Chapter Thirty-Eight
Helene
Kane had always looked powerful to me, felt powerful to me. But it wasn’t just his strength. It was the self-assured way he’d always been able to move back and forth so easily between his popular bad boy persona and the boy I’d known him to be who could never put stock in anything so trivial as popularity. It was the way he’d never cared who was looking when he was sitting across from me at lunch, even when his group of friends had saved him a seat at their always full table and I was sitting alone. It was the casual way he carried himself as though life could never touch him unless he gave it permission to. He was so powerful in my eyes that even the tears I’d seen him shed didn’t touch the masculinity that coursed through him to me—and frankly it was all about me when it came to those tears, because I was likely the only one who’d ever seen them.
But he wasn’t powerful right now. His shoulders were slumped, and his eyes stared at the hole in the ground, watching the coffin disappear more and more and more with every turn of the hand-crank. And when the undertakers were finished lowering the coffin, they stood there patiently, waiting for some direction.
“Is there anything we can do for you?” One of the young men asked Kane.
Kane didn’t respond; he was still staring at the hole in front of us.
“Could we just have a little time?” I asked.
“Of course, ma’am. Take all the time you need.” The men excused themselves.
Kane and I stood there silently, separated by a good many feet. My fingers were cold. It was an overcast foggy Wednesday morning. It was a strange fog that seemed intent to linger rather than burning off as the sun rose. It wasn’t misting; it was more like the fog was thick enough you could feel it on your skin, and everywhere I looked, brown, red and yellow leaves littered the ground. Frankly, it was my favorite kind of day. The kind that made me want to curl up in bed with a warm blanket and take a nap. The kind of day that deserved something hot in a mug held between one’s hands to keep them warm.
It was also an exceptionally confusing day, and I had no idea what to expect from it. I was angry. I was hurt. And it was the most confusing thing in the world feeling those things while I was heartbroken for Kane and his loss. Loss was a weird thing in this instance. His father was not a good man. I’m guessing he’d always been flawed in some way. Perhaps Kane’s mother had gotten to the point where she couldn’t handle the man anymore. I couldn’t fault a woman for that. I could, however, fault her for leaving Kane behind when she ran. All I really knew for sure was that she was gone before Kane was even a year old—and the reasons and why they might matter left town with her.
I watched him, but he wasn’t moving, and he remained silent. I wanted to touch him, hold him, be close to him. I was also terrified to, because I wasn’t sure I’d be able to let go again. And I needed to.
“Why did he have to hate me?” he asked, his voice barely loud enough for me to hear.
Not going to him wasn’t really an option after those words. I walked to him, clutching the sides of his waist from behind his body and resting my cheek between his shoulder blades. “I don’t know,” I said quietly in return.
He reached for my hands, pulling them to wrap around his waist. “We deserved a better life than this.”
I hated how quiet his voice was. It was a whisper, and it was choked. But he was so right, and I nodded, never pulling my cheek from his back. “Yeah, we did.”
We were silent for a while, and I listened to his heart beat. I could feel his inhalations shudder through his chest on occasion as though the emotion was coursing through him in waves that would rise and fall.
“I need you to go somewhere with me. It’s important.” He turned toward me, resting his palms on my shoulders for a moment, and then he let them run down my arms to my hands. “And I need you to do something for me.”
I stared at him, but I could feel my brow furrowing.
He tried to smile reassuringly at me, but it fell, and he looked away. He took his time looking back, and when he did, he didn’t even attempt to smile. “Just … just love me for a little while longer… That’s all I’m asking. A fraction of the rest of your life where you can … love me unconditionally and forgive me no matter what…” He nodded, but his expression was questioning, and his nod was nothing more than his desperate need to see me do the same. His eyes glossed over. “I’m begging you for that. Just for right now. You can take it back later. I promise, I’ll let you. I won’t even try to talk you out of it.”
I did nod then. “Okay.”
His lips pulled up slightly, and they didn’t fall this time, but his eyes were still glossy. “This isn’t going to be easy.” He took my hand and pulled me toward the nearby parking area, not giving me a chance to ask what that meant. I’m not sure I’d have had the nerve to ask anyway.
As we neared, I took my keys out of my coat pocket. He reached for my hand, taking them from me.
“Do you mind if I drive?”
I shook my head, and he opened my door for me before rounding the car to the driver’s door. The undertakers were standing nearby, politely waiting for us to leave. Kane lifted a hand in their direction, and they both nodded.
We headed toward his house once we were on the road, and I thought perhaps that’s where we were going. My mind instantly went to the way things had been up until a week and a half ago. I thought about making love to him, and I wondered if he initiated such a thing would I stop him, would I be able to say no to him. But that couldn’t be what he wanted from me. He’d said this would be difficult. Making love to him was all sorts of things for me. Difficult was not one of them. It was exceptionally easy in a way sex had never been for me before.
He passed by the side road that would lead to his house, and he continued on down the winding, curving highway through the hills. I knew what was out here, or more accurately what used to be, and as we neared the old gravel lot, my heart sped, and my breaths came in short choppy gasps. He was right. This wasn’t going to be easy. I hated even driving by this place, and the very thought of pulling over and stopping for longer than a second was causing a shit storm of panic to course through me.
When he slowed as we approached the empty gravel lot, I looked at him. “Kane…?”
He reached over and took my hand, and he squeezed it. But he didn’t look at me, and he pulled in regardless of my hesitation. He drove to the center of the lot, exactly where the old gas station used to sit, and he pulled to a stop, turning my car off.
He was silent, and I stared at my lap rather than look around. I didn’t want to see where we were. I didn’t want to feel what this place felt like. It was hell. And I didn’t need to look at it to be hurt by it.
“I knew I shouldn’t…” He finally spoke as he looked at me. “It wasn’t my intention to get involved with you—not with my…” He shrugged.
I glanced at him but looked back down, trying to hide the hurt.
He squeezed my hand. “Please look at me.”
I didn’t want to. There would be no hiding the pain when he saw my eyes swimming in tears, and I was feeling just vulnerable enough I didn’t want to share that with him. But when I didn’t look back right away, he released my hand, reached for my chin, and turned my face toward him. He smiled, but his eyes were as glossy as mine.
“But I knew I might never get the chance to see you again, and I couldn’t imagine a lifetime without that.” He ran his thumb across my chin. “And then…” He shook his head as he looked down at my lap. “And then I touched you.” He looked back up at me. “And it felt so good. God, you can’t imagine how good it feels.” His eyes kept shifting away nervously and then moving back to me. He was terrified. “I fell in love with you the very second I wrapped my arms around you in your classroom on that first night. And I knew … I’d made a mistake.”
A tear ran down my cheek, and he brushed it away, his lips pulling up in a sad smile.
“How do you give up something like this?” He studied my eyes but his lips were trembling. “I thought … I could stay for you. I could do this as long as I had you. I could live a life with you and not destroy us. But … it’s not your job to heal me. And that pressure is unfair to place on you when there’s no hope that you ever could. Because the fact of the matter is … you didn’t break me. I did.” He looked around, and a huff of breath left him as he took in our surroundings. “This place…” He shook his head, still letting his eyes rove. “…is a living, breathing reminder of what I—”
“Then we’ll leave together. Why can’t we do that?”
He smiled as his focus returned to me. “I’ve been running away for eleven years. I’m tired, Hell. And it doesn’t work.”
“But… You are running away.” I stared at him trying to figure him out. “If you’re leaving and you love me, then why can’t I come with you?”
He took a deep breath. “Because you can’t go where I’m going. You don’t belong there.”
I shook my head, trying to work out the words he was saying. He watched me, not elaborating in the least, and he finally put the key in the ignition and started the car. I just gaped at him, trying to keep the panic in check. I couldn’t take any more pain from this man, but for some reason, I knew more was coming.
He pulled out, heading away from the turnoff for his dad’s house. It was still foggy, and we drove slowly through a blanket of misty gray air. He didn’t accelerate to the speed limit, and I figured out quickly why. He pulled in at the old Sleepaway Motel. It had been vacant for years. The strip of ten rooms backed up to the thick woods behind it, and over the years, those woods seemed to have encroached and wrapped around the structure.
There were twists of brambles pressing in around the exterior walls, and the entire place looked ghostly and desolate—not that it had ever been a show stopper. Most of the windows were boarded over, and the ones that weren’t had been at one point, and the planks still laid on the ground.
Kane turned the car off, but before he opened the door to get out, he took a deep breath, and his fingers tightened on the steering wheel. I watched him, confused and horrified at the same time. When I reached for his hand, he peeled his fingers from the steering wheel. His fingers trembled as he fumbled with mine, and when I glanced at his face, the tendons in his neck were strained tight, and he was panting as though he were unable to get his lungs to work.
He looked at me, and it was pure panic I saw. He reached for my cheek, clutching against my jawline and pulling my face close to his. He kissed me, but his lips trembled, and I could feel the panting, shuddering breaths touching my mouth with each quick exhalation.
“You promised,” he whispered. “Just love me a little while longer. Okay?”
I nodded. “Kane…”
“It’s okay.” He reached for the door handle, and he held his focus on me for another moment before he climbed out.
I followed him, and when he rounded the front of the car and met me, he took my hand. He led me to the side of the building where the brambles were thick and met the side of the building. He led me through the twisted branches, holding them out of my way and taking my hand to help me balance as we picked our way through the mess.
It reminded me of our childhood in some strange way. We’d grown up playing in the woods between our homes. My family had moved to town when I’d been in junior high, but we’d traipsed through the wooded hills all the way up to that point, and even a few times after.
The gnarled branches scraped my bare legs, and thorns tore into my skin in a few places. I barely felt it, though, and I kept pushing my way through the tangles as Kane helped me. When we emerged, it was to the back of the strip hotel. There were broken and uneven concrete patios behind each of the ten rooms, and beyond that more trees, tangles, and brambles. The land dropped off steeply about fifteen feet past the patios, and it was a jagged rocky decent to the forest floor fifty feet below. The fog broke and moved through the trees, and garbage littered what ground I could see at the bottom of that steep hill. All around me I could smell mildew.
I didn’t like this place.
Kane led me to a patio just a few down from the end of the building, and he peeked into the unboarded window that looked into the hotel room, but he didn’t linger there. He turned, walking to the woods’ edge. There was a small outcropping of rock that jutted out from the ground like a small mossy cliff overlooking the drop off. He stood there, staring down at the forest floor far below, and when he released my hand, he stuffed his hands in his pockets. I remained quiet, watching him, confused and horrified at what was going to come next.
“I did something,” he said quietly.