Picture This by Jacqueline Sheehan Page B

reached a hand out to her cheek and touched the wet that streamed down her face.
    â€œAre you okay? This is not what I wanted to happen, not like this,” he said, his words still heavy and thick.
    â€œI drove to your house and saw you with her. You should have told me she was coming back. I trusted you,” she said, scooping up her bra and shirt, wiping the moisture from her cheeks, wishing she hadn’t cried, wishing she hadn’t already done something that she’d regret. Rocky leapt up with her clothes and ran for the bathroom. She slammed the door.
    She wadded her clothes into a ball and hugged them to her chest. Hill tapped on the door. “Go away!” she yelled.
    Silence. Hill was not a persuader or a cajoler. He would not beg. If she told him to go away, he would. He mumbled something to Cooper as he passed through the kitchen. He let the screen door slam on the way out. She pressed her forehead against the bathroom door until Cooper whined in protest and she opened the door. The black dog looked at her, then toward the screen door, then back at her. This was a language she could understand. “Oh, shit,” she said to the dog.
    Rocky struggled back into her shirt, abandoning her bra, and ran out of the cottage, with Cooper at her heels. The gravel dug into her feet, slowing her usual long stride. She passed Melissa’s house and saw Hill just ahead, near Bracken Road. “Hill, stop,” she called to him. He must have been stunned, she thought, or he would have heard her wincing along. The man could hear a leaf fall from a tree. She caught up with him.
    â€œI want to know why. Why weren’t you going to tell me?” she said.
    Hill’s eyes were red, but it was his anger that made her stop. Every protective mechanism in her system told her to back up, danger. He looked like he had been struck with a sharp stick: fists clenched, muscles tight, eyes dark and steady, lips fixed over his immobile jaw. She had never seen him like this.
    â€œI thought you were leaving me, that you were coming here to tell me that it was over, you were going back to Julie. I should have said something. . . .” She extended one hand toward him and then pulled back.
    â€œThis is not at all like me,” she said. “I’m in unknown territory. Bob never, I mean, neither of us ever wandered.” Wandered? “I didn’t know I would feel this horrible, it never occurred to me that you would lie.” Her teeth had begun to chatter, and not from cold, even though a breeze foretold rain. She looked over his shoulder and saw a bank of dark clouds advancing on the island.
    Hill closed his eyes for a few seconds and his breathing changed; he was struggling for control, fighting against a force that clawed at him.
    She knew she was supposed to say how she felt without accusing, labeling, or attacking. She knew everything she was supposed to say—she was the freaking expert at teaching this to young couples when they fell from grace into the first dark pit of fighting. So why was it so hard to say?
    â€œI was afraid,” she said finally. “And now I’m so embarrassed, no, mortified, that it is taking every bit of strength to stand here instead of running away.”
    Hill exhaled a long slow breath. She caught a new scent from him, hormone fueled, with an underlay of adrenaline.
    â€œWhy didn’t you just say something, ask me? Isn’t this what psychologists do, they communicate?” he said, flexing his fingers, releasing tension. A dim flash of lightning illumined a deep section of the incoming blanket of clouds. The long delay before the rumble of thunder meant the storm was still far off.
    â€œBob and I went from point A to point B, and we just kept going, we never veered from each other. I never thought of leaving him and never imagined that he’d leave me,” said Rocky.
    â€œAnd yet he did leave you.”
    Rocky nodded dumbly as