You Run ,I chase

Chapter 11:

"You run from me," he says, "I chase."

His breath is warm on my mouth. The Harley's metal is cold through the torn dress. And his body's so close I can feel the heat coming off him, feel his chest move when he breathes.

"Let me go," I say.

"Say it like you mean it."

"Let me go, Kael."

And he does.

Just like that. Steps back. Both hands up. Two feet of wet gravel between us.

And I hate it. That's the thing I'll never admit out loud. I hate that he let go, because for one second there — one stupid, insane second — I wanted him not to.

"There," he says. "That's me not laying a hand on you. That's me keeping my word."

"You just slammed me into a bike."

"I put my hand on yours because you were about to steal my bike. The bike part I'll apologize for. The rest of it —" He shrugs. "You were running."

"I wasn't running."

"Elara. You were standing in my lot at six in the morning with a dead phone and a picture of your mama in your bag, about to steal a motorcycle you don't know how to ride. What do you call that?"

I don't answer.

"I call that running."

"I'm trying to protect you," I say, and my voice breaks right in the middle of it and I hate that even more. "You don't get it. You've got a bar and a town and thirty men and none of it — none of it — means anything to a man like Marcus. He'll go home and he'll make one phone call and he'll have your liquor license pulled. He'll make another one and your mortgage gets called. He'll make a third and every one of your boys gets a visit from a state trooper who owes his daddy a favor. You think a cut on my shoulders scares him? He owns the tailor."

Kael listens to the whole thing. Doesn't interrupt once.

Then he says, "You finished?"

"Yes."

"Good. Now let me tell you something about men like your husband." He walks past me — not close, a wide berth, and I notice he does that on purpose — and leans on the fender of a blue bike two down from the Harley. "I've met about a hundred of them. I grew up in a house where one of them came for dinner every Sunday. And there's one thing I know about all of them, every single time."

"What."

"They don't fight." He crosses his ankles. "They hire. They threaten. They call the county. They call the state. They call their daddy. But the second they gotta stand in the rain in their own two shoes and put their own hands up, they fold. Every time. Because they've never had to. Somebody's always done it for them."

"Marcus isn't like that."

"Marcus put four fingers on your throat and then called a lawyer. He didn't come himself. He sent a suit with an umbrella." Kael tilts his head. "Baby, that's not a man. That's a bill collector."

And I want to believe him. God, I want to.

"I need to go," I say.

"You got nowhere to go."

"I'll find somewhere."

"With what? Your dead phone? Your twenty dollars?" He says it flat, not mean. "You know what's out there for you right now? A detective with a rental car and a picture of your face, and every gas station between here and the interstate is gonna have it by tonight. You get on the road without money and without a name, you don't make it two exits."

"Then I'll take my chances."

"On what? On a county you don't know? On a truck driver who's nice?" He shakes his head. "I've seen what happens to women who take their chances. I've seen it up close. And I'm not gonna stand here in my own lot and watch it happen to you."

"So what, I just stay? In your bar? Wearing your jacket? Forever?"

"Three days."

I blink. "What?"

"Three days." He holds up three fingers. "You stay three days. Not forever. Three days, you eat, you sleep, you get your feet healed up and your head straight. In three days the sheriff's got me a file on your husband and I know what I'm dealing with. And at the end of it, if you still want to go, I'll put you on a bus myself and buy the ticket and nobody in this town will ever say a word about it." He lowers his hand. "That's the deal. That's the whole deal."

I stand there in the rain.

"Three days," I say.

"Three days."

"And you'll let me go."

"And I'll let you go."

"On a bus. With a ticket."

"On a bus. With a ticket." He says it like a vow. "I don't lie, Elara. I don't have it in me. Ask anybody in this town."

I think about Marcus. Marcus lied so smooth you didn't even notice it happening. He'd tell me something and two days later the thing he told me would be the opposite, and somehow it'd be my fault for remembering it wrong.

"Three days," I say.

Kael nods. Then he pushes off the fender.

"Come inside. You're soaked."

"I'm not done talking about this."

"Neither am I. But you're soaked and your feet are gonna get infected and then you'll be a whole different problem." He's already walking. "Inside."

I follow him.

That's the worst part. I follow him like a dog following a truck.

Back in the bar, he pushes a chair out with his boot. "Sit."

I sit.

He goes behind the bar and comes back with a plastic bag and a bottle of something brown and two clean towels. Sets them down. Sits down across from me with his elbows on his knees.

"Give me your foot."

"Kael—"

"Give me your foot, Elara."

I put my foot up on the rung of his chair.

He unwraps the old bandage. The cut's scabbed ugly, dark red going black at the edges, and it must look bad because his jaw does that thing.

"It's fine," I say.

"It's not fine." He pours the brown stuff on a towel and dabs. It stings so bad my eyes water.

"You know," he says, without looking up, "for a woman who ran from a man who hurt her, you spent a whole lot of last night apologizing."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"You said I'm sorry four times. You said please don't before I even touched you. You said don't do that when I said I wasn't gonna hit you." He wraps the new bandage. "You know what that tells me?"

"Tell me."

"That you got in trouble for things that weren't your fault. For so long you started doing the apologizing before anybody even accused you." He starts on the other foot. "What'd he get you for?"

"What?"

"All that apologizing. What were the things? What was he mad about?"

I open my mouth and then close it.

Because nobody's ever asked me that. Not the doctor. Not the deputy. Not one person in two years has ever asked me what he was mad about.

"Everything," I say.

He waits.

"The butter was cold," I say. "It was one time. The butter was in the fridge and he wanted it soft for his toast and I hadn't thought of it, so he —" I stop. "The window was open when he came home, and the rain had come in, and he said I did it on purpose. I didn't. The dog was scratching at the door and I let him out and the window was already open."

"Uh huh."

"He got a parking ticket once and I was in the car. I said sorry. I wasn't driving. I said sorry anyway."

"Uh huh."

"The phone. He took my phone because I forgot to charge it. He said if I can't take care of a phone what kind of wife am I." My voice is doing something weird. It's getting quiet. "He made me leave it on the counter for a week. I couldn't call my mama. She died that month. She was dead before I got a phone back."

Kael's hands go still on my foot.

He doesn't say anything.

He doesn't say I'm sorry. He doesn't say that's terrible. He just sits there with his head down and his hands on my ankle, and after a long time he says, real quiet:

"I want you to think about something."

"What?"

"Everything you just told me. The butter. The window. The parking ticket. The phone." He looks up. "Did you actually do anything wrong?"

I stare at him.

"Because from where I'm sitting," he says, "a woman who does the butter cold and leaves a window open and forgets to charge her phone isn't a woman who did something wrong. That's a woman who's alive. That's a normal Tuesday. That's what a life looks like." He wraps the bandage. "You got punished for being alive. And then you got so used to it that you started punishing yourself when he wasn't even in the room."

I'm crying.

I don't even notice it starting. There's just water on my face and it's not the rain this time.

"Don't," I say. "Don't be nice to me."

"Why not?"

"Because I don't know what to do with it." My voice comes out ugly. "When he was nice, it meant something was coming. It always meant something was coming."

"It don't work like that," he says. "Sometimes a man's just nice."

"Not the ones I know."

Kael ties off the bandage.

Then he stands up, and he pulls his chair around the table so he's sitting next to me instead of across, and he leans in a little. Not a lot. Enough.

"Look at me," he says.

And I look at him.

His eyes are so dark this close. There's a little green in them at the edge, where the lamp hits. The scar cuts down past his eyebrow and he doesn't hide it, doesn't even seem to know it's there.

"I'm gonna say something and I want you to hear it," he says. "You're not staying here because I'm nice. You're staying here because a man put his hands on you and I got a problem with it, and because there's a detective coming and I got a problem with that too. And because in three days you're getting on a bus and I'm buying the ticket, and it's gonna be the first thing I ever did that I felt good about in years." He stops. "That's all this is. You understand me?"

And I should say yes. I should say yes, I understand, thank you.

Instead my eyes drop to his mouth.

It's just for a second. Half a second. My eyes drop to his mouth and then they come back up and he's already seen it.

He's already seen it.

His jaw moves. His hand comes up slow — so slow, giving me every chance to move — and settles on my jaw, and his thumb drags across my lip. Not the split one. The good one.

"Don't look at me like that," he says, very low, "unless you mean it."

"I don't know what I mean."

"Yeah you do."

And then there's a bang at the front door.

Chapter 11 Ends.