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Aurnia
I dreamed I awoke with a hand on my cheek.
The hand was warm. I could trace the calluses of the hand like constellations behind my closed eyelids. The hand rose and fell with my gentle, even breathing.
In my dream, I knew who it was who had laid his hand on my cheek. I didn’t even know his name, but I knew the size of his hand, the softness of his touch, the closeness of his breath.
He had come after me in the rain. He had run, puddles in the street lamps splashing against his dark jeans. He had run for me. His fingers had wrapped once more around my wrist, like that first time we met. He had squeezed me tight. He had twisted me around. He had dragged me to him, to his body.
In my dream, he was there beside me in bed, because that’s where he had taken me, out of the rain, out of the cold. In the warm glow of the neon, in the narrow stairs, he had stripped my soaking wet clothes from my body first, then his from his. He had laid me atop the mattress like a rose upon a grave. He had slipped in beside me. He had raised the sheets, thick and plush and warm, atop us, buried us together beneath them.
In my dream, he was cupping my cheek with his hand, because I’d fallen asleep in his arms, pressed tight like we would have been if I’d let him drag me onto his motorcycle. The dawn was breaking and there in the first of the morning light, he’d had his first chance to look at me, to truly see me.
In my dream, when I opened my eyes, slowly, a butterfly’s wings unfolding for the first time, he would kiss me. He would kiss me and his hands would touch more than just my cheek. He would touch all of me. And he would press his body, large and imposing and impossibly strong, onto mine and the ink from his tattoos would transfer to my skin like a stamp.
It was a nice dream, the one with the man’s hand on my cheek.
If only it were just that…a dream.
A wash of ice-cold terror flooded my veins at the sudden realisation that I was awake, fully awake, and that there was a hand on my cheek. I choked back a little moan that had been rising in my throat and jerked back as my eyes flew open to see Nick at the edge of my bed.
I instinctively drew the sheets up toward my neck before remembering with a deep-boned shiver that I had fallen asleep in my wet clothes from the night before. I was deadly cold, but the heartless laugh that fell like a diseased bird from Nick’s lips made me certain that seconds before I had been suffering from the heat of a life-threatening fever.
“Didn’t mean to scare you,” Nick said, holding up his hands as if he wasn’t in my room, uninvited, unwanted, alone.
I drew a hand that I hoped he couldn’t see was shaking over my face.
“But it’s not really my fault that you scare so damned easy, baby Aurnia!” Nick added, his fingertips finding my neck beneath the sheets as he laughed again.
I needed to get away from the feeling of Nick’s fingers on my skin, but squirming away from him would only make things worse. It was the game of cat and mouse that he truly wanted to play. So I disguised my backwards motion with a wide yawn. Nick’s hand fell to my pillow, the tattoos he tattooed himself jerky and uneven across his scarred fingers.
I pushed back my hair and with another start found Nick staring at me, a grin on his chapped lips. Nick had eyes so black that it was a whispered debate whether it was his pupils blown wide from near constant drug use or whether his irises were truly that colour; though I never said anything for fear of it getting back to Nick, I always thought it was the second: it was just like Nick to suck in for himself all the colour, all the life around him.
I tried not to squirm beneath Nick’s steady gaze, his hands now folded primly over the leg he’d propped up on my bed. The key wasn’t playing dead, necessarily, the key was play uninteresting. Prey that didn’t play along was just no fun at all.
“Is my dad not home?” I asked, getting out of bed under the guise of getting ready.
I caught Nick’s eyes, already on mine, sharp and attentive, in the broken mirror above my dresser as I reached for a brush.
“No, he’s here,” Nick said.
I nodded like this didn’t upset me.
“And…” I said, drawing the brush through my still damp hair, “and he knows you’re…”
“In your bedroom, baby Aurnia?” Nick completed the thought for me, his grin widening. “What is it that he’s always saying when he’s high? ‘What’s mine is yours’?”
I tried my best to ignore this. It wasn’t like it was particularly surprising anyway. No matter how many times I stupidly kept expecting my father to do just the bare minimum for a father—like keeping his daughter safe, like making sure dangerous men didn’t wander into her bedroom while she was asleep—he always had a way of making me feel even more like a fucking fool. I lived in my father’s house, slept under his roof, ate his food, but I was an orphan in every other sense of the word. I was, in every way, abandoned.
I hadn’t sensed Nick moving, hadn’t heard him get up from the bed despite the noisiness of the springs. He was there behind me, looming with his black eyes in the mirror, before I even had time to think about escaping.
“Give that to me,” he said, and with a creeping sensation I knew it was the same voice I’d heard him use with my father.
It was a casual voice, an easy voice, a friendly voice even. It was a voice that was intended to make the person feel like they had a choice in the matter, that they could easily say no if they wanted. But just beneath the surface was a very real threat.
Nick’s voice was a sparkling river whose current you didn’t realise the force of till it had dragged you under. Nick was going to take over my father’s drug business whether he knew it or not. And he was going to card his fingers through my hair whether it was with me standing before the mirror or pinned on the floor beneath his knee.
I handed Nick the old brush.
