Mud Vein

He was talking about soulmate polygamy. How could you take something like that seriously?

“You’re a fool,” I breathed. “You don’t make any sense.”

I felt angry with him. I wanted to lash out and make him see how stupid he was for believing in such flimsy ideals.

“I make too much sense for you,” he said.

I shoved him. He wasn’t expecting it. The distance between us grew for just a second as his left foot took a step backward to keep his balance. Then I launched myself at him, throwing him against the painted horse at his back. Fury in fists. I pounded at his chest and slapped at his face while he stood and let me. How dare he. How dare he.

Every blow I delivered set my anger to a lower simmer. I hit him until it was gone and I was mostly spent. Then I slid down, my hands touching the metal diamonds of the carousel floor as my back rested against the hooves of the horse I’d ridden.

“You can’t fix me,” I said, looking at his knees.

“I don’t want to.”

“I’m mangled,” I said. “On the inside and the outside.”

“And yet I love you.”

He leaned down and I felt his hands on my wrists. I let him pull me up. I was wearing a black fleece that had a zipper down the length of it. Isaac reached for my neck; grabbing the top of the zipper, he pulled it down to my waist. I was so shocked I didn’t have time to react. Minutes ago he had been bare-chested, now I was. If I had ni**les they would have peaked in the frigid air. If.

I am just scars and pieces of a woman. Isaac has seen me like this. In a sense he made me like this, with his scalpel and steady hands, but I still reached up to cover my chest. He stopped me. Reaching for my waist he lifted me up until I was sitting sideways in the saddle of my pierced horse. He opened my fleece the rest of the way, then he kissed the skin where my br**sts used to be. He kissed softly, over the scars. My heart—surely he could feel my pounding heart. My nerve endings had been damaged, but I felt his warm lips and his breath move across my skin. I made a sound. It wasn’t a real sound. It was air and relief. Every breath I’d ever caught came whooshing out of me at once.

Isaac kissed up my neck, behind my ear, my chin, the corner of my mouth. I turned my head when he tried to kiss the other corner, and we met in the middle. Soft lips and his smell. He’d kissed me once before in the foyer of my house, it had been a drumbeat. This kiss was a sigh. It was relief and we were so drunk from it that we clung to each other like we’d been waiting for a kiss like this our whole, entire lives. His hands wrapped around my ribcage, inside of my fleece. Mine were holding his face. He pulled me off the horse. I steered him toward the only bench on the carousel. It was a chariot, curved with a leather seat. Isaac sat. I sat on his lap.

“Don’t ask me if I’m sure,” I said. I pulled down the zipper on his pants. I was determined. I was sure. He didn’t move his hands from my waist. He didn’t speak. He waited as I lifted myself up, pulling off my jeans and climbing back onto his lap. I left my panties on. His pants were pushed mid thigh. We were clothed and we were not. Isaac let me do everything, and that’s the way I needed it to be; half concealed, in the cold air, with the ability to climb off and leave if I wanted to. I felt less than I thought I would. I also felt more. There was no fear, just the vibrations of something loud that I didn’t quite understand. He kissed me while we moved. Then once, when it was over. The old man never came back. We zipped our clothes, and walked back up the hill chilled and in a daze. There were no more words between us. The next day I filed a restraining order against him.

And that was the last of Isaac Asterholder and me.

I try to remember sometimes what his last words to me had been. If he said something as we walked up that hill, or on the car ride home. But all I remember was his presence and his silence. And the slight echo of, and yet I love you.

And yet he loved me.

And yet I couldn’t love him back.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

When I wake Isaac isn’t there. I weigh my panic against the pain. I can only focus on one at a time. I choose my pain because it won’t loosen its grip on my brain. I am familiar with heart pain—intense, excruciating heart pain, but I’ve never experienced a physical pain quite this exquisite. Heart pain and physical pain are only comparable in that neither relinquish their hold on you once they get rolling. The heart releases a dull ache when it is broken; the pain in my leg so acute and sharp it’s hard to breathe.

I wrestle with the pain for a minute … two, before I discard it. I broke my body and there is no way to fix it. I don’t care. I need to find Isaac. And that’s when I think it: Oh God. What if the zookeeper came while I was passed out and did something to him? I roll slightly onto my side until I have some leverage, and try to drag myself up using my good leg. That’s when I see my leg. The lower half of my pants has been cut away. The place where the bone was sticking out has been wrapped in thin gauze. I feel liquid running down to my foot as I move. I hold my hand over my mouth and breathe through my nose. Who was here? Who did this? The fire is burning. The fire I built would have given up the ghost by now. Someone had built it back up, fed it new logs.

I wobble where I’m standing. I need light. I need to—

“Sit down.”

I start, jarred by the voice. I twist my neck around as far as it can go.

“Isaac,” I cry out. I start to teeter, but he darts over and catches me. Darts is a strong word, I think. For a minute it looks like he is going to fall with me. I lift my hand up, touch his face. He looks terrible. But he’s alive and walking. He lowers me gently to the ground.

“Are you okay?”

He shakes his head. “Alive’s not enough for you?”

“You shouldn’t be,” I hiss. “I thought you were going to die.” He doesn’t acknowledge me. Instead he walks over to a pile of something I can’t see in the dark.

“Look who’s talking,” he says, softly.

“Isaac,” I say again. “The table…” All of a sudden I’m feeling hot … weak. The adrenaline, which carried me up the well, up the stairs, up the ladder, has run out.

He walks over to me, his arms full. “I know,” he says, dryly. “I saw.”

He’s looking at my leg as he sets things down next to me. He’s lining them up, double-checking everything. But every few seconds he looks at my leg again like he doesn’t know how to fix it.