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Would it be so bad? To be at peace?
The words of that strange visitor repeated themselves so loudly in her head that she doesn’t hear Robert climbing up to her and she jumps when he enters.
“Scared of me now, girly?”
Willa shakes off the night’s events and smiles, “Never.”
She rises from the bed and crosses to him, trying to cast aside all foreboding, playfully snatching the box from his hands, “what did you bring me?”
But she is already tearing it open, so there is no need for him to answer. He knows this; this is their way. As he arranges the food he brought up in a paper bag on the small desk, she pulls out several books ( Lisey’s Story, The Likeness, Garden of Shadows, the Complete Works of William Shakespeare ), a new sketchpad and colored pencils, and several pair of lightweight summer tights.
“Did you read all of these? So we can talk about them?”
“I’ve finished ‘Lisey’s Story’ today… I finished all of V. C. Andrews ages ago. ‘The Likeness’ didn’t seem like my kind of thing,” he gives her a small, almost missable wink as he takes off his coat and tosses it around the chair.
“And Shakespeare?”
“I’ve been around a while. I’ve gotten to William.”
He takes a seat and opens the bottle of wine, but she takes it from his hands, sitting it back on the desk, and places herself on his lap.
“Willa,” he sighs.
“Yes?”
“We’ve talked about this. You…”
“Me what?”
“You getting too close.”
“You keep me, Robert. So have me, too.”
He lets out a sarcastic sniff and pinches his nose. She pulls his hand away, waits for him to look at her. She does see his hesitation but knows she is wearing him down. Hopes she is, at least. Especially if…
Especially if I believe JC… and stick to his plan…
She places a hand along the side of his face, lightly scratching into his beard. He closes his eyes and breathes deeply.
“Let me kiss you.”
“Willa-”
“I’m 19, Robert.”
“Still a child.”
“Oh, right. Sorry. I guess I should just go out and get some more life experience,” she pushes him as she gets up and stalks away. She hates that she has nowhere to go, no door to slam, nothing to break (sharp objects were banned years ago), but in any case she’s had an affect on him.
“That’s not fair,” he rises.
“And this is? This is fair to me?”
“I am doing my best.”
“Your best would’ve been to let your buddies string me up beside my father.”
“Don’t do that.”
“What? Be honest?”
“Of course I want you to be honest, you know you can trust m-”
“Bullshit,” she screamed and her anger betrayed her, sent tears stinging down her cheeks.
“Bullshit? Ha. Who else can you trust?”
“You never gave me a chance to trust anyone else!”
“Willa, I… I’m…”
He turned away from her, but she already saw his eyes glow red, he slammed his fists into the door and let out a low growl.
“I don’t want you to see me like this,” his voice changed the way it is when he gets that way.
“I know what you are.”
“Still… I’m not…”
She watches him press himself into the door, watches the anger running taut through his back and shoulders melt into something else.
Defeat.
Willa knew she just wanted to fight someone, something, hell, anything… she hated him for keeping her here, keeping her alive.
But I…
She loved him too. She couldn’t help but feel it, but it scared her to think it. Thoughts weren’t her strong suit. Feelings? Feelings she had no choice… maybe that’s why she was so tactile seeking, maybe that’s why she wanted him to touch her.
Her new visitor- maybe even friend- might have the right idea. It might be better to die and to take Purgatory to hell with me… it might save the world…
But before she might go, she wants him. To have him. Hold him tangibly the way she did in her heart, even if she wasn’t sure that she should do either.
“Robert,” she quickly dissolves the space between them in this tiny room and places her hands along his shoulders. Her heart is racing, but she isn’t afraid. This part of him has only ever flared up in protection of her or when she… when she wants to die, tries to die. Her hands are ineffectual, he ignores her, mostly... but his head gives a small twitch and she feels his breathing deepen.
“Robert,” she tries again, running her hands down his now limp arms, all fingertips, almost frightened of this intimacy.
He’s never let me get this close…
Wrapping her arms around his waist, she presses her chest into his back. Willa runs her lips along the places his tank top leaves exposed, afraid to fully kiss him, in case he runs, in case her Robert gets swallowed up in the demon Bobo Del Rey again…
That’s not you , she’s told him time and again, but he always ignores it, or gets mean and walks away. So she calls him Robert, all she can do, remind him he’s a man.
“Robert, please,” her whisper summons pinpricks on his freckled skin.
He moves his hands over hers… A chill runs down her spine and she feels a heat burst through her lower stomach, tingles flutter through her. His right hand slides across her arms, grips her elbow gently, and his left arm reaches behind to wrap around her, his forearm pressing her further into him.
They stay like that for what may be a single minute, for what may be a lifetime… it doesn’t feel like a thing that exists in the slow trickle of unforgiving time. It feels as if it cannot possibly exist in the ticking of clock hands that have taunted and mocked Willa for seven years, aged her, robbed her of her childhood, turned her father to dirt, her sisters to ghosts, everything she might’ve been to…
But she remembers she was never going to be anything or anyone… she remembers target practice, recon missions, being woken by whiskey sweat and beer breath in the middle of the night, an Earp is always ready, an heir ten times so , jealous of the deep night breaths of Wynonna, resentful of the babe’s peace of Waverly…
I was nothing before him. Even if he took me, I…
Robert kept her alive by hiding her here.
He kept her alive now… in more ways than that one. And she could have this. This thing… she could have this.
If he’ll let me.
“We can’t be anything, Willa.”
She isn’t sure if her eyes were already welling up before he says it or if it’s this uttered decree, despite their proximity to one another, flesh on flesh, that starts her crying now, but real tears, sadness, hurt, not the spilling out of anger and confusion, flow freely in spite of her.
The embrace dies, he untangles himself from her arms, turns to face her.
“Do you want to leave me,” he kneels before her, his thumbs press deeply just above her hips. His fingers are making circles on either side of the small of her back, softly, like the afterthought of a whisper, like she’s a thing that might break.
“I don’t know,” she feels a sting of shame when her voice refuses to disguise her sob.
He presses his head into her stomach for a moment. She reaches to run her hands through his hair, something she’s dreamed of doing, but he moves before she can.
Robert stands and sits in the chair once again.
Once again she sits in his lap.
He doesn’t look at her but doesn’t protest, not even when she traces his adam’s apple, then his collarbones, then his clavicle, and down, with her fingertips, pressing harder into him once she’s battling the cotton of his shirt. He meets her fingers as they caress his stomach, interlocks his hand with hers.
“I have connections. I can’t go but I could draw up identification for you… maybe even a passport… you could get out of here.”
“How would you ever leave?”
“I’d say you could come back for me, but… I don’t know. You go. Go.”
“I would worry about you.”
“You shouldn’t.”
“Maybe not. But… Robert, I was never going to be anything but a weapon. I was born a ticking time bomb and-”
“I’m telling you you can be more than that. All the Revenants think you’re dead, always have, it would… life wouldn’t be any different for anyone if you went and lived a real life.”
“Not for anyone?”
He laughs, finally looking at her, “Not for anyone.”
“Liar.”
“Yes. I’ve been a liar for a long time, Willa.”
“Then why aren’t you any good?”
She leans her face into his and this time he comes to meet her. She presses her mouth hard against his and he yields to her completely. He lets go of her hand and wraps his around the back of her head, his fingers tangling in her hair from the base of her neck, his other hand firmly pressed to her hip, tucked into the edge of her jeans. His beard is whiskery and tough against her face, but she likes it. Willa presses her tongue into his mouth, finding his, and in that moment he gives in completely. He is hers, wrapping his mouth around her bottom lip and her tongue, sucking her into him. Robert tastes like honey and bourbon and something dangerous. He is autumn and wildness and scorched earth… He is places she has never been and tears she’s never shed, kissing him is seeing the devil and God and dark, warm spaces in a home she’ll never build…
His hands come to meet in the middle of her back. She takes both of her hands behind his head, pulling him in closer, and she moves to straddle him. Willa presses down, soft heat desperate to meet him, and he bites her lip, caught between a moan and a sigh. As she runs her hands down the back of his neck, then scrapes her nails lightly down his chest, he whispers, “Willa… stop.”
“What… what did… did I do something wro-,” she’s embarrassed by how breathless she is and her face runs hot.
“No, no, no,” he whispers. He brushes hair back from her face and looks at her, his eyes meeting hers, then running down her face, her body, and back up again.
“Willa… I can’t.”
Robert grabs her at the waist and slides her off of him.
“Why?”
“Make sure you eat, okay?”
“Robert?”
He puts on his coat, then rests his hand on the desk, like he isn’t sure what to do with it… he lifts it, after a moment making a fist, before dropping it down by his side.
“I have to go,” he mumbles.
Willa watches him walk to the door and open it. He turns and looks up at her before he closes it, sealing her inside of her sanctuary and her hell once more. There’s a glitter to his eyes that she’s never seen before.
She struggles to breathe as he looks at her in a way he never has before. Willa wants to say something but nothing would be meaningful.
I feel stupid, I feel like a child. She is scared he was right about her.
“Willa,” he finally treads through the silence that threatened to drown them. “I will come back.”
She nods.
Robert closes the door.
She presses her fingers to her lips, she can feel her pulse in them, swollen, sore, and hungry. Willa feels like she’s floating as she sinks down onto her bed.
Once again, she is alone.
When she finally falls asleep, she dreams of him, dreams of trapping him, tangling him in her hair, in her fingers, in her legs, in her arms, inside of her… when she wakes up she swears she can smell him.
The sun is high and ambushes her through her blinds. She usually only sleeps this late if he’s been here, talking to her until the sky shifts from black to half pale morning, sleeping on the floor, so close and so far from her.
Maybe even my body couldn’t bear to leave that dream…
Willa sets about her morning routine, as if nothing has changed, as if her entire world, her entire heart, has not been ravaged by a persistent spring. When she exits her small makeshift bathroom, where she did not brush her teeth because she wanted to taste him on her for a little longer, she noticed that something has been slid underneath the door.
She hurries to it. A burgundy leather notebook. On the inside there is a driver’s license, a social security card, and a passport for someone called Charlotte Anne Bell, using a photo Robert had taken of her forever ago, when she had begged for a real permit. When she picks up the passport a small, silver origami bird falls out. On one of it’s wings “open me” is scrawled in his small, messy handwriting.
My W,
Wait up for me tonight. Whatever you decide we’ll do.
R. Sv ❦
Willa refolds the note and presses the little bird to her lips.
To have forever on her own or seven more years in this sanctuary…