Cera #2
Wells doesn't say anything. His hand keeps moving across my back, and the silence stretches between us, heavy but not uncomfortable.
I press closer, needing the warmth of him, the solid weight of his body against mine.
"It really shook me up,” I admit.
Wells' chest rises and falls beneath my cheek, steady and slow.
"I bet. Car accidents are..." He trails off.
"Yeah."
Wells' hand keeps moving across my back, steady and slow, and after a while, the rhythm makes the silence less heavy. "My mom was killed in a car accident too. A semi, same as your friend."
"Jesus, Wells. I'm so sorry."
"It was really hard. I was nine."
I don't say anything. I hold him. That explains a lot about him. A nine-year-old boy losing his mom must have been catastrophic.
"My mother loved New Orleans. It's the main reason I've never left for good. This city is her."
His voice is low, the words coming slowly, and I go still against him because I recognize what this is: an offering.
"Most of her life was spent trying to save the bones of it. She loved old houses, the ones people wanted to tear down for condos. She'd buy them, restore them, make them matter again."
I don't interrupt. I barely breathe.
"There's a mansion in the Garden District called the Creston House. Have you ever heard of it?"
"It sounds vaguely familiar."
"She bought it when I was young, and spent years planning how she would bring it back. She died before it was finished, but it's on the historic registry now and open for tours. It gets me that one of the things she left behind has thousands of strangers walking through it every year."
He pauses, his chest rising and falling beneath my cheek.
"I'd love to see it someday."
"I'll take you."
It's not grand, not a promise wrapped in poetry. It's a fact, plainly said, and somehow that makes it bigger. He wants to share his mom with me.
His hand stills on my back, and something rises to temper it.
"I used to dream about having a mother like that," I tell him. "One who wanted to create things, bring things to life."
"What was your mom like?"
The question is sincere. Just like I want to know more about him through who his parents are, he does about me. And I always defer here. I've never shared my home life with anyone.
But I've never been safe enough to, until Wells.
"When I was on the roof counting cars, I'd imagine a picture-perfect family, with a mom who greeted me as I came home from school, who made my lunches and came to my school events."
Wells turns toward me. Bringing his hand to my face, his thumb brushes my cheekbone.
"I take it your mom wasn't like that?"
His voice is gentle. He's not pushing, but I can tell he's genuinely interested. And for some reason, for the first time in my life, the intense desire to dress it up or brush it off doesn't rise. I didn't choose my family, but I've always felt so much shame surrounding how we behaved.
I close my eyes.
"No, she wasn't. My mom hardly left her bedroom. And my father was a raging alcoholic."
There. I said it. And I'm surprised to find it's a relief. It isn't the whole story, but saying even that much is enormous for me.
Wells doesn't say anything. He keeps his hand on my face, his thumb tracing the line of my jaw, and the silence between us shifts.
I breathe against his chest for a long time before I can find the words to go further. It's bursting out of me now. I couldn't keep it in even if I wanted to.
"My mother had an affair."
I say it flat, almost clinically, like it was a disease, not a choice. It's how I taught myself to think about it, so it wouldn't crush me.
"I was the product of that."
Wells says nothing, but his grip tightens.
"My father found out I wasn't his biological daughter when I was around four.
He drank before, but after that, he lived in the bottle.
When he came home, it was worse than when he stayed away.
My mother couldn't look at me without seeing the mistake that cost her everything, so she stayed in her room and left me to figure the rest out myself. "
Wells's hand stops moving on my back.
"I was the dirty little secret, the lie made flesh, the thing they both had to look at every day that reminded them the family was broken before I was even born. I guess I should be thankful for the few years we got before my dad knew and my mother had to face it.”
My throat tightens, but I keep my voice level.
"That isn't your fault, Cera."
"I know that on a basic level. I do. Our family probably could have survived the affair if my father hadn't been tricked by her. It was the lie that sank us, and it continued, even after my father found out. We protected it, keeping it inside our walls, and I've carried it ever since."
Wells doesn't speak. He pulls me closer, and the solid warmth of him anchors me somewhere I've never dared to go until this very minute.
"You don't carry any of that with me. I'm not going anywhere. You're stronger than you give yourself credit for."
"I've never told anyone else about this."
I press my face into Wells' shoulder.
Wells shifts, his hand coming up to cradle the back of my head. He holds me against him, and his breathing stays even, giving me something to match mine to.
After a long silence, he opens his mouth to speak. The shape of something starts to form, and then he catches it, swallowing it back. Whatever it was stays trapped behind something I can't see.
"I'm here," he says simply.
Something about the way he says it catches at me, a familiarity I can't place.
I'm here. I'm not going anywhere. I've heard those exact words in that exact order before, in a different dark, in a voice that wasn't his.
My breath snags on it. For one second, I almost lift my head to ask him why it sounds like something I already know by heart.
Then I let it go, because chasing it feels dangerous in a way I don't want to name tonight.
The exhaustion hits all at once, the kind that comes after holding something heavy for too long and finally setting it down. My limbs go loose, and I sink into him, into the warmth of him wrapped around me.
Sleep pulls at me, lulling me into the safety of his arms.
I lift my head just enough to kiss him. "Sleep tight, don't let the bedbugs bite."
Wells's breathing has already started to even out, too, and I can tell he's on the edge of sleep. His voice comes sleep-thick, unguarded like I've never heard it.
"You too, Peoria."
I'm awake all at once, my breath gone shallow. I freeze.
The name hangs in the dark between us, and it takes a second to catch up to what I just heard, even though my soul knew immediately it was all wrong. My heart slams against my ribs while I hold dead still in his arms.
Wells is Midnight. It lands wrong, and then it lands true. Did he know? On the app, at the interview, every late night since, has he known exactly who I was the whole time?
Then I remember the shift in Midnight after we slept together, how his account vanished right after the second time.
I always had a sense that things between us became too familiar too fast, but chalked it up to fate, or some other bullshit thing people lie to themselves about love.
Wells' breathing deepens against my hair, his body gone under, unaware of what he just said, unaware that he just became the exact thing that broke my family before I could walk.
I have to get the fuck out of here. Now.