Chapter 25 #2
I reach past him and switch the flashlight off.
The garage goes black. My hand finds his wrist in the dark — warm skin, the shape of his forearm under my fingers, known to me in a way that does something to my chest I've never had words for — and I pull.
Not hard. Enough. He comes. No resistance, no question, just his weight shifting and his boots on the concrete, and then we're through the side door and into the kitchen and up the stairs in the dark with nothing said, because words are for when touch isn't enough, and tonight touch is more than enough.
My room. The twin bed with its sharp corners and its water-stained ceiling and its history of two boys who shared it until sharing got unbearable and then unbearable was the only thing they knew.
The sheets are clean. I changed them this morning, because changing sheets was a task that existed, and tasks are what you grab for when the alternative is sitting still with your own head, and my head hasn't been a safe place to sit lately.
We come together without the usual charge.
No anger. No adrenaline. None of the rough urgency that's run under every time since he came back.
What happens is slower. Intentional. His hands find my face.
Mine find his waist. His mouth is warm on mine and it doesn't rush, and the not-rushing is its own confession, the kind that lives in the gaps between heartbeats and doesn't need a vocabulary to be heard.
His palm traces my collarbone. Slow. A thumb following the bone from sternum to shoulder at a pressure so light I should barely feel it, except I feel all of it, every point of contact firing like my nervous system has been waiting for exactly this and didn't know how to ask.
His fingers find the muscle of my shoulder, the terrain of a body rebuilt twice — once by Wade's belt, once by my own stubbornness — and read it like ground he means to memorize.
My jaw under his thumb. The stubble. The set of a mouth that's spent most of its life clamped shut around things it couldn't get out.
I pull him down onto the bed. One hand at the back of his neck, fingers in his hair, holding him there.
His weight settles over me — careful around the ribs, and I can feel him managing it, a man carrying damage who doesn't want to hand any of it to me — and then we're face to face in the dark and I'm just looking at him.
His eyes are dark in the near-black, pupils blown wide, and there's something in them I've caught before but never this close, never this stripped, and it sits between us with a pull I can feel in my teeth.
I hold the look. His jaw tightens. Then his eyes cut away — toward the window, the dark past the glass — and the cut is its own surrender, and I let him have it, because surrender is the one thing he almost never lets himself, and tonight he's letting everything.
We move together. His hips against mine.
My hands flat on his back, gripping, hard enough I'll leave marks by morning, and neither of us gives a single fuck, because morning is its own country and we are not its citizens.
He works me open slow, and when he pushes into me the stretch narrows the whole world to one point of white-hot pressure, and I arch up into it and his breath breaks against my throat and his hand comes to the back of my skull and holds me there — not with force, with something that feels both old as us and brand new.
It's urgent and it's honest and it's slow enough that every second registers and desperate enough that the registering is its own ache, and ache is the coin we've been spending since before either of us knew what a coin was worth, so we spend it.
All of it. His face in my neck. My nails in his back.
The frame knocking the wall in a rhythm the house has heard before and doesn't judge — the house just holds us, the way it's held everything that ever happened in it.
When he comes it's with my name half-bitten against my skin and his whole body going taut over mine, and I'm already there with him, his hand wrapped around me, the heat of him spilling into me, every nerve I've got lit at once.
After, we lie tangled in the dark. My hand on his chest. His heartbeat under my palm slows by degrees, a man bringing something back down that wanted to run loose. Both of us awake. Neither pretending.
The words are right there. I can feel them lined up behind my teeth — three of them, in an order that would cost nothing to say and everything to mean, and the everything is what stops me.
Trevor's hand finds my forearm where it lies across his chest, settles over my wrist. Holds.
Not squeezing. Just there. And I don't say it.
He doesn't either. The not-saying is a country we've lived in so long we know all its roads, and we drive them quiet, one more night, because tomorrow there might not be a road at all.
My breathing starts to go heavy — not sleep so much as my body overruling my brain, which is too worn down to veto it, and it takes me under fast and complete.
The last thing I know is Trevor's stillness beside me, his breathing too even, a man who's decided sleep is a luxury he won't spend tonight, not with what waits at the end of the driveway.
I surface once in the deep of the night.
His hand hasn't left my wrist. His breath is still too measured, a man counting his own heartbeats and not liking the total.
I don't open my eyes. Don't speak. Just lie there with my arm over his chest and the dark around us and the freight of everything unsaid sitting on us both like a thing that might, given years we may not get, turn bearable.
His thumb moves once over my pulse. Slow. Barely there. Then gone. The night goes on. Out on Cembrook an engine rises and fades, and the room stays dark.
The first gray comes to the window around five — thin, washed-out, the kind that promises nothing except that night's over and day's here whether we wanted it or not.
I keep my eyes shut. His hand's still on my wrist. The room's cold.
The sheets are wrecked. Somewhere east of town a seventeen-year-old with watchful eyes is either still breathing or already isn't, and the gap between those two is the only thing that matters and the one thing we couldn't control, and control is what we go to take back today with what little we've got left — which isn't much, but it's the whole of it, and some mornings the whole of it has to do.
Trevor lies beside me with his eyes open, listening to me breathe, until the gray goes blue and the blue goes gold and the alarm goes off at six, because six is when we move, and moving is the only thing left.