Chapter 18 #3
I stare at nothing until my vision blurs.
When it clears again, my nest is still there.
It's not mine anymore.
I put my hands in my lap.
I wait for the next command that doesn't come.
I breathe like that's a thing that matters.
I don't make a sound.
No one comforts me after.
Maybe that's the point.
Maybe it always was.
After they leave, the room trembles for a second like it's trying to shake their scent out of itself. It can't. Smoke and vanilla sit heavy over the floor like fog.
I stay in the chair because my legs don't remember how to be legs yet. The word please is still lodged between my ribs, useless now that there's no one here to hear it.
My ears ring with the end of my own voice.
I didn't know I could make that sound.
The silence after hurts worse.
I can still see it when I blink: Drake's hands moving in careful, useless motions; Marie's cheek pressed into my pillow, her eyes on me; Ragon's wrist dragging along my blankets, deliberate, methodical.
My palms sting. I realize I've been digging my nails into them hard enough to leave shy little half-moons.
"Breathe," I tell myself. Air goes in. Air comes out. It doesn't change the way my chest feels like someone reached in and twisted.
The nest sits in the middle of the floor where I left it last night when I still thought the worst thing that could happen was an awkward conversation.
It looks the same from a distance.
Up close it's wrong.
Not just the smells. The shape.
The weight is different. The way the middle slumps like someone bigger pressed it into a new idea about what softness is.
I stand up because I can't sit anymore. I take one step, then another, like I'm walking into a room where something died.
I stop at the edge.
I've done this a hundred times—stood here and looked down and felt the bone-deep yes that nests make in my chest.
There is no yes now.
There is only a buzzing that sounds like DMV lighting when you've been there too long.
A hair glints on the pillowcase. Dark. Not mine. Not Eli's. I want to pluck it off and I want to set the entire house on fire and I want to lie down and go to sleep for a week and I want to never close my eyes again.
I don't touch the hair.
I back away.
The closet is exactly where it always is. So is the bag of spare bedding. I open the door and stare at the shelves, at the tidy stacks that used to feel like a promise.
The plastic crunches under my fingers when I pull a roll of garbage bags from the bottom. Heavy-duty. For garden clippings and holiday decorations. I tear one free. The bag unfurls with a sound like paper being torn in slow motion.
When I turn around, the nest is still wrong.
"Okay," I say out loud. "Okay."
I kneel at the edge. My knees hit the floor in the grooves my knees know. My stomach rolls.
I gather the top blanket—the one with weight that used to quiet my brain. It has drape to it, heft. My hands don't want to pick it up.
I pick it up anyway.
The scent hits me in the face.
Pine and smoke. Vanilla. Drake's citrus twisted through with something that smells like anguish. My own sweet under-note trampled flat underneath.
I gag.
I don't make it dramatic. I just breathe through it while my mouth waters. I yank the bag mouth wide and stuff the blanket down into it. The plastic snarls against the fabric.
Next, the blue cotton strip that Eli once called my "security worm." I hold it for a second because it's a reflex. Then I smell it and that reflex dies. Bag. Gone.
The cardigan goes next. A button snags on the edge of the plastic and for a second there is resistance. I shake my hand until it lets go.
I strip the pillowcase off with brutal efficiency. The pillow itself—foam, fancy, bought after neck pain and three hours of reviews at two a.m.—goes in too because it's soaked in smoke in a way washing won't fix.
The weighted blanket is last.
It's heavy enough that lifting it makes my biceps remember they exist. I drag it across my knees, across the edge of the bag, and then I stop because my breath won't pull all the way in.
It was a good blanket.
It feels stupid to grieve a piece of fabric.
I shove it down until the bag bulges, then I press air out and twist the top like I'm wringing a chicken's neck. The plastic creaks. When I pull the tie tight, the sound is final. Scent tightens inside the bag: boxed-in, contained.
I tie a second knot because I don't trust one to hold.
The bag sits in the middle of the floor like a crime. My instinct says, hide it under the bed. My instinct should also say build a new nest now, right now, immediately.
Nothing in me moves.
I sit back on my heels and wait for the reflex to kick in. It doesn't. The place inside me that always hums with wanting to arrange softness just goes quiet.
A ridiculous thought: maybe I finally broke the part of me that's useful.
"What are pack for," Drake said the other night, laughing into my mouth. The thought slams into the wall of the day and drops like a stone.
I stand up and my knees crack. A lovely, human noise.
The chair in the corner has a dent in the cushion where Eli sits when he reads to me. I've teased him that he'll ruin it with his bony scientist ass. Today I'm grateful for the shape.
I go to the closet again. On the top, folded alone, is a single fleece throw I bought on clearance because it was the exact right shade of green to remind me of spring. It smells like laundry, not like people. It smells like nothing. I like that.
I take it down and hold it with both hands. It's light. It's small. It will not curl over and around and make a cave. It will cover my knees and pretend that's enough.
I sit in the chair. I pull the blanket over me. I tuck my feet up and make my body small, like I'm trying to hide in a nest made for a rabbit. The fabric brushes my chin. It's soft in the way fleece is factory-soft, not earned-soft like cotton gets after a hundred washes.
The room smells wrong.
Even with the bag sealed, even with the stripped mattress, the air is a layered thing that doesn't know me.
Ragon's scent has always been comfort when it's on him.
Marie's scent has been a thing I've learned to live beside.
Drake's citrus used to make me smile. All three of them in my nest without me—their combined presence twisted with shame and cruelty in the place where I fall apart on purpose—makes my skin crawl.
The rest of the house murmurs beyond my door.
Someone laughs, small and tentative, and then stops.
A low voice rumbles. Another voice—hers—floats up in a shape that would be soothing if I didn't know what it looked like pressed into my pillow.
Footsteps pause outside my door. The air shifts with them. For a second, hope lifts its stupid head.
The footsteps move on.
Right. No comfort.
Eli's pause feels like a hand pressed to glass. It hurts worse than if he hadn't stopped at all.
Jasper doesn't make noise when he moves. If he stands outside my room, I won't hear him. He'll be a shadow filing paperwork in his head, polishing words until they're knives.
Drake's scent skims the edge of the door and I know it in my bones. He stops. I hold my breath until my chest aches.
He goes.
My body sags like something cut a string. The blanket shifts with me.
The house has felt like a cage before—after the kneeling, after the ban. Today it feels different. Not because the walls changed. Because the thing they were supposed to hold doesn't exist anymore.
Nesting is instinct. Everyone says it, like it's gravity. You can trust it. You can rely on it.
I stare at the empty space where my nest used to breathe.
I feel nothing move.
There's a part of me that still wants to bake, stupidly. I imagine going into the kitchen and making biscuits. I imagine flour dusting my hands. I imagine Ragon walking in and telling me I'm not allowed to comfort myself.
I pull the fleece higher under my chin.
Outside, a car goes by. The neighbor's dog barks twice and stops.
I close my eyes.
The chair creaks when I curl tighter.
I try to imagine getting up and building again. Laying out blankets and tucking edges and making corners and saying mine out loud until the room believes me.
Nothing in me answers.
I am very small in a house I used to know by heart.
I am very quiet because someone told everyone not to touch me and they obeyed.
I tuck my toes under my thigh and make a little cave with my knees.
It will do.
It has to.
They can keep the bare bed. I don't want it anymore.
I keep this chair, this small square of green, this breath that goes in and out even when it's hard.
The rest of it is not home.
Not anymore.