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Fiona
I’m not asleep when Boyd comes back to bed; even less so when he pulls my leg closer to his body, pressing me firmly into his hip. Granted, moving toward him while he thought I was asleep probably wasn’t the best move, but I couldn’t resist the electric pull his soul seems to have on mine.
Now, my body feels like it’s on fire, my core throbbing so hard and fast I can taste it in my throat. It’s not an unwelcome sensation, death by combustion, but the unfamiliarity of it is what has my gut churning like an unstable bomb seconds from exploding.
Anxiety threads through my nerve endings, igniting each one with a different worry—I’m too inexperienced to be lying in bed with someone like Boyd Kelly, too trusting, too optimistic.
Too everything.
Isn’t that what people really mean when they assign you qualifiers like “dramatic” and “princess,” that you’re a catastrophe of emotion and experiences coagulating to create a single high-maintenance soul?
Clearly, he came here for some kind of comfort, maybe even expecting to fuck out his frustrations, and I’m reading too far into things. The fact that he’s here right now probably has more to do with availability than anything else.
He thinks you’re easy.
Remembering how he suggested as much that night he yanked me away from Nico, I start to pull out of his embrace, a sinking feeling filling my chest. It settles like an anchor in the pit of my soul, weighing me instead of steadying.
Boyd’s arm tightens around my shoulders, holding me captive, as the lamp on my nightstand flickers on. “What are you doing?”
I freeze; my body feels like it’s being slowly split in half, one side content to stay within the warmth he provides, the other racked with shame to the point of paralysis. “Isn’t that supposed to be my line?”
Chuckling, he wiggles around a bit, trying to get me to relax back into him. His hands are warm against my skin as he attempts to coax the stiffness from my bones, but my brain continues to replay the scene of him calling me a whore over and over, blotting out the ability for anything else.
“Are... you having some kind of panic attack?”
“No,” I snap, though the palpitations stuttering through my heart say otherwise. “I don’t have those.”
He slides my leg off his waist slowly, disentangling from me as though I’m a wild animal that needs to be handled delicately. I sit up, curling into myself with my knees against my chest, refusing to look his way.
The heat from his gaze burns, more unnerving than anything else because it feels like he sees right through me. Like he’s used to unmasking people and unearthing their true selves, and I can’t think of anything more terrifying than Boyd Kelly knowing my secrets.
I didn’t spend my life trying to bury them just so he could come in and dig them up.
“Okay,” he says, nodding slightly as he pulls his own knees up and drapes his forearms over them. I notice for the first time that he’s shirtless, ink stretched across every smooth plane of his skin save for his face, disappearing beneath the comforter.
Intricate designs I feel myself getting lost in, skulls and abstract shapes that don’t let any sunlight into the surface underneath.
His eye is still swollen and purple, his knuckles cracked raw—evidence of the beast within, proof that one day it’ll claw its way out. Even if that means destroying him in the process.
As I sit there, struggling to grab a hold of the tether barely keeping my sanity together, I blurt out the first thing that comes to mind. “I think my mom wants to kill herself.”
Heavy silence stirs in the air around us, bloated with a confession that really isn’t mine to speak. One I’m not even sure holds a shred of truth.
Guilt slams into me like a freight train, making my heart accelerate and my fingers shake. I stuff them between my knees, trying to hide the tremor, my brain searching in overdrive for something to focus on other than the sense that my world as I know it is imploding.
That’s the only way to fully describe the sensation that ripples through my body when I have one of these... episodes. An irrational fear wraps around my body, sucking out the energy to fight and replacing it with the need to crumble.
Boyd’s eyebrows raise, wrinkling his forehead. “I beg your pardon?”
“You speak English, don’t you?”
He cocks his head, giving me a look. “Christ, Fiona, yeah but I’m... that just came out of nowhere, don’t you think?”
My skull throbs, thundering between my ears in an orchestral grand finale. Propping my hands on my knees, I drop my face into my palms, letting out a loud groan that scrapes the inside of my throat. “How do you think I feel?”
“Are you sure I’m the person you should be talking to about this?” he asks, his voice soft and hesitant. Completely out of character. I turn my head, peeking at him over the edge of my hand; there’s concern welling in his irises, softening the sharp contours of his face.
Like my issues are siphoning the malice from his soul.
