Page 11 of Rogue
“Smart,” he said.
It was the first word out of him, and the smallness of it -- one word, with no weight on it either way -- unlocked something painful in my chest.I pressed my palms hard into my legs.
He gave me room to keep talking.
“Those bruises -- are any of them from before last night?”
I reached over.
I picked up the loose end of the sleeve, and I rolled it slowly up my forearm.
The wrist was the worst of the new ones -- purple now where it had been red atHadley’s, the swelling tight against the bone, a small scrape across the back where his ring had caught me when he’d yanked me an hour before the ceremony.
I set my arm on the table where he could see it.
He looked at the wrist, but he didn’t stay there.
He tracked up -- slow -- past the wrist, past the forearm, past the inside of the elbow.Some of the bruises had faded to a greenish color.Others will still dark.But the one on my upper arm had been the worst.The bruise was old.The purple at the center had gone the color of a plum left too long in a bowl, and the edges had started to yellow.Five fingers.You could count them.
I went still.
I tracked every shift in his expression.
His face didn’t change.The line of his mouth didn’t move.His eyes didn’t narrow.He set both his palms flat on the table on either side of where my arm lay and kept them there for the length of three slow breaths, which I counted because I couldn’t look at his eyes anymore.
Then he stood.
He didn’t look at me.He pushed the chair back with the backs of his knees, crossed the kitchen in four steps, and braced himself at the window above the sink, one hand on the frame and the other on the counter.He faced the pines beyond the yard.
He didn’t say anything.
He didn’t need to.
I sat at his kitchen table in a stranger’s clothes with the bruises of a man I’d run from laid out on the wood between us.As I watched the line of his shoulders against the window, the realization hit again, heavier this time -- whatever happened next in my life, my choices stopped belonging only to me the second I climbed onto his bike.He stood at the window a long time.
I didn’t interrupt him.
* * *
The day had passed without any issues.Dinner had been a little awkward, but that was only because we were still essentially strangers.Although, the more I talked to him, the more at ease I began to feel.He really was different from anyone I’d known before.
“Bathroom’s yours,” he said.He tipped his head down the hall.“Clothes are on the counter.”
He walked me to the bedroom door.
I turned around and started to speak.
He shook his head.
“Don’t,” he said.
Whatever was on my tongue -- thank you, I’m sorry for the trouble, I don’t know what I’m doing to your life -- he heard it coming before it arrived and stopped it at the gate with one word.Just the word, and the door, and the pull of it until it was mostly closed.
The latch did not click.
I looked at the gap.Half an inch of dark hall, the sconce light from the front room throwing a pale line across the hardwood at my feet.There was a lock on the knob -- a small button I could press and feel better for pressing -- but no deadbolt, no chain, no mechanism between his space and mine except a door left mostly closed because he had left it that way.I stood there for a long moment, my eyes fixed on the button lock.Pressing it would have been instinct.Instead, I turned away, leaving the door exactly as he had.
I went to the bathroom, changed into his flannel shirt and sweatpants, and looked at myself in the small mirror above the sink -- my own face, hair down, the mark at my jaw faded to that bruising I had predicted in the bridal suite mirror.I did not recognize the girl.This time, the not-recognizing did not feel like a warning.It felt like something else, something that did not yet have a name I knew.
