Goodnight

Goodnight

When I got back to the trailer, the lights were off. When I got inside, everyone was asleep. I crawled up onto Pete’s unused bunk and cried a little before I fell asleep.

I woke up in the morning to Ian. He didn’t look precisely mad, but he didn’t look precisely thrilled with me, either. “Where in God’s name were you yesterday?” His voice broke on the verb. His hand was on my shoulder—that was what had woken me up. “Do you have any idea how freaked out I was when I woke up and you weren’t there? Seriously, Sloan, it was bad enough not knowing last night, and I was freaked then. You nearly gave me a fucking heart attack.”



My response was perhaps not the most mature. In my defense, I was incredibly tired. “You could have called.”

For a moment, I thought Ian was going to have an aneurism. “I was trying to give you some space, because I knew you were mad at me,” he shouted. We were alone in the trailer. Thank God. “That doesn’t mean you don’t come home, Sloan. You can’t just not come home.”

All of a sudden, I was struck by an emotional landslide. I was furious—furious that Ian was yelling at me because I’d slept one freaking bunk above him. I was miserable—miserable that I had done it to him, made him upset. And I was crushed—crushed that whatever was wrong here was wrong. I didn’t know what to do anymore. In the past month, something had gone wrong.

In the past month, there were a hundred conversations that I hadn’t had with Ian. There were a hundred kisses we hadn’t shared, a hundred smiles we hadn’t smiled, jokes we hadn’t cracked. There were so many things I hadn’t said to him. There were so many things I hadn’t said to him.

“Where have you been?” I asked.

He looked at me like I was insane. “I was right here, Sloan—that’s the whole problem. I was here and you weren’t.”

Rubbing my face tiredly, I shook my head. “That’s not what I mean. You’ve hardly been around for the last month. I haven’t seen you or talked to you at all in a long time. I miss you.”
Ian’s expression had been gravitating towards upset—now he shot back to angry. “You keep saying that, Sloan, but I have no idea what the hell you’re talking about. I see you all the time. We live together, we sleep together, we eat together.”

“Bullshit,” I said. It was bullshit. It was complete and utter bullshit.

“Don’t give me that,” he snapped. “If you have this huge problem with us, you can’t just be all cryptic and crap. I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know what you’re talking about, Sloan, and I can’t fix it unless you tell me.”

I just blinked at him. I didn’t know what to say. I’d said my piece and he hadn’t known what I’d meant and I didn’t know what to give him aside from that. And he stared at me and I stared at him and I thought about how this was probably the biggest fight we’d ever had, and definitely the biggest fight we’d ever had since we were married—it was the only fight we’d had since we were married. And he stared at me and I stared at him and we got nowhere.

And he stared for a moment more, and then pushed away from the bed. “Forget this, Sloan.
Tell me when you want to be a rational human being and then we’ll talk. I have practice.”
That made me more angry than anything. I let out a shriek of irritation—the kind of shriek that hurts your throat, that makes your head feel like it’s going to explode, like you want to cry and cry and cry and never stop. “You always have practice!” I was screaming at him, screaming so that he would hear me even as he walked away—or maybe screaming more so that somebody else would hear me, and care, just a little. Or maybe I was screaming just to scream.

And then I did not cry.

I got out of bed, I showered and got dressed. I changed my clothes. I combed my hair until all the snarls were gone. And then I put it into two very tight braids, so tight that they hurt my head. At least I could control my hair. My stupid fucking hair was not going to do anything I did not want it to do. I tied my shoes until I could barely feel my feet.

And then I walked out the door, with a specific destination in mind.