The Comfort of Black by Carter Wilson

leave
.”
    â€œHannah, we’ll talk later.”
    â€œNo, we will talk
now
.”
    He took another step. She grabbed his arm, and in thatmoment, it was Billy’s arm. Hannah was fifteen again. In her mind, her hand held a lighter with a flame that glowed in a dark room.
You don’t get to do this anymore. You don’t get to hurt any of us ever again. It ends tonight
.
    Like Billy, Dallin looked down and yanked his arm free. Unlike Billy, Dallin then kept walking and disappeared into the other room.
    Now Hannah screamed.
    â€œ
I’m the one who gets to leave you!
”
    Silence for a moment. Then Dallin reappeared. He stood there in the doorway, hands in his pockets, perfectly still. It wasn’t that he was merely quiet, observing. He was completely motionless. The way he looked at Hannah was something she had never experienced from her husband. In that look, in that absence of life in his body, he wielded all power in the room, as if, telepathically, he commanded the sound and the air to leave the room. And Dallin just stared. He just fucking
stared
at her. Then very quietly he said, “What did you say?”
    Her voice was coarse and dry. “I’m the one who gets to leave you.”
    Dallin stormed into the room. That’s the word that came to her mind in the seconds before he grabbed her. He’s
storming
. The twisted face of rage, the anger at the inconsideration of someone defying him, the need to punish the insolent, the disobedient.
    She heard his sharp, fast breaths—
jackal
—as she saw him raise his hand.
    Then it was around her throat, and he used that hand to shove her against a wall. The pain in her throat as he squeezed dwarfed the concussive slam of her head against the sheetrock. A framed picture from their honeymoon fell and shattered on the floor, shards of glass scattering around her feet.
    Zoo roared to life, barking furiously, the yapping piercing Hannah’s brain.
Bite him!
her mind screamed, as her voice was unable.
Fucking bite him!
But Zoo only barked.
    â€œLeave me?” Dallin said. His voice was calm, controlled,as his fingers squeezed her throat. “That’s what you’re going to do? You think you can
leave
me, Hannah? Just like that? With everything I’ve done for you? Saved you from a shitty white-trash existence. Made you wealthy. Given you everything you wanted, just so you can sit here and drink all day. And you get to leave me? No, I don’t think so.”
    His fingers squeezed into her neck. Hannah reached up and grabbed his forearm with both hands and dug her nails in as hard as she could.
    Dallin’s eyes widened barely more than a hair. “You have no idea what’s good for you,” he whispered.
    He wasn’t squeezing hard enough to block her air passage. Yet. She sucked in a shallow breath and asked the only question that existed in her mind at that moment.
    â€œ
Who are you?
”
    Dallin studied her. There was no joy in his eyes, yet neither was there menace. There was just a complete sadness, a resignation, the look of someone lost deep in the woods who finally realized they weren’t ever going to make it out. He leaned in and Hannah felt his breath on her ear as he spoke. The words came on such a light whisper she wasn’t even convinced she heard what he said.
    â€œI’m so sorry.”
    Then, without saying anything else, he released his grip. She fell forward, almost to the ground before catching herself, regaining her balance just as she saw Dallin turn and walk into the living room. Hannah stared out vacantly in that direction, unable to move, gasping. Zoo came up and whimpered softly as he licked the top of her right foot, the small, wet tongue rolling over the ridges of her bones.
    You don’t touch me
, she thought, thinking not of her dog but her husband. The last man who had hurt her physically was Billy, and the emotion, the adrenaline, the heat from the rage,