I never cared for anyone so much. I was born with a bomb inside my gut.
She registers the change in his expression but says nothing.
She does not try to call into focus all of his transgressions.
They are none of her business and she does not ask him to share them.
Something shifts in the center of her chest and she buries whatever impulse she has to reach out and touch him, to lay her mouth against his shoulder as if it might bring him some semblance of comfort. She swallows it down deep and just goes on watching him as if she has any right to look at him at all. As if she has any right at all to wonder what he’s thinking.
She has perhaps gleaned enough from this interaction to know that he is almost certainly warring against something and she grits her own teeth in sympathy. She is curious, steeped in intrigue, she wants to reach into the center of him and pull out the parts that hurt.
Because she knows what it’s like to hurt. Because she knows how it aches to carry the pain and the darkness in your chest and never having anywhere to set them down, even if just long enough to catch your breath. And there is a vicious twinging in her heart when she thinks about his guilt – or what she registers as his guilt. He’d said he’d prefer being alone to hurting people and then, minutes later, had forced her to entertain the possibility that he hurt people on purpose. She couldn’t make it make sense.
His question catches her so thoroughly off-guard that she actually takes one shuffling step backward. She blanches and then frowns and then scrambles to smooth her brow and adopt a more neutral expression. Did she want to go to Sylva?
“With you?” she asks before she can stop herself and then, realizing what she’d asked, launches herself into her next statement. “I don’t know that I have much to offer a home.”
lilian
