We charge each other across the sand, slamming in with fists and knees. We pound at each other’s flesh. With our teeth and fingers, we rip and tear into each other’s guts and throats. We’re sloppy with blood.
Suddenly the floor opens under us and we’re tumbling down in a waterfall of sand. I lose track of him. I don’t know where he’s gone or if he’s even still separate from me.
Now, falling, there’s nothing to fight and no way to win. I’m utterly powerless. I panic.
I twist and writhe, desperate to be anything other than helpless.
“Roman!”
I scream in horror, in absolute terror.
“Roman!”
I jerk awake in darkness. For a second, that’s all I register outside of myself: darkness and the presence of another. And within myself there’s a storm of emotions that transmute into the only safe one: anger.
I surge up. I hear the awful, furious sound I make. I feel the blood rush hotly through my body—
A light clicks on. Warm light. Golden. It pushes back the darkness, changes reality.
Everything inside me trips and stumbles. It’s a physical sensation: heart rate going erratic, thoughts crashing into each other, emotions tangling into a knot, twisting around my lungs until I can’t breathe.
“It’s okay,” Lucas says. “I’m here. You’re here with me.”
His expression is soft. Worried but not afraid. He shifts toward me in the bed. I make a sound that meansno, that means don’t touch me. But Lucas hears something else in that sound. He must, because his fingers press into my thigh. It makes my whole body jerk. I start making other sounds, worse ones. They still mean no, at least I think they do, but Lucas crawls between my legs and into the crook of my body.
I sound awful, like some broken, wounded thing, like Lucas is hurting me at every point of contact. But he just stays there, curled up against me, until I draw up my legs and curl around him.
Shudders wrack my body, but Lucas gives me something to shudder against. He’s just soft enough, just solid enough to take it. I feel like the shudders pass from me into him and away. Slowly, my breathing syncs with his. Slowly, the worst of it fades.
We stay like that for a long time. Lucas’s arm slips out of the cave of my body to wrap around me, holding me as I hold him.
But the calm passes as I reorient. I get agitated. I need to get up.
I uncurl from around Lucas and get out of the bed. We’ve moved the bed from its original location, putting the head of it against a wall so there could be escape on either side. Lucas was supposed to take that escape. He wasn’t supposed to stay with me.
But he does stay, even now. He walks with me into the kitchen area. He fills the electric kettle and turns it on.
I’m frustrated. I don’t like that he’s taking charge, like he’s just going to decide what happens.
I walk away. I start pacing. Lucas doesn’t try to stop me. He just works on making peppermint tea.
I come back to him, standing behind him, trapping him against the counter. He doesn’t fight me. I bite the back of his neck. I’m angry with him. He was supposed to leave the bed, not wake me.
Lucas reaches up and pets my head like I’m not dangerous to him. I start shaking again.
“I could’ve hurt you,” I tell him.
“You’ve never hurt me, Roman.”
I have things I want to say to him, but I’m not sure what they are. Everything is too jumbled.
“The light worked,” he says. “I wish I had thought of it before. Last time.”
I make a frustrated sound, though I don’t know exactly what I’m frustrated about. I don’t like that I’m shaking again. I don’t like that I don’t know what to do and don’t know how to talk to him.
“It’s okay, Roman,” Lucas says softly. “We’ll keep finding solutions. It’s okay.”
But it’s not. It’s really not.
