Four Letter Word

“Don’t be scared of me,” he urged in a stressed voice, putting a firm but calming pressure on my neck. “Don’t ever be scared of me, Syd. I’d die before hurting you.”

I swallowed his words and locked them inside my heart.

He would. Brian wasn’t lying. He’d never hurt me. I knew that.

“I know,” I whispered, curling my fingers around his arm. “I just need to know what’s going on. I need you to talk to me.”

“I will,” he promised. “Let me get us outta here and I will.”

“Okay.”

He heard my reply but he waited before letting go, keeping hold of me and looking into my eyes while taking his other hand and brushing his thumb across my cheek.

It was a soothing gesture. This was Brian taking the time to make sure my okay really meant okay. That I wasn’t just saying it to get answers. That I wasn’t scared.

I wasn’t. Not of him.

Of what he might tell me? Yes, but I was good at hiding that.

He let me go.

I buckled my seat belt and watched through the windshield as Brian hurried around the front of the car. He climbed inside, started it up, and pulled out onto the main road.

My hands stayed tangled together on my lap as I waited for Brian to start talking, willing my anxious breaths to stay quiet so I wouldn’t miss even the slightest sound from his direction. I didn’t know how far he needed to take us before I could get any answers, but I promised myself I’d be okay with however far that needed to be, that I could wait until he was ready because he would be ready. He promised me he’d talk and I believed him.

Five miles felt like five hours. My foot tapped restlessly against the floorboard and I cursed red lights like I hated their very existence and whoever the bastard was who invented them.

So much for patience. I was ready to crawl out of my skin and scream into the night. My palms stung from the bite of my nails and my stomach twisted.

Then it was over and the only thing I felt was relief.

I didn’t know if it was coincidence that made Brian pull over at the exact moment I contemplated throwing the gear into neutral and forcing him to stall, or if he had meant to drive us here, to this exact spot.

Brian shifted out of gear and cut the engine.

Seconds passed. The silence in the car threatened to swallow me up.

I unbuckled and turned in my seat, hoping to tempt conversation.

Brian’s chest heaved with slow, filling breaths and his shoulders pulled back while he stared ahead out the windshield, clenching his hands nervously in his lap.

I sucked on my lip and waited. He didn’t make me wait long.

“Got hit hard in February with snow this year,” he began in a low voice. “Don’t know what it was like in Raleigh, but I’m assuming it was the same as it was here. Seemed like every week we were getting slammed with another storm. Sun would come out during the day and melt it, making the roads a fuckin’ mess; then at night temps would drop and that shit would freeze.”

“It was the same in Raleigh,” I told him, remembering back to last winter. “I was scared to drive in it.”

“I wasn’t,” he mumbled tightly. “Had a truck before I got this. Made getting around easy, especially in bad conditions. I always went out. Didn’t even mind sliding a little.”

I swallowed uncomfortably before saying, “That can be terrifying.”

“I was fuckin’ stupid,” he hissed, turning to look at me then. “Had no business being out on the roads when they were like that but I wanted the rush. That feeling of nearly losing all control, the one that terrifies you, babe, I fuckin’ loved that. I chased it. It’s why I surfed. Which is why I can say without a doubt that I would’ve been driving in that last storm no matter what.”

I knew what storm Brian was talking about. It was the very one that kept me at work because of the warning of black ice. The ER was slammed that night from accidents.

My stomach knotted.

“Brian …”

He turned away with a cold laugh and resumed looking out the windshield again.

“You’re feeling sorry for me already and you have no idea what I’ve done.”

“I love you. I’ll love you no matter what it is,” I confessed, watching his eyes pinch shut as if hearing that caused him pain. “It’s true.”

“You won’t,” he said quietly. “Not like this. It’ll be different.” He looked at me once more and whispered slowly through a thick voice, “I don’t wanna tell you.”

Tears fell onto my cheeks.

Brian was afraid. He was afraid hearing this would change how I felt about him, that this would change us.

This was the bad in his life he held on to, the bad he never spoke about.

The bad I was healing him from.

I reached across the console and grabbed his hand, squeezing it between both of mine.

“Tell me right now so I can tell you I love you,” I pleaded. “Just like this. Just like how I do now. Tell me.”

He held my eyes for a long second, smiled a little, and said, “You’re really fuckin’ pretty when you lie, Wild.”

I leaned closer.

“I’m not lying.”

“How much do you love me right now?” he asked, face deadly serious. “Scale of one to ten.”

“Eleven.”

“That man back there at Friendly’s, you saw him looking at me?”

I nodded.