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The Auburn police had come. The Wahredua police had come. The Highway Patrol had come. North had told his story so many times he’d gotten lost in it, his throat hurting, his head hurting, every inch of him stinking with flop sweat and gun smoke and the faint hint of violence done to bodies.
And Shaw had said only one thing, at the beginning. “He must have been so scared.” Then he’d been gone, lost in that place inside himself where North couldn’t go, where all the best parts of Shaw turned their knives on him and set to work.
Eventually, the police had released them. Jem and Tean had shown up to drive North and Shaw back to the motor court. Somewhere out in the parking lot, North guessed, Jem was jackassing around, and Tean was telling him to stop, and the whole world was normal and spinning along the way it always did.
He had to get up from the bed quickly, move into the tiny bathroom, shut the door before he turned on the light. He sat on the closed toilet seat and twisted a washcloth between his hands, telling himself no, no, no. And then, when no wasn’t enough, he bit the corner of the washcloth and cried as quietly as he could. For himself, mostly. Self-pity was an old friend. But for Shaw, too. For a world that never let up, and for Shaw, who, no matter how many times he was hurt, never grew the calluses everyone else took for granted.
After a while, he grew sick of the taste of washcloth and self-pity, and he turned off the light and let himself out into their room. He wasn’t an idiot; Shaw must have heard something, must have suspected. When he stretched out in the bed next to Shaw, he heard that same measured breathing. Then Shaw’s hand came to rest on North’s belly, startlingly warm and heavy.
“I’m ok,” Shaw said. But he didn’t sound like Shaw. He sounded like someone speaking out of a Valium bath. “I’m fine, North.”
“I know.”
“It was just a lot. First Maleah, what she told us, those horrible things that happened to her. And then Philip and Adam. And Gid.” He paused. His fingers twitched against North’s bare skin. “Ambyr.”
“Don’t think about it,” North said, like that had ever worked. “Try not to think about it.”
“I’m not.”
He found Shaw’s face in the dark, felt the tears there.
“I’m fine,” Shaw whispered, and then he moved his hand in an arc, a sweep of warmth across North’s belly and chest. “Go back to sleep.”
“We both need to sleep,” North said.
“I’m falling asleep right now,” Shaw said with a little laugh that wasn’t Shaw.
North closed his eyes. In the morning, they would call Dr. Farr. Shaw could FaceTime with her, and then, later this week, they’d have an in-person session. And it would be fine. It was always fine. They always came out of this, made their way through it. He ran through the plan again and again. And, at some point, he fell asleep.
The fighting started in the morning.
“Because I don’t want to!”
That was Shaw’s only explanation for why he refused to FaceTime Dr. Farr. The argument had escalated slowly over the course of the morning. At first, when Shaw had made excuses, or put off the call, North had said nothing. Well, he’d tried to say nothing. Shaw was tired, after all. Exhausted. Hurting. North told himself that an extra hour wouldn’t hurt. Maybe after some food. Maybe once they’d both had a chance to clean up.
But when he’d raised the issue again, Shaw had said, simply, “No.”
“What do you mean, no?”
“I mean no.”
North stared at him. The best he came up with was “Why not?”
“Because I don’t want to.”
At first, it had been confusion more than anything else as North asked and questioned and tried to get a better answer. Shaw’s responses had become stiff. Curt. And then North had dug in his heels. He’d started insisting. He’d tried ordering. Shaw had begun to shout. He stalked away from North—in a moment so ludicrous it would have been laughable (if North hadn’t been in a murderous rage by that point), even going so far as to climb over the bed to get away from him. At one point, Shaw even tried to throw the hair dryer at him, which ended up being ineffective because it was one of the wall-mounted varieties and the cord wasn’t all that long.
The whole shitshow reached its climax when Shaw shut himself up inside the bathroom, slamming the door so hard that the sound ran through the tiny motel room like a gunshot.
North, in one of his finer moments, jiggled the handle and screamed through the hollow-core. “I will kick this fucking door down and drag you by the fucking hair to her office, do you understand me? Open this fucking door!”
“No!” Only it wasn’t even really a word; it was a shriek of defiance.
Stepping back, North lined himself up. It was a shitty door in a shitty motel, and one good kick would probably pop the latch free of the strike plate. He was readying himself when the motel room door swung open.
Theo stood there, with Auggie behind him. “That’s why I was saying you should open it with your ass,” Auggie was saying. “Remember? Like that one time?”
“I remember something,” Theo said. “Wasn’t that when I was still single?”
