Deep (Pagano Family #4)(83)

“Nothing. You’re doing it, being here. I’m sorry about today.”

“Don’t be sorry.” He stared down at her, and Bev had the clear sense that he was examining her, taking a reading. “What you wanted—you’re okay after?”

Their sex. She thought about that for a minute, searched her head for the bad associations she’d been so frightened of. “I’m okay. It helped, I think.”

“Good.” He kissed her hand. “Do you have that back, then? Do we?”

“I…don’t know. I think so. But—my head feels too small for everything in it. I need to work out one thing at a time, and right now I’m trying to figure out how I feel about Chris.”

“What do you mean?”

Bev stared through the glass. The sun was setting, and the day was darkening. The low, reddish glow of the summer sun washed over the view. In Bev’s eyes, everything looked worn out and used up in the late afternoon. “Sunsets make me sad.”

His only answer was a tightening of his hand on hers.

“I don’t know how to feel about him. We weren’t speaking—since April, we’d barely spoken. And I don’t even know how he felt about me since that day at your uncle’s. In a way, it’s like I’ve been mourning him since then. He’d already been leaving my life. And what was our friendship, anyway? Not what I thought it was. I try to remember him, but every memory feels like I got it wrong. I’m still so mad and hurt. And I don’t even know if I should be. I’m mad at him for loving me, and that seems cruel. I want to be sad, and I am, but the mad is still in there. It hurts my head. It makes me tired. I’m a terrible person.”

Nick lifted her hand and rubbed his thumb over her feathers on her wrist. “Do you even look at this anymore? Does it mean what it did to you?”

She watched his thumb smooth over her skin. She hadn’t looked at her feathers much this summer. In truth, she’d almost forgotten they were there.

“Your light was the first thing I ever noticed about you. Before I knew your name, long before we ever spoke. The first time I saw you, right after you moved in. You were coming out of the mailroom. We did the little dance in the doorway that people do when they’re both trying to be in the same space at the same time. You laughed and smiled up at me, and I’d never seen anyone smile with such genuine peace before. You weren’t trying to be polite, you didn’t seem to be flirting, you were just open. It struck me. I didn’t think much more about it, but every time I saw you, I swear I thought you glowed. Your heart was light, in both senses of the word.”

Bev remembered that day. And she’d probably been flirting a little—or getting ready to. She’d been dazzled by his looks. He’d had a couple days’ growth of groomed beard, as he sometimes did. It was her favorite look on him, and his green eyes had sparkled down at her. Later that day, she’d seen him walking out with a gorgeous, Victoria’s Secret-type blonde.

He went on. “And then I found out what’s under your tattoo, and it set me back a little, until you told me what the feathers meant.”

She remembered that conversation vividly, though it seemed ages ago. But it had been only April, not even four months ago.

“I remember. But the trouble I have now is heavier than feathers can lift.”

“Heavier than the troubles that led you to open your wrist?”

She nodded. Those troubles seemed absurdly small to her now. She’d been nothing more than a lonely teen girl, an only child, overweight and unhappy with her looks, her parents divorcing, her calm, good-natured father leaving her with her controlling, angry mother. No big trauma, no dark secret. She’d merely caved under the weight of middle-class adolescence. A boring story.

It hadn’t been a cry for help. She’d truly wanted to be gone, and she’d studied up on the right way to do it. But she hadn’t been able to get her right hand to work well enough to cut deeply once she’d slashed her right wrist. And her mother had come home from work unexpectedly early.

Bev had spent a few weeks in the psych ward. The whole neighborhood had found out, of course. Her mother had never forgiven her for the embarrassment, and they’d had only the most perfunctory relationship since. It was her father Bev had been close to.

He was dead, too.

“And yet you’re here.”

“Hmm?” She’d gotten lost in her thoughts, and she didn’t know what Nick meant.

“Your troubles are heavy, but you haven’t tried to do this”—he drew his thumb down the longest, most-raised scar—“again. You’re stronger than you were. Why?”

“You.”

“No, bella. You’ve said that before, but what I heard this morning is that I haven’t been here the way you needed me to be.”

That was true. It was sick, she had to be sick, but she needed his darkness. His tender care of her, his quiet, steady patience, for all these weeks and weeks since the diner had been making her more anxious by the day. He hadn’t been himself. He was being what he thought she needed, and she had personal experience with how warping and frustrating it was to be someone other than yourself for someone other than yourself. It would have killed his love for her eventually.

This morning, though, he’d been with her the way he’d been with her before, and she’d felt her old life almost in her grasp again. She wanted that back. She’d loved that life. She’d worked hard to be that person in that life. To live weightlessly.