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He held me like that, still and quiet, while I filled my ears with my own heavy breaths, and he stroked along my arm until the panic started to fall away and awkward came up off the bench to fill its slot. I’d have sworn I was too big and too old and too evil for holding years ago, but his arms said I wasn’t. And that made me want so many things I’d written off.
All in all, a fucking embarrassing way to wake up.
“You alright?” he asked me after a few minutes.
He rubbed his hand across my shoulders, and I shivered and burrowed into his neck where he smelled so good, inhaling hard before I made myself roll away onto my back. There was a time limit to how long I could let him hold me like that, I guess, before it felt like way too much.
I didn’t know how to answer his question. I wasn’t okay. I was probably never going to be okay. Not exactly a selling feature.
I stared up at the ceiling and took a few deep breaths, tried to make them stealth and keep them hidden in my chest, but it was hard to be sneaky when it was so fucking quiet. No screaming, no traffic sounds, no music, no breaking bottles, just silence, like shit was normal.
“Great,” I finally said.
He snorted a laugh and somehow that made me feel better, so much that I might have smiled a little. It’s not like Iwantedhim to see what a mess I was. I didn’t want anyone to see that, and I hid it well enough so mostly they didn’t, I thought. Or maybe no one actually cared and they just pretended not to. Whatever.
Hedidsee me, though. Out loud, no pretending. And that was not something I expected to like so much.
“You know, when I was little, I used to wish someone would kidnap me,” I told him, and I had no idea why I said that, because that was one of those things I definitely didn’t tell anybody since it made me sound fucking crazy. There were so many of those things, and opening that door just a little made it almost impossible to keep holding it closed. “Like anyone, I didn’t care who. I’d go places by myself, ride my bike through shady neighborhoods, watch movies about kids getting snatched off the street or read those stories about kids wandering into the woods, and think yep, that’s what I want. How fucked is that.”
“Kinda fucked,” he agreed, slowly, like he was giving it some thought. “But it’s all relative, I guess. When things are bad, any way out seems better. Sometimes it is.”
He could have meant a lot of things by that, but it sounded personal, so I stayed quiet to see if there was more.
“I used to think about running away a lot,” he added after a minute. “Not really the same, but I’d think about what it would be like to have different parents. Get adopted by somebody else, be an orphan, whatever. I read too many books about orphans when I was a kid probably.” He paused. “That sounds creepier than your thing, maybe, now that I say it out loud. It’s not like I wanted anyone to die or anything. Just…”
I couldn’t help thinking it was funny, his soft little bookish daydreams he thought might scare me. “Nah. I used to think about that too. What would happen if my mom just didn’t wake up one morning. What I’d do. Where they’d take me. I was afraid of it happening, but I still thought about it. Too much, probably.”
“Are you okay?” he asked me again, propping up on his elbow, and I rolled back over toward him, feeling stupid now that I was mostly awake.
“I just don’t sleep great,” I told him. Fucking understatement.
He nodded. “The knife under your pillow kind of gave that away.”
Seemed weird to say I forgot about that, but I guess I did. My brain prioritized shit with a system I didn’t always understand, and the whole him-accidentally-getting-stabbed-while-we-were-fooling-around thing had already stopped being a big deal.
“Yeah, well, I do that a lot. Wake up at night. You should probably just… take me back. If you ever want to get any sleep.”
“Not happening,” he told me, reaching over and stroking his hand across my stomach, skimming some bare skin where my tshirt had twisted up around me. “You’re not going anywhere.”
I swallowed a moan. The guy wasbossy, in a straight up, subtle, smooth way I couldn’t get enough of. He absolutely should take me back, that was the only way this was ultimately ending, but I liked when he told me no. Liked it alot.
“Feels kidnappy,” I told him.
“Great. Enjoy it.”
I huffed a laugh, almost ticklish but not quite, when his fingers slid up my ribs.
“You have a bad dream, I’ll be here,” he told me, lifting his hand up to my face again, sliding his fingers softly up my cheek, like he knew how much it tortured me. “I’m not going anywhere either.”
I was pretty sure he was actually inside my head, like he really had hacked my brain, not just to move things around and make room for all this chemistry shit, but to rifle through my drawers and to look at all my secret lists of things I wanted.Don’t leave mewas some pretty base shit, but here he was making base ass promises I couldn’t help but roll my eyes at.
“I am a bad dream,” I muttered.
“None of that.” He slid his thumb across my lips. “Watch your mouth. You don’t talk like that about my boyfriend.”
I let my eyes focus on his, finally. They didn’t want to, avoiding was easier. I expected to see some teasing in his expression, some flirty bullshit, but it wasn’t there. His eyes were soft, but serious, and that turned me on more than if he was trying to dirty talk me. Thank god I never had dreams about anything like this because waking up would kill me.
Not a great indicator of what would happen when whatever the fuck this was shut itself off. But if it could just last long enough to keep me off probation, that would be killer. After that… Jesus, I didn’t fucking know.
