Deep(95)

He was dead, too.



“And yet you’re here.”



“Hmm?” She’d gotten lost in her thoughts, and she didn’t know what Nick meant.



“Your troubles are heavy, but you haven’t tried to do this”—he drew his thumb down the longest, most-raised scar—“again. You’re stronger than you were. Why?”



“You.”



“No, bella. You’ve said that before, but what I heard this morning is that I haven’t been here the way you needed me to be.”



That was true. It was sick, she had to be sick, but she needed his darkness. His tender care of her, his quiet, steady patience, for all these weeks and weeks since the diner had been making her more anxious by the day. He hadn’t been himself. He was being what he thought she needed, and she had personal experience with how warping and frustrating it was to be someone other than yourself for someone other than yourself. It would have killed his love for her eventually.



This morning, though, he’d been with her the way he’d been with her before, and she’d felt her old life almost in her grasp again. She wanted that back. She’d loved that life. She’d worked hard to be that person in that life. To live weightlessly.



Still staring out the window, though now there was nothing much to see but their own reflections on the darkened glass, Bev told Nick a story.



“When I left home, I got a job at a big yoga and meditation studio in Boston. I was just a receptionist at first, part-time, and I made extra money coming back in and cleaning the place in the evenings. I was renting a room from a couple of grad students, so I was living cheap, and it was enough. Anyway, I got free classes. I’d never done yoga or meditation or any of that, but I was fat and trying not to be, just trying to lose everything I could about my life with my mom. Yoga is an eastern discipline, so there’s a lot of eastern spiritualism. Hinduism, mainly. But not solely.



“Anyway, one of the instructors was a sort of equal-opportunity spirit. Whatever felt good and right to him, he went with. He started every class, just before the warm-up, with a prayer. He said it came from the Lakota Indians. The first time I heard it, it spoke to me. More than any of the other things I’d learned about centering and meditation, that hit me right in my heart. Since then, I always start every meditation with that prayer.”



“Tell me.”



Nick had directed, not asked, in as few words as possible, which was very much like him. It made Bev smile. Meditation was a private, solitary thing, and if he’d asked in any other context, she would likely have refused. But she was telling him this story for a reason, even if she wasn’t yet sure what the reason was.



She closed her eyes and recited, “Teach me how to trust my heart, my mind, my intuition, my inner knowing, the senses of my body, the blessings of my spirit. Teach me to trust these things so that I may enter my sacred space and love beyond my fear and thus walk in balance with the passing of each glorious sun.”



When she opened her eyes again, Nick’s expression was stunned. That surprised her, and it worried her a little, too. She didn’t understand why that prayer would have hit him so hard. “What did I say?”



He shifted, moving his hands to cup her face. “I think often about what it is about you that’s so powerful—why it is I love you the way I do, and why you so easily turned what I wanted in my life inside out. And that prayer is it. It describes you perfectly. I’ve never known anyone else who was so instinctive and in tune with themselves. You lost that because you love me. But I felt it in you today, in the shower. You’re getting it back, bella. You’re stronger than all of this.”



“Maybe. I’m so tired of being scared and sad. Numb hurts. That sounds stupid—”



“It doesn’t.” He gave her a tight smile, almost a grimace. “Making somebody numb can be a powerful way to cause pain. It’s counterintuitive but true.”



Nick had still never told her, straight out, what his job was—except for being the chief of operations at the shipping company. He’d just let her come to know that he killed and tortured people. No big revelation, no gnashing of teeth, no shock. It was something she simply knew about him, organically. Like knowing he had a long scar across the back of his left hip. Like knowing the dark hair he kept short had a lot of curl in it. Like knowing his green eyes turned dark and almost grey when he came. And when he was angry.



And she’d accepted it just as easily. Even with everything that had happened, even knowing that who he was had put her in the position to be hurt, even in her deepest suffering, she’d never been able to sustain a serious question about her commitment to him. She loved him. He wasn’t a ‘bad boy.’ He wasn’t a bad man. He was a good man who did dark things.