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When I’m within touching distance, she steps back, one foot behind the other, matching my pace, but she’s not fast enough and trips. I catch her by the elbow and pull her toward me.
She crashes into my chest. And it’s a full-body fucking crash, where her soft curves are molded to me, her thighs touch mine, and her head is nestled against my shirt.
And is that her heartbeat or mine that’s about to rip flesh and bone?
She stares up at me as if hearing the same rhythm—the pulsing, the pulling, the tugging—and her lips are parted again. There’s a blush in her cheeks, a pink color that extends to the hollow of her throat and the shells of her ears.
And because I can’t fucking help it, I lift her chin with my thumb and forefinger, angling her head back. I do it because I want to watch her mystic eyes, the changing in them, the mixture of emotions swirling in them. But maybe I also do it because I want to touch her.
Put my hands on her.
She’s soft and small and that does fucked-up shit to me.
It shouldn’t.
It can’t happen.
But fuck if I understand that right now.
Because this, right here, this moment suspended in the middle of nowhere feels like the truest thing I’ve experienced in a very long fucking time.
But then something happens.
A full body shake takes hold of her.
And it’s not just one of the side effects of her insomnia; it’s a violent type, as if she’s about to combust. Her chin trembles, too, like when she’s scared.
Like right before she goes to hide.
What the fuck am I doing?
I release her and step back. I need to get away from her before I do something I’ll regret.
Under King’s own fucking roof.
12
Gwyneth
Two weeks later, I’m forced back to reality.
I’m forced to let go of the hope I held on to so tightly when Dad had his accident. Because the truth is, he’s not waking up and probably won’t. The doctor said that the more time he spends in a coma, the slimmer his chances are of coming out of it.
And even though I’ve been visiting him every day, I can feel the gloomy cloud that hovers over his hospital bed. I can tell that my dad is probably not there anymore, no matter how much I talk to him and read to him and everything in between.
And that’s just been too painful to think about, so I distracted myself with school before the summer break. And cleaning. I do that a lot when I’m anxious or stressed. I scrub floors and counters and dishes and the bathroom.
In my head, I’m scrubbing my mind clean. Does it work? For a while, maybe, but not in the long term. Because the problems far outweigh the solutions. I thought myself strong enough to take it all—let it soak in and then vanish—but maybe it’s been disintegrating me from the inside out.
The thought of theD-word happening to Dad makes me shake uncontrollably in my closet.
That’s why I need to be distracted. Summer vacation has officially started, and if I don’t keep myself occupied, I’ll go mad. I’ll live in my closet, scrubbing the floor and eating ice cream until I have some sort of a crisis.
A mental breakdown. Meltdown. Or something else that ends withdown.
It doesn’t help that Susan isn’t backing off. Not even an inch. She’s still throwing suits left and right, trying to get the house back because it was her husband’s and should’ve belonged to her, but my father “stole” it.
Despite my efforts to get involved, Nate doesn’t give me many updates about her.
