Chapter Eighteen #3
It was too good to be true. Or to believe in. Terrible things would happen if he believed in it. Because if something happened to Hilary, Trenton knew he wouldn’t be a person anymore. He’d just be that explosion in his arm again, a tearing collapse.
“Together,” Hilary reminded him. “Just keep thinking my name. Don’t look away.”
The change in the man should have left him reeling, this new intensity to him baffling, but it was the opposite.
Trenton sank into it, like the feeling of having his feet finally touch bottom, the first real breath after a struggle so long he couldn’t remember the beginning of it, or that there might be any other way to be.
The police had questions, but Hilary took all of them, pulling back any attention that dared radiate wider.
“What’s wrong with him?” one of the officers asked, pointing rudely just in case anyone might not follow.
Hilary’s hand tightened on Trenton’s elbow, a silent reassurance. “He was attacked when he was a boy and is re-experiencing trauma. If you want more details, I can get his doctor on the phone for you. Otherwise, I’d like to finish here so I can get him back home. He’s very ill.”
That last part wasn’t a lie, at least. Holding Hilary was helping, but every moment was still defined by the fight to hold back his vomit.
He was trying not to move his head or speak or do anything but keep his focus on Hilary as he’d been instructed, but everything was so much and loud, and at the edge of his awareness was that thing, gone in all its details, but like a malevolent presence, reminding him that it could break everything—that it wanted to break everything and was just waiting for the most impactful moment to do so.
But he still had doubts. Had he been attacked?
Hilary had, but himself? He didn’t know.
He couldn’t remember anything but having his hand around that guy’s throat.
The others in the restaurant all corroborated Hilary’s story, but they were also his regulars—all others having fled before the worst had happened.
There was posturing and swaggering and a lot of repetitive words pushed at his head at varying volumes, but then somehow they were outside, and the cold air was much better for him.
He took great gulping breaths of it, his hands up against the brick of a shop, then his brow, just letting himself feel the roughness of it, a thing that was just a thing, solid beneath him.
“How?” It was as much of the question that he could get out.
If he’d been afraid of ruining things before, it was nothing to now.
Though he also couldn’t understand how it was not yet ruined, the disbelief of still having Hilary there—of having him more than ever—was baffling enough even to edge out over his fear.
Hilary didn’t need the rest of the question. He’d seen him asking it the whole time they’d been inside while the cops milled around, puffing themselves up.
“How do you think?”
It wasn’t an avoidance of the question, but rather, something just as pressing, a trade Hilary was offering. Like saying, Tell me what you think of me.
“You’re…kind.” But he knew that wasn’t it. Kindness didn’t taste like this. It didn’t know things. He tried again. “You protect people.”
“People?”
Trenton couldn’t have made the assumption on his own, the one that raised himself up on a pedestal, but Hilary did it for him, giving him the permission to go ahead with the claim.
“Me. You protect me.” It still felt egregious to say, even with permission. An obnoxious presumption.
Hilary smiled. Not like he usually did when trying to cheer him up or give him strength, but like a man setting down a burden after his back had already broken under it. “I’m your stalker, Trenton,” he said. “I’ve been stalking you for years.”
The next breath burned. Not like the acid in his vomit, but like a strong soap. The purgative, not the poison. Trenton felt himself growing, a gentle but insistent kind of pushing inside him. “I don’t believe you.”
“Yes, you do.” Hilary was looking a little like Trenton felt, though less relieved and more exasperated. “It answers too many things for you, doesn’t it?”
It did answer things. Things like why Hilary was always around and, more importantly, how he always showed up exactly when he was needed.
It also explained how the man knew so many things about both past and present, things he needed to do or say.
Because only someone singularly devoted, someone who had made him into a kind of life’s purpose, could have done as well as Hilary.
It still left one question. “Why me?”
“Because it has to be you. Because you were always, from the beginning, going to be.”
Trenton thought maybe the feeling blooming inside was how Mary Magdalene had felt with Jesus, the transformation so complete he couldn’t be compared to the person he’d been before the knowing. “Can I be something that special?”
Hilary looked up at the sky, and he looked so frail, so small beneath the weight of the world, that it seemed he would shatter into a powder of tiny fragments the next moment. But he didn’t. Hilary just took a breath and smiled into it. “Want to find out?”