Page 49 of Animal Tamer
“He raped me.” The word is out. Twenty years I've talked around it, called itwhat he didandthe fixationandmy problem, and now it's out in the air between us, ugly and exact. “When I was a child, Logan. Before I understood what it was. That's what he does and there's no workaround for it, there's no crack in it, there's just a woman who's patient enough to care for the rubble?—”
“Rowe, stop, I didn't?—”
“You want to know what's different? Nothing's different. My skin still screams. I still can't kiss her goodnight. I stood in that parking lot ten minutes ago and she blew a kiss across five feet of air because that's all I've got, that's the whole inventory—” My breath is coming ragged now, and I can't stop, the pressure of two decades finding the fault line and splitting it wide. “He made me do it with the other kids. Do you remember that? The boys. The girls. Lined us up in that room off the chapel and made us—while he watched. While his Prophet friendswatched, sitting in chairs like it was a recital, jerking off, and afterward he'd tell me I did well. He'd pat my head like a dog.”
Logan looks like he’s going to puke. I want to puke too.
“And the cutting.” I yank my sleeve up, shove my forearm into the space between us, the raised lines shining in the afternoon sun. “You think these were punishment? Punishment I could've survived. Helikedit. He'd recite while he worked, whatever verse he'd chosen for the evening, slow, like a lullaby, and when he finished a line he'd—” My throat closes. I force the words out. “He'dfinish. On the wounds. On me. His version of salting the cut, he called itsealing the lesson in, and then he'd clean me up so gently, Logan, so gently, like he was the one saving me from what had just happened, andthat'swhy I can't be touched. Because gentle is what comes after the horror.”
The words stop.
The paddock is silent except for Cleopatra chewing and the wind moving through the Big Top's canvas across the lot.
Logan is crying.
I've seen my twin bleed. I've seen him burned, broken, stitched up on a folding table with a bottle of whiskey for anesthetic. I have not seen him cry since Zach died in his arms with the compound burning behind us.
He swipes at his face with the heel of his hand, furious at the tears, knocking them off his jaw like they've personally offended him.
“I knew it was bad.” His voice comes out mangled. “I knew—we all knew it was bad, but I never—you never said—” He swipes again. It's not working. They keep coming. “I wasright there, Rowe. A bunk over. I heard them come get you and I'd lie there and count until you came back, and Itold myself if I didn't look, if I didn't know exactly, then—” A sound tears out of him, half rage, half grief. “I should've burned it down sooner. I should've burned it down years sooner. I should've put a pitchfork through his throat when I was ten and let them do whatever they wanted to me for it. I'm sorry. God, I'm so—I'm yourtwin. I was supposed to?—”
“Logan.”
“—supposed to protect you, that's the whole job, that's the only job?—”
“Logan.” I step toward him. “You were a child. They'd have killed you. And then I'd have had nothing.”
“I'm sorry,” he says again, wrecked, scrubbing at his eyes. “I'm sorry I pushed just now. I run my stupid mouth, I always run my stupid mouth?—”
I shake my head. “I shouldn't have snapped at you.”
“You should snap at me. Somebody should snap at me daily. It should be on the schedule.”
A rough sound comes out of me that's almost a laugh, and then I do the thing before my body can call a vote on it.
I hug him.
My arms go around my brother and pull him in, chest to chest, his tears wet against my collar, and my skin lights up with the old alarm—gentle is what comes after—and I hold on anyway. Because it's Logan. Because he counted in the dark for me. Because some things are worth the scream in my head.
Logan goes rigid. His mouth falls open against my shoulder, and his arms hover in the air behind me like he's afraid to close the circuit.
Then, carefully, the way I hold Peanut, he does.
We stand there in the hay dust. Cleopatra watches us. Brutus has turned around in his corner, sulk abandoned,small dark eyes fixed on the two of us like we're the strangest act he's ever seen.
Logan pulls back first, holding me by the shoulders at arm's length, studying my face. His eyes are red-rimmed, and his grin is coming back, but it's soft at the edges, softer than I've seen it since we were boys.
“You hugged me.”
“Don't make it a thing,” I mutter.
“It's a thing. It's the biggest thing that's ever happened. Twenty years and youinitiated—” He shakes his head slowly. “That woman is changing you, brother. For the better. She walked in here for a monkey with a bruised hand and she's rebuilding you from the inside out and she doesn't even know she's doing it.”
“Maybe.”
“Not maybe.” Logan squeezes my shoulders once and lets go. “There's no maybe in it. I watched you flinch away from a touch for two decades. You just hugged me, on purpose, with witnesses.” He jerks his chin at Brutus, who is still staring at us. “The bear can testify.”
Brutus huffs, right on cue.
