It’s all too perfect. What if he’s not awake?
“Tell me you’re real,” he whispers sadly. “Please.”
“I’m real. Do you want another random fact? I’m sure I can find one.”
He nods, almost childlike, desperate for reassurance. If they’re caught in the eye of the storm, then he wants to stay here while danger swirls around them as long as he can.
“The last time you got transferred to a different foster family, the very last time, I used to find reasons to go into your room after you left,” she admits. “Silly reasons. Laundry, cleaning.”
Nope, he never would have made that up. “Why?”
“Because I missed you, and for a while, it still smelled like you. Like that awful body wash you used to use, remember that? It was sandalwood or smoke or whatever manly thing marketing convinced you was worth a purchase. I missed you when you weren’t around. Even enough to inhale that terrible scent.”
He remembers that body wash as clear as day. “Come on, it wasn’t that bad.”
“Sure, sure, not that bad.”
They’re ignoring the reason he was transferred that final time. The black eye and busted molar he earned from flinging one of their foster father’s friends off Kara, where he had her bent over the pool table in the basement. The two of them fought hard enough to tear that whole space apart. In the end, he was the one charged with assault and relocated, and the truth was ignored in an overcrowded system.
Wade had a track record, after all. Violent. Hard to handle. More school suspensions than he could count.
“Were you okay after I left?” he asks quietly. “We never talked about it. Did he come back?”
“I aged out soon after and got the fuck out of there before he could try. I was okay, but only because of you.”
That moment changed her in ways she still struggles with.
Before, she went through life flinching.
After, she started swinging first.
They go quiet for a long moment and his eyes slip closed again while her hand fans out between his shoulder blades. She stays clear of his scars and never strays to the worst ones, but his mind drifts anyway. Back to when her ghost held him all those nights he thought he wouldn’t make it.
“Can I tell you something?” he whispers.
“Mhmm.”
“I used to dream of you when they had me. You’d come to me just like this. Felt as real as you do now.” He’s already lost a few of his own tears to the valley of her breasts, and she joins him with a sniffle.
“Is that why you thought I wasn’t real?”
He nods. “Stay with me? Just a little while longer?”
“Always.”
He has every intention of lying here until hunger forces them up, but a ring of bruises on her wrist startles him. Everything that happened last night, all the terrible moments his mindshielded him from this morning, flood back in. He wrenches backward away from her, unable to feel the loss as deeply as he thought he would in the face of a brand new sin. “I did that?”
She’s an angel below him, hair fanned out against the pillow and chest lifting in a rhythmic cadence. Doesn’t look surprised at his reaction, almost seems to have expected it.
“You weren’t yourself. You were having a nightmare, and it was a bad one this time,” she tells him, sitting up against the headboard.
“Fuck. Fuck. I knew this was gonna happen.” He doubles over, head in his hands before straightening up to inspect the marks he left behind.
She lets him look. He can’t help but think of how easily it could have gotten worse. The details of his nightmare are long gone, leaving only the purple clusters on her skin as proof that it happened.
“You should clock me right across the chin. I earned it.” He wishes for the pain of her fist connecting with his face to block out the faint memory of pinning her to the bed.
She huffs as if he’s lost his mind. “I’m not gonna hit you. This wasn’t your fault.”
