A History of Wild Places(73)

“They weren’t trying to escape,” I explain. “They were going to get help.”

“There is a thin line between escape and sacrifice.” I’m not sure of his meaning, but I hear his footsteps move to the window, and I imagine him staring out at a starlit forest, the moon suspended low in the sky. He’s so far away, I couldn’t touch him even if I wanted to. “I can feel a change in them, all of them,” he says, carefully tracing the words he wants to say before he lets them leave his lips. “They don’t trust me anymore. They think of the outside world, of what they don’t have instead of what they do.”

I run my fingers along the quilt beneath me, feeling the familiar stitching, the pattern sewn together in little triangles. There are no holes, no torn edges in it—unlike most things in Pastoral. It has been mended and well-kept. “They still trust you,” I say, my own mind slipping back into old patterns. Always comforting, always reassuring. Even now, I can’t help but buoy him up. It’s what I’ve always done—I am the guidepost for a man who sways so easily off course. “They just need to know that you trust them in return, that you make decisions for them, not for yourself.”

“Everything I do is for them,” he snaps, his body twisting around, his voice now directed back at me and not at the window. “Those men would have undermined everything if they’d made it any farther down that road. If they’d gone into town.”

“Why?”

He crosses back to the bed. “We don’t know what’s out there,” he answers, mostly to himself. “We don’t know what’s left.”

“What are you talking about?”

He breathes and takes another drink from his flask. The room smells of alcohol, it saturates the walls, the linens, Levi’s skin. As if the house itself has been soaked in whiskey.

“They were traitors,” he answers at last, with a quick finality.

“They weren’t traitors,” I argue. “They only wanted to save Ash’s child.”

His breathing grows deep, a heady weight to each inhale and exhale. “It doesn’t matter why they did it, only that they did. They had to be punished.”

“They were hung because they were sick. Not because they were traitors,” I correct.

He makes a strange sound from the back of his throat. “They see what they want to see.” He sinks back onto the bed beside me, his body too heavy to hold up.

“Who does?” I ask, unsure what he means. “Ash and Turk?”

He shakes his head, I can hear the subtle shift in the air. “No, Bee.” He sounds tired, like he’s fighting the sleep tugging at his brain.

“Tell me what you mean,” I press.

He sways closer to me. “The others,” he says. And when I frown at him, still unsure what he’s saying, he adds, “You ask too many questions. Too many things you shouldn’t worry about.”

I open my mouth but then his hand is at my throat. Not hard, not violently pressing, but smoothing across my skin up to my ear. He tugs at the ends of my hair, like he used to do when we were kids, when he would sneak up behind me and pull my hair, a reminder that he was there. Always close. My companion, my best friend, and sometimes my shadow.

“I loved you,” he says now, and it sounds as if tears are pushing against his eyelids again. As though I was the one to hurt him, I was the one who has married someone else. “You were always better than me. Smarter even—I always knew it.” He exhales deeply. “Even when we were kids. It’s why I had to—” His voice breaks off.

I pull away from him, and start to stand, but he reaches out quickly and grabs my wrist. “Bee,” he says, drawing me back down, back beside him. “After tonight, I will belong to Alice.”

“You already belong to her.” You’re already married, I want to scream.

He sighs. “But it’s always been us… you and me. Even when we were younger. I always thought I’d marry you, that there would be nothing that ever pushed us apart.”

“But you’ve chosen her,” I say. “You pushed us apart.”

“No,” he answers. “I didn’t push us apart—this place did, this community.”

I shake my head, feeling my own tears swelling against my eyes. I don’t want to hear him say this, any of it. It only makes it worse—the pain he’s cut into me, the betrayal of marrying someone else. He has hurt me more deeply than anyone ever could. And I hate him, hate him, hate him. “I’m not yours anymore,” I manage.

He brushes his thumb across my cheek, catching the wetness. “That’s not true,” he says, his voice breaking a little, his own hurt rising to the surface. “I’m still yours.”

“No,” I say, and again I stand. But he follows me to the door, grabbing my hand. And when I turn back to him, to shout for him to let me go, to shout that I hate him: that I will never forgive him for this thing he’s done, for loving me but still marrying someone else, for denying our child—the tiny ember of light inside me—but instead, his hands find my arm, my face, and he pulls me to him.

I don’t want him to touch me like this—I don’t want the heat of him so close, reminding me of too many nights when we folded ourselves together beneath the sheets. I don’t want any of it. And yet, his lips are against my ear, muttering things I won’t recall by morning. His hands are in my hair, his words in my chest, and I feel myself sinking, slipping, and then my mouth is on his. This man I hate, this man I could press the life out of if my hands found his throat.