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I thought better of myself.
So I didn't run.
I stayed.
And then I stayed some more.
Until, we weren't just fucking anymore.
We were together.
I wasn't even sure how it happened. But one minute, I was just me, taking care of Cy when he was around, and myself all other times.
The next minute, I was investing money in her place too, helping her with bills. Taking out her trash. Fixing her car when it went on the fritz every few days.
And then there was Mikey.
He was always there, sitting with his eyes glued to one screen or another, eating what Erica served him, saying nothing, doing nothing.
Being all but ignored by his mother.
"Hey buddy," I tried, sitting down next to him on the floor, looking down at the game. "I used to play a game like this when I was younger."
"Why are you bothering?" Erica asked impatiently, having already told me she wanted to run a bath and share it, and clearly not happy I was delaying that. "He won't let you play," she added, like I had any actual interest in playing it. I just felt like shit that I went about practically living in this house, and walking around him like he was furniture.
"I'm not trying to play."
"Well, he won't talk to you neither, baby. Come on, let's take a bath."
And because I was hardly more than a careless tourist here still, I did. I went with her. I left him there.
I didn't even have any idea if the kid got to bed that night. Since Erica didn't get up to help him, I figured he just passed out where he was.
And that, I guess, was the final straw for me.
Maybe she didn't want to be a mother to him, and while I sure as fuck was not anyone's father, someone had to step up, step in. Someone had to give a fuck about this kid.
So I did.
I can't claim I was good at it.
In fact, that first week, I mistakingly created three meltdowns, things I didn't know were possible since Erica never tried to engage him.
"Just let him scream it out. Jesus," Erica said when I was frantically going to her laptop to try to research how to handle an autistic meltdown. "He will stop eventually, baby."
And he did.
When I got down on the floor, wrapped him tightly in a thick blanket, and rocked him.
Otherwise, honestly, I wasn't sure it would ever stop.
"Congratulations, you're the Mikey whisperer," Erica said, rolling her eyes.
Those were not good days between us, as a couple. She was, as it turned out, resentful of the time I spent trying to figure out some way to interact with Mikey aside from just sitting there and talking at him.
"I'm just not comfortable going about our lives like he isn't there," I told her when I came to bed an hour later than I said I would because I had been fighting with Mikey to get his teeth brushed.
"He's there, baby. He's there. We both know he's there. But I'm here too. Remember me? The one who fucks your brains out? Or did. It's been a while. I am starting to forget."
She had always been good using sex as a means of distraction. And, well, I'm not too proud to admit that it worked. I was young and horny and stupid. It worked.
And then she had my attention for a while.
Until we woke up one morning to find Mikey had fallen asleep on the goddamn cold, hard living room floor, and decided that, if nothing else, I could figure out a way to get him into his own bed at night.
He would be safe, comfortable, and I would be able to sleep easy knowing that he was both of those things.
It took a month just to get him in the room.
And even after I did, he wouldn't sleep there. He would sit staring at the walls, wide awake all night. Until he was allowed to come out in the morning. Where he would walk across the living room, get down on the floor, and pass out.
"I don't know what to do for you, bud," I admitted to him as we sat sitting up against the wall in his bed, both looking off blankly at the wall. "Fucking sucks, not knowing, not being able to fix shit. That's what I do. I fix things. I get that I can't fix you, but I want to be able to fix this sleep thing. My Ma was a lot like your mom; she didn't care if we slept or not, but we had to be out of her hair at night, and get up for school in the morning."
I had never really had issues sleeping, not as a small kid anyway, only later in life when I had my resentment to keep me up at night.
