I never cared for anyone so much. I was born with a bomb inside my gut.
It strikes fear in the heart of her.
It presses the air out of her lungs.
She bites her tongue. She is a simple, stupid girl and what had she thought she’d been giving him in saying it at all? She had mistaken his anger for caring, allowed herself to believe something that wasn’t true. She had been desperate and greedy and it’s no wonder that her conversations expire before they ever really get started.
She frowns. Pointedly. Doesn’t bother trying to hide it. But it is neither anger nor confusion that furrows her brow. It is concentration instead. She bites her tongue and tries to determine why she’d thought herself fit to say anything in the first place. The frown dissolves around the edges of the grimace she’d tried so desperately to hide only moments earlier.
And then the expression softens altogether. She has ruined this, certainly, the same way she has ruined everything else. She shrugs her shoulders then and she looks at the snow underfoot, the mud mixed in. She thinks about how he had hurled himself down the bank toward her as she’d thrown herself back onto land. She thinks about how he’d snapped at her, asked her if she’d been trying to kill herself.
When she speaks next, she does not sound so certain, so self-assured. When she speaks next, her statement sounds more like a question. “You would have let me drown,” she says, quiet. So quiet that it’s almost as if her worst fears have been realized – one day she’d open her mouth to speak and no sound would come out at all. “If you hurt people on purpose, you would have let me drown.”
lilian
