Sheltered (22 page)

“Because my face
is
huge. Van—come on. This isn’t fair, you’re like six foot seven hundred and twelve.”

“It’s much more like six foot five. You’re measuring skills are
terrible
.”

“They’re not. Just let me…”

“You got your face wrong too. It’s actually really normal-sized.”

She stretched as far as she could go, without leaving the bed altogether.

“I can almost…get it…”

“How about now. Can you almost get it now?”

Of course he said the latter as he wrapped one arm around her waist and pinned her to his chest. Which just made the challenge unfair on two fronts—the first being his freakish giant strength. And the second, well…

“Do you have an erection?”

“Of course I have an erection. You’re squirming all over me. Naked.”

She stopped going for the book. Settled into the cradle of his arms instead, breasts pressed to his chest. Legs tangling around one of his impressively solid thighs. All she’d have to do to get a bit of contact on that still pleasantly humming place between her legs was sink down a little.

But somehow she found herself just looking at him. Just looking into his dark eyes, and reveling in the chance to do so. It was what he’d meant by time, she knew—and why a person always needed more of it. What was life without the minutes and hours and days to just stop and stare?

“It was something to wake up with you next to me,” he said, after a long moment. “Just wanted to mark it, you know?”

She nodded, because it was almost exactly what she’d been thinking. If she’d had a pen and a piece of paper she’d have done the same—though the results probably wouldn’t have turned out quite as well as what he then showed her.

The girl in his drawing looked asleep, she thought. She looked as though she’d been asleep for a thousand years, before someone whispered the right words and brought her back to life.

“It’s really lovely, Van,” she said, then cursed herself for not having those same right words to say in return. What if she didn’t wake him up, the way he woke up her? What if she could never draw a picture of him that perfectly showed how beautiful he was?

Because that was what he’d done for her. He’d made her beautiful—hair like a sprawl of leaves and vines, the side of her face a soft slant in the light he’d made happen on the page.

“Don’t be sad,” he said, but she couldn’t help it. She had to go find some place else to live, now, and knew it. You couldn’t just live in something like this, forever. There wasn’t a forever. Forever had bills she couldn’t pay for and food she had no right to eat. Jobs she wasn’t qualified for, support she couldn’t offer.

“I’m not. I’m just…glad that we’ve had this time together.”

He shifted then, until she had no choice but to lever herself back onto the bed. It wasn’t a cold move, however—far from it. As he swung off the windowsill and reached for the jeans he’d left on something that might once have been a wicker chair, he said things.

Things that should have been reassuring.

“Well, there’s plenty more where that came from.” She watched him button and belt the clothes, once they were on. “I was thinking we could go to the gallery today—or is that too much like something I want to do? Man, I bet you’ve got a million things you need to see right now.”

She thought of them all in a quick succession—a coffee house, a book store, the nearest movie theatre immediately.

“Van…”

“So think about it, while I get breakfast.”

“Van,” she said, more firmly.

He wasn’t listening, however. Or more, he
was
listening. He just didn’t want to hear it. He knew the words about bills and jobs and support were coming, and didn’t want to hear them.

“What do you want? Eggs? A bagel?”

He stopped in the middle of his room, t-shirt half on, half off. A look on his face that told her she was right. He understood what she was going to say, for sure.

“How am I going to pay for eggs and a bagel, Van? I don’t even know what eggs and a bagel cost. The last time my parents took me out to dinner we went to the orphanage Oliver Twist lived in, and I had gruel.”

He glanced away, expression somewhere between amused and disbelieving.

“How do you even come up with this stuff, seriously?”

“What stuff?”

“The Oliver Twist stuff… God, I don’t even know how you still have a sense of humor.”

“I don’t. That was deadly serious.”

His eyes sparked bright. She had to say—she lived for that light in his eyes.

“Evie, listen—” he started, but she cut him off.

“I can’t just live here, Van. I can’t. You know I can’t. What would I contribute? What can I give to you? I—”

“You give me everything.”

“Please don’t say that.”

“Why not? It’s true. I don’t even laugh for anyone but you.”

She hesitated, for that one. Did he really mean that? Surely not.

“Tim seems like a really funny guy,” she tried, but all it did was make his mouth form that mean line.

“Tim pees in the kitchen sink.”

“Well, okay. I could at least promise not to do that, but even so—”

“What exactly are you going to do instead? Go out and find the nearest YMCA? That’s just not…it’s not an option. If you go someplace I’ll find you, and force you to come back. You know I won’t just—”

“Van, I can’t just stay here.,” she said, then had to take a breath before the next part. A big, steadying breath. ”I think it’s best if I just…I don’t know. Find a shelter…or I have this aunt who lives pretty far away. I mean, I’m sure she’d take me in and everything would be fine.”

Man, that
just
really didn’t belong in the sentence she’d spoken. And by the look on his face, he didn’t think so either. He couldn’t even seem to speak, for the longest time.

“You can’t be serious.”

“Why? I mean, my Aunt Sylvie’s pretty weird but she’s not a monster or anything. I could make up some story about…um…I dunno. Just some story about why I’m there. I’m sure she wouldn’t call my dad if I explain that—”

“Evie, I’ve got to ask at this point. Are you actually wanting your father to kill you? Because if you go stay with some relative he’s going to know where you are. I mean, is that why you did all of this—so that he really will kill you? Like some sort of insane suicide attempt?”

“What? No, God, no. I didn’t even…I wouldn’t…” She searched in vain for the right words. None would come. “Why would you even think that?”

His hands clenched and unclenched at his sides. His brow had an almost permanent line right down the middle of it. She’d never seen him look so agitated, so full of anger, and at first she couldn’t work out why. Was it really such a ridiculous notion, to want to go back home?

“Because when I was fourteen, I went out and got my first tattoo. But I didn’t do it because I wanted one. I did it because I hoped that when my father saw it, he’d kill me. I wanted him to kill me. I wanted everything to be over, and it seemed like an almost guaranteed way of going about it.”

Most of her insides immediately lurched up through her body and tried to escape out of her mouth. She held on to them by the skin of her teeth, though doing so didn’t seem to matter. There was still this big miasma of emotions to deal with, before she could blurt something out.

Anger, she thought it was. Mostly anger. But there was a good deal of pain in there too—and all for him. The tattoos weren’t armor, at all. They were a raised finger, a badge of honor.

A way to erase everything what had come before them.

“Don’t say something like that,” she rushed out. Somehow she’d started clutching at the end frame of his bed, like wringing her hands only with metal in between.

“Why?”

“Because that’s not what I was trying to do. Getting a tattoo isn’t the same as lo—” She caught herself, with half of the word on the tip of her tongue. Changed it, right at the last minute. “
Liking
someone. You got the tattoo because you wanted a reaction. I came here because I had to. Because I…because I like you.”

She flushed, on the second
like
. It sounded absolutely lame, even to her ears—only when she dared look up at him his expression had gone as soft and warm as a summer’s day.

“You can say the other word, you know,” he said, and suddenly all the tension ran right out of her. She let her hands drop from the metal frame. Her body sank back down, onto the bed.

“I’m trying, I swear to God. I don’t know what’s going on. You’re Mr. Stoic, and yet somehow I’m the one finding it hard to actually get out.”

“Because you’re just waiting for things to turn bad, honey. You’re just waiting—and that’s okay. I got time to prove that’s not going to happen.”

“What if I can’t ever say it? What if I’m all…messed up inside, or—”

“I can wait.”

“Or what if I don’t know how to feel stuff anymore, maybe I—”

“You’re worth waiting for, Evie.”

She stopped babbling then. She had to. All of this weird air was rising up inside her, and it didn’t want her to talk about being scared or broken. It wanted her to say something else instead, in the exact way he’d done it the night before—as though some new feeling had grabbed hold of her abruptly, and shaken her upside down.

He’d said she was worth it. He wanted to get her eggs, and if she went somewhere he’d come get her. Somehow, things didn’t seem so messed up inside her, when he did things like that. A little space opened up, between the nobody she was and the person she could possibly be one day.

And that person just went right ahead and said it.

“I love you.”

* * * * *

He didn’t broach the subject again until quite a long time after. Mainly because he then wanted to tangle together on the bed for a while, until she felt breathless and flushed and just as good as she had the night before.

And then once she was in this dazed, lax state, he brought her eggs. Delicious eggs, incredible eggs, eggs that didn’t even taste like eggs anymore. They had green bits on them, and they came with ham and bagels and sauce.

He really wasn’t playing fair.

“I think you’re trying to trap me here with food and sex,” she said, as she licked the last of it off her fingers. It was the first time she’d ever eaten anything in a bed, the first time she’d ever stayed undressed until noon.

The first time she’d ever felt relaxed enough to do either of those things.

“If food and sex aren’t working, I could go with something else. There’s a movie theater two blocks from here.”

She couldn’t keep the grin from her face.

“How did you know I was thinking about movies?”

“Because you’ve been eyeing my DVD collection since you got here. Plus—it’s one of the first things I would want to do, if I’d never had the chance. Anything to do with movies, books, magazines…life. Culture.”

“It’s all very tempting, true.”

“It’s not a temptation, Evie. It’s the way things should be. It’s stuff I want you to have.”

She looked away, briefly.

“You did hear me when I said I can’t support myself, right? I don’t know how to do anything. I can’t—”

“You can. I’ve got enough money to take care of us both—it’s not a lot, and we won’t live the way you did back in suburbia. But then, I don’t think you really want to live like that anymore, anyway.”

“I don’t care how we live,” she blurted, without really intending to. But once the words were out there, she couldn’t really take them back. They’d already made him smile in this warm, satisfied sort of way.

He’d got her, and he knew it.

“We?”

Oh, he knew all right.

“Okay, yeah. It’s pretty unrealistic to think I can just go out there on my own and pretend I know what I’m doing. And true, my only other option is to maybe stay with you. But…you get why I find that hard, right? Life isn’t a fairytale. You can’t just run away with the prince and live in his castle.”

“Or in this case—his rat-infested, falling down apartment building, with a roommate who comes into the bathroom to pee while you’re in the shower.”

“He does that?”

“He does that.”

She added it to the mental list of weird things Tim did.
Sex in the living room, peeing in the kitchen sink, ogling Van while Van took a shower…

“So you know—I’d understand if you
didn’t
want to live here.”

“No, no—I do.” She thought of waking up every morning like this, and wanted to more than anything. “And I guess I could train to do a job. I could be a cleaner, or a waitress, or—”

“Or you could finish your degree someplace normal and get a job you’d actually like. I have the money for you to do that, if you just stop being so prickly about it. I mean—it won’t last as long as I would have wanted it to, but it doesn’t need to last if I have someone by my side, to think about the future with. To work out a mortgage or set up college funds and all of that kind of stuff.”