“I sat in the bed next to you, but I didn’t touch you. I worked on my computer while you slept and when you had a bad dream, I just called your name to wake you up… until that last one. I had to touch you that time because you weren’t responding to just my voice.”
Aleks pulled in a deep breath and nodded.
“You slept for about eight hours.”
He nodded again. “I forget to eat,” he said softly. “I have to set a reminder on my phone because I’m not used to…” He shook his head and then said, “I would like to eat something, please.”
If he’d asked me to hand him the sun, I gladly would have found a way to do it. And while stopping at a restaurant to eat wasn’t exactly the most conducive behavior to trying to fly under the radar, no way in hell was I going to make him eat shitty food from a fast food place.
“Okay,” I said quickly, then got the car started. It took just a few minutes to find a little hole-in-the-wall, no-name place that claimed to have the best omelets in town and looked busy enough to mean the food probably wasn’t completely terrible, but not so full of people that I’d have to watch our backs the entire time.
Though I’d probably end up doing that anyway.
The waitress seated us quickly but when she asked Aleks if he wanted coffee, he clammed up.
“Could we have two coffees, some tea if you have it, a hotchocolate, and a couple of glasses of orange juice? And some water?” I asked.
The woman sent me a friendly smile. “You got it, hun.” She left the menus on the table in front of each of us, then left to get our drinks.
She was back within a couple of minutes, but Aleks didn’t even look up from his menu. As small as the restaurant was, the thing was pretty lengthy and had several variations of every breakfast food imaginable.
“You all need a minute?” the lady asked when she saw how intently Aleks was staring at his menu.
“Please,” I said with a nod. She left again. I prepared my coffee and then pretended to skim my menu as I watched Aleks. He’d managed to make it to the second page, but his distress was only building. He looked like he was on the verge of tears.
“Aleks,” I began, but he shook his head and then discreetly wiped at his eyes. I snapped my mouth shut, but I couldn’t just sit there and do nothing. So I used my foot to brush against his beneath the table. He let out a little whimper and I was sure he would pull his foot away, but then he was moving his foot so it was completely lined up with mine.
And he left it that way.
“Talk to me, Aleks,” I urged. I put some sugar in the tea as well as the coffee and pushed both of them plus the hot chocolate toward him. I was relieved when he put his hands around the mug of hot chocolate.
He didn’t answer me. He just stared at the mug.
“Is there nothing on the menu you like?” I asked.
He shook his head, but I wasn’t sure if he was telling me there was nothing that appealed to him or the other way around, so I was about to ask him the question a different way when he looked up at me, his eyes shimmering with tears.
“It should be easier by now, shouldn’t it?”
“What?” I asked gently.
He spoke the next word so softly that if I hadn’t been leaning across the table, I definitely wouldn’t have heard him.
“Choosing.”
With any other person, the single word would have been their way of conveying that there was too much on the menu to pick from. But that wasn’t what he was saying at all.
I managed to keep my expression soft despite the rage burning inside of me. What kind of mental torture had this young man endured to get to this point where the mere act of making a choice hurt so fucking much?
And hewasin pain.
With his back hunched and his fingers biting into the ceramic mug, Aleks looked so damn broken.
But I knew he was anything but.
The fact that he was sitting there with me was proof of that.
I almost offered to choose something for him because I thought it would be easier for him, but I caught myself in time. “Tell me about breakfast at home,” I said instead.
