Chapter 20
Lennon
I slept like shit, and I feel like shit. I probably look like shit too, polycotton and dad-core shirts are so not my vibe, but in a way, it seems appropriate. So wrong it’s right. The synthetic material of the pants makes a faint vvvsst vvvsst sound as I walk to the kitchen.
I hate it.
To drown it out, I pray Connor is out and I’ll have the kitchen to myself. Naturally, as this is my own personalized version of hell, he isn’t, and I don’t.
“Morning,” he says cheerily.
It’s hard to say for sure, but it looks like he might be in a better mood than usual. Fuck me.
“Good sunrise?” I ask.
“The best.” His smile is slow and knowing. It’s one of those smiles that mainly affects his eyes. For a millisecond, they grab hold of me and pin me in place, pouring good things into my soul.
I blink and snap out of it.
He watches me as he takes his tablets, soft eyes following me as I fix my breakfast. He doesn’t look at me, he looks into me. He sees me. He sees my pain and doesn’t look away from it. He sees it so deep and so clearly that I have no choice but to explain myself.
“I’m not okay all the time,” I say stiffly. “But I’m working on it.”
“Okay,” he says lightly. His smile doesn’t flicker.
It doesn’t fade, and it doesn’t intensify.
He stands at the counter, swallowing tablet after tablet, and when he’s had six, he puts the glass of water down and chases his meds down with a few spoonfuls of yogurt. “Does it come for you worse at night?”
It takes me a moment to understand the question. Almost as though I’m translating it from a second language I’m not fluent in, into my first language. It’s so blindingly accurate, it throws me, and I answer honestly before I have time to come up with a lie. “Yes.”
He nods slowly, rubbing his palms together in long, leisurely strokes where he traces his fingertips from one hand down the fingers and palms of his other and back up again. “Okay,” he says again. “Let me think about it, and I’ll come up with a plan.”
A frisson of fear creeps up my legs.
A plan?
A plan to do what?
“Don’t look so scared, it won’t be anything bad,” he says, holding out a hand to placate me. “And honestly, it was probably a good thing you went to bed early last night. Those lentils got to me, man. I swear, I was farting to kill.”
It’s so unexpected and he looks so earnest when he says it that it rearranges my organs. My lungs expand, and a loud, sudden bark erupts from my chest.