Page 54 of Bull Rush

“I have a hard time imagining you pining too.”

I give her a flat look, and she smiles, but itfades quickly.

“I know you loved me. I don’t doubt that. But I mean… the kind of pining love where you write poems and love letters and can’t stop thinking about a woman.” Her eyes soften as she looks me over.

“Is that what it takes to win you these days? Love letters and poems?” More stupid questions on my part.

“Maybe,” she says quietly. “Would that be so bad?”

“I don’t remember you ever being that romantic. Is that how he won you over?” My heart strains in my chest at the idea, and my mind drifts through all the ways I fucked this up. I’m fucking terrible at feelings—processing them, expressing them. After my parents’ deaths, I tried therapy. The local therapist struggled to make any sort of progress with me, and he sent me to the city for someone more specialized. I’d gone for a few more weeks after that and then given up. Football was better therapy for me than any talking I’d ever done. I worked my shit out on the field until I had to see someone again in prison.

She looks at me warily. “You don’t want to talk about him. Not really.”

“Not really,” I admit. “I’d rather beat his ass for putting his hands on my wife.”

“Bea said she didn’t even know you had a wife before the trial. Did Cooper know about me?” She deftly changes the subject.

“I mentioned it once when he asked about my life back here.”

“What’d you tell him?”

“That I was married once, but I had a fucked-up life here. A family involved in things that cost them their lives, and the aftermath of that cost me my wife.”

We sit in silence after that summary of our end. It was true enough. The black and white bare bones of it, but it lacked all the color that had made it so painful.

“I packed a bag that night after you left.” She breaks the silence between us.

“A bag?” I turn to look at her, but her eyes are on her bottle, peeling the label off the front.

“I changed my mind, or I thought I did. It hurt so fucking bad without you in the house. Seeing your stuff still in the closet, your bike still in the barn… It was like you were going to come back any day, when I knew you weren’t.”

“Haze…” I say softly.

“I’d never felt pain like that… not really. Grieving someone that way. Someone who was still alive. I thought I could just pretend you were dead. Make peace with you being gone like I did my mom and your parents. Then I didn’t have to imagine you happy somewhere without me or with someone else. But all the things that people say when they’re gone—that they’re in a better place, that you’ll see them again someday. None of that’s comforting when they’re still alive.” She sighs. “Not that I wanted you to be hurting, but…”

“I did hurt. Like hell. For weeks at night, I’d just stare at that spot in the bed where you were supposed to be. Questioning if I did the right thing. I went to pick up the phone so many times, but I was worried I’d only make it worse.” I confess things I never told her.

“How many weeks until you put someone else in that spot in the bed?” she asks, raising her lashes to look at me.

“Haze…” I beg her not to go down this road as her eyes search my face.

“You’re right. I don’t want to know. Not any more than you want to know about him.”

We sit in silence for a moment. I’m desperately trying to think of the right words to say. Something that will salvage what was an otherwise good day.

“I’m sorry,” she says at last, breaking the silence. “I fucked itup. Maybe we just need to… make an agreement about that. I don’t ask about the in-between, and you don’t either. We just live in the bubble we’re in for the next few weeks, and we make the best of it.”

“If that’s what you want.”

She downs the rest of her beer and sets the bottle on the windowsill.

“What I want is sleep after this long day.” She gives me a soft smile and stands. “You coming in soon?”

“You go on ahead. I’ll be in in a while. I just want to sit out here and watch the stars for a bit while I still got ’em at night.”

“No stars in Cincinnati?”

“Not like this.”

---