As I am, well and truly, over my head, I think I’m doing a pretty good job of sticking to my role.
Trips, meanwhile, gets dropped in for short, sporadic visits with me, and every time, he can’t stand to have his skin not touching mine. Something changed while he was locked away, but I don’t know what. Besides his apology, he hasn’t said much. It’s like his voice is still caged in the room down the hall. When he’s brought back to it, a little piece of me weeps.
But a bigger part of me roars in fury.
Trips is a person. A full-grown man. And his father controls his every move. He can’t shit without being watched, can’t speak without his words being turned against him, fuck without it being dictated by his father.
No one should live like that.
I’ve been dealing with this for a few months.
This has been his entire goddamn life.
Fuck that shit.
I stew in the unfairness of it all, and I plan. I analyze and calculate odds. When I started this, I simply wanted to get Trips free from his father. But I’m going to finish thisknowingthat Trips is free from his father.
It’s pitch black, a chill wind tearing through the trees outside when the door to my room clicks open. The broad shape of Trips is so familiar at this point that I slump back into my pillows, flipping the blanket up for him. He slides in beside me, flopping face first into the pillow with a groan.
“Are you okay?” I whisper.
“I miss pillows,” he answers, his voice muffled by the fluff he’s burrowed into.
I chuckle, because the alternative is to scream. And screaming wouldn’t get us the hell out of here.
He rolls onto his side, opening his arm for me to tuck against his chest, and after a moment of hesitation, I do.
“You know, I’m not used to cuddling. I’ve never really done it before,” he says, his palm warm against the small of my back, the silk there twisting and folding under his fingers.
“You’re not too bad for a beginner,” I say, nuzzling into him.
I never thought I’d reach out to this man for physical comfort. But he’s surprised me. At every turn, he’s proven tome, and to himself, that he has it in him to be a man I need by my side.
Remembering the first time I came back from Maria’s with a book for him, I marvel at the change between us. I was shaking, terrified of what his reaction would be to me dropping the collection of pages about anger management in his lap. I’d gotten used to the explosive fury he’d shown until then, but after I almost died, it was like he was afraid to feel much of anything, wary that any emotion at all might lead to another anger-fueled break from reality.
Would he be mad? Sad? Fold even farther into himself?
I didn’t have a plan then. Not yet. But I knew we were going to have to come back. While we’d lost that round of the game, there were more rounds in the bout. Unfortunately, the mess around me wasn’t a team.
It was a collection of broken people, all of us trying to rediscover ourselves after our worlds turned upside down.
Walker struggled with light and moving too fast for longer than any of us thought he would. And his hand shook every time he tried to draw for weeks. We were ready to find another underground doctor for him when he finally started to get better.
RJ was angry. Furious really. But he wouldn’t talk about it. I still don’t know if it was because he hadn’t been the one to take down Smith, or if it was something else. He wouldn’t tell me.
Jansen’s hand was a mess, but it was nothing compared to his mind. Through trial and error—and a hell of a lot of research on that shitty laptop—I took control of him. I became the only person he’d listen to, the only person who could keephim from taking the most extreme risks. The games that had been so fun in the bedroom were less fun in day-to-day life, but I had no idea what else to do for him, besides getting him real help. And according to Maria, his type of drugs were almost impossible to get even with a steady doctor and a legal, local identity.
An impossible solution while we were on the run.
And then, there was Trips. Hollowed out with his hand wrapped up like a foam present, the surgeon we found all too happy to take cash under the table.
Nearly all our cash. The whole reason we’d ended up in La Pieta was that we’d run out of money for gas. We were just lucky that there was a place for us to park the RV.
But Trips. Everything about him scared me in a way I hadn’t seen before. Silent. Morose. Afraid to look me or any of the guys in the eyes. So when I came back with that first self-help book, I didn’t know what to expect. I couldn’t, with him behaving so differently from what he’d been before.
This was before we’d gotten the hammock, but he was always outside the RV, right from the beginning, sprawled in one of the lawn chairs we’d found stashed under the dinette. I’d pulled a chair next to him, and he’d watched me warily, like I might bite, or scream, or cry.
Like I was poison, waiting to suck the last bit of life from him.
