He turned away from the road and headed for the guesthouse.
Thomas started to call after him, but Marcus put a hand on his shoulder. “Let him go, pet.” He sent Thomas a significant look. “It’s begun now. You don’t get between Master and sub when they’re in session.”
“You think that’s what this is.”
“It feels that way. Life exists between Lloyd Dobler and Dr. Seuss, after all.”
Thomas blinked, his dark brown eyes reflecting that endearing puzzlement that happened when Marcus threw a wrench in the workings of his brilliant artistic mind. “Say what?”
Marcus quirked a brow. “‘I’m looking for a dare to be great situation,’ versus ‘To the world you may be one person; but to one person you may be the world.’ But it all goes back to Lloyd. I think he knew they were one and the same. The dare to be great situation was being the person his heroine needed. Becoming the one.”
Thomas shook his head. “Eighties movies and Dr. Seuss. You never fail to surprise.”
“Long and short, let it play out. Trust your brother. Trust Daralyn.”
“I do. I just don’t want either one hurt. He’s still got so much anger in him sometimes.” Thomas sighed, looking toward the guest house. “His attitude has improved by leaps and bounds, but Mom worries he’s still vulnerable to emotional bumps in the road that can throw him for a loop physically. I’d say that’s a Mom thing, but I feel it too. He’s so invested in Daralyn already. What if staying here, being with him, isn’t what’s best for her?”
Marcus shifted, his body brushing Thomas’s in support. “If he truly loves her, and yeah, I think he’s already way past halfway there, he’ll know that, maybe even before she does. If that’s what she needs, he’ll let her go.”
“How do you know that?”
Marcus met his gaze. “Because I love you. And if me letting you go had truly been the right thing for you, for your happiness, I would have. Even if it had killed me.”
Thomas’s eyes went to heat. In less than a blink, he had his hand on Marcus’s biceps in a solid grip. “There’s no world where that would have been the right thing for me,” he said.
Marcus’s jaw flexed, but he gave Thomas’s nape a hard squeeze. It was the answer he was always glad to hear, down to his soul, but it didn’t make his own statement any less true. Letting Thomas go would have destroyed him. Not physically. He would have kept going, being who he was, but something inside would have died and never lived again.
If that was the depth of feeling Rory and Daralyn were on their way to sharing, Marcus shared Thomas’s worry.
He hoped to God Rory wouldn’t have to face that choice. Because Thomas was right. Nothing could knock a person down harder than that, and make you never want to get up again.
Chapter Three
Daralyn stared at the legs of her kitchen table. It was a yard sale bargain Elaine had found. She and Daralyn had painted it a pale green, and Daralyn had stenciled the legs so a vine with tiny white flowers was climbing up them.
Her backpack was at her feet, and she was curled up over herself, her head in her hands. She didn’t have the energy to move, even as she despised herself for that immobility.
So much had changed, so much hadn’t. Each day brought new challenges, but each challenge was just as hard as the last. Would it ever be easier? Why, after five years, did she still stand in darkness in broad daylight? A weighted darkness no one else could see.
She was smothered by it. Silently.
We hear a peep out of you, girl, you stay in that hole another hour.
Dr. Taylor, her psychiatrist, had coaxed Daralyn to talk about it.
No one else can see the darkness, so it’s not real. But it’s the most real thing. Because it stands between me and everything else.
Everything else you want? Dr. Taylor asked.
Everything else. Just everything else.
In the meantime, she was losing things her survival instinct told her it was too dangerous to lose. Like awareness of her surroundings.
“Daralyn.”
She snapped up straight. She hadn’t heard him open the door, his chair moving over the threshold.
She didn’t have to look his way to feel his presence. There was a heat around him that could fill a room, surround her. And his eyes…if she looked at his dark brown eyes, she found something there that she wanted to be as real as that darkness, because then maybe she’d have a shelter from it. She felt that way when she was around him.
“I knocked, but I could tell you didn’t hear me.”
She would have ended up in the cellar for a couple hours for not paying attention. Maybe had her next meal taken away.
She kept her face down, because he’d see she’d been crying. But she hadn’t been expecting him here, and didn’t know what to say. Which might explain the utter nonsense that started to come out of her mouth.
“I’m sure the tuition can be refunded, and you all can use it for something else. And the books and these notebooks, I can use them for other things, maybe study them at home and learn—”
“Stop,” he said.
“It’s okay. Really. I’m fine. I just…I’ll be at work tomorrow. It will be okay.”
He moved toward her, and she surged up and around the table, retreating. What was she thinking? But before her unthinkable act could fluster her, he came to a halt, met her gaze with an even, steady look.
“Are you running from me, Daralyn?”
She’d seen him get frustrated about his ability to maneuver easily in close quarters. But the loss of that ability had taught him to rely on other methods. Effective ones.
She stammered to silence and gripped the hem of her shirt in nervous hands, but otherwise she stopped moving. With a satisfied nod, he came to her, stopped so she was standing by the side of his chair.
“What happened?” He took her hand, tugged so he moved her back to her seat in the kitchen. “Sit down and tell me.”
I couldn’t do what’s so easy for everyone else. Again. No matter how much faith you all have in me, no matter how much I try, I can’t seem to make it into the light. The cold and dark are always waiting.
“Hey.” He’d touched her face, had kept her hand clasped in his other one. “Don’t get so frustrated. You’re fine. Remember? You just told me so.”
He was teasing her gently, his lips curving above the well-groomed short beard that covered his jaw. She couldn’t smile, so she stared at their linked fingers. She loved his hands. Strong, chapped from the work he did around the farm and at the store. He was wearing a T-shirt, so she could see the fine lengths of his forearms, the biceps that flexed when he pushed his chair. She could get ridiculously mesmerized watching that.
She wanted to tell him what had happened, she realized. He was good at that, too, helping her unlock the things in herself that kept her from saying what was happening in her head.
“I thought I could do it,” she said. “For a few minutes, it was exciting. Then there was the noise, and someone was shouting across the courtyard. So many things, from so many different directions. I went to my first class and all the chairs were taken except one in the back, and there were so many people between me and it. The teacher started talking, and…I don’t know. It felt like too much. I couldn’t breathe. So I left, and everyone was staring at me…”