Chapter 14 #2
The kitchen light flickers. Scottie sets the coffee machine on the worktop – a shiny chrome alien in the rustic kitchen – and drops my bag by the door.
His mother opens the freezer and pulls out a bag of frozen peas. ‘Ice those knuckles before they get any worse.’
He sits down. She passes behind him, and her fingers brush his cheek, brief and private and so tender it knots my stomach.
This is what family looks like.
I haven’t seen my own mum since June. My birthday. Eight months ago, but it feels longer.
‘Katie’s room is free,’ she says, running water over a cloth at the sink, wringing it with hands that have clearly done this ten thousand times.
‘End of the hall. Clean towels and a toothbrush are on the bed. Breakfast whenever you wake.’ She drapes the cloth over the tap.
‘And you’re staying for as long as you need, love. ’
The mug is chipped at the rim, old and well-used, and the tea is builder’s strength. I take a sip, and the heat spreads through me.
‘Thank you. I’m so sorry for—’
‘Nothing to be sorry for.’ Her voice is kind but firm. ‘You get a good night’s sleep. Tomorrow, the world will look different. You’ll see.’
The hallway is narrow, floorboards warped by decades of footsteps.
Katie’s room is at the far end. When I push the door open, the space is so dense with personality it nearly pushes me back out again.
Polaroids tacked to the walls: friends in graduation robes, a dark-haired girl kissing a red-haired girl’s cheek at what looks like a music festival.
A bookshelf stuffed with marine biology textbooks and dog-eared paperback romances.
A single bed beneath a Velux window with a cuddly shark toy.
I give it a pat, pick up the towel and the toothbrush, and nip across the landing to the bathroom.
As I’m brushing my teeth, Scottie and his mum’s voices drift up the stairs.
My brain is too tired to make out anything they might be saying.
Doesn’t really matter anyway, I’m so grateful they gave me somewhere safe to crash.
As soon as I’m done, I head back to Katie’s room, slump onto the mattress, and pull out my mobile. The screen glares in the dark as I open the app. Nevin. Last online 00:19.
He is awake. I suppose that’s good, and no one’s going to prison anytime soon.
My thumb stalls over his name. His profile picture is us from the Rebels’ launch party in summer. His hand is on my back, already knowing where to press to make me stand straighter.
Not anymore.
I tap, scroll to the bottom, and tap the block button. The confirmation box pops up. Block ‘Nevin Neely’?
I press ok. And then I go and block him everywhere. Email, Instagram, TikTok.
It’s done. A digital amputation. I chuck the phone onto the bedside table beside Katie’s battered copy of Sunset Song by Lewis Grassic Gibbon. I read it in school. Tough story, but great.
I crawl under the duvet and curl onto my side, shark toy in my arms. The pillow breathes out lavender and sea salt as I close my eyes and wait for the adrenaline to dissolve.
The nightmare doesn’t have monsters. It has a room without doors.
The walls – made of polished mirrors – are closing in.
I’m in the centre, on pointe, and I have to hold a perfect arabesque.
If I wobble, the walls crush me. Nevin is the room.
The mirrors reflect my face, but it’s wrong. My mouth is sewn shut.
The walls touch my shoulders.
I’m woken by a scraping sound in my windpipe. A high-pitched intake of breath that releases as a choked cry. I scramble upright, tangling in the duvet, and grab my mobile from the bedside table. 03:33.
The room is painted in shades of grey by the moonlight filtering through the skylight, but the terror is pulsing behind my eyelids. My ribs take a battering from the inside that shakes my whole frame.
Knock. Knock.
The sound is soft, but there is an urgency to it that cuts through my hazy panic.
‘Ava?’ Scottie’s voice is muffled by the wood.
I force the sob back down. ‘Come in.’
The door pushes open. Backlit by the landing, his dark silhouette fills the frame. He is wearing a T-shirt and boxers, and the moonlight catches the broad angle of his shoulders.
‘I heard…’ He crosses the threshold and closes the door behind him. ‘You screamed?’
‘I did? No, it’s fine.’ The reassuring-reflex is instant. ‘It was only a dream. Don’t worry. Go back to sleep.’
Scottie doesn’t even acknowledge the fib. He drops onto the edge of the mattress and the bedframe creaks. ‘You’re shaking, Ava.’
‘I… The dream. It was…’ I can’t articulate the horror of it, so I deflect. ‘Jesus. It’s freezing in here.’
‘The radiator is on full blast. It’s just not very good at blasting.’ He reaches out, and his hand covers mine where it’s clutching the duvet.
‘Breathe,’ he says. ‘Do it.’
I inhale. It shudders on the way down.
‘Again.’
The panic seeps out of me until there’s nothing left behind it but exhaustion.
‘I can’t go back to sleep,’ I force the truth into the dark. ‘I’m afraid he’ll be there in my dream.’
Scottie looks at me, his face half-shadowed. ‘I can make a cuppa.’
‘No.’ The empty sliver of space beside me is a joke. It’s an absurd ask on a single bed. But him walking out that door is so much worse than things getting weird.
‘Stay?’ My voice is barely a scratch on the silence.
Tonight, I’m choosing who enters my space. It isn’t weakness to ask for a wall when the ceiling is falling down.
He lets out a slow breath. ‘I’ll pull up the chair.’
‘No.’ I curl my knees up, opening a sliver of space. ‘Here.’
He looks at the narrow strip of duvet. ‘Ava. That bed is built for one person. I’m almost two.’
‘And I’m a little less than one.’ My teeth chatter in the quiet. ‘Please?’
Scottie looks at our hands, mine still trembling beneath his. He is running the calculation – awkwardness versus my nervous system collapsing.
He exhales. ‘Right. Okay, I’ll stay until you’re asleep. Budge up, then.’
I shift toward the wall and press myself against it to make room. The mattress dips substantially as he lies down behind me. Katie’s bed really is small.
Then his arm comes over my waist. A ballast that binds me to the here and now. His chest is a broad, warm barrier against my back. There is no space left as the bulk of his thighs sinks into the mattress.
It’s like being held by a mountain range.
I should be worried about being squashed, but my shameless, inappropriate brain wonders if he could crush a watermelon between his enormous thighs.
Probably.
‘Better?’ his voice rumbles against my neck.
‘Yeah. Even though you’re crushing me.’
‘I’m trying my best not to.’
In any other timeline, I would be mortified. I would be hyper-aware of the heat radiating off him, the intimacy of his knees tucked behind mine. I would be wishing I had found him earlier, before Nevin turned me into a knot of scar tissue.
But right now, I’m simply thankful for his existence.
I trace the landscape of his forearm, the ridge of muscle. ‘He was the room,’ I say. ‘In the dream.’
‘He’s not here, love.’ Scottie locks his arm around me. ‘And I take up a lot of room. There’s no space for him. Not even in your dreams.’
Fair point. Hard to argue with the literal size of him.
The cold ache of vigilance that usually lives in the marrow of my bones begins to thaw. ‘Goodnight, Bear.’
‘Night, Marzipan.’