their eyes meet and he sighs and he wishes so fiercely that things were different. But he’d told her, hadn’t he? He’d tried to warn her. That he could never love her the way she deserved, that she should save her heart for someone who would know how to take care of it. And yet. And yet.
He takes one shuffling step toward her, the expression plaintive as he stares at her across the vast distance that separates them. And when he laughs, a breath of it, it is a mournful sound. Mirthless and dark. And he finally looks away, shakes his head so that the tangles of his forelock fall over his eyes. But it doesn’t matter because, for the moment, the eyes are closed and he tries hard to steady the beating of his heart.
She is still there, still watching, when he opens them again. There is a smile that stirs in the furthest corners of his own dark mouth, but this, too, is mirthless. There is no joy in this. When he opens his mouth to speak, the words have to claw their way up his throat. Strangled. “I don’t know how we got here,” he whispers.
“I don’t know what I did and I don’t know how to make it better.” He shakes his head again, presses his mouth into a thin line, averts his gaze to the sun-dappled ground underfoot. Thinks of the bugs and the worms and how he belongs with them, if not lower.
BETHLEHEM
I'm just tryin' to do what's right. oh, a man ain't a man unless he's fought the fight.
