That maybe she’s not as helpless as some believe.
No, she’s not helpless at all. She’s kind, funny, talented, and honest when she trusts someone. I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve ruined the last bit for us—that the ease with which I’ve touched her previously is gone, replaced by the skittishness caused by ghosts you can barely remember.
A feeling I know all too fucking well.
I remain in the bed with her for another hour, focusing on the soft, regulated sound of her breathing deeply. As if just to reassure myself that she is in fact alive.
Something about her recounting of the evening niggles in the back of my mind, though, and I can’t let it go.
Beckett said he’d seen her go to the caves voluntarily, but she said she was attacked and dragged there against her will.
Eventually, once I’m certain she’s in a deep enough sleep, I leave the room, closing the door behind me, and make a few calls.
55
ELLE
Sutton stays wrappedaround me the entire night.
I know because I wake every half hour to check.
Each time I shoot up, panic shredding my chest wide open, he presses the weight of his arm against my head and curls into me. It’s a little overwhelming how close he tries to get with each surge of fear, but even though my body is sore all over, I find his suffocation comforting.
I don’t realize I’m crying until Sutton stirs, making my cheek shift against the wetness on his bare chest. He cups my jaw, so softly as to not cause further harm, and I can feel his inspection.
“Are you in pain?” he asks. He’s already given me the allotted dose of medicine for the next couple of hours, but the pills haven’t done all that much.
I’m numb mostly. His cool hands are a relief, and I lean into his touch, aching to put the memories from tonight behind me.
“How did you make yourself forget?” I reply quietly, staring at the base of his throat. “What they did to you… You really don’t remember any of it?”
“Well, I was drugged, so I have the advantage of unconsciousness. If you want to call it an advantage. But to behonest, Elle, I don’t know if it really mattered. Not addressing the things that haunt you is no way to live. The memories were sporadic, fractured, but they affected me nonetheless. Especially when it comes to intimacy. I forced myself to sit through their ceremonies, trying to feel something other than disgust even though I couldn’t fucking place why exactly I felt that way. I knew, deep down, but I never let myself think about it too much.”
I exhale, closing my eyes. Every time I do, I see it all—Percy. Bellamy. Pythia. Her laughter reaches deep, gripping my heart in its claws and puncturing slowly.
Not thinking about it doesn’t feel like an option.
“Until you, that is,” Sutton continues, his voice barely above a whisper. “You weren’t some magical cure, but suddenly when I was around you, I…wanted to be better.”
Opening my eyes, I blink at him as he moves, tracing back and forth across my forehead with his lips.
“But your sister?—”
“Doesn’t matter. Well, that’s an oversimplification, but right now you’re the only thing I want to think about.”
“How can you stand to look at me?”
“That night at the Stop N Go and then Lethe’s… I remember being so confused about why I was instantly enamored with you. I hadn’t let anyone approach me in nearly a decade, and even then, touching outside the organization was out of the question. But I never hesitated when it came to you. All the resistance was merely a front. I wanted to touch and be touched by you more than I’d ever wanted anything. I’ve been looking at you ever since.”
That, despite everything, makes my chest feel warm. “Maybe you recognized me, subconsciously, from our first meeting.”
He pulls back, considering. “The body does remember what the mind won’t. Perhaps I knew all along you were destined to save me.”
The despair in my soul grows like a black mold, but I let him surround me again anyway, burying my face in his neck. It’s easier than admitting that the only person I’ve ever actually saved is myself.
When I wakein the morning, Sutton’s gone. I grope along the cold sheets, terror claiming my esophagus. Blood coats the cotton fabric, and a blush crawls up my face as I realize it’s mine.
Maybe I should’ve taken him up on the offer to get checked out at the hospital last night, but all I’d wanted at that moment was to sleep and try to forget. Exhaustion and misery blotted out everything else, making me think somehow I’d come out of those caves unscathed.
