The familiar prickle around my eyes and wetness on my face tell me it’s too late to stop it. Instead, I focus on trying to catch my breath, but I can’t. I’m still rocking forward with it, so much it hurts my side every time I move.
Micah’s eyes go wide for a moment, but his expression switches to something placid yet confident in an instant. I’d be impressed if I had the mental capacity for it. He takes in a breath and sighs, the words, “Oh, honey,” escaping his lips like a prayer.
Of course, that doesn’t help. The absurdity of it—someone callingme,Padraig Moynihan’s pet butcher—‘honey’, makes me want to laugh. But the laugh gets caught up in the rest of the squeezing and straining that’s going on inside me, and it comes out just as choked as every other breath.
Micah’s hands are still on my face. His eyes flick from side to side quickly, like he’s trying to decide something. He’s been able to fix everything else that was fucked up about me so far. Hell, maybe he can fix this too.
With only a little hesitation, Micah folds his legs up under him and lies next to me on the couch. It’s a decent size and made of some dark blue fabric that matches his eyes, but I take up a lot of space. He’s slender though, like he used to be, even if his personality gives off the impression of someone who takes up more space now. He manages to shimmy into an impossibly small sliver of space in between my body and the edge of the sofa, and before I know it, his cheek is resting on my shoulder.
If it were anyone else, it would be impossibly, unfathomably weird. But with Micah, all this does is activate a bunch of muscle-memory pathways in my brain I’d forgotten about.
He used to get so scared. He was a tiny slip of a thing, and Father’s rage seemed like a monster that filled the whole house sometimes. Even if we were hidden, Micah would tremble and cry, so I would pull him close until he calmed down. I couldn’t do a lot about the shitty situation we were both in, but if clinging to me made him less scared, I was happy to let him bury his face in my neck and clutch at my side until he stopped shaking.
So now, although I’m the one freaking out, my body does exactly what it used to without needing any input from me. He’s on my uninjured side, so I’m able to lift my arm enough for him to slip underneath it. His cheek presses into my shoulder, and then the warmth of his palm finds my face again. His weight is draped against my body from top to bottom, and it’s like a line of warmth and stillness I can anchor myself by.
My chest is still trying to turn itself inside out and my body is being taken along for the ride, but I focus on how calm Micah is. There’s a solidity to him he didn’t have before. He feels like something indestructible, while I feel like a 210 lb weight that’s about to be blown away.
Like dandelion seeds in a frigid breeze.
I want to turn and wrap myself around him until I’m as solid as he is. But my left arm is fucking useless. Instead, all I can do is dig the fingers of my right hand into whatever part of him I can reach and cling to it. With his shirt fisted in my hand and my eyes closed, I stave off the impending embarrassment for the sake of getting my shit under control. My ragged, raspy breathing fills the room with sound.
At least now I know Father definitely isn’t here anymore, or he would have knocked us both off this couch by now.
Achingly slowly, like a seedling opening its first leaves, the muscles in my chest unclench one by one. My breathing gradually evens out, although the shaking seems to have set up shop in my body and is refusing to leave.
The more relaxed the rest of me gets, the weirder the shaking feels. It’s not like normal, hyperventilating trembling. It’s more like electrical shocks. Like my body is jerking suddenly in small, unpredictable ways, and I can’t control it.
Fuck it. I don’t care anymore. It’s not the first time my body has betrayed me; I’m sure it won’t be the last.
I can’t even die right.
I think I want to tear off my skin and crawl into the nearest corpse to see if that works out any better for me.
Micah uses his hand resting on my face to turn me to face him. He’s barely two inches away. It’s the weirdest here-but-not-here feeling, like I’m living in a memory and the present at the same time. Everything we’re doing feels inherently normal and comforting because it’s something we’ve done a million times before. But also, twelve years and a lifetime of changes are standing between those versions of us and who we are now.
I’m abruptly aware of how much older Micah looks, although I noticed it before. It’s like the thought lurches into my brain. His face is smooth, but I can see a hint of stubble, like he hasn’t had the chance to shave in a while. He smells good, like much fancier soap than any man I know would ever own. And his hair, which always used to be a mess, is styled now. Like the kind of messy curls you pay a lot of money for, because you want to tempt people to run their fingers through them.
Because my former little brother is an adult now. He’s an adult with his own life, who probably has a job and goes on dates and has normal fucking sex and pays taxes and does all the other things that people who aren’t scumbags do with their time.
Suddenly, it seems like I’m tainting him just by letting him touch me.
I’m the one who was too weak to escape Father’s influence. I let him drag me down into the mud and turn me into exactly the kind of evil, disgusting piece of shit I always knew he would. And then, without my permission, he saved my life by dragging me all the way to Micah, so I could infect the only good person I know with this disgusting bullshit.
As much as I was jealous of him for getting out, he deserved it. I can’t jeopardize that for him. I need to get away from him before I put him in danger. Or worse, he realizes exactly what I let Da turn me into.
“Get off,” I say, my voice coming out in a rasp. Everywhere he’s touching me feels like a brand. Like the poison is seeping out of my skin and burning into his. I need it to stop.
Micah looks at me with a confused frown on his face.
“What?”
“Get off!” I’m choking on the words. My body is flushing hot and cold, and I feel like my limbs are going to jerk so hard they might tear themselves apart. I need to escape. The panic makes my stomach churn; while my heart races and my vision starts to swim.
I realize this is more than just the despair that hit me a minute ago. There’s something wrong with me. I’m not registering the pain of my wounds anymore; all I can feel iswrong. Like my body is screaming a warning at me.
Maybe it’s telling me I’m dying. Or maybe my body agrees that I’m toxic, and I need to get away from Micah before he gets hurt. Whatever the feeling is, it’s tearing through me like wildfire.
“Oh fuck,” I think Micah mutters as he scrabbles to put his feet on the floor.
