Foxes (21 page)

“Does anyone else live here?” he asks in a quiet voice as we walk along the overgrown little road.

It’s funny how being with him makes me experience everything anew.

The trees are twisted together in a canopy above us, blocking out the moonlight. The sounds of traffic on the road behind us are muffled too. All I can hear in the pause after his question is the faint crunch of our footsteps on the icy ground and Micky’s shallow breathing.

Since Micky took hold of my hand, every single one of my senses has gone into overdrive. I breathe deep and discover snow makes the world smell of nothing, but here beneath the trees, the snow is absent and there is a faint scent of urine, wet plaster, and old machinery. It’s so familiar I hardly notice it normally, but now I want the scent gone. I want a blank slate and unscented snowy whiteness.

Micky only grips my hand all the harder, squeezes it. His fingers are so cold and his hand trembles. If he notices the smell, he doesn’t say. I remember he asked me a question.

“Only Milo at the moment. He’s not here right now, but he’ll probably be back later. He’s—” I sense I should keep talking, revealing myself, even though I find it hard. Talking is something Micky finds comforting. “—my friend. Sometimes other people live here for a while, but we have the securest rooms.” I tail off, not really sure if Micky wants to know all of this.

“I’m sorry,” Micky whispers. “I wanted to come here for you, to be here for you, and all I’m doing is trembling in the fucking dark.” He sounds so disappointed with himself, and he should never be disappointed like that.

“It’s okay.” It really is. “You make me feel better by just being here.”

“Yeah?”

I catch his eye in the gloom and find myself smiling helplessly. I’m being so obvious, but it feels right. I want to make him feel good, like he’s the most important person in the whole world.

“Wait here,” I say as we come to the plywood panel that Milo and I fashioned into a door. All the other entrances are blocked with impenetrable metal sheets that refuse to budge even when you whack the hell out of them with branches and lengths of scaffolding pole.

Micky doesn’t let go of my hand. Gently I try and loosen his grip.

I want to go and get my torch. I want to show him the pool, but in the dark he’ll hardly be able to see it. If I’d been thinking straight, I would have brought my torch out with me in the first place and Micky wouldn’t have had to walk down here in the dark. But then maybe he wouldn’t have held my hand, and it makes me sad to admit it, because I don’t want Micky ever to be scared, but I love that he did that.

“You don’t want me to leave you out here, do you?” I say when I realize I don’t really want to try and make Micky let go of my hand anyway.

“Not really.”

I smile. It doesn’t matter. I can show Micky the pool in all its devastated glory another time. Now we need to get warm more than anything.

I lead him inside—both of us stepping carefully over the broken tiles and past the dark pit of the empty pool to the door to my shell. Micky keeps his gaze either straight ahead or on me until I unlock the padlocks and lead him inside my room. Then he smiles, and I get the sense he’s relieved.

Maybe he was expecting it to be really bad—squats often are. I don’t know.

Without thinking, I lean down with my bad arm to retrieve my torch from the floor next to my nest. Hiding my face I grit my teeth and wince as I turn the torch on and pass it to him—it seems I’m not going to let go of his hand for anything.

“This is why you smell so good!” he says as he flicks and splashes the light all over the walls. “You live in a shower room!” He laughs brightly.

In that moment I love my shower room more than any place in the world. It’s full of dancing light. It’s full of Micky. I hold my breath as I watch him through my hair, loving that he’s squeezing my hand tighter than ever.

TWENTY MINUTES
later Micky is no longer shivering as he sits in my nest, every blanket I possess draped over his skinny shoulders. My supplies from bartering and fixing the few things that I do are piled neatly in the corner. I feel a little self-conscious about them. About everything.

As I hold out a hot cup of tea to Micky, he tries to hold my gaze. The weird closeness I felt when we were holding hands hasn’t gone yet. It’s exciting and terrifying—like a really bright light coming at you so fast you can’t see what’s behind it.

Maybe there’s nothing behind it. Then again, maybe there’s everything.

“Don’t you ever worry they’re going to take all this away from you?” he asks.

I’m not sure who he means by “they.”

“I don’t think about the future much,” I reply. It’s true. The present is consuming enough.

“You’re not like anyone else. I’ve never met anyone like you, you know that?” he says.

In the warm glow of my little battery-powered lantern, I stare at my fingers—at the way they briefly touch his as he takes the plastic cup from me, making me shiver all the way to my toes.

If he knew how many times I’ve wished I was just like everyone else, I don’t think he’d be saying this or making it seem like being like me is a good thing.

“I was really worried when you phoned me,” he says.

I meet his gaze, then look away. I get the feeling he’s asking me with his eyes if I want to talk about it. And I do. Surprisingly I want to tell him everything. Every. Single. Fucking. Thing. But… I don’t know where to start, so I say nothing.

“I know I talk a lot, but I can be pretty good at listening too.” He dips his head. It’s such a shy gesture that it makes my heart trip over itself.

“I don’t know how to tell you,” I admit eventually.

I can’t believe there is such a beautiful boy in my room, looking at me as if he wants to know what’s going on in my head more than anything. Yet, at the same time, I know he’s real. The hard, heavy way my heart beats in his presence makes this as real as it gets for me.

“You can trust me,” he whispers, dropping his head again. “After last night I need you to know that. What you did for—”

“I want to trust you,” I cut in before he can thank me or say anything else embarrassing. I run my thumb down the seam of the tiles in front of me. “It’s just—” I meet his gaze. “—don’t be… grateful, just—” I take a deep breath. “—be my friend?” I shrug, feeling awkward. “I don’t want you to think you have to do anything to make up or….”

Wow, I’m so bad at this, and Micky is watching me with the most patient expression I’ve ever seen. “It comes under ‘stuff you do if you care about someone.’” I don’t look up.

“I care about you too.”

I clasp my hand over my mouth to stop the laughter that bursts out of me. I don’t even know why I’m laughing. Maybe it’s because it shocks me that he says things like this so easily. On some level I’m scared that he says things like this to everyone, but the bright warmth that fills my chest doesn’t care right now.

When I glance up, Micky looks amused, his eyes sparkling like sunlight on water.

“You don’t know how glad I am that I broke my phone,” he whispers, still smiling.

All at once my good feelings nose-dive. Instead I feel awful, because he didn’t break his phone, did he? That was me.

I owe it to him to trust him. All I’ve done is lie.

“I broke your phone,” I say quietly. I push my fingers against the floor until the pain from my sore arm bites into me.

“What?” His eyebrows furrow, making him look so sweetly confused.

“I fixed the screen, but then I broke it. I didn’t mean to,” I add, maybe a little pointlessly. Well, I kind of hope Micky wouldn’t be here with me if he thought I was the kind of person to do stuff like that on purpose. “I wanted a picture of you,” I mumble.

I remember the list of things I wrote down, all the possible reactions I thought Micky might have. The gentle shrug he gives me was definitely not one of them.

“It’s no big thing,” he says. “Just an accident, right?”

“I lied to you.”

That’s the worst thing. I’ve lied about lots of stuff.

“Because you thought I’d be angry?”

“I was scared you’d think I was a creep.”

Micky shakes his head. “I would never think that. You gave me your phone. And like I said, I’m glad it broke. We wouldn’t be here otherwise. I wouldn’t be sitting here, feeling like this, with you. We wouldn’t have found each other.”

Found each other? It’s funny, but that’s exactly how I feel when I’m with him: found. Micky deserves more, though.

Leaning forward, I reach around him into my nest and pull out my pad from where I stored it earlier. Carefully I unwrap it from the plastic bag protecting it.

I hold it in my hands, staring at the curling, ripped cover, the badly drawn sharks. It’s battered and it’s been through a lot—much like me, maybe. I find myself smiling again—it sneaks up on me. Micky probably thinks I’m missing a few neural connections by now, and he’s probably right. I hold the pad out to him and find myself blushing as he takes it almost reverently.

His bony fingers trace the faded shapes on the front cover. “I remember this. Shark hunting, right?”

I nod.

“Loki and his superhero stuff?”

I notice he didn’t say supervillain, even though “supervillain” was the joke. But we aren’t pretending now, are we? God, I hope we aren’t pretending.

“Sort of.” I want to tell him my pad holds my every thought and a whole lot of confusion that’s been in my head these past few weeks. It probably doesn’t even make sense, but perhaps it’s a start.

Somehow I know this is the biggest risk I’ve ever taken. It feels so much bigger than following Dollman and looking for sharks. Bigger than telling Micky I lied to him. I’m letting someone into my head. Someone after Dashiel—and perhaps closer, too, than I ever let Dashiel. But after what happened last night in the snow, everything seems different. Changed. There was a barrier, and now it’s gone.
I hope it’s gone.

I get up and wander over to the high window. My hands shake. I can’t watch Micky reading. It would do some serious damage to my already virtually imploding heart. His easy acceptance so far has completely thrown me.

Snow falls steadily now through the starless dark. I stare outside and think about the foxes I saw the other day. I wonder where they’ve gone now.

“Is this me?” I hear Micky whisper a while later.

“Yeah,” I answer without turning around. My breath makes hot clouds on the net of reinforced glass in the window.

There could be no mistaking that I’ve written about him. Endlessly.

I guess he knows everything now.

MINUTES PASS.
They feel like hours. All I can hear is the faint whisper of pages turning, the occasional swallow as Micky drinks his tea.

Without a word, Micky gets up and stands behind me. I hold my breath, trying to work out how close he is, ignoring the apprehension I feel. What he thinks of me now he’s read all those things I wrote, I’ve no idea.

“Thank you,” he whispers.

As soon as he says it, my chest locks up entirely. I can feel the warmth of his breath on my neck, so he must be right behind me.

What are you thanking me for?
I want to ask him. But I don’t; instead I’m listening to the crunch of footsteps and the faint muffled curses outside as Milo tries to find the plywood panels to open to get inside the swimming pool. He forgets which one it is every time he’s wasted.

“Milo’s back.” I turn my head and find Micky’s face shockingly close to my shoulder.

Micky nods. “He sounds a bit drunk.”

“More than a bit, I reckon.” I turn around and press my back against the tiles, completely aware how close Micky is standing, how close our bodies are to touching. “Do you want to meet him?”

“Okay.” Micky looks as though there are words in his mouth that won’t come out. We each take a deep breath at exactly the same time. It’s funny. We smile. Then Micky speaks. “I looked at all the pictures on your phone. I read all your text messages over and over again.” I’m puzzled. I know he’s seen them. He told me this when we were at the Pagoda. “How you felt about your friends was beautiful. I’d looked at everything a hundred times before I asked you if you minded… so I didn’t tell you the whole truth either.”

I stare at the floor, thinking about all the things I wrote about him in my notepad that he’s just read. He must
know
. “Dashiel would have liked you. I probably wouldn’t have talked to you if he’d been around, though.” I can’t do eye contact right now, so I look over at my nest.

“Why not?”

I shrug, not sure how to explain.

“He made it easy,” I say eventually. Saying this out loud makes me feel bad, but I know it’s true. Dashiel made it really easy for me to remain in the background, and I would have been happy to stay there. Or at least I would have thought I was.

Something warm touches my hand and I jolt back against the wall in shock. When I look down, I see Micky’s fingertips touching mine.
Oh.

“I like to think I would have still tried,” Micky says softly. “Or you would have.”

Why?
I want to ask but the word is stuck inside me.

Micky isn’t holding my hand, his fingers are only touching mine, but still I can’t think clearly. Liquid fire is swirling low down in my belly. My heart is a fire alarm. He’s so close that all I can think about is how good he felt to hold in my arms—all warm and soft and yet full of sharp edges. My own kind of heaven.

“Let me help, Danny.” I can hear the plea in his voice with my whole body. “Something happened earlier, before you called me, didn’t it?”

Dollman’s face flashes across my vision. For a second the fear I felt on the floor of his office, unable to move, rushes through me.

I look at Micky helplessly, my words gone.

“Were you looking for sharks? For one of the men Dashiel told you about? Do you think one of them might have killed him?” Micky asks.

It’s too many questions. All at once I feel overwhelmed—by everything.