The quiet stretches out as Carver works. Neither of them move to break it and for a little while, things settle back into a rhythm. This is what he wanted, Carver thinks: to feel like a person, to feel safe enough to believe he could have that for a little while without everything going so goddamn wrong.
Then she speaks again, and that’s in the air between them. His hand stills on the comb for a moment before he remembers to breathe and wishes, with a quiet sort of bleakness, that it wasn’t such a familiar story. But that’s the trouble with knowing a person, telling them your truth. You both have to live with the knowing, after, and it has a tendency to go both ways.
He sets the comb aside and begins sectioning her hair into two braids. Not too tight, but careful. Methodical.
“I’m sorry that happened to you,” he says, very quietly. It shouldn’t have, but the world doesn’t work the way it should. You take what you’re given and you assign meaning to it. You take strength from what you survive because you have to.
CW: domestic abuse
Then she speaks again, and that’s in the air between them. His hand stills on the comb for a moment before he remembers to breathe and wishes, with a quiet sort of bleakness, that it wasn’t such a familiar story. But that’s the trouble with knowing a person, telling them your truth. You both have to live with the knowing, after, and it has a tendency to go both ways.
He sets the comb aside and begins sectioning her hair into two braids. Not too tight, but careful. Methodical.
“I’m sorry that happened to you,” he says, very quietly. It shouldn’t have, but the world doesn’t work the way it should. You take what you’re given and you assign meaning to it. You take strength from what you survive because you have to.
That, they have in common.