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I’m kissing his cheeks and forehead, stroking my hands up and down his back and his shoulders. I hug him tight, and he starts shaking harder.
“Sorry,” he grits. He feels tense in my arms.
“No, angel. Don’t be sorry for anything.”
“It’s just…old adrenaline,” he whimpers.
“I know.”
“Sorry I can’t even tell you without…”
“Feeling little echoes from it?” I rub his back…rubbing him good and steady. “Put your cheek right under my throat. Hold onto me tight, Ez. That’s the way we like to do it. Make it so there’s no air between us. Then just cry if it’s in there. Don’t cry by yourself. Cry so I can hold you. That’s the only thing I want.”
So he does. He sobs, soft and broken, it breaks my heart into a million pieces. His body trembles, and at one point he can’t get his breath, so I cup my hands around his mouth and breathe my breath into his lungs.
“I’m sorry,” he rasps, still twitching from the aftershocks of crying. His eyelids lift open slightly. “Miller?”
“Yeah, Ez?”
“Feels good…with you.” He wraps his arm around me and scoots close, and I hold him as tight as I can.
“I love you,” I say. “I’ve got you. You’re mine, and I’ve been waiting for you, so I can wrap you up and never let a damn thing ever hurt you again. Not without going through me first. I know you’re bigger, but I need to take care of you,” I whisper. “I already knew from the nightmares that you had in Fairplay someone hurt you. Now I want to murder that guy Paul, and everybody who was there. But that’s another story. Sorry I said that,” I add.
“You’re as good as I thought, Mills,” Ez whispers. Then his body twitches, and he’s asleep.
Seven
Josh
He must be bone tired. First the game, then finding me, and then the strain of telling me what happened to him. He sleeps pretty solid, his big body warm and still against mine, his arm wrapped around my back.
That helps me feel good, but it hurts me, too. He lost his memories of us, but he still wants me…craves me. He knows I’m safe. Look how fast he found me, and he told me everything.
"I don't really know you. But I feel like I can't live without you."
I love that. I need it. If he can’t remember, I can adjust; it’s okay as long as I feel like he loves me. The way he holds me, tucks his cheek against my chest—that’s us. It’s just like before. He feels like my Ezra, smells like Ezra. Every contour of his gorgeous body, the slight scruff on his jaw and cheeks—it’s delicious Ezra. My whole body and my soul reach for him. He is everything that I’ve been needing. Now he’s in my arms. He’s holding onto me, and I’ve got him close.
It fucking hurts, though. It rips me up. To know how bad those people hurt him. He was…tortured. Locked up, starved, shocked. I can’t stand to think about it. Every time I think about him like that— I can’t catch my breath. Feel like I’ll pass out.
I think of him so weak that he can’t walk, and people have to carry him from that closet down to the twisted “clinic.” Then that fucking monster shocking him, taunting him. All the pain of trying to eat. Jesus…so much pain. And his mom came, and she blamed him?
Fuck, he needed someone back then. I think of him in a psych hospital, everybody telling him he’s sick, and no one there to love him. No one there to know him. I think of Ezra—my fierce, untamed Ezra—being strapped down to a bed and having seizures. How it must have felt for him to be in a hospital after nearly dying in the “clinic” at Alton. Goddamn! It’s no wonder he was so scared of hospitals.
And fucking no one there with him. No one to hold him, kiss him, wake him up from nightmares. No one to see the dazed look in his eyes and realize he needs grounding. God, if I could go back there and rescue him from that hell—
I’d do anything. Just…anything.
I think about him leaving Fairplay. How he asked me to draw on his chest again. I’ve been so haunted by that night—the way he wanted to be held. The way he made me promise not to let go of him. It was because he knew! He was gonna sneak out before morning, drive away and back to his mom. He knew he was headed back to that inpatient place to go through ECT again. Of course he seemed strange that day we went water skiing. Of course he’d seemed fragile.
Did I let go of him in my sleep that night? If I hadn’t, would he have just stayed with me in Fairplay?
