Chapter 59 The Present
THE PRESENT
AMELIA
Caiden and I had fallen asleep next to each other in the wilderness, and I awoke with him pressed up against me from behind.
I woke just after sunrise. The cold bit deep, and my shoulder throbbed like a hymn for everything ugly that had happened.
I could see my own breath, each exhale a ghost. I shifted, and something heavy tightened around my middle.
His arm. Caiden’s arm, banded across me, hand buried under the hem of my shirt as if he’d tried to climb inside me for warmth while we slept.
My body went rigid.
At first, I could not move. My brain spat static and white-noise instructions—run, bite, scream—but none of it made it past the locked gates of my jaw.
I could not even muster a sound. His chest pressed against my back, radiating heat, anchoring me to the cold earth beneath.
The thing that frightened me most was not the weight of him, but how I wanted, for a moment, not to move. How my skin prickled at every point of contact, how the salt of his palm on my stomach felt more real than any touch I’d ever known.
If I shifted, if I so much as blinked, he would know I was awake. I didn’t want him to know. I didn’t want to explain why I hadn’t shoved him off, or why the idea of being alone in the cold was suddenly worse than being trapped in this tangle of bruised limbs and borrowed heat.
The animal in me stirred. I hated it, but also wanted it. To be held, to be wanted, to let the ache inside me find its answer in the press of his body. I wanted him to suffocate the memory of our kidnapper and the wire and the cage, to kill it with the violence of his presence.
I did not want him to wake up and see me like this: exposed, caught in the act of needing.
I jerked forward, dislodging his arm, and rolled a few feet away so violently I almost retched.
The movement startled him awake. He sat up, instantly alert, his face wrenched into an animal grimace.
He looked at me, hair wild, eyes black with hunger or fear, and for a long moment we just stared at each other.
Neither of us said a word, but the silence was louder than a gunshot.
His stare, wild and bare, made my skin crawl with something that wasn’t disgust. Not quite. I wanted to spit, to scream invective at him, but my jaw wouldn’t unhinge.
In the freeze-frame of dawn, I couldn’t tell if I was more afraid of being touched or of never being held again.
Caiden broke the trance first. He scrabbled to his feet, brushing the dirt off with quick, savage motions, refusing to look at me.
I crossed my arms over my stomach, feeling the imprint of his palm like a brand. My body was a contradiction of needs.
Bone-deep shame, vibrating want.
“We have to move,” he said.
He turned away, hauling the pack over one shoulder. I trailed after, slow at first, anger and embarrassment sticking to me and made every step echo with the memory of his hand pressed flat to my skin.
I wanted to scrape him off, to pretend it had never happened. I wanted to scream at him for being what he was. But I also wanted to grab his hand and put it back.
The sun was already high, burning the dew from the grass, and my wound had crusted into an ache. We followed a dirt ridge, picking our way through scrub and shale, the world already shimmering with heat.
My lips were cracked. I licked them, tasting salt and iron, the aftershock of fear like a fever under my sweat.
I refused to look at Caiden, but I kept close enough to hear his footsteps, to note the way his breathing shifted when the path narrowed and our arms brushed.
We stopped at a trickle of water, the stream barely wider than a piss trail.
I knelt and drank, then splashed the freezing water onto my face. It shocked me clear for a moment, blurring the edges of the memory.
I watched Caiden lean over the bank, cupping his hands. His arms were strong and bruised and beautiful in a way I hated myself for noticing. There was a rawness to him now, as if the wild had stripped away the shell of menace and left only the animal, hungry and hounded.
He caught me watching. For a second he blinked, and for a moment there was nothing in his face but pure, blank need.
My chest clenched.
I let the water chill my wrists, my temples, the wound on my shoulder. The cold seeped in and numbed the world for a minute, and I let myself believe that the fever had broken, that I could walk on without memory.
But then I stood, and he was waiting for me, gaze pinned to my face as if he’d never seen me before.
“Does it still hurt?” he asked, and for a second I thought he meant the shoulder, but his eyes darted to my stomach, then away.
“Not really,” I lied. My voice was steadier than I expected.
He nodded, like he knew it was a lie and didn’t blame me for it. We followed the creek until the banks widened into a low, stony basin.
There was a scattering of driftwood, bleached and splintered, and I settled onto one of the logs while Caiden picked his way along the waterline. He crouched, poking at the mud, then stood and stretched, the movement pulling his shirt taut over the ladder of his ribs.
I watched him, not bothering to hide it.
I was starving. Not just for food, though the ache in my belly was a black hole, gnawing at the integrity of my skin from the inside out. It was everything. The need to be seen, to be wanted, to be more than a discarded scab on the edge of the world.
And when I looked at Caiden, I recognized the same hunger, a shadow-self that stalked the edges of his body.
He was the only person alive who knew what the inside of that cage had done to me, who had seen the animal curled up in my spine and didn’t try to kill it.
Maybe because he’d had his own animal, and maybe because he wanted to see how long we’d last.
Caiden drifted back to where I sat, and the air between us was as dense as the day after a funeral. He dropped onto the log beside me, letting our knees touch, not by accident.
His thigh was warm through the shredded fabric, and the proximity made my skin prickle. He looked out over the basin, his hands twisting in his lap.
“We should figure out where to go next,” he said, but his voice was softer than I remembered, all the edges worn away. “We’re running out of food. And the bandage—” He made a vague gesture at my shoulder, the gesture useless and almost apologetic. “You’ll need antibiotics. Soon.”
I watched the ants migrate up the driftwood, all order and hunger and single-minded survival. “You think there’s anyone out here looking for us?”
His face went still. “No.” He shook his head. “There’s nobody. Not for a while, at least.”
He didn’t say what we both understood, that we weren’t the kind of kids anyone came looking for. Not quickly. Maybe not at all.
I picked at a splinter, tried to pluck a word or two from the mist in my head. “The freezer,” I said, and my voice came out thin, crimped. “Do you think he ate all of them?”
He stared at his hands, flexing the fingers. “He definitely ate some.” He didn’t elaborate. The silence made my teeth ache.
“Would you eat me?” I asked it like a joke, but my mouth was too dry, my tongue heavy as a stone.
“I’d eat the fuck out of you.”
The words hung in the air. My brain flared, then shorted out, unable to decide if I wanted to laugh or run or just lie down in the mud and let the ants do their work.
The way he said it, deadpan, but with a twist of heat behind it, forced my skin to erupt in goosebumps.
He met my eyes and didn’t look away.
“Was that a joke?” I managed, voice so dry it cracked.
He shrugged. “Depends if you want me to be serious.”
The way the wind sculpted his face, the wolfish cut of his jaw, made me want to bite something myself.
"You're disgusting," I said, but my voice was trembling, the words failing to land between us as anything but a dare.
He leaned closer, enough that I could smell the sweat and riverwater on his neck. “You’re the one who asked.”
For a beat we sat there, knees pressed together, the rest of the world narrowing to two sets of teeth and a single thumping pulse.
“You wouldn’t like it. I’m all gristle and spite.”
“I like gristle,” Caiden said, and his mouth tugged at one corner, almost a grin. “Spite’s the best flavor.”
His thigh pressed harder against mine, deliberate now. I didn’t flinch. I let the heat seep through, let my own hunger bloom behind the wall of my chest.
There was a gravity to the moment, a slow drift.
He looked at my mouth, then back to my eyes, and for the first time since childhood I understood what it meant to want something so badly you could almost feel the shape of it in your bones.
I should have been repulsed by him, but I wasn’t. The horror had torn everything else out of me, and in the riptide it left only want. Raw and simple.
I felt the want in my jaw, in the way my tongue pressed against my teeth, in the hard ache at the base of my skull.
I wanted, and I hated that I wanted, but I was starving for it, for the violence and the tenderness collapsed together until I couldn’t tell which was which.
But, this was Caiden, I shouldn’t have this hunger inside of me towards him, but it’s there, and I’m terrified it won’t ever go away.
It was wrong, so wrong.
I watched the shadow of a hawk spiral over the dry creek bed, and I thought, not long now.
Whatever Caiden and I had become—whatever wolves or scavengers we’d turned into—there wasn’t much left in us but the will to be the last one gnawing on the bone.
The thing was, I didn't want to be the last. I wanted him to stay, despite our past, even if it meant I kept eating until there was nothing left but the two of us, empty and toothy and sated on each other’s ruin.
I wanted to ask him if he blamed me for any of it, if he would have left me in the freezer if the choice was there, but I could not make my tongue move.
So I just sat, letting the sweat bake over me, feeling the wound throb and the riot of wants settle into a hard, black seed.