Nate never knew what that meant.
If either Nate or Bob had been deep, pondering kind of men, they might wax philosophical about consequences and how the decisions made in your life either help you or hamper you, but no matter what, they’re yours to keep. But Nate wasn’t this kind of man. Mostly he thought Bob was simple, and maybe a bit thick in the skull.
Until now.
The phrase came to him in the early morning, the reddish haze, sun behind closed but awake eyelids: you can’t outrun your own skin, and Nate sat up, heart thudding, and it occurred to him that he was trying—desperately—to do just that.
His hiking boots sat in the corner, mud caked, from his long walks through the forests he’d long forgotten about, his thigh muscles out of practice, straining under the long treks. Hours he’d be out there, sometimes, even in the same section of woods he’d tried to find Lucia in.
He wasn’t looking for her, he would have insisted to anyone who found him, and it would have been true. He was mostly just trying to pass the time doing something he remembered enjoying when he was younger. The smell of damp dirt and rotting vegetation was the perfume of childhood, wet and clinging to his skin and erasing troubles with a muddy thumbprint just as easily now as it did then.
He couldn’t have explained to anyone how hard it was not to have a purpose, or rather to have your purpose be yanked from you as quickly as a magician’s tablecloth, and to still be able-bodied, able-minded, just empty. He couldn’t have talked to anyone about how he was shelled, hollowed out in the middle, and wandering, because then people would say but what about the girl? Like he was a monster and how dare he think of himself.
But when you’re alone, you can’t help but think of yourself.
He thought of Alecia, her anger lighting a fire under his skin until he pushed her out of his mind. He thought of Gabe, his warm, smiling little boy, the feel of his arms around Nate’s neck, the smell of his hair, slightly damp, slightly sweet, a little boyish smell, a sticky sourness in his neck.
He spent precious little time worrying about Lucia, and he admitted only to himself that he wished he’d never met her, even though for months prior, he’d spent more time than he’d ever admit preoccupied with her. Worrying about her, wondering if she was all right, thinking about her awful, deranged brother, even once following Lenny through the mall, in and out of Rubic, a well-known head shop, to his truck—the one he and Lucia had shared—until he got in and drove away.
Something about the way her mouth would twist when she said certain things, a whisper of a confidence, the shy duck of her head when she admitted anything at all about herself, like she had no right to do so. She stayed later in his classroom than she needed to, her feet propped up comfortably on the desk in front of him, a ratty, secondhand platform heel bouncing, the skin on her thigh rippling so slightly with each bounce, her legs bare. He didn’t look too hard at her legs, in fact, avoided looking at them. He did like making her laugh, a high feminine tinging that tickled the back of his brain.
He couldn’t have explained all that. She laughed so little, that was all. Her life seemed like such a shabby confusing mess to him that he worked really hard for those laughs.
She’d say these wild things—throwing broad proclamations at him, just to see how he’d juggle them, and it was this reckless flinging of her soul that he found so intriguing. He wasn’t even sure what parts of her ramblings were true. I can walk on my hands. It’s true, my mother was in the circus and she taught me before she had to go away. I’ve been reading Jung, you know he’s full of slightly less shit than Nietzsche. She was like a constantly streaming ticker tape of isolated statements, fact and fiction tangled together, indistinguishable.
And sometimes she’d stay late and perch on the edge of his desk, his arm brushing up against her leg until he moved his chair a few inches away. He was careful to keep the distance, but he can’t say he didn’t notice. He can’t say only now, and only to himself, that she’d tongue-tie him, his throat dry. And then the kiss, the thing that should have ended all their talks and he probably should have blown her off after that, or least discouraged her in earnest, but he didn’t. He didn’t think about the kiss, the way her fingers sought his skin between the buttons of his shirt, the warmth of her skin, the confusion in her face that he’d turn her away—she’d been so sure he wouldn’t. No, he avoided the corner of his own brain where that kiss stayed, wedged between his first blow job (Melissa Kinney, seventeen, on the railroad trestle) and his last sexual encounter before meeting Alecia (in the bathroom at the QB and all he remembered was her legs wrapped around him, her back against the stall door—he couldn’t have even told you if it was the men’s room or not). It shone there in that corner, bright like the sun, only ever to be examined in periphery.
Then she came back one day like it never happened, asking him, did you know that Nietzsche died because he saved a horse? And hanging on his answer like he had any idea what the hell she was talking about and they were back, the way they were before the kiss.
She made him feel.
It was this admission that pushed him into the woods, plowing through the underbrush, the thickets stuck to his pants, his legs, the way he plundered the depths of his mind, wondering if what everyone was saying about him was true. Sometimes he’d stop, his hands on his knees, and suck wind, his lungs bursting, and wonder if that was actually the thing. He wasn’t guilty of the things people said he was, but he wasn’t not guilty, either.
Except he didn’t kill her.
He was thinking about this, his guilty-but-not-guilty acts, when he saw a flash of something in front of him. A quick but deliberate movement, that of a person, not an animal in the thick, off to the left. He pushed his way through a wild, sticking raspberry bush, his neck suddenly sweating. He hadn’t come into the woods to find her. But he hadn’t considered what would happen if he did.
Would he call the police again? He stopped, considering. How would it look? What would she say? What would she do?
He heard a loud snap then, and a low rumbling groan.
Tentatively, he called out, “Lucia?” his voice shaking and wobbly. God he was so stupid, everyone would think so. How do you explain to people that growing up in the woods meant the woods became your only safe haven, the sounds of birds and the smell of far-off babbling creeks, the dew condensing on all the green leaves and the late afternoon sunlight filtering through the canopy of branches were things that felt like home, when home wasn’t a place he could go. He was safe here.
Except when he wasn’t.