Sage’s stomach was a bustling butterfly sanctuary as she moved down the uneven hall, toward her childhood bedroom. Upstairs, she could hear the sleep sounds coming from her parents, familiar in a déjà vu kind of way. In her youth, those sounds had signaled peace. The chance to move around her home without having to witness the sickness surrounding her parents like sticky gray clouds. Without being the focus of an irritable hungover crying jag or tirade.
She’d never felt anything but alone inside the house, but with Belmont’s steady footsteps thunking behind her on the floorboards, she was…surrounded. That’s how large his energy was. It filled every available space and slipped in between the strands of her hair and beneath her clothes. It bombarded her, replacing her dejection with awareness. He draped her in static, lifting her skin in goose bumps and sensitizing every inch of her body. Before they’d kissed, Belmont had been capable of doing that to her, but those reactions were now multiplied by a thousand. A million.
And just because they were in silent opposition about him going into the mine didn’t mean he deserved to have so much of her resentment. Right that moment, however, she had nowhere else to place it. She could cast the unwanted emotion out like a fly-fishing line, and his presence was so big, it would probably land on him anyway. She didn’t want to revisit the places that had shaped her. Didn’t want to peel back layers and let people in on her secret: She was nothing but a big old faker. Her wedding planning skills had been a stroke of luck that she’d bolstered by poring over magazines and scouring the Internet. Nothing about her was polished or put together—it was all an act. She would always be that poor Alexander girl.
Where did the old Sage start and the new one begin? She no longer had the energy to maintain the illusion of glass-half-full wedding planner. Belmont would see the real her if she lowered her guard completely. He saw everything. And while she was darn proud of what she’d accomplished without proper schooling or encouragement, having him acknowledge that she was a fraud would knock her right off the pedestal he’d placed her on.
So what had she done? Offered to show him her room—the lowest possible pit of despair—just to get her fall from grace out of the way. His presence usually reassured her, but just then, she wanted to turn around and beat his chest with her fists. How dare he come to Sibley and force her to reveal herself? How dare he take away the one thing that could have kept her warm at night? The fact that once upon a time, she’d won the devotion of this extraordinary man.
How long would it last once he saw her worst?
Sage knew the exact moment Belmont realized what she was doing, too. His hand landed on her shoulder just outside the door, slowing her to a stop. “Sage,” he said, so close to the back of her head, his breath bathed her neck. “Let’s make a trade.”
She didn’t want a different plan. Didn’t want more sweetness from him. She just wanted to rip off the Band-Aid, but she answered anyway, in a dull voice. “What do you mean?”
“A place for a place.” His frustration over having to knit words and explanations together was clear. “You show me something that’s important to you, a place or a thing or a story. And I’ll give you the same.” He paused. “If you want…the same from me.”
The offer was too tempting to turn down. A chance to get inside Belmont’s head? It was a place long denied to everyone. Maybe once he realized Sage wasn’t perfect, he would change his mind about wanting to know her more, but…she loved this man. Seemed like she’d loved him for a million years. If there was the slightest possibility she could repair what was damaged inside him—with words, with actions—she had to seize it. “I show you my room, you tell me something no one else knows?”
His swallow was audible. “Yes.”
Not wanting to give him time to change his mind, Sage turned the rusted brass knob and pushed the door open.
Since arriving back in Sibley, she hadn’t ventured into the room. There was no reason to. No fond memories remained inside the ten-foot-by-ten-foot space. No pennants from the local sports team or graduation pictures taped to the wall. There was nothing. The black mold that she’d desperately tried to scrub away and hide behind paint had taken over, crawling up the edges toward the ceiling, framing the windows like some macabre outline. Obviously there had been a leak directly upstairs, because a huge chunk of the ceiling had caved in, the torn bulge hanging suspended in the center of the room. Above it, the ceiling beams were visible along with a hole that peeked into the second-floor bathroom.
Sage straightened her spine and edged into the room, staying close to the wall just in case the rest of the room decided to cave in. When her foot nudged an empty bottle of whiskey, she pulled her leg back and kicked it across the room, not so much as flinching when it shattered against the dingy skirting board. God, it felt good. The resentment she’d been harboring broke free and ran amok inside of her.
Her gaze shot toward Belmont, and as expected, the man looked like he’d just seen the ghost of Napoleon. The second he fully entered the room, it was entirely new. He had that effect on everything. Instead of a scene from a nightmare, it now looked like a movie set, the hero arriving to save the day.
But she didn’t want to be saved. She wanted to be her own hero. Even if she failed, at least it would be at her own expense. Not at the expense of others, like her parents. Like Belmont. The room was the epicenter of everything she’d run away from. The worst parts of her upbringing that slipped into her nightmares regularly. Recognizing the self-pity didn’t make it any easier to avoid. It rose up and swallowed her whole.
“I’m so angry. I don’t want to be, but I am,” Sage heaved out. “Did you know I could get mad? Did you know I’m not serene and understanding all the time?”
Belmont was still. So still. But dead focused on her. “Tell me why you’re angry.”
She crunched a piece of broken glass beneath her heel, grinding down. “Because I hate feeling responsible. I hate it. Why should I feel responsible when this is what they gave me?” She lifted her hands and dropped them helplessly. “I should have laughed when my mother called and told me Augie was trying to kill my father. This place almost killed me. Everything inside of me. I left here a shell. And I decorated myself, same as I decorated churches. I’m a lie.”
He was silent for long beats, thoughts whizzing through the blue of his eyes. “I won’t deny you’re the kind of beautiful that makes me hungry, Sage, but you’re no shell. God, no.” His tread creaked across the floor in her direction. “Call yourself a lie? You proved yourself wrong by coming back here. You can’t turn off your sense of responsibility, your love. Your beauty runs so deep, maybe even you can’t understand it.”
Her anger tried to nosedive, but she held on for dear life. “You can’t do this,” she cried out. “You can’t say and do the right thing every time. Just let me be pissed off. Let me feel guilty and shitty and robbed. Okay?”
“Okay.” She reeled a little at the loss of his stare, the weight of it falling to the floor. Before she could ask what he was looking for, he produced an uneven metal rod. Or a pipe. At some stage, it had probably been part of the deteriorating plumbing, but she stopped speculating when he pressed the cold length of it into her hand. “Be mad. I’m right here with you.”
Her laugh was more a brittle exhale than anything else. “You don’t want to see me break things. You want me to pretty them up. You want me to make you better. Pretty you up.” Air razed the inside of her windpipe. “We’re just like them.”
“No. We’re going to fight until we’re not.” He nodded at the pipe. “Right now is about you, though. Get as ugly as you want and I’m going to stand right here, having your back.”
A huge, horrendous sob broke from her throat, freedom finding its mark in the center of her chest. She walked toward the closest piece of furniture—a bureau. Surprisingly, it had held up pretty well, the little pink rosebuds she’d painted on the surface still visible beneath the dust and grime. She pulled out the top drawer, wincing at the sound of scraping, splintered wood. And then she bashed it with the pipe, again and again, until spikes and nails were all that remained. Chunks of lumber flew in every direction, so she closed her eyes during the downward swings to protect herself. Every drawer received the same treatment, the muscles aching in her arms in a satisfying way. So satisfying. Her teeth hurt from being clenched, her throat sore from gritting out unintelligible words. By the time she’d finished, her heart was going wild inside her rib cage. A good wild. The kind that made a person feel like they could jump ten feet high.
When she dropped the metal onto the ground, she drooped, only to find her back pressed to Belmont’s chest. He didn’t touch her, he simply stood there and propped her up while she caught her breath, his heartbeat eternal against her.
“Impressive,” he rumbled.
And she laughed for the first time ever inside her childhood bedroom.