Charlie #2
Constantine rubs a hand over his face. “I brought the bag from his apartment to my room. I can go get it now.”
Nikolaus nods at the idea. “Yes, please do.”
Constantine looks right at me and says, “I’ll be right back.” And as he leaves, I’m once again left alone with Nikolaus.
He reaches for me, his hand closing gently around my elbow, and I let him help me stand because my legs are not having a good time being legs right now.
He leads me toward the sofa, not the bed, and that small detail makes it easier to go with him.
The bed feels complicated now. Warm and enormous and too close to the memory of falling asleep beside him.
The sofa is safer. Or at least different, which is sometimes the same thing when my brain is this messed up.
I sit at the edge of it while Nikolaus sits beside me. He looks down at his lap, then at me, and my face heats because I know what he is thinking before he says it.
“Come here,” he says softly.
I tense, expecting him to force me, but all he does is pat his thigh.
“You don’t have to sleep,” he says. “Just lie down.”
“I’m fine sitting.”
“Charlie.” His voice is deep and rumbling, the same tone he used before when telling me to drink water and eat grapes and tilt my head back while he washed my hair. The tone that somehow slips under my defenses because it doesn’t sound like anger, even when it gives me no choice.
One second, I am sitting upright, and the next, I am curled sideways on the sofa with my head in his lap, no force needed.
Nikolaus’s lap is warm.
His body gives off heat like a furnace, and my cheek is against the soft sleep pants covering one of his thick thighs, which is somehow worse than if I had put my head on his bare skin, because now I am aware of the fabric and the body underneath it and the way he has one hand hovering above my head, waiting.
“May I touch your hair?” he asks.
I almost laugh.
The question is absurd after everything. Because he kidnapped me and had guards outside the door and won’t let me leave, but is seeking consent to touch my hair.
I don’t understand the rules.
I don’t understand any of the rules.
But my scalp still remembers his fingers from the bath. The nice pressure, the careful untangling, and the way my whole nervous system had betrayed me and melted for it.
I give a tiny nod, my eyes closing as his hand settles on my head.
Nikolaus does not say anything. Maybe he knows that if he does, I’ll remember to be embarrassed and sit up.
Maybe he just doesn’t want to ruin it. Either way, his fingers move slowly through my hair, not combing exactly, just stroking from my forehead back toward the crown of my head, then down to the nape of my neck.
My body doesn’t relax fully, but some of the tension I’ve been carrying since the guard incident finally begins to loosen.
Nikolaus reaches for the remote with his other hand and turns on the television, muting it immediately before the sound can startle me.
The screen fills the room with a soft blue glow.
He scrolls through channels, apps, and menus like he’s searching for something specific.
He passes by sports games and news broadcasts, stopping eventually on a cartoon.
A little animal character in a raincoat is talking to another little animal beside what looks like a treehouse. The sound is low when he unmutes it, gentle and cheerful, and so far removed from everything that just happened.
“Is this one alright?” he asks, his fingers lightly scratching at my scalp.
I nod against his thigh, not really ready yet to talk. He doesn’t make me, and sets the remote down.
The little animal on the screen trips into a puddle and gets back up laughing.
Nikolaus’s fingers travel lower, rubbing at the base of my skull. A shiver moves through me before I can hide it, and his touch slows before he repeats the same motion with more intention. He rubs my neck next, thumb pressing gently into the tight muscles there, then moves behind one ear.
The sound I make is tiny, barely anything, but the soothing touches don’t falter, and my captor doesn’t comment on it.
He only rubs behind my ear again, and my eyes burn because apparently, this is all it takes to make me want to crawl out of my own body.
A warm lap, a cartoon, fingers behind my ears, and the knowledge that the men with guns are outside the door instead of inside the room, and if they tried to come back in, Nikolaus probably wouldn’t hesitate this time before pulling the trigger.
That should horrify me, and it does, but it somehow also makes my breathing easier, which I kind of hate.
The door opens after a few minutes, and I jolt so hard I nearly roll off the sofa.
Nikolaus catches me with one arm before I can fall, pulling me back onto him. “Easy.”
Constantine steps in, carrying a dark duffel bag, and freezes. His eyes flick to me, then Nikolaus, then the television. Something like understanding crosses his face, but he is smart enough not to say anything about the cartoon.
“Sorry,” he says quietly. “It’s me.”
My heart is still thudding.
Nikolaus’s hand settles heavily between my shoulder blades. “Bring the room service menu over, please.”
Constantine finds the leather-bound menu on the kitchen counter and brings it over without argument. Nikolaus takes it, then nudges my shoulder.
“Pick out something for your breakfast, baby.”
“I’m not hungry,” I murmur quietly.
“Maybe not, but won’t you feel better later with at least a little something in your stomach? I won’t make you eat all of it, so just order whatever sounds good, okay?”
I nod meekly, face red. I don’t understand how he already knows my poor eating habits. That shouldn’t be possible so quickly. It’s not fair at all.
Avoiding eye contact with both men, I roll over slightly to see the menu better.
Nikolaus holds it open in front of me, one large hand still petting me, and I blink at the list of food.
Most of the listed options come with what sounds like enough food to feed a small family.
There’s also a lot of stuff with salmon.
And while rich people must enjoy eating fish for breakfast, I most certainly do not.
While I read through, trying to find something that won’t result in a ton of wasted food, the two of them start talking.
In English this time, thankfully. Although part of me is curious to know what it was that they were speaking earlier.
Even thinking back on it, I can’t pinpoint a language.
In the guards’ mouths, it had sounded blunt and rough, the words shoved out in hard, ugly bursts while they grabbed at me.
But when Nikolaus spoke it, it changed. He sounded cold and controlled, his voice low enough to make the words feel heavier, smoother, like they weren’t being shouted so much as aimed, like a weapon.
Part of me wonders what it would sound like if he were to use those words in a different situation, like how it would sound if he spoke them softly to me.
I’m not sure how I feel about that curiosity. I’m not sure how I feel about how nice it is to be on someone’s lap, or how weirdly calming it is to be left out of conversations because they’re going over details that aren’t my job to figure out.
My job is to pick out what I want to eat.
I hear bits and pieces of their conversation, but it sounds faraway as I focus on the menu. Constantine is telling Nikolaus that I don’t have any pets or roommates. He says something about my car, and something about “important papers.”
My stomach does a weird, twisty thing at that, because important papers could mean anything. Medical bills, insurance stuff, maybe even my birth certificate.
I should ask.
I know I should ask what he took. I should sit up and demand to know exactly what parts of my apartment they went through, and whether my neighbors saw, and whether Constantine judged the dishes in my sink or the laundry I’d left in piles or the stupid little nest I’d made on my bed because sometimes getting under the covers properly took too much effort.
But Nikolaus’s hand moves behind my ear again, his thumb pressing in a little circle at the soft place beneath the bone, and all the thoughts that had been stacked up in my head simply fade.
My eyes drift back to the menu.
Words.
So many words.
Omelet. Granola. Benedict. Compote. Artisanal. House-made. Seasonal. Fresh.
They all start looking like a fake language.
I blink hard, trying to make the letters behave, but they keep blurring and separating and floating around the page.
My head feels full of warm cotton. Not sleepy exactly.
Not the same way as before, when my body crashed and dragged me under against my will.
This is different. Softer. Like I’m still awake, but not in the front of my brain anymore.
Constantine says, “There are four prescription bottles in the bag and two over-the-counter things that were beside the bed. I didn’t want to guess what mattered, so I brought all of it.”
“Good,” Nikolaus says.
His voice rumbles through his thigh and into my cheek.
I close my eyes for just a second.
I can feel the heavy robe around me, my hoodie bunched at my shoulder, the soft cartoon voices from the television, the shape of Nikolaus’s thigh beneath my head.
His lap is so warm, and his fingers are in my hair.
One of his hands is big enough to cover the back of my skull almost completely, and that should make me think about the guards again, about the hands that covered my mouth and held me down.
It doesn’t.
Or it does, but only for a second, and then his thumb strokes behind my ear again, and the memory slips away like something too heavy to keep holding.
Maybe because his hand doesn’t feel like theirs.
Maybe because I’m exhausted.
Maybe because I’m a deeply stupid person with a broken brain and no survival instincts.
I don’t know.
I only know that my body slowly, slowly gives up its rigidity.