I remembered the night he’d followed me down to the river, the last day of junior year. I’d gone to smoke, to scream at the wind and kick rocks into the muddy water, to burn off the nerve endings he’d spent years fraying.
He’d appeared behind me, as silent as a stray dog, eyes glittering in the dusk. “You don’t have to be here,” he’d said, as if he was granting me permission. “You can just leave. Nobody would give a shit.”
I laughed, and the sound had come out like a cough. “Fuck off, Caiden,” I had told him, but he hadn’t moved.
When I tried to step past, he grabbed my arm, hard, so hard I tasted iron, and spun me into him.
I felt his breath on my neck and the tremble in his hands and the way he wanted to say something real but didn’t know how, so instead he squeezed tighter, fingers digging into the meat of my shoulder until I yelped.
“You’re not better than the rest of us,” he whispered, then shoved me again, not quite letting go.
I’d hit him that time, hard enough to split the skin over his cheekbone, hard enough to satisfy us both.
He’d laughed then, a ragged, wild sound, and I remembered that laugh more clearly than any of my mother’s lullabies.
Afterward, I’d stumbled home, fist throbbing, heart raw, and stared at my bruised knuckle for hours, not sure if I was proud or ashamed.
Now, watching him through the glass, I wondered if he remembered that night. Or if all the memories had blurred togetherinto one long series of hurts and retaliations, a relay of damage passed down until we lost track of who’d started it.
Sometimes I’d let myself believe we were just animals in a cage, stripped of our histories and motives, surviving by base instinct. Sometimes I wanted to believe there was meaning in the pain, that it made us special, or holy, or at least not completely empty.
But then the man would come, and the world would shrink to the size of a fist again.
The next time I slept, the dreams came in a flood.
I was running down the railroad tracks, legs made of concrete, every step heavier than the last. I could hear Lillian’s voice behind me, chanting in time with the slam of my feet. “Run, Melly, run, or you’ll end up like me.”
Only it wasn’t Lillian’s voice at all, it was his, the man upstairs.
The sky sagged overhead like a dead lung, and every step took me closer to the end of everything.
I woke gasping, cheek pressed to the glass, and found Caiden staring straight at me.
He looked different: the haunted, wary edge was gone, replaced with something scraped raw and almost childlike.
I realized I’d been speaking in my sleep, mouthing the words “don’t leave,” over and over. I hated him for hearing that, for knowing that even now I needed him here.
He moved his hand, slowly, so I could see he meant no threat, and pressed his palm to the spot opposite mine. My fingers hovered, then settled onto the glass, separated by a millimeter of plastic and vacuum.
His hand was bigger, bones stark under the skin, but the lines of our hands fit together like two halves of an old wound.
We stayed like that for a long time, not speaking, just breathing in sync. The world beyond the glass was a smear of shadow and sickly light, but in here, for a moment, I could almost imagine we’d made a place of our own.
Not safe, not sane, but ours.
The man interrupted us with the thunder of boots. He stormed in, kicking at the tray with enough force to send the food skittering across the concrete and shatteringthe silence.
His voice was a drill through my skull: “Hands off the glass, lovebirds. Unless you want a reason to need stitches.”
Caiden’s hand snapped away. Mine did not. I pressed harder, glaring back with the only currency I had left: spite.
The man grinned at me. Today he wore a different coat, something bristly and red that looked like it had been skinned from a living thing.
He paced, eyes flicking from me to Caiden, back again. His shadow bent around him, a greedy black tongue licking at the wire.
He stopped directly in front of me, crouching low so that our faces were almost level. His eyes were jaundiced, ringed with cracked red like old paint.
“Do you know how many days it’s been?” he whispered, as if we were co-conspirators. “I do. I always do. That’s the fun of it.”
