Slide (33 page)

It didn’t make any sense to me, none at all, but I hadn’t spent most of my life dealing with it. Even if he couldn’t remember the actual events, the repercussions had tormented him for years. Maybe finally learning why would help him, who knew? In the meantime, I had to try and focus on the things we
could
fix.

And I needed to change the subject before my head exploded. “You need to get this pneumonia crap licked first. It’s making everything worse for you.”

Almost on cue, he coughed and rubbed his chest. “I know. I’m trying, but it just keeps getting worse.”

“I know,” I said, “but you’ve got to fight it. You need to get better, babe.”

“You make it sound like I don’t want to.”

I looked away, guilt raging through me. Beside me, Ash made a sound that could have been a snort. “Trust me, Pete, if it was that easy, I would’ve done it years ago. Do you really think this is what I want?”

“You tell me,” I said wearily. With the bandaged cut on his arm and images of the broken kid in the park all I could see, my mind was in a really dark place. He’d ripped holes in his own body, and he’d left himself to rot on the streets. The jump to actual suicide didn’t seem that far.

Ash shook his head again, but he seemed too tired to argue. “What about you?” he said. “What are you going to do?”

“What do you mean?”

He gestured at the hand I’d left on his knee. “This is the longest you’ve had your hands on me for days.”

“That’s not true.”

“Yes, it is,” he said. “You only touch me when I’m freaking out, not because you want to.”

“You’re sick,” I said. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

Ash scoffed. “What? By holding my hand? Fuck off, Pete. I’m not stupid. Even if this shit isn’t real, I know what this means for us.” He leaned forward and put his face inches from mine. “You don’t want me.”

I thought back and tried to find some logic in his thinking. It was there—I
hadn’t
put my hands on him much since he’d come home—but not for the reasons he thought. I stared at him. His tone was belligerent, but his eyes betrayed him. He was scared, really fucking scared, and a huge part of him honestly believed the clusterfuck we’d found ourselves in meant the end for us.

Fuck that.

I crawled along the futon until I reached him and yanked his arms from around his knees, straddling his waist as I grabbed his head and forced him to look at me. “No fucking way. You don’t get to tell me that. Why would you think that?”

He met my glare head-on, and for the first time in days, he didn’t look away. “You’re so angry.”

I shook my head hard enough to jar my brain. “Not with you. I’m angry that you have to go through this, and I’m scared, Ash. I’m scared about what this is going do to you, but none of that changes the way I feel about you.”

The uncertainty in his eyes crushed me. I didn’t know what else I could say to him. Desperate for him to hear me, I leaned forward and smashed my lips to his. It was the first time we’d kissed in weeks—perhaps months, I didn’t even know—but the way he made me feel was nothing new. Heat erupted and all logical thought left. Ash responded fiercely. He wrapped his arms around me so tightly, I could hardly breathe. His lips were hard, his tongue soft, and in a place where things had gone so wrong, suddenly everything felt right.

I broke away when I felt him, hard against my stomach, and I pressed into him so he could feel me too. “See? Nothing can ever change this.”

He rested his forehead against mine. I could feel his pulse racing beneath his skin as his battered lungs heaved for air.

“I want to get better, Pete, I lo—” He stopped and took as deep a breath as his chest allowed. “You know I love you, don’t you?”

I’d waited a long time to hear him say those words, but the moment was bittersweet because even as we stared at each other, I could still see a lingering fear in him, a fear that I would reject him. I kissed him again, briefly this time, with less fire but with all the warmth and tenderness I’d ever felt for him. “I love you too, Ash, so much.”

Hesitantly, he shifted so he could lean forward and put his head on my shoulder. I felt relief as I wrapped my arms around him and held him tight against me. Despite the black cloud hanging over us, I felt a tiny sliver of hope, like his acceptance of the way he felt about me was enough to convince me he really did want to get better.

Until he’d said those words, I’d never been sure of him. I knew he loved me. It was in every touch, every grin, and intense stare we’d ever shared, but I’d never been certain he loved himself enough to stay with me and build the life he truly deserved. Now, with everything stacked up in front of him, more real and imposing than it had ever been, I was suddenly convinced that he did.

Or at least that he wanted to try.

“Pete?”

I looked down at him absently. “Yeah?”

“I’m glad I’m home.”

Ash

September 2010

I
WAS
certain I’d hear him come home, but as usual, I didn’t. I woke up just before dawn, and he was passed out beside me like he’d been there the whole time. His body was half covering me, his arm like a vise around my middle and his legs completely entangled with mine. It felt nice—it felt right—and it was only the need to stretch that made me reluctantly shift away.

Carefully, I uncurled my legs and straightened them. I kept an eye on Pete as I moved; I didn’t want to disturb him. He’d already been working for sixteen hours by the time I went to bed. Besides, I wanted to make the most of this quiet time with him. It was going to be a while before I had this again.

I glanced past him to the nightstand. The stark white envelope containing a plane ticket and everything else I needed to travel Philadelphia was propped against the lamp. With the warmth of Pete’s skin seeping into me, it didn’t seem real, but in a few hours I’d be thousands of miles up in the sky, leaving him far behind.

It had been Ellie’s idea for me to accompany her back to Philadelphia. I refused over and over again until my shrink asked me what exactly was stopping me, and when I sat back and considered her question, I couldn’t really think of an honest answer, beyond being nebulously uneasy about doing it. Which meant I probably should. Dr. Gilbert was cool like that. She got me to see things differently.

Not that it hadn’t taken me months to figure that out. I hadn’t wanted to go to therapy at first, even though I’d kind of promised Pete I would. The idea of delving into my car-crash brain scared the shit out of me. Pete tried to convince me I’d be fine, but it didn’t work, because underneath it all he was as freaked out as I was. He never said it, but I knew he was worried it would make things worse. Neither of us could handle that. We’d about reached our limit. Paradoxically, though, in the end, it was watching that fear consume him that changed my mind. Suddenly it was him jolting awake in the dead of night, his heart racing, his skin cold. My nightmares had become his, and I couldn’t bear that.

One night when he was tossing and turning, I woke him up. He was mumbling my name over and over, in an achingly desperate tone, a tone I’d never heard from him before, and when he finally opened his eyes to look at me, I knew exactly what he’d seen. “You saw me die, didn’t you?”

He wouldn’t answer, but he didn’t have to, and it was the wake-up call I’d needed. I couldn’t watch my bullshit destroy him. The very next day I asked him to take me across town to the psychiatrist David had found for me.

PTSD—the name for what made me crazy. The shrink told me it explained everything—the nightmares, the flashbacks. It even explained the hallucinations, weird memory problems, and psychotic episodes. When I was diagnosed, Pete showed me a really long list of symptoms. I was surprised to see I only had half of them—surprised and relieved. For all the shit I’d been through, it could’ve been worse. Some days, I even believed that.

Facing up to the reality of my situation was tough. Dr. Gilbert told me I’d never know for sure what had happened to me. My mind was now deemed unreliable, and nothing I remembered from that hazy time in my life could ever be verified. Not without a confession from the person they believed responsible, and that was never going to happen. Daryl Hunter was long dead.

I knew I was in trouble the day Pete came home clutching a folder with “Child Services” stamped all over it. Until then, Daryl Hunter had just been a voice, a blurred shadow that haunted my dreams. That all changed when Pete began trying to explain what David had found out about him and his connection to me.

The home I couldn’t remember was in some shitty town just outside Houston. I’d been there for three years under the care of a foster mom with seven other kids. Her adult son lived with her too and helped care for the kids while she worked.

Yeah, you guessed it. Daryl Hunter was her son.

The connection to abuse was dubious. I tried to reason my way out of it until Pete finally broke down and told me what he’d kept from me since the day he first went to David for help.

That night, he crumbled as he painfully explained the crimes Daryl Hunter had been accused of before he died. Beating his wife. The torture, rape, and murder of the street kid in the park. The similarities between me and the boy were horrifying: he was young, blond, and covered in burns… burns that matched the scars on my back. Pete laid it all out there for me that night, and with Dr. Gilbert’s help, we matched the few facts we had with the worst dreams I’d ever had, ending months of morbid speculation.

It wasn’t pretty. Worst-case scenario: Based on my nebulous nightmares, Daryl Hunter had come into my room when I lived in his mother’s house, held me down on my bed, and raped me, burning my back when I struggled. The best case we could figure was that I’d seen it happen to someone else, that I’d taken someone else’s nightmares and made them my own, but that didn’t explain the scars on my back. At the very least there had been physical abuse.

Dr. Gilbert made me write my dreams down, like I would forget them. It was heavy reading and it hurt Pete. Seeing him break down and cry was devastating, but the fact that even so he pushed me to continue was enough to convince me not to give up.

Making the decision to rebuild my life turned out to be easy, but actually doing it was anything but. I didn’t know where to start. Dr. Gilbert said it wasn’t about trying to piece together my past. It was about dealing with my present, as though the actual events didn’t really matter anymore because the past couldn’t be changed. Whatever the truth was, I needed to work on the way my perceptions of it affected me here and now.

Here and now, with Pete, because without him, there was no doubt I would slide away into nothing.

“Ash?”

I turned my head. In the darkness, Pete gazed at me, his warm eyes gleaming. Somehow I’d missed him waking up and even putting his chin on my chest. I said, “Sorry. Was I staring?”

“Nah, you just looked far way. Have you been awake long?”

I glanced back at the window. It was still dark, but I had no idea how much time had passed. “I don’t know.”

He scooted a little closer. Quite a feat considering how mashed together we already were. He shoved his face into my neck and found the spot with his lips that made me squirm.

The sensation tickled. I threw my head back and laughed, until he kissed up my neck and jaw and found my mouth. He kissed me senseless, and every negative thought in my brain faded away until I was left with just him. I twisted and tried to get even closer. His blunt nails scraped over my chest. I broke away with a gasp, but he didn’t let up. He caught my lips again, and like a spark on dry tinder, his kiss was enough to ignite every nerve in my body.

I shoved his sweats down his legs, using my hands and then my feet before lifting my hips for him to relieve me of mine. The comforter slipped from the bed. It left us bare to the night air, but that didn’t matter. The heat between us was enough.

He took his time working his magic. He’d always been good at it, but since our sex life had recovered from my physical and mental absence, the chemistry between us had only gotten hotter. Things were so good now, Pete had even topped me more times in the past few months than he ever had before. To my pleasure and his.

I’d shocked him when I asked him to do it just a few days after he told me about Daryl Hunter. He thought it was a knee-jerk reaction, a diversion, like it had been before, but it wasn’t. It was something I’d thought about for months. To get better, I needed to trust him—I needed to trust myself—and to do that, I had to give him everything.

We’d tried it before. Hell, I still remembered the first time. I was really happy that day. I’d just enrolled in art school, and for the first time in my life, I felt like I had a future. I had Pete, my job, and a new way to learn. That night, I came home to him with a big grin on my face, and it stirred something in him. The way he looked at me was different, like he could see something he hadn’t seen before. I wanted him to look at me that way forever, and in a rare moment of clarity, I was suddenly aware that I was completely in love with him. It wasn’t an emotion I was familiar with. It scared me, but at the same time, it made me feel strong—strong enough to give him what I knew he craved.

Bottoming that night, and the rare occasions that followed, had been strange. Most times, my feelings for Pete won over, but while my body responded in all the right ways, on the inside I felt detached. Something was missing. For the longest time, I didn’t realize it was me.

It wasn’t like that anymore. These days, after everything else had gone so wrong, it felt different—
I
felt different—and it changed everything between us. From that point on, I wanted him inside me, sometimes even more than I wanted to fuck him. It was like we’d found another missing piece in the puzzle that joined us together. Another void had been filled, and I began to crave the feeling of being connected to him like that.

It was different for Pete too. Before, he’d always watched me, analyzed me, and followed cues I didn’t understand. I didn’t want that anymore. I didn’t want to be the one in control. I wanted him to own me, completely and utterly, not be afraid of something in me that I knew I could beat.