Page 49 of What We Bury

I’m not sure I can.

Thatshouldscare me.

Whatdoesscare me is that she saw enough of it to flinch and still didn’t let go.

I pull into my driveway and sit in the dark with the engine running.

My house is small. Two bedrooms, one bathroom, a kitchen where I eat standing up because sitting down to a meal alone is depressing as fuck. My legitimate jobs are teaching kids at Hunter Elementary and GED prep at Westlake Adult Learning two evenings a week. Between the two paychecks, I cover the mortgage and not much else.

That’s where the third job comes in.

At least Odin pays well for what we do.

None of my students—the small ones, the older ones—know that the man teaching them about morality and justice and the human condition has seventeen men’s deaths on his hands.

Eighteen, counting Brock.

My phone lights up again.

Micah:

You gonna answer Knox or do we need to send out the search party?

I stare at it.

I swear to God, sometimes Micah has a sixth sense for when one of us is about to break. My fingers hover over the keyboard, and for one ugly second, I’m this close to sending back an SOS.

The last time I did, they came over with beers and sat on the porch beside me. Not one of them asked a single question. We drank in silence and watched the moon move across the sky, and when they finally drove away, the monster clawing in my chest was pacified.

Not gone.

Never gone.

Just quiet enough to be useful again.

But tonight, the thing under my skin isn’t something they can fix with beer and proximity. It isn’t grief. It isn’t guilt. It isn’t the old familiar hum of violence with nowhere to go.

It’s wanting something with a clarity that scares the shit out of me and knowing I can’t give in.

That’s what people get wrong about control. They think it means I don’t feel things.

I feel all of it.

All the time.

Every urge. Every impulse. Every ugly, hungry thought. Every image I refuse to let become intention.

Control is taking the thing inside me by the throat and holding it there until my hand cramps.

Control is knowing exactly where my hands want to go and keeping them folded anyway.

Control is the difference between being a man and being a warning.

Micah knows.

He’s always known.

He looks at me like he can see straight through the wall to the thing pacing behind it, and the worst part isn’t that it makes my pulse trip every time his name lights up my phone. The worst part is that he lets me keep pretending. He never pushes. He just waits. Lets me ration out what I can stand to give and takes it without complaint, because he learned a long time ago that pushing me only makes me bolt.