Page 131 of Bend
“Things have changed,” I said, though I couldn’t define them.
“Keep your eyes on the tip of the pen.”
***
Are you relaxed?
I am. I feel a freedom I hadn’t felt before. I feel hopeful and generous, sweet and melancholy. Emboldened and encouraged, ready to start a new journey, a life after this incident.
I want you to think about the ride here, to Westonwood. Can you remember that?
I don’t. It’s not even a blur; it’s blank.
Go back a little further. To the stables. You were given a shot. Do you remember the pain in your arm?
The black goes grey, and I feel something in my arm, as if I’m being poked with a rigid finger. I feel something else, a pounding in my chest, a confusion that I’m separate from. I can’t tell what’s happening, besides the feeling of being restrained.
Go back further. Before the shot.
I don’t want to. I feel the resistance binding me to my forgetfulness, the comfort of not knowing. If I lean into it, just a little, maybe I can see what happened without feeling it. Maybe I can observe coldly, like a reporter noting facts for relevance, not profundity. If I let myself accept that fear, I’ll know. So I relax into where the rope of my fear pulls and binds me, dropping into some unknown graphite-colored place in my head. I expect to go back in my memory a minute, two minutes, half an hour, but intuitively, though I can’t tell the whens and wheres, I know I’ve gone back further.
His breath falls on my cheek, and a pain in my arm runs from my wrist to the sensitive side of my bicep.
“You did not,” he says from deep in his throat. He’s naked, stunning, the stink of sex and blood on him. He pins me to the wall, the friction screaming against the open skin on my ass.
Regret. Pounds of it. Miles wide. Regret to the depth of my broken spirit.
“I’m sorry.” Am I? Or am I just saying it?
“Why?”
My wrist hurts. He’s pressing it so hard against the wall, as if I’d leave, as if I’d ever turn my back on him. Yet I want to get away, to run, to show him that I can abandon him the way he abandons me.
I wiggle, but he only presses harder and demands, “Why?”
“Get off me!”
“Tell me why!” His eyes are wider, his teeth flashing as if he wants to rip out my throat. “Why?”
“I need it!”
The words come out before I think, and they’re poison to him. Before I expect it, he slaps me in the mouth. He lets me go, and I fall to the floor. When I look at him, he’s cradling the lower half of his face as if he can’t believe what he’s done. He’s slapped me plenty, but not in anger. Not without me halfway in subspace and high on dopamine. Never outside a scene.
But that’s nothing compared to what he does next. The ropes of my fear try to pull me away, back to safety, and I let them.
What is it? What does he do?
I must have been silent too long. I must have watched Deacon’s face, frozen in my memory, for a second too many. The sense that he is going to do something terrible is all I have, but I don’t remember what it is. When Elliot asks from the present what Deacon does, I stay to see it.
“I’m sorry,” Deacon says.
I don’t say anything. My face hurts, and I taste liquid copper. We stay like that forever, or time is stretched in my memory. This is the moment I can tell him it’s okay, or the moment I can be angry, or I can have a reaction that will make him not do what he’s going to do.
But I don’t do anything. Not a word or gesture.
He walks out.
I don’t know why there’s a finality to it that I haven’t ever felt before, but there is. When the bedroom door clicks behind him, that’s it.
