A More Deserving Blackness (12 page)

             
The second his lips touch mine he wrenches back abruptly, horror and disgust plain on his face.  There is blood smeared across his mouth, in his teeth, dribbling down his chin.  When I reach for him he shoves me back with both hands against my chest and I fall with a hard thud, the back of my head cracking the ground.  Above me the lights are whirling and twinkling, buzzing merrily like dancing sprites into the shape of a sunburst, a star, back to a sunburst, always blinking and revolving, around and around, sickening me.

             
Something is pressing down on me, crushing me.  Pain explodes over my body, tearing at my throat, my wrists; my body on fire.

             
I can’t scream.  The silence is overpowering as the rain splatters my face, quiet scorching my ears.

             
I can’t scream and it should be coming now, that voice,
his
voice.  I should hear it soon, hushing me and whispering to me brokenly that it’s okay, but it doesn’t.  It doesn’t and I’m left alone in the silence with the devil’s fireworks bursting overhead.

             
“Bree!”

             
Huge hands are shaking me from the nightmare, gripped over my arms just below the shoulders, tightly enough that they wrap all the way around.

             
“BREE!”

             
Logan.  His face warped with fear, inches from my own.

             
I grab wildly for him, my violently trembling hands fumbling against his shoulders, making their way to his neck.  His skin is hot under my palms and his eyes are wide and alarmed and I’m terrified something else has happened, some other attack, that he’s hurt, but I can’t focus, can barely think past the ear-splitting screaming in my head.

             
And then my stomach jerks and I wrench away from Logan’s hands because, dear God, the screams aren’t inside my head anymore, they’re mine.  That hideous, inhuman sound is clawing its way out of my throat and I can’t believe I still have lips the sound is so wrong. 

             
I lurch off the couch, land hard on my hip on the floor.  Logan reaches for me but I scuttle backward, clamp a hand over my open mouth and then stumble away, spinning and running toward the front of the house.  I make it to the bathroom, crashing through the door just in time to drop to my knees and vomit painfully into the toilet.

             
I feel Logan behind me as I heave, clenching my eyes shut over tears that drip from my chin into the vile bowl below.  But at least the screaming has stopped.

             
He doesn’t say anything as he gathers my long hair with feather-light fingers, his other hand reaching into the cupboard below the sink and pulling out a washcloth, pushing up to wet it under the faucet and then handing it to me.  As I’m wiping my mouth he softly smoothes my hair out and then gently weaves it into a loose braid and it feels wonderful.

             
Miserably, I reach up to flush the toilet with a hand that is still far from steady.  Logan helps me up and walks beside me with an arm around my waist, pausing in the kitchen only long enough to grab the pad of paper and pen from the table before guiding me right past the living room where we’d awoken and down the hall.  He uses his free hand to push open a plain wooden door and I see more bookshelves, filled just like the others, and bare grey/blue walls.  A single chair in front of a simple, wooden desk.  He’d left his closet hanging open, though inside it are shirts in bright, vivid colors, blue and red and white; shirts he never wore.  There’s a tall dresser, a single bedside lamp on a squat table, and a queen-sized bed covered in rumpled, mismatched blankets.

             
He lowers me gently to the edge of that bed and kneels down in front of me, sitting back on his heels, studying me.  His eyes are probing but haunted, his face white, like he’d seen a ghost. 

             
“How can I help you?”

             
Oddly, this makes me laugh.  An ugly, strangled laugh.  I shake my head.

             
“Do you get nightmares like that a lot?”

             
My fingers idly plucking at the blankets beneath me, I nod.

             
“Do you always wake up screaming?”

             
Shocked shake of my head.  My fingers searching, and Logan slips the pen and paper into my hands.

             
Never,
I scribble, underlining it with a dark slash.  I hadn’t made a sound in over two years.

             
“Do you want me to take you home?”

             
No.
But then, because shame is a heavy thing,
I’m sorry.

             
“For what?”

             
I didn’t mean to need you like this.

             
“I’m not complaining,” he says easily, and then just stares, his eyes roving over every minute detail of my face, flitting from one random feature to the next.  In the dim light from the lamp his irises have plunged right over the edge into total black.

             
What are you looking for?

             
“Answers.”

             
You can ask
, I write, but my shaking hand betrays my fear.

             
“You’ll tell me when you’re ready.  But I didn’t just mean answers about you.”  He reaches up, swiping away the last remnants of my tears with his fingers, and I catch a look in his eyes I’ve never seen before.  Guarded, uncertain.

             
“Do you want to sleep?”

             
I shrug, but he frowns at it.

             
“You’re hand broken?”  When I furrow my brows at him he gestures at the paper.  “Talk to me.”

             
I don’t think I can sleep but I don’t want to be the reason you lose sleep either.

             
“I wouldn’t be losing anything I would’ve had without you here,” he tells me seriously, and then pushes up from the floor, crawling onto the bed beside me and sitting back against the headboard, stretching his legs out over the rumpled covers and crossing them at the ankles.  When he’s settled, he opens his arm in invitation and I scoot over to him, my head fitting perfectly against his shoulder, over the thick slashes of his scars I knew were there beneath his shirt.  His other clasps one of my hands in his over his belly, fiddling with my fingers, tracing my nails, idly touching me.

             
But the silence makes me want to crawl out of my skin.

             
“Am I making you uncomfortable?”

             
I grope blindly behind me and then feel it, slapping the pad of paper onto his thigh to scribble,
When you cut yourself, did it help?

             
He stills, but other than that, if he’s surprised by the question he doesn’t show it.  “Yes,” he admits.  “It was easier.” 

             
Easier.  Yes, it’s easier.  So much easier than everything that bursts from the depths of my mind to devour me.

             
He senses my hesitation. “Just ask.”

             
When did you start?

             
“Two months after my mother was murdered.”

             
God. 

             
I close my eyes against his chest, my hand lifting automatically to trace the scars through his shirt.  The words bring a memory to mind, that ugly, red word scrawled over his garage door, but I shove it away, disgusted.  That wasn’t possible.

             
“Why did you ask about that right now?”

             
If it helped then why did you stop?

             
“Because I was building up a tolerance.”  He shifts, tucking his chin to look down at my face.  “Why are you asking?”

             
I sit up to look at him and feel the slip of my shirt over my chest.  Suddenly I remember I’m only wearing that thin Gone With the Wind t-shirt and a pair of shorts and wish I could cross my arms over myself but I have to write.

             
I can’t talk.

             
“I know.”

             
No, I mean I can’t,
I repeat, underling that last word with a dark stroke of the pen.  My hand is shaking and the line squiggles a little.
  I can’t let myself.

             
“It’s okay.”

             
For a second the nightmare flashes in my mind; the lights and the rain and that awful pressure on my chest, all to the sound of Logan telling me “It’s okay,” but then as quickly as it had come, it’s gone.

             
It must’ve shown on my face though because Logan’s brows are furrowed when I blink the nightmare from my eyes.  He doesn’t say anything, just reaches over and drags me back down to his chest, wrapping me in his arms.

             
“You can spend the rest of your life not talking to me but I need you to promise me one thing.”

             
What?

             
“Promise.”

             
I can’t until you tell me what it is.

             
“Promise me that next time one of those nightmares wakes you up you’ll call me.  Or better yet just walk over here because God knows I won’t be asleep.”

             
His voice is stern and uncompromising and I nod my head.

             
“Promise,” he says again, almost irritably.

             
I don’t know what makes me do it.  Maybe it’s guilt for not texting him yesterday when I’d told him I would, or maybe it’s just the hint of petulance in his tone, but this time I forgo the paper and grab his wrist, holding it up as I write carefully and clearly down the meat of his left thumb,
I promise.

             
“Good.” 

             
He kisses my hair and when I shiver he starts rubbing my arm, chaffing it to warm me, as if it were from cold and not from him. 

             
“I meant what I said.  You don’t have to talk to me.  Ever, if you don’t want to.”  He rests his cheek against my head, his voice rough.  “I can’t say I haven’t thought about it, though.  What it would be like, to hear your voice.  I just never thought the fist time would be you screaming in terror.”

             
I feel embarrassment and that surprises me.  Fear, pain, anger, apathy - all these I am familiar with.  But embarrassment, gratitude, compassion . . . need?  These are new and unsettling. 

             
Logan reaches over to the table by his bed and plucks up the novel there (a nonfiction retelling of the rescue of 500 downed airmen during World War II) and begins reading it aloud to me, right in the middle of a sentence where presumably he’d left off when “a few assholes from school” had lit his house on fire. 

             
I nestle into his shoulder, not really listening to the words so much as his voice.  The easy confidence of it, the rumble of it through his chest; it’s comforting.

             
Which is the problem, really.  Before Logan, I never had the desire to speak.  Before Logan, I’d never openly invited anyone to ask about my past.  Before Logan, everything was tightly controlled.  The screaming stayed locked in my head and for over two years I’d never made a single sound.  But he was tearing down the walls I’d built, one by one, without even realizing he was doing it.

             
And I can’t let that happen.  Not if I want to survive.

             
At some point I must’ve drifted back to sleep because when I wake up I’m lying on my side in the middle of Logan’s unmade bed, the book he’d been reading flipped on its face on the pillow next to mine.  The paperback cover is bent slightly from his hands, both sides curling away from the heavier pages like the first petals to break from a tightly coiled bud.  The page he’s keeping is considerably further along than he was last night, and I know just from looking at it that he’d never fallen back to sleep with me.

             
I hardly have time to wonder what I’m supposed to do, if I should go look for him, before I hear him padding softly down the hall.  He slips through the door quietly but then, seeing me awake, his face breaks into a smile.  Three steps and he’s sitting next to me on the bed, handing me a bagel and a steaming mug of . . . tea?

             
“Eat,” is all he says, and I take a sip of the tea, tasting sharp citrus and spice.  Earl Grey. 

             
He’s watching me enjoy it and all I can think is that at some point in the last twenty-four hours when he’d been away from me he’d gone to the store and actually bought me tea, which is incredibly sweet and thoughtful and I am a grisly mess of a girl and what the hell could I possibly offer someone like him?