She stayed strong.
Then something shifted in the darkness. She saw the slick gleam of something almost like a smile.
And she just couldn’t help it. She climbed in, heart racing, breath coming too fast. Then once she was there, an even more intense urge came over her. For the first time in over a decade, she desperately wanted to write something to ward it off. Her hand itched for a pen, in the exact way it used to whenever she had one of these weird delusions. They’d come, and her hand would go to her pocket. She’d whip it out, like a gunslinger with a very strange sort of gun.
And then the words.
She even remembered them.
Let me be, she’d written every time, on the air.
But she couldn’t do that now. She couldn’t even try to. She wasn’t even supposed to think about it, her dad had said.Once you stop you can come home from the hospital, he had told her. And she’d stuck to that, she’d kept her word, she’d pressed it all down no matter how terrifying things got.
And theywereterrifying right now.
She tried to close the doors around herself, but for just a second it was like something got ahold of them. She saw something glint again in the darkness, razor sharp, followed by a hint of something else. Something skeletal, grisly looking—a hand and a claw, she thought, as she pulled hard, hard, hard.
But the thing pulled harder.
It was strong, impossibly so. And it was going to get her this time. It had her this time. There was no escaping, no way out of this madness, nothing she could do to fight it and no one to help her now, not a soul, not a person in the—
“Kid, it’s okay. It’s okay, hey, I’m here. I’m here, it’s okay, I got you, I got you,” Jack said, so sudden and so frantic that she didn’t think. She just got hold of him. She grabbed him, tight, tight, tight.
It was okay, though, it was fine to.
Because he had hold of her.
She felt his hand go around her waist, like when he’d hugged her. Only confident this time. Sure and strong as he pulled her into his arms. Like that lesson had made it okay to. Or the circumstances had given him some permission. He even cradled her like that on the floor of his bedroom, one hand smoothing her hair back from her face, his expression so full of concern she didn’t even feel embarrassed, until the delusion started to fade.
Until he asked, “Are you okay?”
Then she blushed. And tried to get it together.
“Yeah. Yeah. Totally.”
“It didn’t look like you were, then.”
“I promise it was nothing. Everything is fine.”
She went to sit up, to pull away a little. And he let her. He sat back on his heels as she tried to laugh and think of something to explain it.I thought I saw a bug, she imagined herself saying. But just as she went to, he cut in.
Cautiously, hesitantly, she thought. Yet he did it all the same.
“Okay. But if it wasn’t, you know you could tell me, right? Like, you get that I’m not like other people you might not want to tell. Other people that might think you’re weird over it. Who might do horrible things to you because of it,” he said.
And god, her heart almost stopped.
How do you know about that, she wanted to say.
But she caught herself in time. She forced out a laugh instead.
“Nobody has done horrible things to me.”
“So let’s call it not-great things, then.”
“My dad just did what he thought was best.”
He didn’t even bring that up, why are you copping to it, she hissed at herself in her head. It was too late now, though. Jack’s face damn near crumbled, in a way that grabbed her hard and by the heart. Then, even lovelier, it smoothed out into something stern. Like a storm cloud had passed over it. “That what he told you?” he asked. Followed by a nod he almost aimed at himself. Like, yeah, he knew the score on this one. “Because to be honest, that sounds like the kind of thing shitty parents say when their kids aren’t what they want them to be, and think doing something horrible to them will fix it. And believe me, I should know.”
