Page 13 of Carver
She steps even closer, eviscerating my private space. I never let her touch me until a few weeks ago in my kitchen. Her fingers whisper over my right hand. I always have it tucked into my body. I still have plenty of feeling in the hand and arm, it just won’t work properly. Bronte’s touch sets off a landslide of sensation.
“I’ll be your silence,” she breathes. “I’ll be your flowers. You can’t know you’d break me or wear me down or that we’d wind up being anything but beauty. Life takes work. Love takes work. You can’t decide for me what sort of work I want to do or what I’m best suited for. You can’t tell me that I’m honest andthen call me a liar in the same breath I see you, Dom. I know you. I know you’re drowning, and you weren’t trying to harden yourself off to tenderness and love, hope, andme. This has always been a battle with yourself and your past.”
Her words are a blade, cutting me from my chin all the way down my chest, spilling my insides onto the floor. Spilling out all the shit I’ve stuffed deep down inside as well. All those cracks I’ve tried so hard to keep glued together bust wide open.
There’s never been anyone who’s justgot melike Bronte does and there never will be anyone in the future. She can see that it’s too much.
She walks me across the room and over to the bed. I basically collapse into myself, shoving my left hand over the right side of my face. It’s not just the bruising or the swelling. There are stitches in all over the place that have yet to dissolve. I’m aware how utterly grotesque I am.
“What’s the point of hiding what I’ve already seen?” Bronte sits down beside me, but leans over and picks up my jackknife off the nightstand. I take it everywhere with me. It belonged to my grandpa.
She turns it end over end in her hand, running her fingers over the worn wood. The varnish peeled off long ago, but from all the rubbing in my pocket and all the handling, it’s been worn even smoother.
“I’ve decided that there’s only one way to get you to hear me. I’ve tried talking to you for a year and a half. Pouring my heart out. Loving you unconditionally. You’ve trained yourself not to hear it or see it. I get that this isn’t me. It’s nothing I’ve done. It’s you. But that part of you that won’t listen to anything or respond to anything- that’s the part I need to get to.”
She’s not wrong, but I have no idea how she’ll do that.
“The voice inside of you that tells you to haste yourself, that tells you aren’t good enough—it picks you apart. It tears you up. You were trained in that early on. In neglect and violence. The only way to break you out of this, to stop this cycle of destruction, is to show you visibly what it does to me to see it. With every word you believe, every thought you choose to give purchase, you’re cutting yourself. You’re making yourself bleed, but I’m bleeding too.”
I can’t find words to interrupt her or tell her that she’s wrong. She’s known. All this time, she knew what I was doing. She’s known better than I have.
She draws in a shuddering breath, but there’s nothing hesitant about her. Her voice never wavers. Her eyes stay locked on her hand, where she caresses my knife. “I can’t reach you with kindness, with understanding, with compassion, or even love. If the only way to get to you is to walk through fire and make a blood sacrifice, then so fucking be it.”
I blame the painkillers, or maybe it’s years of knowing Bronte and finding her so gentle. I’m not fast enough to react to what she’s saying. I can’t stop her because I don’t see it coming until it happens.
She snaps the blade of the knife up. I keep it finely honed at all times. I’m meticulous about sharpening it.
Sheknowsthat.
She slides the blade over her palm, biting into her flawless skin. Red droplets well up. She was careful not to cut deep enough to damage herself, but the cut wells with blood, flowing over her palm so that she has to bring her other hand below to cup it tokeep it from dripping on the floor. I try to leap up, but she stops me with a look.
“Next time you think that you’re unworthy, that you’re nothing, that you’re beyond redemption, that you can’t be loved, that you don’t deserve goodness or humanity, think about me, bleeding for you.”
I tumble off the bed and lurch out of the room, down to the bathroom right next door. Dravin stocked a bunch of medical supplies in there for me, knowing that I’d be staying here after I got out of Archer’s. The sudden movement jars my whole body, sending a dizzying wave of pain crashing through me. My head throbs and I nearly stumble straight into the wall on the way back into the room.
I get down on my knees in front of her and take her hand, pressing a wad of gauze to her palm to stop the bleeding. I want to beg her to stop hurting for me, but she’s been bleeding for years.
I lift her palm to my lips, wrap her fingers around the gauze to hold it, and brush a kiss over her knuckles. When I cried at Archer’s clinic, that was more just my eyes constantly leaking from the pain in my face. I’d bring my hand up and find my fingers soaked. It was reactionary and instinctual. Those weren’t real tears.
I bow my head over Bronte’s hand, moisture slicking off my cheeks and dribbling onto the floor. These are real tears. I bathe her hand in them. Her wrist. A tremor starts in my chest and rocks through me like the aftershocks of an earthquake.
Bronte slides off the edge of the bed. Her knees hit the floor and she wraps her arm around my shoulders. “Shh. It’s just a shallow cut. I’m sorry, that was fucked up. I just couldn’t thinkof what else to do to make you see, unless it wasreallymaking you see.”
I’ve been edging up to this moment for years. For most of my lifetime. I’m so exhausted. So tired. I can’t remember the last time I slept. Yes, I close my eyes, and sometimes I enter some shallow stage of sleep, but nothing restful and nothing that I can’t wake myself quickly from. With my dad in the house, drunk and often in a rage, it was the only way I could ever sleep, when I dared. Even though it’s been years since he’s been gone, and my uncles too, I spent all those formative years training myself. I equated sleep with danger. Add to that the anxiety and physical pain of the past few years and I don’t even know how I have the energy to sculpt most days. Sculpting doesn’t bring me joy. It’s something I have to do with a manic need.
Bronte brings me joy.
Everything she’s said today hits so hard.
I wish I could stop sobbing and shaking. It’s mortifying. I should be the one comforting her, holding her, not the other way around. It’s always been Bronte who has seen me, found me, saved me.
I raise my head to try and wipe away some of the tears, and to muster the world’s most inadequate apology. That’s when I spot Dravin standing in the doorway holding two full smoothies.
I know he can’t have been there long. He would have announced himself somehow—a cough or a rough throat clearing.
He looks like he wants to edge back down the hall and disappear, but I’ve seen him now, so there’s no point. He offersme a lopsided grin that is allshit, this is awkward as fuck, I’m really fucking sorry,and holds out the tall mugs.
“I- uh- these are ready. For erm- if you wanted to take a break, but I can see that you’re busy, so I’ll just leave them in the kitchen.”
