Chapter 22 #2
But I was not a child, and the old terror of being too much, wanting too much, was still there, hissing, alive in the marrow of my bones.
He made a sound then, half-moan, half-sigh, and turned over onto his stomach, one arm splayed wide as if to hold the whole bed hostage.
For years, I had trained myself to fear the silhouette of him, to tense at the sound of his approach, but in this moment, I felt nothing but an awful, crushing loneliness, and a small, sick hope: maybe if I lay down next to him, the ache would stop for a few hours.
I watched him for a minute, letting the dull pain in my ribs settle, letting the comfort of his shape settle the panic that had been gnawing me to shreds for days.
I peeled back the edge of the blanket and slid in beside him, slow and silent, the mattress barely creaking under my extra weight.
He did not wake, but some part of him must have registered my warmth, because his body shifted back, aligning itself to mine, the broad muscle of his back curving into the bowl of my chest.
I tucked my knees behind his and wrapped my arm around his middle, pressing my palm flat over the rough cloth of his t-shirt.
I could feel his heartbeat, a slow, steady drum, and in its pulse I found a rhythm I had forgotten how to trust.
For a while, I just breathed. I let the darkness around us thicken, let the silence become a kind of blanket itself.
I was so tired, tired in a way that felt geological, a fatigue that came from centuries of erosion, of being ground down by wave after wave of unmet longing.
I buried my face in the back of his neck and let myself dissolve, molecule by molecule, into the sleep I had denied myself for two days.
I woke hours later, or maybe minutes, to the sensation of his hand snaking back, settling on the curve of my thigh. His fingers dug in, unconsciously at first, then with a kind of desperate, waking pressure, as though he was trying to keep me from floating up and away.
I let him. I let the weight of his hand anchor me.
"Amelia?"
I pressed my lips to the nape of his neck and didn't answer.
He rolled toward me. Too fast, all at once, his arm locking around my waist, his breath hot and sour against my face.
For a moment, I thought he’d crush me, break me in half with the blunt force of his embrace, but he just pulled me tighter, until every inch of my body was caged by his.
I could feel his pulse everywhere: his chest, his wrist, his cock, hard against my thigh. I burrowed into the heat of his body, the sound of his breath a tide in my ears.
He said nothing. I didn't need him to. I just needed this, a little contact, a little proof that I wasn't already dead.
We lay there, bodies tangled like driftwood, until the edge of sleep softened everything.
When I woke again, the world had shifted: the faintest grey seeped through the window, painting his face in a light so gentle I almost wept. He was already awake, staring at the ceiling, eyes wide and empty.
He didn’t look at me, but he didn’t move away, either. We stayed like that, in an almost obscene silence, for what felt like hours.
Every few minutes, I would listen for his breath, the subtle shift of his chest, to make sure he was still there and not just a trick of the gray morning.
I wanted to thank him, or spit at him, or curl my fingers into his skin and never let go.
Instead, I waited for him to leave.
He didn’t.
The strangeness of that was so deep it took me a long time to recognize it as comfort.
My mother had never stayed, not once. Not in the night terrors when I was a child, not in the shivering aftermath of my father’s violence, not in the years when losing her felt like the only thing I’d ever been born to do.
I’d learned to expect only absence, to mother myself, to patch up the bleeding with whatever I could find. Even with Alex, even with Sabrina, I’d never once fallen asleep knowing I was safe in another body’s shadow.
I let my hand creep across the sheet and rest on his shoulder. The muscle there twitched under my palm, but he didn’t flinch or shrug me off.
He hadn’t left. He hadn’t left, and for a minute I didn’t know whether to sob or to scream, or how to tell the difference anymore.
I should have gotten up, but I didn’t. I lay tangled in the sheets, listening to his quiet, dogged refusal to look at me. My heart pounded a little, a stupid, fragile hope vibrating in the place where despair had lived for so long.
No one had ever let me stay, not really, not like this. This was the first time I’d allowed myself to be held, to simply exist in another’s arms, and not immediately recoil from the embarrassment of wanting it.
The memory of my mother’s limp, indifferent hugs scarred me. How they never lasted, never felt warm or loving, how I rarely ever received her hugs. Or anybody’s hugs.
But this? With Caiden? It felt right.
Maybe it was the loneliness, or maybe it was the grief that was causing me to feel so at ease here with Caiden, craving the comfort. People left, over and over again. It was something I was used to. It was brutal, and eventually I realized that love was a lie in the world.
But when I taste affection, it was always a kind of shock. I didn't know what to do with it, the way Caiden's arm stayed heavy across my ribs, the way his breath stayed tethered to mine, interval for interval.
The old fear—people vanish, love is a trick, don't be a fool—ran in the background, but I refused to move.
If this was a hallucination, it was kinder than any I’d ever had. He didn’t leave. Even as the morning brightened and the house filled with the faint clatter of Sabrina in the kitchen, he only rolled to his side and curled me closer, like he had a right to it, to me.
And I let him, too consumed by my grief to care that this was Caiden Baxter, the boy I told myself I would never become close to in this way.