Chapter 3
She got into the truck and started the engine, and he stood there in front of the vehicle, the headlights pouring over his body. She found some joyful irony in that. That she was the one driving away. When she had written a whole hit about the taillights on her father’s truck, and watching him leave.
This should be a triumph. As soon as she started back down the winding road to the main highway, she regretted trying to leave.
There was snow all over the road, and her tires were slick. She had four-wheel drive, but this was solid ice. The temperature had dropped with the passing of time, and the movement of the storm.
Her truck was slipping and sliding, and her heart was pounding. She tried to drive slow, tried not to put herself in a position where she would have to brake suddenly, which would cause her to slide right off the road and over the edge of the embankment. Her palms were slick. She rounded the corner, and had to slam on her brakes, because there was a giant tree down in the middle of the road. Stretching from end to end. Her breathing was ragged, and she could barely hear it over the sound of the wind whipping against the side of her truck.
Shit. What was she going to do? She couldn’t even turn around. The road was too narrow. And she would have to...to walk back up and...
There was a pounding on the door of the truck. She jumped, and turned toward the passenger side, and saw Flint standing there looking in the window. “Come back to the hotel,” he shouted.
He was shouting because of the roar of the wind; she knew that, except he still sounded angry.
“No, thanks.”
“Fucking hell, Tansey, don’t be suicidal because you don’t want to see me.”
He didn’t understand. It felt like suicide to see him. To be sharing air with him. To be sharing the same space with him. Because the problem was, he was still beautiful. And no matter how she had rewritten him into the perfect storybook villain, no matter how she tried to make herself remember only that terrible moment when he had shut all of his emotions off, and had been a blank wall she couldn’t see through, couldn’t reach through, couldn’t get through, when she saw him, she had to remember that he was a whole human being. A man. Flesh and blood.
A man who had kissed her, touched her, given her pleasure.
A man who had held her, and cared for her, and given her things that no one else ever had before. And then taken them away from her.
Yeah. It was easier to remember him as the collection of truths she had put into that song. Because every line had been true. But he was right. It had been a story. Carefully chosen details designed to create a neat narrative. One that highlighted the things that had been so good they were painful, the things that had cost her. The risks she had taken. But none of his.
She hadn’t put in all the ways he’d helped her, respected her, listened to her...
Hadn’t put any of his risk, any of his vulnerability into it. Because even though he’d never opened up to her, not all the way, even though he’d never told her why he was the way he was, she’d seen how he was. That being with her scared him sometimes.
All the fear, the vulnerability in her song... It had all been hers. And so in the end it had been about her pain, because she hadn’t given any credit to the idea that he might have had any.
But looking at him now, she knew the man. The whole man. Not just the one from the song.
And it made her ache.
It was why her little fantasy about running into him and coolly walking away could never actually happen. Because it wasn’t really Flint in that fantasy. Just a hollow stand-in that looked like him. Not one that embodied his heat, his life. Everything he was.
“Come on,” he said.
“I can’t turn around,” she said.
“I know,” he said. “If you get in the ditch right now, you’re never getting back out of it. And it’s too slick to try. So just get out of the truck and leave it here. No one else is getting past that tree either. We are going to have to get a chainsaw out and cut it into pieces to move it. And we could do it now, but to what end? There’s just going to be more obstacles down the road. There’s a hotel a quarter of a mile back that way.”
“We have to...walk back?”
“Yes. We both have to walk back. Because you were playing the part of idiot in a horror movie. Congratulations.”
“You’re being such an asshole,” she said.
“You too.”
And it was only then that she realized they were literally shouting at each other over the howl of the wind and through the window of her truck. And her own voice was ringing sharply around her, and she didn’t like it.
Reluctantly, she got out of the truck.
“Where are your bags?” he said, his voice hard.
“Just behind the seat...”
He reached back there and grabbed her duffel bag, and her guitar, slamming the door shut with his elbow.
“You don’t have to carry...”
“If I were you, I would give it a rest. You can stop telling me what I can and can’t do, and what I should and shouldn’t do, because people who run off into blizzards don’t get to make proclamations.”
He wasn’t wearing a coat. He had come after her in only that T-shirt, and she was so aware of how the wind was biting at him, but he just put his head down and kept walking forward.
It made her feel small, and strange. She was walking directly behind him, and she realized that she was using his body to help shield her from the wind.
And that was sort of a humbling realization. She couldn’t say she cared for it.
She was freezing, and she was wearing a coat. His arms were bare.
And this was the problem with Flint. There were these moments. Because this was exactly who she’d begun to believe that he was. The man that would shield her from everything. The man that would carry it all on his shoulders. And that was more, and different, than the sharp heartbreak she had been carrying around all this time. It was a deeper, more fully realized regret.
All that she didn’t have because of what she had wanted him to become.
