Dark Rivers of the Heart

needed to say to her were more easily said in a liberating delirium like the one in which he'd made his previous revelations. Now he was inhibited by a reserve that resulted less from shyness than from an acute awareness that he was a damaged man and that she deserved someone finer than he could ever be.
        "And even if I hadn't been delirious " he continued "I would've told you anyway, sooner or later. Because I don't want to keep any secrets from you."
        How difficult it sometimes could be to say the things that most deeply and urgently needed to be said. If given a choice, he wouldn't have selected either that time or that place to say any of it: on a lonely Utah highway, watched and pursued, hurtling toward likely death or toward an unexpected gift of freedom-and in either case toward the unknown. Life chose its consequential moments, however, without the consultation of those who lived them. And the pain of speaking from the heart was always, in the end, more endurable than the suffering that was the price of silence.
        He took a deep breath. "What I'm trying to say to you… it's so presumptuous. Worse than that. Foolish, ridiculous. For God's sake, I can't even describe what I feel for you because I don't have the words.
        There might not even be words for it. All I know is that what I feel is wonderful, strange, different from anything I ever expected to feel, different from anything people are supposed to feel."
        She kept her attention on the highway, which allowed Spencer to look at her as he spoke. The sheen of her dark hair, the delicacy of her profile, and the strength of her beautiful sun-browned hands on the steering wheel encouraged him to continue. If she had met his eyes at that moment, however, he might have been too intimidated to express the rest of what he longed to say.
        "Crazier still, I can't tell you why I feel this way about you.
        It's just there. Inside me. It's a feeling that just sprang up.
        Not there one moment… but there the next, as if it had always been there. As if you've always been there, or as if I'd spent my life waiting for you to be there."
        The more words that tumbled from him and the faster they came, the more he feared that he would never be able to find the tight words. At least she seemed to know that she should not respond or, worse, encourage him.
        He was balanced so precariously on the high wire of revelation that the slightest blow, although unintended, would knock him off.
        "I don't know. I'm so awkward at this. The problem is I'm just fourteen years old when it comes to this, when it comes to emotion, frozen back there in adolescence, as inarticulate as a boy about this sort of thing.
        And if I can't explain what I feel or why I feel it-then how can I expect you ever to feel anything in return? Jesus. I was right: 'Presumptuous' is the wrong word. 'Foolish' is better."
        He retreated to the safety of silence again. But he didn't dare linger in silence, because he would soon lose the will to break it.
        "Foolish or not, I've got hope now, and I'm going to hold onto it until you tell me to let go. I'll tell you all about Michael Ackblom, the boy who used to be. I'll tell you everyting you want to know, everything you can bear to hear. But I want the same thing from you.
        I want to know all there is to know. No secrets. This is an end to secrets. Here, now, from this moment on, no secrets. Whatever we can have together-if we can have anything at all-has to be honest, true, clean, shining, like nothing I've known before."
        The speed of the Rover had fallen while he talked.
        His latest silence was not just another pause between painful attempts to express himself, and she seemed to be aware of its new quality. She looked at him. Her lovely, dark eyes shone with the warmth and kindness to which he had responded in The Red Door less than a week ago, when he'd first met her.
        When the warmth threatened to well into tears, she turned her attention to the road once more.
        Since encountering her again in the arroyo on Friday night, he had not until now seen quite that same exceptionally kind and open spirit; of necessity, it had been masked by doubt, by caution. She hadn't trusted him any more, after he'd followed her home from work. Her life had taught her to be cynical and suspicious of others, as surely as his life had taught him