ooh for the word wip ask! "before"
take what's broken, make it whole
She goes home with Jack; it’s less of a decision, leaving the diner with her belly full and her mind screaming for rest, and more of a tidal effect. Exhausted, hands numb, soul even more numb than her hands, she climbs into the passenger seat of Jack’s car. It settles over her at once: she cannot go back to her shitty studio apartment and pretend that it’s her home. She cannot go back to her shitty studio apartment and pretend that she didn’t lose her home seventeen years ago, months before the bank foreclosed on the house, years before her mother remarried. Cracking Robby’s chest opened something within her, a silent wound that has never done more than scab over, let alone scar.
So she goes home with him.
She takes the offer of his guest room, a clean t-shirt, and a pair of boxers. She washes her face with a foaming cleanser one of his older nieces left behind on a recent visit. She crawls between the sheets onto a nicer mattress than the one she owns, the cotton softened from white vinegar and bleach. Somehow, between her crowded thoughts and the tightness in her chest, she manages to fall asleep. She is safe here, her body knows this to be a fact. She is safe here, and Jack Abbot will never let anything bad happen to her. She is safe here, and the outside world is uncaring and unbiased to her grief.
But she still wakes screaming, hours later.
