Page 4 of Atonement

“Youdid!” He punched me square in the face and jumped back. I reeled on the ground, rolling over to let my blood drip onto the hardwood.

“God dammit.” I watched his footsteps retreat to the kitchen, heard the clatter of ice, and then he was crouching in front of me with a bulging wash cloth. “Put this on your fucking face.”

He looked at my hand while I leaned against the couch, closing my eyes against the cold and wincing as Shawn tugged at my fingers before re-setting them and wrapping the bandage once more.

“Look at me.”

I opened one eye. He was sitting back on his heels, arms folded in front of him with a red mark across one cheek. He grabbed the ice from me, ignoring the blood staining the cloth, and held it against his face.

“What is going on, Meyer? Why are you acting so cold?”

I laughed and closed my eyes again. “I’ve never been anything but.”

“You were with her.”

My eyes snapped open once more. “You barely saw us together.”

“Then imagine how pronounced the change must have been for me to notice.”

I didn’t want to tell him I was right. I had been throbbing all day with the need to run off and come back here to her, whether it be to whisk her away or to sit and await our fate together. I should never have left her. Every time I blinked, I saw her face behind my eyelids. My mind ran through every possible scenario—coming back and finding her gone. Hiding from me with a kitchen knife, ready to swing. Naked and wrapped up in the sheets, waiting for me to come to my senses. But my brain never allowed me to consider the worst—that he would come and take her. I’d shut out that possibility completely, unable to even comprehend what it would mean for her. What it would say about me, to allow that to happen?

Now it was my reality, and I had to face the truth.

“He would have taken her anyway, Shawn.” My head dropped into my uninjured hand. My voice was stuffy from my bloody nose. “At least this way I didn’t have to be here to witness it when it happened.”

He seized my wrist. “He doesn’t have to win, Meyer.” His voice was plaintive, eyes searching mine as if he could find the last ounce of humanity hidden in my gaze. “We can go get her.”

“He’d stop us.”

“What do you think she’d want you to do?”

I ground my palm into my eyes. Fresh blood dripped down my face. “She won’t want to see me again.”

“She loves you, Meyer. You’ll need to beg her forgiveness, maybe for the rest of your life, but she’d rather be with you. I’d bet my life on it.”

Blood slicked across my hand as I wiped my face. “You said it yourself. I broke her heart. Even if she didn’t hate me now, I’d have to fight Conrad to get to her.”

“And what makes you think you can’t do that? Meyer, you’ve lived your entire life surviving him. What in the world makes you think you’re not strong enough to stand up to him now?”

Blood dripped down the back of my throat. “It’s exactly that. I’ve lived my entire life surviving him, and I’m still barely alive.”

He pushed to his feet, frustration evident in every movement. Hitting me in the face had done nothing to calm him down. He was committed to doing the right thing, I had to give him that. I wondered if he’d be so eager to run to Conrad’s house if he had any real idea of what he’d face when he got there. “I can’t make you care enough, Meyer. We’re losing time. If you’re not going to go after her, I am.”

I stared at the floor as he turned around and ran back down the hallway, pausing only to scoop up his phone. My body was aware of his every move, even if I couldn’t see him, but my thoughts were focused on all the ways I had been fucked over my entire life.

From the moment I came into the world, I was told that being nice was the way to lose. “You don’t get ahead by being kind. You just get hurt.” Conrad didn’t mean hurt emotionally. He meant physically wounded. My father was never my friend, even as a child. There was no coddling, no hiding from the horrors of the world. “You have to be like ice if you want to earn anything.” He’d rap me on the shins with his lacrosse stick, never allowing me to daydream during our drills. The endless practices were torture on my small body. When I became old enough, I chose baseball as my sport simply because it generally required little to no physical contact. Conrad wanted me to do football, and he fought me every step of the way. I was only permitted to continue once became clear that I excelled at it.

But I couldn’t find a way around every one of his lessons. His brutal form of instruction found words lacking, and substituted fists when what I needed was a soft hand. When he did deign to speak to me, the words were meant to incite fear and mistrust, not to comfort or guide. To anyone watching, his hand on my shoulder and quiet words between innings were reassurance. In reality, it turned every drop of blood in my body cold as I contemplated the punishment waiting for me at home if I dropped a play again. As the years went on and he ground me down like sandstone, I became closer to the man he wanted me to be.

Still, I was never good enough.

I made myself cold. I learned to examine everything with frigid detachment. When he hit me, I thought not about the betrayal I felt at suffering yet another beating but of the way it was strengthening the bone he struck. When he snapped my arm, I attacked physical therapy to ensure my muscles came back stronger than ever. I survived physically, and cauterized the emotional ends of my psyche that were never given the chance to take root.

Being near Madeline had helped me remember the child that I never truly got to be. Where before I had mocked her for being too sensitive in a world that demanded grit, I found myself craving her solace and warmth. She pushed past the anger and torment I wielded as a shield and rooted out my feelings, fed them sunlight and water, coaxed growth from sensations that were only dormant and not dead. What I thought had been covered with miles of scar tissue was really sitting just below the surface all along, waiting for the right conditions to break through and grow.

She was my light.

I had already decided that I wanted to be worthy of her. I wouldn’t survive any other way. I just had to become what she deserved before she found a way to destroy us both. And if I couldn’t—if she tore me down just like she promised before I could prove the truth of my soul—then I would know I hadn’t ever deserved her at all.

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