Chapter Eight #2
“Well, I have no clue why there does. In fact I thought I was pretty clear there wasn’t. We talked about this, like, a bunch of times. I told you how much I didn’t know anything about any of this sh—stuff.”
“Yeah, but I thought it was just like with me. That things just went wrong.”
“Honestly, I wish I’d gotten to the going wrong part. That’d be something,” he said, all brusque and kind of mad at himself about it. She could almost see him shaking his head. While she stood there, breath caught somewhere around her throat. Because did this mean that he was—
“Okay. Right. But you’ve been with someone, though. In the carnal sense,” she said, before she could stop herself. And it went down about as well as she should have imagined it would.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa. I just told you that discussing your body in explicit detail is too much. But now you think I’m gonna be able to talk about that? In front of a lady ? A sweet, wholesome lady? No way. No, ma’am.”
“I can’t decide if that means very not ever or very you have a ton .”
“It means none of what I’ve done is anything I want to assault your ears with,” he said, and she breathed out for the first time in what felt like half an hour. He’d done stuff. He wasn’t a virgin. Things weren’t that harrowing for him.
They were just harrowing in another way.
The somehow-talking-about-sex-with-him way.
“But you’ve read the books I gave you. You can’t think I’d be scandalized,” she somehow found herself saying. Like this was a good issue to press. And not one that exposed her completely.
“You blush every time you mention them. Pretty sure you would be.”
“So then what good am I going to be to you, a man who doesn’t blush about these things and is probably really experienced in that way. I mean, maybe you’ve not been to dinners but you’ve obviously been to other things.”
Orgies , her brain decided to shout at her in the middle of all this.
And right before he sighed, heavily enough that she peeped around the door just as he launched into his explanation.
“Because I’m worth the other things but not the dinners.
And I want to be worth the dinners, too.
I want to be worth the dinners more than I want to be worth the other stuff.
I don’t want to pick people up in bars, or get persuaded into stuff I don’t want to do, or have to get a grain of affection by some trash cans in an alley.
If you like that stuff that’s okay, that’s cool, but I don’t.
I just unfortunately look like I do. And have had life experiences that make it seem like I should.
Instead of any of the life experiences I long to have,” he said, like it was just obvious.
Something to be spelled out matter-of-factly, the way a person might act if they were trying to describe a slight promotion they wanted at work.
He shrugged, rolled his eyes. On the end of it he leaned back against the dresser by the window.
Shook his head. Started searching for his cigarettes.
No big deal , she thought.
Only somehow, somehow, her eyes were stinging.
Her face was suddenly wet. She had to try to swipe at it, surreptitiously, while he was frowning at the empty packet he came up with from the depths of his back pocket. “I should quit anyway,” he was saying as she finished up.
But she didn’t make it in time.
Because he looked up from under one cocked eyebrow. Then almost seemed to do a double take. Like he’d expected to see something close to amusement, and had to look again long and hard when he encountered the opposite. And once it was confirmed, his eyes went wide. He stood abruptly.
“Oh jeez, I’ve made you cry. How have I made you cry? That was about me, that was about me and what a screw-up I am, I wasn’t trying to be angry with you or anything. Kid, I’m sorry, please—” he tried to say. He even took a step toward her when he said it. Held a hand out.
But she had to stop him before it went any further.
“Don’t say please; I’m okay, it’s not your fault.”
“But it started happening when I was talking.”
“Because it breaks my heart to hear you say that stuff. And I don’t know how to tell you it does without seeming soppy or like I pity you or something, even though I don’t, I don’t, I just wish things were not like this or that I could reassure you that you’re lovely and kind and cool just the way you are somehow, I don’t know. ”
“You’re doing all of that already. You’re doing great.”
“God, don’t try to make me feel better. Here, let’s just find you clothes, let’s just look for things you can wear on a lovely date with someone nice.
She’s nice, isn’t she, this girl you like?
She’s really nice and will be good to you?
” she asked, even though it kind of broke her heart to do it.
Because, god, what she wouldn’t have given to be that nice girl in that moment.
To be good to him, the way she hoped someone else would be.
And so much so that when he went very still, and spoke very soft and quiet into the fraught air between them, she didn’t know what to do with it.
“She’s the very best. There is no one in the known universe above her,” he said, like… she didn’t know what. She couldn’t explain the weight of those words, how he looked at her as he said them. There was so much pointed eye contact that for a second she didn’t just believe he possibly meant her.
She knew he did.
He was telling her he did.
But the second she let that idea take hold, it happened. Another weird thing, like the weird stuff in the shop. Like when he’d made her think that before. The lights flickered—in fact, they didn’t just flicker. They went weirdly bright, and then snapped off. Like a circuit breaker had burst.
And the darkness, when it came, was so total she almost screamed.
She came close to reaching out, to grabbing hold of him and all his safe, reassuring solidness.
But she forced herself to be calm. To think rationally.
To hold on to the idea of electrical problems, instead of going down that bad path.
The one that said this darkness was very like the one she used to experience all the time.
In the middle of random afternoons, when things should have been bright as day, but suddenly they weren’t.
Suddenly everything was so pitch-black she could almost feel it brushing against her.
And only hiding in the closet had ever made it go away.
Getting right down in there, the way she almost wanted to right now.
Though she managed to resist, at first.
She stayed strong.
Then something shifted in the darkness. She saw the slick gleam of something almost like a smile.
And she just couldn’t help it. She climbed in, heart racing, breath coming too fast. Then once she was there, an even more intense urge came over her.
For the first time in over a decade, she desperately wanted to write something to ward it off.
Her hand itched for a pen, in the exact way it used to whenever she had one of these weird delusions.
They’d come, and her hand would go to her pocket.
She’d whip it out, like a gunslinger with a very strange sort of gun.
And then the words.
She even remembered them.
Let me be , she’d written every time, on the air.
But she couldn’t do that now. She couldn’t even try to. She wasn’t even supposed to think about it, her dad had said. Once you stop you can come home from the hospital , he had told her. And she’d stuck to that, she’d kept her word, she’d pressed it all down no matter how terrifying things got.
And they were terrifying right now.
She tried to close the doors around herself, but for just a second it was like something got ahold of them.
She saw something glint again in the darkness, razor sharp, followed by a hint of something else.
Something skeletal, grisly looking—a hand and a claw, she thought, as she pulled hard, hard, hard.
But the thing pulled harder.
It was strong, impossibly so. And it was going to get her this time. It had her this time. There was no escaping, no way out of this madness, nothing she could do to fight it and no one to help her now, not a soul, not a person in the—
“Kid, it’s okay. It’s okay, hey, I’m here. I’m here, it’s okay, I got you, I got you,” Jack said, so sudden and so frantic that she didn’t think. She just got hold of him. She grabbed him, tight, tight, tight.
It was okay, though, it was fine to.
Because he had hold of her.
She felt his hand go around her waist, like when he’d hugged her.
Only confident this time. Sure and strong as he pulled her into his arms. Like that lesson had made it okay to.
Or the circumstances had given him some permission.
He even cradled her like that on the floor of his bedroom, one hand smoothing her hair back from her face, his expression so full of concern she didn’t even feel embarrassed, until the delusion started to fade.
Until he asked, “Are you okay?”
Then she blushed. And tried to get it together.
“Yeah. Yeah. Totally.”
“It didn’t look like you were, then.”
“I promise it was nothing. Everything is fine.”
She went to sit up, to pull away a little. And he let her. He sat back on his heels as she tried to laugh and think of something to explain it. I thought I saw a bug , she imagined herself saying. But just as she went to, he cut in.
Cautiously, hesitantly, she thought. Yet he did it all the same.
“Okay. But if it wasn’t, you know you could tell me, right? Like, you get that I’m not like other people you might not want to tell. Other people that might think you’re weird over it. Who might do horrible things to you because of it,” he said.
And god, her heart almost stopped.
How do you know about that , she wanted to say.
But she caught herself in time. She forced out a laugh instead.
“Nobody has done horrible things to me.”
“So let’s call it not-great things, then.”
“My dad just did what he thought was best.”
He didn’t even bring that up, why are you copping to it , she hissed at herself in her head.
It was too late now, though. Jack’s face damn near crumbled, in a way that grabbed her hard and by the heart.
Then, even lovelier, it smoothed out into something stern.
Like a storm cloud had passed over it. “That what he told you?” he asked.
Followed by a nod he almost aimed at himself.
Like, yeah, he knew the score on this one.
“Because to be honest, that sounds like the kind of thing shitty parents say when their kids aren’t what they want them to be, and think doing something horrible to them will fix it. And believe me, I should know.”
She wasn’t sure he did know, however.
And it was only right that she didn’t lay claim to whatever he had been through.
“Yeah, but I doubt you were having nightmares while awake about stuff coming out of the walls or out from under the bed. Then imagining that the stories you wrote were stopping them from getting you,” she said, half of her cringing as she did at the thought.
Sure that he would now find it all just too weird.
She even tried to look away, at anything but that steady, assessing gaze of his.
But when she did, he followed her.
He bent his head until she had to meet his gaze again.
And it was so steady, and so serious, and so damned good .
“Right, and which one troubled your dad the most? Which one did he find the most objectionable? Your terror of something you desperately felt like you needed protecting from? Or the slightly weird way you, a teenager, a child , went about protecting yourself from it?” he asked.
She couldn’t answer him, however. It made her too speechless to hear someone put it like that.
As if they believed the things she’d feared had been real, or at least real enough to her that her dad should have cared about them, instead of her writing spells in the air.
And somehow, Jack knew it. “Yeah, that’s what I thought.
Listen, kid. Sometimes you’re not just imagining things.
Sometimes you haven’t just gone round the twist. And even if you have, even if you are, even if you were, it’s okay to do little things to help you get through.
A good father wants you to be safe, no matter how little he understands what you’re scared of.
A good father believes his daughter, and wants her to be okay.
He doesn’t send her somewhere even less okay than where she already is, with a terror in her heart for the only weapons she believes she has. Do you understand?”
No , she thought.
Yes , her heart said.
“I understand that nobody has ever said anything like this to me before,” she told him, finally, once the ability to speak came back. And he looked so disgusted at whoever these nobodies were she could honestly imagine him spitting.
“Yeah, well, maybe they should have. Maybe they’re guilty of not.”
“Maybe they thought it was all fine. Maybe they thought it was for the best.”
“ For the best is the enemy of what’s right, kid. Don’t forget that.”
Jesus Christ , she almost blurted out. But before she could, he stood.
He left her sprawled on his carpet, flabbergasted, and went to his dresser.
Gathered up a pen and a notepad, and held it out to her.
Then when she didn’t automatically take it, he knelt and forced it into her hands.
“Anytime you feel scared, you write down something. You write it now—and not like a kid playing pretend. Like it’s real.
Write like it’s real. Write what the adult you would do to stop a threat to your well-being. ”
And for the first time in over a decade, she looked at the pen in her hands—just a battered silver thing, with that same word emblazoned on it that his hat had, that same strange company out of a Stephen King story thing that had made her feel weird—and she wasn’t afraid. She didn’t feel embarrassed.
She clicked the button on top, and wrote down almost instinctively:
Let me be. Let me be. Let me be.
And when she did, she felt it in her bones.
A kind of brightness, a burgeoning spark.
Something reigniting after years of long disuse.
Then, finally, a sense that the darkness she hadn’t even known had been closing in was drawing back.
It lifted, and for the first time in a long time, she felt safe.
She felt okay. She felt like herself again, at last.