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The memory hit anyway.
Brunette hair tangles in the wind, strands spat out with laughter because she can’t keep her mouth closed, can’t stop talking, about the school’s new running back while sitting on the high school’s lawn, her sundress hiked up enough to tan her legs and kicking out at my shins when I throw pieces of my sandwich at her.
At first, I didn’t feel the waft of cool air against my shins. I’d burrowed into my legs, the barrier offering meager protection to the battering, endless remembrance.
She’d only been alive for seventeen years, and yet Cassie would stay with me forever.
Light footsteps sounded, but I didn’t look up, barely cared, how Rada or any of her staff would see me. Too immersed in self-pity, grief, fear, it was a state that didn’t—couldn’t—happen often anymore, but when it did, it hit like a bear. Limbs quaked, sounds escaped, but if they were from me, I couldn’t tell.
Weight fell across my shoulders and pulled me against fabric. Large hands spread out on my bare back and stoked.
I lifted my forehead from my knees, squinting through the steam. A black lapel brushed against my nose, and as I looked up, the mist parted and cleared against the sheer concern on Theo’s face.
“It’s okay,” Theo said, still stroking. He studied every aspect of me that he could, grazing for wounds, blood, anything to indicate why I was curled up on the floor in a cloud of fog.
He’d unbuttoned his shirt, the collar flayed open to expose his clavicle, beating rapidly as it assisted pumping to his brain, his heart, his very lifeblood pulsing in the center of my vision.
Why I fixated on this was unknown, but I lifted two fingers anyway and pressed down on his neck.
“Scarlet, what’s going on? I can’t help you if I don’t know.”
The beats hit my fingers, his adrenaline making it harder, faster.Alive.
“Sweetheart, you’re crying.”
His thumb scraped across my cheekbone, and he spoke. “What’s happening here?”
My hand found his wrist, squeezed. “I don’t … I can’t.”
“Can’t what?”
I swallowed. “The…”
He followed my gaze, his hand never leaving my face, cupping my cheek, stroking my jaw. “The hair dye?”
“It’s brown,” I said, as if that contained all the answers he needed.
He settled back into his crouch. I still gripped his wrist. He said, with the way of trying to understand where a baby’s pain is coming from, “You don’t like the color?”
Against every internal warning, my eyes welled. “I haven’t been brunette since…”
Realization dawned. “Ah, shit.”
Theo’s curse was like an ice cube being thrown at my nose. I shook him off, let him go. “It’s—stupid, I know. I can do it. I’m being a child.”
“No, you’re not.”
Theo’s cadence, the pureness of its meaning, made me want to bawl in his arms. But, crying didn’t make it better. Wouldn’t bring Cassie back.
“I had a moment. I’m sorry—”
“Don’t apologize.”
“Sometimes it hits me out of nowhere,” I said over his words. “Stopping at an intersection, waiting for a light to change. My head hitting the pillow at night. Raking through clothes racks. Staring out a goddamned window.” Theo’s thumb was stroking at the crook of my arm, but I barely noticed, shame replacing sorrow. “Looking at a box of fucking hair dye.”
“It’s not the hair dye.”
I bit down on the inside of my cheek.
