I approach slowly, like she’s going to bolt at any moment. I don’t know what to do for her.
I mentally lock down every muscle in my body, every instinct telling me to reach for her, hold her. Defend her, even if it’s from her own mind.
I lower myself to the very edge of her bed, leaving achasm of space between us. One wrong move and my ass is going to end up on the floor.
After a long moment of tense, fraught silence, she whispers “I don’t want to seehimwhen I see you.”
The words gut me.
“I would never touch you like–” my voice breaks. “Gods, Casie, I’m not him. I could never be him.”
Her fingers twitch. “What if I don’t know that? What if my body doesn’t know that?”
I don’t have an answer. This is my worst nightmare, come to life. I can’t do anything. Nothing except sit here, letting the silence, the tension, the pain, stretch out between us.
I won’t, can’t, move closer. Not until she crosses this space herself.
He’s making coffee. I stand across from him, my arms folded, unable to look him in the face, meet his eyes.
He doesn’t look at me. Not even once.
The steam curls between us. It smells like hope and consciousness and adulthood. I hate how it almost makes me feel normal.
He sets a mug down in front of me andI know, without tasting it, that he’s doctored it just the way I like it. He pulls his hand back, fast, as though I’m about to dump the hot elixir of life on his skin.
“You always look away,” I blurt, not intending to.
He still doesn’t meet my eyes. Why do men forever find their feet so fascinating?
“I’m trying to respect you. Your boundaries.”
“…by acting like I’m poisonous?”
Finally, he looks up. There’s hurt there, shame. “I thought — I thought maybe you wouldn’t want to be looked at. By a male. Byme.”
“Am I ruined?” I whisper, desperate and terrified of his answer.
“Are you?” he counters.
A voice in my mind screams “NO!”
But part of me whispers “yes.”
True to form, it’s Annemarie who makes me see the light with all the subtlety of a wrecking ball.
The apartment is quiet except for the kettle hissing on the stove. I sit on the couch with my knees tucked up. I’m trying to read the book in my hands, but I can’t focus. Flint has made himself scarce. Since I snapped at him, Isee him less and less, even when I feel him around me. It’s weird.
I have a thin blanket wrapped around my shoulders. Calida stretched out along the back of the couch, snoring lightly. Unlike Flint, she’s only left my side when she doesn’t have a choice.
Not that I’m bitter or anything.
Annemarie pads over with two mugs, setting one gently on the table near me. She doesn’t push it into my hands. She just sits beside me, like she always has. She allows me to just exist. At least for a while.
“Talk to me,” she pleads.
Finally, I whisper, “I feel… wrong.” My throat burns. “Like I can’t scrub it off. Like I’m… I don’t know. Dirty, somehow.” Like my skin is imprinted with the hands that were never supposed to touch me. “I’m having nightmares. They aren’t always the same, but they are. It starts as Flint and we’re… ya know… but then it’s Brett and… I… I…” I can feel my throat work.
Annemarie’s head tilts, those sharp green eyes catching mine. She doesn’t look away.
