Page 45 of Ravaged Wolf
I didn’t think I had tears left, but I do. My eyes are aching in their sockets now. “Is that all?”
“She said you were brave. That you’re unlearning, and that’s a hard thing to do. She said when you got here, you’d know what to do, and we should help you.”
I’m not brave. Abertha’s right about the unlearning, though. Whatever I’ve been doing, it’s the opposite of figuring things out. “I have no idea what to do.”
“Well, what do you want?” Rosie asks.
I let out a ragged sigh. “Go back to the start. Do it all differently.”
“What would you do differently?”
Memories rush over me, more feelings than pictures, but one image stands out—Trevor’s stormy eyes watching me, tentative and wary and longing at the same time. “I’d talk to Trevor when he was staring at me in the parking lot. I’d stay with him when he brought me a soda.”
They won’t know what I’m talking about, but all three females look at me like I’m making perfect sense anyway.
“We have sodas in the fridge,” Flora says. “You can take him one and tell him you want to start over.”
“Oh, good idea.” Rosie pops the last orange slice into her mouth.
Nia leans back and away a little so she can look at me better. She’s not smiling like the other two.
“Can I ask you something?” she asks.
“Sure.”
“It’s none of my business.”
I almost snort. Everyone knows my business. The worst day of my life is Moon Lake lore. “Okay.”
“You might get upset.”
“It’s fine.”
I figure after that preamble, she’ll let it rip, but she takes a few seconds to choose her words. “Can you really forgive him for what he did? I mean, I understand that he was in rut. He was out of his mind and everything. But do you really believe that? Like deep down?” She pauses like she’s frustrated that she’s not putting it exactly the right way. “I mean, if it were me, even though I’d know in my head that he wasn’t to blame, I don’t think I could ever really trust him. How do you sleep next to a person, knowing they’re capable of that, you know? How do you have pups with them?”
Flora’s jaw drops. Rosie’s eyes bug. Everyone tenses. You could hear a pin drop.
“What the fuck, Nia?” Rosie barks. “Handle delicately, remember?”
Nia ducks her head, but she doesn’t break eye contact with me. “Sometimes you’ve got to lance the boil after you rip the Band-Aid off. Trust me.”
I got hit in the solar plexus with a lacrosse ball once, during Human Sport class at the Academy. My heart stopped for a second, and the air whooshed out of my lungs. That feels like this.
I don’t think these thoughts.
I don’t ask these questions.
In my mind, there is Trevor with the blue-gray eyes who knows about feng shui and smells like gravy. And then, in a locked box that I store as deep inside as I can, there’s the beast with the bleeding black eyes. He’s always lurking down there, but if I don’t look, he doesn’t exist. He’s the monster under the bed.
And that way of thinkingworks. It got me out of bed and out of my room. It got me here. If Nia had just kept her mouth shut, it would get me all the way to chasing down Trevor with a soda, and I’d magically know what to say to him, and we’d start fresh and end up happy ever after.
“It’s not your business,” I say through grinding teeth.
“I know,” she says. The compassion in her voice pisses me off.
“Oh, no, you don’t. Everyone thinks they know, but they don’t—they can’t possibly— and they should begratefulthey don’t know, and mind their own damn business, but instead, everyone’s morbidly obsessed with the story, like, like I’m a true crime podcast. I’m just a person. Why can’t I have what everyone else has? Why can’t I want what everyone else wants?”
The females listen with their kind eyes and commiserating faces, and I want to sweep the tea service onto the floor and flip the table and scream at the top of my lungs.
