“Yes,” I said. “Yes.” Then I reached up and laced my fingers through his thick black hair and drew his face to mine. He took off my glasses and kissed me, and I thought, for the thousandth time since meeting him, I’d never been kissed so well in my life.
In the bedroom, I was impatient, peeling off my shirt and then Heath’s, but he gripped my wrists to make me slow down. I pulled him to the bed, but the more urgently I moved, the more he resisted. Every time I pressed against him, he would pause whatever incredibly delicious thing he was doing, fix his eyes on mine, and gently push me away. He grazed his fingers over every plane of my face.
In the light from the hallway, I could see that his brown eyes had lightened to a pure, reflective amber—the way they did anytime he was tired. His lips parted, then pressed together. It seemed like there was something he wanted to say.
“What is it?” I gave him a playful shake even as alarm shuddered through me. This was always tricky territory for me—opening up, talking about my feelings. And Heath and I didn’t usually go there, but this night felt different. He shook his head and kept staring at me with those amber eyes. There was something more than tiredness in them—something I’d never witnessed before. He was afraid, afraid to tell me something.
Suddenly I was afraid too. I had a crazy urge to cover his mouth with my hands or to run out of the room. But I didn’t do either. Instead I calmly pulled aside the sheet, tugged down his underwear, and went to work on his body until all thought of conversation had been forgotten.
Later, he pulled the sheet over my shoulders and murmured in my ear. A simple wedding, he said—maybe in our backyard, or even at the courthouse. A honeymoon in the Caribbean. I nodded to all of it. The details of a wedding were irrelevant to me. Neither of us had enough family to count and only a handful of friends. What mattered was we were back to normal. Whatever he might have wanted to say, he’d changed his mind. The delicate balance between us was restored. I was safe.
Heath pressed a kiss against my hair, and I burrowed into the blankets, my eyes fixed on the diamond band on my left hand. It winked in the bar of light from the bathroom. Heath had gotten it sized to fit me perfectly.
It was perfect.
Everything was perfect.
Sometime in the night, I felt the blankets jerk and I woke, disoriented. The streetlights had shut off and the room was ink black. Heath, on his hands and knees, was mumbling and pawing at the covers, like he was searching for something.
“Break the mirror,” he said. “Break it. Smash it.”
He leapt up and darted across the room, yanking up the blinds on the bay of windows in our bedroom. He laid his hands on the wavy old pane of the center window, gently at first, his fingers spreading outward. Between them, I could see the cloud of his breath on the glass.
“Heath?” I said, but there was no answer. Only the sound of his breathing. It was heavy, like he’d just burst over some invisible finish line.
“We can open the window, if you want.” I could hear a tremor in my voice. Maybe he was having a panic attack and needed fresh air. I told myself to stay calm.
“Do you—” I started.
With no warning, he balled his hands into fists and smashed them into the window. The glass cracked but didn’t shatter. I gasped, then he drew back again, ramming his fists clear through to the other side. The window splintered, breaking into a million triangles.
A moth fluttered around his head, and the sheer voile curtains billowed behind him. He held his hands out, palms up, and a beaded line of blood trickled down his forearms. His eyes were wide open but hollow, and the look on his face stopped my breath. It was a triumph I’d never witnessed on anyone’s face before.
“I did it, Mom,” he said.
I shrank back against the wooden headboard and waited—for what, I didn’t know. After a few seconds, Heath moved to the bed and lay down again, curling his body away from me. I heard him sigh once, deeply, then begin to snore.
I eased off the bed and crept around to the other side. It was hard to see in the dim light, but the worst cut seemed to run along the edge of his hand, all the way down past his wrist—a good three inches and a series of angry, oozing crosshatches across his knuckles. But the bleeding had already slowed, even though some of it had soaked into the blue sheet beneath him.
In the kitchen, I made myself a cup of tea and drank it standing up, staring out the back door, willing my hammering heart to slow. I flung open the door of the pantry. Rows of cans and boxes and packages lining every shelf. Plenty of food for now. Plenty for always. I counted until my breath evened out.
The next morning, when I got out of the shower, Heath was sweeping the floor. He shook his head when I asked him what the dream had been about.
“I don’t remember.” He squatted and swept the glass into the dustpan.
“You don’t remember anything?”
“No.” He dumped the pan into a garbage bag.
“Was it something about your mother?” I asked, my throat closing with dread.
The question hung in the air between us. Here was his chance to tell me anything he’d held back. Here was my chance to do the same.
“You said something about a—”
“Daphne,” he interrupted. “It was just a bad dream. No point in talking about it. But I’m sorry about the window.”
He slung the bag over his shoulder. Something in the clipped tone of his words, the closed look on his face that I’d never seen before, kept me from pushing any further. I had the distinct impression that we’d ventured into a tenuous place. That if I wasn’t careful, I could lose him. I nodded my assent, and he left the room.
The nightmares continued, at least two or three times a week. Occasionally Heath got physical, delivering a particularly fierce kick or jab to my ribs. Once I caught an elbow on my jaw, leaving me tender and bruised. When Lenny saw me at the office the next day, her eyes got big, and she sent Kevin on a coffee run.
Her silence made me nervous. “It was an accident,” I said. “He was asleep—dreaming—and got agitated. I just happened to be in the way, that’s all.”
“Did he mention what he was dreaming about? Zombie Nazis? Killer T. rexes? The IRS?”
I avoided her gimlet eye. “He said he didn’t remember.”
“Maybe it was about his mysterious, murky past, that he doesn’t like discussing with you or anyone. Which you let him get away with because y’all seem to have this weird pact where you don’t talk either.”
I sighed. “Everybody has a right to privacy. Some of us just need more than others.”
“I know,” she said. “And I’m not trying to pry, I swear. I’m just . . . I love you, Daph. And I think it might be a relief to let it all go.”
“Mm-hm,” I said.
“Something to think about,” she said. “That’s all.”
“We need to put the Mathison drawings into CAD,” I threw over my shoulder as I stalked off in the direction of our minikitchen.
“I love you,” she yelled after me.
“I love you too,” I yelled back, and that was the end of that.
She might’ve been off base thinking Heath was an abuser, but she was right that the nightmares were a sign of something more going on with him. The truth was, I had known for a while now that below Heath’s perfect exterior, inside him, lay a wilderness—I had recognized it that first night because I had the same thing. Before, it had made me feel connected to him in a way I couldn’t put into words. But now I knew there was something seriously wrong—something my fiancé didn’t think he could tell me.
And it occurred to me, for the first time, that both of us could end up lost—so easily and without any hope of rescue—in that vast, hostile wilderness.
Chapter Five