Touched

He wonders if this will live under his skin now too, now that he’s allowed it in – or if this is something that’s been somewhere inside him for a while, simmering away before boiling over. The sensation comes back to him like a phantom, her dark hair prickling against his lips, the smooth skin on the back of her neck. He doesn’t like it.

He’s been marked in his time by a lot of sets of hands, but he can still mentally pick out what was Maggie, not Lori cajoling him or Claire hopeful in his arms, or some other person, worse and nameless. As if not looking at her could have made her anyone else–

He remembers holding her in place. He wonders if he could have hurt her.

*

She thinks about it sometimes as well, trying to remember if she’s ever heard Rust raise his voice otherwise, outside of that night – and she hasn’t, not in seven years of acquaintance. He could be stern sometimes – some unpleasant echo of her ex-husband is rattling around her head, pontificating about how men didn’t talk about their feelings in the old days, not that Marty ever shut up whenever he felt hurt or sour or mean – but Rust wasn’t an angry man, just sad, and tired. And she’d hurt him. That didn’t mean it wasn’t terrifying, that it didn’t make her whole body hitch with an instinctive cringe of fear even now, and she’d done well to flee.

She wonders if he’d have hurt her if she’d asked him to.

But back there, head swimming in that horror movie shadow-box of an apartment, just then it had decided to dawn on her what they could have been. They might have been friends; they might have put off an affair for years and years. They might have married while the ink was still wet on the divorce papers, they could have taken the girls and moved out of this hellhole parish only to drift apart over 10 ugly years like any other married couple. All that potential had flared for an instant like a struck match-head, and just as soon it was gone. They could both have escaped somehow, and now she has, and he hasn’t.