sorry …’ he slurred.
She turned. ‘You’re freezing.’
‘This is like some bad porno,’ he said, his laugh constricted by the spasms of his chest. He’d gone past shivering to a place of rhythmic, full-body muscle contractions.
‘You need to get warm.’
His shaking head rustled against the sleeping bag he’d hiked up to his face. ‘I don’t think that would be a good idea for either of us.’
She wasn’t in a hurry to have him pressed up against her, either.
‘Take the underneath layer,’ she ordered, ‘and wrap it around you like a cocoon. It’s got my warmth.’
He did it and the shifting and tucking let in a whole lot of cold night air. Her goose bumps returned. But then he was done and he curled onto his side and let her remnant body heat do its job.
‘You’re so warm,’ he murmured as her toasty thirty-seven degrees centigrade soaked into him from the high-tech fabric.
Her lips quirked and she rubbed at the gooseflesh. ‘I was.’
He roused. ‘Now you’re cold.’
She pushed him back down. ‘I’m not hypothermic. I’ll make some more heat. Don’t worry. Go to sleep.’
She turned away from him and scooted as best she could to her side of the double bed. It really wasn’t big enough for much separation, especially with him curled. But she understood why he needed to be. His body was protecting its vital organs.
In the silence, the time between his convulsive muscle clenches slowly lengthened. Then eased altogether. His pained sigh was a kiss of cold air on the back of her neck.
‘Better?’ she whispered back over her shoulder.
‘Getting there.’
It wasn’t tawdry. He was about as protected from any accidental contact as he could be, wrapped in a full-body sheath of goose down. But she wasn’t going back to sleep either. He was way too close for that.
‘Thank you,’ he whispered into the darkness.
‘You’re a jerk, but you don’t deserve to freeze to death.’
‘No …’ His breaths drew out and his words sounded close against her ear. ‘Thank you for finding me. That day.’ He breathed again. ‘Thank you for saving me.’
Every muscle in her body paused to listen.
‘I was on a path nowhere good when you pulled up to my cottage that day. I’d quit drinking but the whole downward spiral hadn’t really changed. You forced me back out into the world and made me engage with it again.’
A deep ache started up in her chest. What could she say to that?
‘I love doing what I do, but I don’t always like what I do,’ he murmured between tremors. ‘I don’t like the expression I imagine on my mother’s face when I think of her looking down at me from above and seeing who I’ve become. I didn’t like the look on your face when you found out. The judgement.’
She opened her mouth to apologise.
‘That’s not a criticism of you,’ he whispered against her back. ‘It’s me. It’s my choices. But you’ve shown me a way forward that I think I can live with. The road ahead is no longer a dark abyss.’
She lay in silence, understanding that he needed to do this. Fearing he’d stop if she spoke. Greedy to understand him better, even if it was their last night together.
‘My parents split when I was sixteen,’ he breathed into her hair.
Just split? That was less dramatic than she’d imagined.
‘My mother finally found the courage to leave. He wouldn’t let her go before that. Or me.’
Her heart squeezed. Domestic violence. Closer to what she’d imagined.
‘My father told her she could only go if I stayed. Knowing she’d never leave me behind. That’s what he traded on. Our love for each other. If she stayed, I was powerless. If I stayed, she was. But with her gone …’ He swallowed. ‘I made her go. I was nearly sixteen, close enough to independent. By then I could play him like a piano, keep myself safe. But I couldn’t keep both of us safe at the same time.’
His cold-slurred speech tapered off and she wondered if he’d fallen asleep.
‘She left you with him?’ she risked, not wanting to break the spell.
‘And set up on her own across town. But she didn’t get all her bone breaks treated professionally. One of them grew an abscess and leached toxins into her system over a couple of years. Irrevocable.’
Shirley swallowed around the sudden lump in her throat.
‘Those years of freedom were the best of her life, even though they were still so imperfect. I avenged her every day, manipulating my father and learning to despise how easy he was to play. I had him in the palm of my hand and absolutely no inclination to take care with what I had. Everything bad I learned about human nature I learned from him, one way or another. As education went, it was powerful.’
So were his words, confessed to the night and suddenly so close to her ear. A tremor skittered down her flesh.
‘She died about the same time you started coming to my house?’
‘Registering for your mother’s class was the best thing I ever did. Without her, I would have assumed all people were like my father. But I did it because I thought she was someone else I could play. A great brain I could challenge and best. A whole class full of students to be smarter than. That’s who I was.’
She pressed her lips harder together in the shadows.
‘Except she saw immediately who I was and she never let me best her. She was always a step ahead, in a way that lifted me up to her level. It challenged me to be better, not smarter.’
Would he admire his mentor so much if he knew what she’d done rather than face her own flaws?
‘I’m hurting you, Shirley, and I can’t forgive myself for that.’
‘Because I am her daughter?’ she whispered.
He stroked her hair. ‘Because you are you. But I can’t be who you want me to be, I can’t turn myself into someone who can do forever. Not even for you.’
She wanted to rail, to point out that she hadn’t asked him to. But this was goodbye; fighting it wouldn’t change it.
‘And I would hurt you again, eventually. I would take what I know about you and your feelings for me and use them against you. Because that’s what I do as automatically as breathing. I exploit people’s natures. You are so much better off far away from me.’
She smiled into the tent wall. Hollow and empty.
‘“If
