Chapter Text
The bus moves at the pace of an old dog, lumbering through cityscapes and countrysides with its bag of scavenged bones. By the time it crawls into Huntington, the sky has long been taken by the night and there is only a few of them left, swaying in their seats like carcasses on hooks, dog tags beating hollowly against their chests, seeming less like soldiers coming home and more like dead things being carted to the butchers.
They can’t be blamed. The taste of victory was as brief and sweet as summer lemonade, but the war is stuck in their teeth like grout, constantly leaving ash heavy on their tongues and copper thick at the back of their mouths. When they swallow, their bellies fill up with fear, devastation, corpses.
Carwood sits at the back, slumped with his head against the window, the thrum of machinery buzzing against his skin as the bus meanders through Downtown. The Keith-Albee Theater sets the rain-slick streets aglow with golden glamour, people pouring in and out in a rush of night-time excitement, and further down on the corner is Carter’s Ice Cream Parlor, its red booths and checkered floors packed with families.
It should stir something inside him, reuniting with childhood landmarks that, at times, he’d thought he never see again. In France, he’d dreamt of the Keith-Albee with its long carpeted halls and buttered-popcorn smell, and even in the cradle of heaven they’d found in Austria, Carwood had longed for a lemon Popsicle to cool his mouth and sticky his fingers.
Right now, the delight of it all should be welling up like a wildfire inside him. But there is just listlessness, accompanied only by the dread that gnaws tirelessly at his stomach.
Despite how much he wants to deny it, Carwood is not the man he was when he left Huntington and all these things that should awaken his dormant joy do nothing but remind him how different he is. Even a stranger would light up at the sight of Downtown like this, all awash with rain-sparkling colour and thrumming with simple life. He is somehow less than a stranger. But he does know this place. Maybe, it no longer knows him.
Now behind them, Downtown fades away into a distant glowy haze as the bus drawls slowly through the neighbourhoods, yellow headlights piercing into the night, lighting up the pitted roads. Carwood sits up with a quiet sigh and glances around, needing to look at more than just the darkness outside. There is only a handful of soldiers left, most if not all heading for the last stop in Charleston.
One lounges with his legs sprawled across two seats with a book in his lap, glasses glittering like the glossy scar that streaks across his forehead. One sits like he has an iron rod for a spine while another is slouched back like a stringless puppet. A pair lean up against one another, fast asleep, holding onto each others’ jackets in a way that makes Carwood think of Bastogne. Many times he woke up like that, tangled and clutching with whoever was in his foxhole, some quiet mammal instinct insisting their bodies to reach out to each other.
The sickly glow of the bus station bursts around the latest turn and Carwood rubs his hands on his thighs, trying to quell the tension starting to rise in him. As they draw closer, he sees parked up buses, dark-eyed and still, and the metal shelter beneath the streetlamp, gleaming and empty.
Something churns in his belly and his chest locks up tight, like the wind has been knocked out him, the same way it was when he was hit in Carentan. It’s the realization that the moment he steps off this bus, full of war-dredged soldiers, it’ll be the final string being cut from him. The military that forged him into a weapon now has dismantled him and thrown him away, as if he has enough human parts to build back who he was before.
Don’t freeze up, don’t freeze up, blares in his mind, to freeze is to die, don’t freeze up. Of course, that only mattered when he was in Europe, knee-deep in smoke and blood, it doesn’t really mean anything now that he’s in the States, a thirty-minute walk from home. But Carwood knows that everything that happened to him, from the little to the big, is stuck inside him like fish hooks, barbed and so deeply wedged inside him that they need to be edged out instead of ripped. It’ll take time, he knows that. It’s of a similar nature to grief.
Picking up his carry-all and shouldering it, he walks down the aisle to the front of the bus as it stumbles to a halt, hissing and creaking like a stiff-boned cat. He thanks the driver, a black old-timer who, in a slow southern drawl, says to Carwood what he’s said to every soldier that’s stepped off his bus - “You rest now,”
It’s kicks up a lump into his throat that Carwood has to fight to swallow down.
The doors peel open and, after a moments pause, he steps off. It must seem strange, how he’ll confidently - confidently is a strong word - leap from a plane into a place of promised violence, yet somehow hesitate when it comes to returning home. In some terrible turn of fate, it feels like war has made him brave in the face of death but fearful at the thought of anything else. He should’ve seen it coming. He has always prided himself on being useful, now he is something no longer that; a guard dog with its teeth pulled out.
But, despite these terrible thoughts, Huntington presses up against the bottoms of his boots, solid and familiar, and the air that wraps around him smells like the Appalachian Mountains, as it has since he was a boy. He knows this place. That he takes comfort in, that he is in a place he knows solely by feel and smell. The bus shudders to life at his back and once again begins to lumber its way down the road. Carwood watches it go until the dark swallows it out of sight.
Looking up, Carwood stares into the night sky, inkwell-dark and starlight-shimmering, with rain-spent clouds scudding along as the wind starts to kick up again. It’s nearing the end of November now and the chill slips up his sleeves and down his collar like snakes, but he doesn’t shiver, his body burdened with the knowledge of what true cold is.
Through the gaps in the thinning clouds, he admires the stars and finds himself remembering the night in May, when Germany surrendered.
Him and a man, drunk on champagne, lying in a quiet field of wildflowers, shoulders pressed together, fingers touching. Music and laughter was behind them, far in the distance. The man was pointing at the stars, slurring their stories, and Carwood was looking at him, counting his lashes. Carwood only remembers the man, who’d been warm and shuddering like a star, and the taste of his mouth, which had been sweet like all forbidden, far-away things are.
Ron. He’s been trying not to think about him. It’s difficult not to, but he knows it’s for the best, so he tries anyway. It helps lessen the tightness behind his ribs, that terrible yearning. Closing his eyes, Carwood urges the image of Ron’s wet lips and bright eyes out of his mind. Let him go, you have to let it die.
After a deep breath and dropping his head away from the stars, Carwood fishes a lighter and a pack of Lucky Strikes out of his breast pocket. The art of smoking is ingrained in him now, refined with muscle memory, nothing like it was when he began, unsure fingers and fumbling lips, much like how he was when Ron let him touch him for the first time- Goddamn it.
The smoke floods his mouth and spills into his lungs, throat kicking with nicotine, and Carwood looks down the road. The black asphalt shimmers lamplight-yellow until it disappears into the dark’s hazy mouth. Somewhere, down that road, is home.
“Let me take you home” Carwood murmurs into the thin skin of Ron’s jaw, a pulse thumping contently against his teeth, “I want to have you again in my bed,”
Ron laughs, a sound that is chest-deep and velvet-soft. He yields his throat, arches his back, spreads his legs, everything about him serpentine and seductive, “How about you have me again now?”
Carwood starts to walk.
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At this time of night, Westmoreland is a quiet neighbourhood. Most of the houses have their porch-lights off and are shapeless shadows in the night, only distinguishable by their orange-eyed windows, and the streets are empty, soulless but for himself.
Even though everything is cloaked in night’s veil, Carwood is comforted by the familiarity of it all, reminded of when he would walk home late after working extra hours at Camden Corner. He’s half-tempted to make a visit, it’d barely take five minutes, just to see how Mr Galloway is doing and, if Cindy still shuts up shop, scavenge himself something warm and sweet. But he decides against it quickly. He can say hello - And find out how many sons Mr Galloway lost - another time.
At the end of Bradley Rd is the cul-de-sac Carwood grew up in, his home a two-story house with a wrap around porch and a treeline in the backyard that leads right to Fourpole Creek. His heart stutters a little at the sight of it and he gets this childish urge to run, to burst through the door and collapse in his mother’s arms, spewing up all the terrible things he saw and the terrible things he did in a downright hysterical display. He chokes that urge down and further crushes it under his heel with his spent cigarette.
Carwood pauses at the edge of the driveway. The porch-light is on, a buzzing light bulb with moths fluttering desperately around it, and at the top step is a dog. A dark predatory shadow that is staring down at him with eyes that are reflective-white and uncanny. He knows this dog, has since she was a puppy, but right now she is looking at him like he’s a stranger.
“Vixen,” He breathes, a greeting, a warning. She doesn’t react, just continues to watch him. Carwood knows this dance of hers, has seen it played it before, but he’s never been on the other end of it.
Vixen is a strange dog. A Fox Red Labrador who doesn’t bark - she’s hasn’t made a sound louder than a whine since she was six months - and doesn’t go to greet people, for she expects them to come to her. She’s reserved, not as out-going and generous like her breed typically is, and her silence is downright unnerving, especially when you realize that it doesn’t equal to timidness.
Carwood remembers when a stranger came to their house in the middle of the night.
Through a slip in the curtain, he and Sarah had watched him approach the porch where Vixen was - it’d just been them home, the rest of the family in North Carolina, staying the weekend at their grandparents. He’d looked suspicious, with his coat collar turned up and something that must’ve been a crowbar sticking out the waist of his pants. He remembers his heart pounding and Sarah’s fingers digging bruises into his bicep with how tightly she held onto him. Vixen had sat almost gracefully, seemingly undisturbed by him. The man had offered his hand for her to smell, as if buying her friendship would allow him easier access into their home.
Vixen bit at least two of his fingers off. Carwood says at least because they only found two on the porch when they went to clean up the blood the following morning.
That’s what Carwood thinks about now as he walks up the path. The streaks of red on the porch, the torn flesh and ripped sinew, the teeth indents on the exposed bone and the way Vixen licked her chops as Sarah scrubbed blood out of the wood grain. The pain, the mutilation, is the last thing on his mind. In truth, it’s the rejection. Nothing scares Carwood more than rejection. And to rejected by Vixen would mean he’s no longer welcome home.
He holds his hand out to her. Her coat is blood-orange red under the porch light, her eyes bottomless-black. She nudges his knuckles with her wet nose, warm breath huffing over his skin, over scars that weren’t there the last time they saw each other.
“Remember me, Vix?” He whispers, hopeful, afraid.
God, she’s doesn’t know me anymore. Carwood holds his breath. She’s gonna sense all this change inside me and it’s gonna smell like rot to her. She’ll bite me, eat me, throw me back up, because I’m a corpse.
Instead, Vixen erupts into a symphony of delighted whines. It’s like music to his ears, and the the relief it brings him is so devastating it forces him to his knees. She’s there to meet him, jumping up, her paws heavy on his shoulders, greeting him in the best way dogs know how. Her tongue is warm and wet against his cold face, and it makes him laugh.
“Heya girl, you miss me?” He says, ruffling her neck and patting her shoulders. He cradles her face and notices that her snout is flecked with white hairs, like she’s been snuffling around in a pile of snow, or powdered sugar. She’s older. They both are.
Vixen snorts and nips his chin, wagging her tail so violently the movement of it echoes through her whole body. She looks at him and Carwood wonders how he could’ve ever doubted her, his quiet Vixen, with her sharp teeth and picky heart, full of dog-loyalty and animal-understanding, who came into his life when grief was killing him and has allowed him back into hers despite his rotting insides. To be loved by something that can smell your fear.
“I’ve missed you too,”
Out of the corner of his eye, something moves.
He glances to see the curtain thrown open and- oh God, that can’t be Tildie? His baby sister? Has he really been gone for so long? She’s still soft in the cheeks and her hair is still the same shade of blonde Pa’s was, but there is a growth to her that Carwood notices even through the windowpane. For a second, she stares at him, sparkling eyes big like saucepans, mouth agape laughably wide, showing off her missing front tooth. Then the joy comes and it’s as blinding as he remembered it was.
“CARRIE!” She shrieks so loud it’s a surprise the window doesn’t shatter, and then, with a swish of the curtain, she’s gone.
Carrie. He hasn’t been called Carrie since he left home. Tildie had ran after the shuttle bus, screaming it through her tears, and he’d never felt so guilty in his life, leaving her like that.
Vixen backs off him, sensing what’s coming, and not moments later the front door is flung open, banging against the wall in way that would make Mama grind her teeth. He barely sees her, a little blur of blond hair and blue fabric before she crashes into him with the power of a mortar blast, throwing them both off the steps onto the ground below. It knocks the wind out of him and he clutches onto her, half-laughing, half-panting.
“Carrie! Carrie, you’re home!” She squeals, wrapping around him like she’s a swathe of gauze and he’s an open wound. He hugs her back and finds that she fills his arms more than she used to, “I don’t know you, my Tildie isn’t this big,”
“You’ve been gone so long, I’ve grown up! See!” Tildie explains, lifting her head to grin at him, “My adult teeth are coming in!”
“So they are,” He smiles fondly, brushing her fringe out of her eyes, marvelling at this little girl and her heedless joy. He expected tears from her, like when he left, but all she has for him is smiles.
Feet thunder against wood in their direction and before Carwood knows it, he’s being dog-piled. He’s pinned beneath three of his kid siblings now and though he grunts under the weight of them, he craves it fiercely and tries to envelope all of them in his arms. He can’t bundle them up like he used to and every reminder that they’ve grown makes him feel sad and guilty, makes him think about all the important things he’s missed.
Charlie, always easy to spill tears, weeps Carwood’s name from where he clings against his stomach and Lucy crawls on top of Tildie’s back so that she can bury her face in his neck, always quick to keep her tears private. Closing his own watery eyes, Carwood pulls them tighter to him, as if he wants to draw them all into the cavity of his chest and keep them there, warm and tucked away from all the bad things in the world. They make him forget that there is anything wrong with him.
Something snuffles and then Carwood is sputtering as Vixen licks his ear. He tries to turn his head away from her but she follows so he has to unfasten an arm to push her back.
“Vixen’s missed you,” Lucy giggles wetly, rubbing her cheek with the heel of palm, and Carwood strokes the back of her head, following her long river of dark hair as he answers, “I’ve missed her. I’ve missed all of you,”
“Not more than we’ve missed you,” Tildie states without a waver of doubt and Charlie lifts his head up just so he can nod in agreement. Carwood can tell by his beet-red face that he’s too choked up with sobs to speak.
“Tildie? Charlie? Mama will kill me if she gets home and finds you all out of bed-”
Carwood doesn’t recognizes his voice and barely recognizes him at all when he steps out onto the porch. He sees a young man, tall and lean with his hair short and brushed, the polar-opposite to the Robert he remembers, who’d been a lanky boy that avoided scissors and brushes like the plague because he liked his hair long and tousled. It shakes him, to the soul, and Carwood gapes at Robert just as much as he gapes at him.
Gently, he urges his siblings off him so he can stand up, which spooks Robert into startled action, hurriedly stepping down the porch and approaching with nervous enthusiasm. After a moment of dumbly staring at each other - a moment that leaves Carwood horrified as he realizes that Robert now stands eye level with him - they yank each other into an embrace. His brother trembles, clutching at his back, reminding Carwood of how he’d cling onto him during thunderstorms.
When they part, he pats Robert’s jaw in the same way Pa would do to him, callouses scratching against his teen stubble, and says, “Didn’t know who you was for a second. Last I saw you, you were a boy. Now look, almost a man,”
“That’s what happens when you miss three of my birthdays,” He jokes hoarsely, but his eyes are shivering with tears and his lips are too wobbly for him to maintain a smile, so he just crashes back into his arms, “Man, I’m so glad you’re home,”
“Me too,” Carwood whispers, resting his chin on the crown of Robert’s head.
He tries to will his own tears away, even though he knows he doesn’t have to - his family never one to shame each others’ emotions - but it’s a habit that’s been a part of him since Pa passed away and it only thickened during the war, to remain unbowed and steadfast, a harbour for others to moor themselves to when things get rough, despite his own crumbling foundations. It’s natural to him, to hold and to carry, sometimes it feels like its what his shoulders were made for, what his soul was designed to do.
“Robbie, you’re hogging him,” Tildie whines, only to be chided by Lucy, “He’s not just your brother, Tildie, he’s our brother. We have to share him,”
Carwood grins, heart swelling with affection. He’s missed them all, so very much, and in truth he barely knows how he spent so much time away without trying to claw his way back to them. Rationality and duty, perhaps some other things.
“Where’s Sarah?” He asks, allowing Robert to pull away and situate himself, the empty space he leaves immediately filled in by Charlie, who ties his arms around his middle like he’s liable to disappear at any given moment.
“Asleep,” Lucy answers promptly, which kick-starts Tildie into action, leaping up the porch steps as she exclaims, “I’ll wake her up!”
Immediately, as if out of instinct, Carwood tells Tildie to leave her be. There is little that he is more familiar with than Sarah’s post-sleep anger. No amount of passing time will make him forget that waking up her is akin to signing your own death certificate, or earning yourself, at the minimum, a tongue-lashing that’ll do lasting internal damage.
He remembers that, around this time of year, he always ended up interrupting her mid-afternoon nap when he started splitting logs for the woodshed and she’d storm out, wrapped in her dressing gown, to curse him to the darkest pits of Hell, or wack him around the head if she had the passion to chase him around the backyard.
“She won’t be mad for long,” Tildie says as she dances excitedly in the doorway, her nightdress swishing like blue water around her calves, “Not when she sees you’re home,”
From memory, he expects Charlie to hurry along after her. The two of them are the youngest - seven and eight, no, Lord, ten and eleven - and, being born only a year apart, they might as well be twins, especially with how one is never far behind the other, as if they are stringed together by a rope.
But Charlie remains pressed against him, face buried into his shirt, holding onto him like a ball and chain. It makes Carwood’s chest hurt, not just out of fondness but also guilt, knowing that his little brother is afraid he’ll leave again, trying to prevent it with his small weight.
“I’m not going anywhere, Charlie,” He reassures softly, stroking his hair, “I’m not going anywhere for a long, long time,”
Charlie tilts his head back, staring up at him with big watery eyes.
“Promise?” He utters, in a voice so high with desperation and tears that Carwood cannot help but swoop him up into his arms and hold onto him as tight as he can. It must hurt his little bones, but Charlie doesn’t complain as he welds his face into the crook of his neck.
“I promise,” Carwood swears, breath stuttering in his chest as he presses a firm kiss into his brother’s hair, “I promise,”
A door slams shut inside the house. He can hear Tildie giggling cheekily as she scurries down the stairs and the thumping footsteps that follow behind her, accompanied by a slew of sleep-roused rage.
“I swear to God, Matilda, if I go down there and see another damn possum that Lucy’s brought home, I’m going to lose my mind,”
“A possum?” Carwood throws a curious look over at Lucy, who just shrugs and simply says, “It was raining outside and it looked cold,”
He huffs an amused laugh. Nothing has changed. Lucy has always brought home the strangest things. He lowers Charlie to ground, the topic of the possum seemingly shaking the blue out of him, if the grin he shoots up at Carwood is to go by anything. Smearing away the tears on his cheeks, he adds, “We called him Mr Smith, after the dog from that movie,”
“Bet Mama wasn’t happy with that,” He says, smirking at Robert, who nods his head to the door, “Surprisingly, she took it well. Sarah, eh, not so much,”
Laughing, Tildie comes skidding onto the porch, nearly tripping over Vixen as she pads up the steps and settles down on her bed by the door, a sawdust-stuffed striped quilt that is stained with filth and time. Mama sewed it for Vixen years ago after they realized that she preferred to spend the warmer seasons sleeping on the porch.
It was her first true act of embracing Vixen, his mother more a inclined to cats than dogs, which was why they’d never had a dog before her, despite mostly Carwood’s pleading. It was only after Pa passed did she finally yield, handing him a box on Christmas morning, their first of many without him, for Carwood to open and find a little red puppy with a big red bow around her neck. He’d sobbed and she’d scrambled up to lick the salt of his cheeks.
“Don’t run in the damn house,” He hears Sarah bark snappishly, stomping down the hall, and he sees her before she sees him, her narrowed eyes fixed on Tildie, who bounces on the soles of her feet with building excitement, “Now what is it?”
Silently, grinning from ear to ear, Tildie points to Carwood. Sarah is scowling when she turns to look at him. She isn’t when their eyes meet.
To his relief, Sarah hasn’t changed at all. She’s still freckled and blonde, still has a penchant for braiding her hair in way so that it drapes over her shoulder, still wears the bangle of twined string and green ribbon that Pa made her when she was little. And she still covers her mouth with her hands when she cries.
“I hate you,” She hiccups into the shell of her palms and Carwood grins, “I’ve missed you too, Sarah,”
When she runs at him, he catches her. She pounds at his back and shoulders as she sobs and slowly, he feels himself getting overwhelmed, a well starting to overflow, his own tears thicker and faster now with something solid pushing up his throat, something like a scream. No, not yet. Later, he can let it all drown him later, but not now, not while they’re all here.
But it’s hard not to. Especially with Sarah, who is his sister, his first friend, his steadfast shoulder that has always been there for him to lean on, never shuddering under the weight of his worries. No one in this world knows them like they know each other. Their skeletons share the same closet, for there are no secrets between them. He knows that she’s kissed more boys during Sunday Mass more than she’s prayed there and she knows that he’s queer. Some secrets are heavier than others.
The new ones inside Carwood sit inside him like heaps of mud, like bags of gunmetal, like buckets of blood, and he feels like offering these to her would be too much. The weight of the war should be his own to carry and it’s not just the weight anymore, because now he could stain her, somehow, like his terror could mar her as it has him. He can imagine he’d scare her, with the things he’s done.
He’d scared his boys, when he walked out that house doused in blood. Luz didn’t look him in the eyes for days, he’d seen what Carwood had done to that kraut, to his face-
Carwood won’t risk losing her, can’t risk Sarah looking at him like he’s a stranger, or like he’s filthy with sin. Maybe he is, but for the love of all that is cruel and kind, no one else can know.
He holds her painfully close, breathes in the smell of her sharp hair tonic, focuses only on that and the wet-warmth of tears on his skin, their salt mingling together. He’s never been one for favourites, but Sarah’s absence from his life hit him hard, overshadowed only by Mama’s. Speaking of…
“Where’s Mama?” He’s not quite ready to let her go just yet, so his words are quiet and muffled against her hair, but she hears him, her voice rough around the edges in his ear, “Over at Mrs Abernathy’s, gossiping or something, I don’t know. Anita is gonna lose her mind when she finds out she missed you, the one week her family goes out of town and you come home, Lord, she’s gonna have a dying duck fit,”
God, Anita! He’s barely thought of her, his oldest friend and he’s barely thought of her. In truth, Carwood had tried his hardest not to think of Huntington at all during the war. He dreamt of it, Lord, did he dream of home.
“I’m sure she’ll give me her share when she comes back, and-” Whatever he was going to say next is washed away as Mama bellows from across the street.
“ROBERT JAMES LIPTON! WHY DO I SEE CHILDREN OUTSIDE WHEN THEY SHOULD BE OUT OF SIGHT IN BED?!” It sends shivers up Carwood’s spine and he’d never think he’d be so delighted to hear his mother’s yelling.
“Uh oh,” Tildie sings and Robert huffs, “Can’t she see why you’re all out of bed? It’s clearly for a good reason,”
“She’s not wearing her glasses,” Lucy supplies, “She decided the meaning of the picture even though she can’t see all of it,”
Lucy has always been the eccentric of the family. As strange as Vixen, she’s a smart girl that has unnerved people since she was little, which suits her fine since she’s always preferred her books and trinkets over them anyway. She likes to say things that sound like she pulled them straight out of a novel and quotes obscure proverbs throughout the day if they fit the situation she finds herself in, either lightening or sobering the mood.
Carwood recalls thinking that Ron and her are alike with how they are both unapologetically their peculiar selves, and that the two of them would get along like a house on fire. One they set alight themselves, no doubt.
Over Sarah’s shoulder, he watches Mama storm down the footpath, ranting. His misty eyes fog over again at the sight of her, a woman who has barely aged since he was small, who is all warm hands and sugary smiles, dark-haired with biscuit-brown eyes. There is such wonder to her, something he can’t explain other than she is his mother, who loved him first, before even God, and he knows that if he’d died in the flooded fields of Normandy or the pitted earth of Bastogne, she would’ve found some way to barter his life for her own.
“Your brother is gonna be home any day now and you’re all gonna be too tired to welcome him back because you’re too busy causing a raucous at Lord knows what time,” She goes, faffing with her hair as she does when she’s vexed, “Honestly, Robert, I ask you to do one thing and this-”
Like the others before her, Mama freezes at the sight of him. It scares him a little, when they do that, as if they see him as some wild animal that’s wandered into their home, unwanted and liable to bite. But it doesn’t last long, and Mama comes to him. She cradles his face with her hands and Carwood sinks into her palms, sighing shakily, tears slipping as he closes his eyes. He’s home, Jesus Christ, he’s home.
“Carwood,” She says his name like a prayer “My sweet boy,”
“Mama,” It comes out choked, a half-sob, a sledgehammer that slams against the glass bottle, and then he’s crumbling into her arms, overwrought with homesickness and grief, with all sorts of overwhelming things that are too terrible to have names.
She draws him close, pressing his head against her heart, stroking his hair and his back, hushing him, murmuring, “It’s alright now, I’ve got you. My darling boy, you’re home, it’s alright,”
Behind him, he vaguely hears Sarah ushering the others inside, away from the scene he’s making. Later, when he feels embarrassed and ashamed, he’ll thank her and apologize. But right now, he lets himself have this.
For the first time in a very long time, Carwood puts his weight on someone else and lets himself be held.