Page 70 of Rooster's Remorse
"Stop." His hand doesn't move off them. He keeps it right there, warm and open over the worst of me, and he doesn't pretend it isn't there and he doesn't take it away. "They're not ugly and they're not pretty. They're a map of every single day youstayed alive when quitting would've been easier." His voice has gone rough and clear through. "I'm not going to lie and tell you I can't feel them. I can. And I'm holding you anyway, and I'm going to keep holding you, and there isn’t one inch of you I'm scared to put my hand on."
I can't get a breath.
"You're the only thing I've ever wanted," he says, low, right into my hair. "Every version of you that came up that road. If I had to pick between the ruined one and anybody else in the world walking around whole, I'd take you every time, and it wouldn't be close. You hearing me?"
I press my face into his neck so he can't watch what it does to me, and he holds me in a cold courtyard under one light with his hand still spread flat over the ruin of my back, and I let him.
I don't fly apart, and I don't pull away. I stand there and let a man hold all of me at once for the first time in years.
I want more than this.
He wants it too—I can feel that he wants it—and he's not doing one thing about it, only holding me, and knowing he'd stop right here and hold me all night if this was all I had in me is the exact thing that makes me certain I want the rest of it.
"Not tonight," I say into his neck.
"I know." His mouth presses to the top of my head. "I've got nothing but time, Mila. I'm not going anywhere. Not this time."
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Rooster
My mother comes through the gate at four in the afternoon in a car driven by a man I've never met, and I'm at the fence before it stops rolling.
She gets out slowly.
She's still in the wool coat, too warm for the afternoon, like nobody's told her she can take it off yet.
She's smaller than she was, gray coming in at her temples she used to cover and hasn't, and she stands up out of that car and looks at me across a chain-link gate that's already open, because I opened it the second I saw the dust come up off the road.
"Finn," she says.
And then I've got her.
I've got my arms around my mother for the first time in ten years. One of us is shaking, and I can't tell which.
She's got two fistfuls of the back of my shirt and her face buried in my chest, saying my name into it over and over like she's checking it holds.
"You're taller." She says it into my shirt. "How are you taller? You're thirty-five."
"I'm not taller, Mom."
"You're something." She pulls back and puts both hands on my face, thumbs going over my cheekbones, her eyes wet and running all over me like she's counting to be sure it's all still here. "Look at you. Look at this beard. Your father grew one like this for about a week, and I made him take it off."
"You can make me take it off."
"I might." Her chin trembles. "Ten years, Finn."
"I know."
"Ten years."
"I know, Mom."
I hold my mother in a courtyard in Mexico while she cries into my shirt.
Over the top of her gray head, I see Mila in the doorway of the main room with her arms crossed, watching us.
She's not smiling, but her face has come open in a way I've seen maybe twice since the gate, and when she catches me looking she doesn't divert her eyes away.
