Page 21 of Them Bones

They didn’t live in an awful area, exactly. Ma called it “working class”. Cary told her to get a fucking job, then.

Theirs was one of few detached houses, the single garage visibly sagging, and the lawn was more dandelions and dirt than grass. The neighbour to the right had taken apart a rusted-out dirt bike on the lawn that summer and left it there. The neighbour to the left had dismantled their rotting siding but the husband had walked out on them, so the mom had stapled up blue tarps over the exposed Home Depot panels. That was two years ago.

Apart from the occasional OD, the cops didn’t come around too much. Most of the men worked at the nearby lumber mill, often carpooling because half of them had DUIs or their cars had been repossessed, but they were far enough outside of the city that serious instances of violence were uncommon. It was mostly petty theft or domestics. Still, Shane didn’t want her walking to the bank alone because it would be dark by the time she got home and wasn’t safe.

“Dustin walks to the bakery in the dark all the time,” she said.

“Not anymore,” he’d replied, crossing his arms. “When he wants his job back, I’ll walk him there myself.”

Nobody had ever cared about their safety before.

This weary, detached version of Shane in front her was unsettling, and she didn’t like it. He disappeared to his room early, without so much as a word.

She sat in the living room alone, the blue light of the tv flickering until long after midnight. To her disappointment, he hadn’t resurfaced to carry her to her bed and she was surprised how much it stung.

She didn’tactuallyfall asleep, anymore. But she knew after a few minutes of pretending, he’d wrap his arms around her and pull her close. It was the only time he ever touched her, and she found herself willing the hours to tick away just for those brief few minutes every night that she was able to bury her face in his armpit and press her fingers to his neck, forearm, back, without him shrugging her off or stepping away. She had hoped after a few days that he’d let her get close even though she knew instinctually that he wouldn’t let her kiss him. Still, she thought maybe she could push his limits, a little.

She’d been wrong. The guy was infallible.

By 2:00am, she decided to shelve her pride and tiptoed down the hall. She pressed her ear to his door and didn’t hear anything, so without knocking she slipped inside his room in the dark, shutting the door behind her and leaning on it.

“Shane,” she whispered. He didn’t answer. “Shane...”

The covers rustled. She could feel that he was awake, so she waited.

“You shouldn’t be in here,” he finally whispered back.

She slid down the door, crossing her legs.

“I’m not going anywhere until you talk to me.”

He sighed, and she could picture him in the dark; jaw taught with annoyance, fists balled, the tendons in his forearms standing out, his eyes narrowed into slits staring at the ceiling.

“I need to leave,” he said. “Me being here? It’s going to end.”

She tried to listen to the words in all the spaces he was leaving, all the things he wasn’t saying. Despite his stillness, despite the muted tone of his voice, he was atornado.He was radiating anger, and fear, and something else that he was trying to push down. Something heated.

“Why do you think we’re going to end?”

Shemeantto say ‘it’. Why do you think ‘it’s’ going to end. She could feel his eyes on her in the dark.

“Everything good ends, Laney” he bit out.

He rarely said her name, not to her face. She loved the way he said it, like it was a hard piece of candy that he was rolling around on his tongue, coating his mouth with her.

She ignored her staccato heartbeat. She ignored the tremble in her hands. And she took one last, lingering look at her pride before chucking it out the window.

She crawled on her hands and knees over to the mattress, reached out in the blackness for the covers, and slid beneath them.

He was rigid, a human statue, but she shut off her thoughts and just pressed herself to his side, snaking one arm around his waist, the other upward, her hand sliding underneath his neck, tips of her fingers resting on the side of his throat. She sunk her head into his armpit, like she did every night, and breathed him in.

They laid there like that for a long time, him stiff and awkward and too still, her molding herself to the contours of his body. It might have been minutes, it might have been hours, she didn’t really know. But she forced herself to stay awake.And eventually, she felt him thaw so slightly it was almost imperceptible. He shifted his right hand, his thumb brushing against her lower back. Just once. But it was enough, and she finally drifted off to sleep.

She woke up in her own bed, tucked in tight like always. On her bulletin board was a picture of two dragons, intertwined and blazing with heat. The blue-green one was fixated on the black monster, looking like she was going to devour him, but the black dragon looked sad, somehow. Like he knew he was going to die and was going to let it happen anyway.

Fucking Dustin,she thought.

But she had to admit the drawing unnerved her a little, too.

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