“I missed the whole summer,” he murmured. “But none of it would have been as good as today was anyways.”
My heart swelled, and I found myself lightly stroking his stomach.
When we were encouraged by the cops to leave the park with everyone else twenty minutes later, we rolled up the blanket and walked to the car. There was no mention by either of us of taking him to his cousins’ house. I just drove to my apartment and we went upstairs, tired and a little sunburned. Phoenix sank down onto the couch and patted the seat next to him.
It seemed safe to mention it now that we were in my place and we had implied he would be staying over by coming here. “I don’t mind you sleeping in my bed again,” I told him, which sounded bolder than I meant it to. I just meant that he didn’t need to bother to start out on the couch, because the truth was, I wanted him sleeping with me. There was something comforting about his presence in a way that made no sense at all. I knew that. But it didn’t make it any less real.
“Thanks. I’ll take you up on that. But I guess I have to go back to Riley’s eventually,” he told me, taking my hand and pulling me up close to him. “I’m going to need to change my underwear at some point.”
I laughed. “True. And I can’t help you with that unless you like bikini style.” Funny how I had abandoned the thongs when I had stopped wearing the tight Lycra dresses out at parties and clubs. No longer worried about panty lines, I had gradually shifted back to fuller coverage for comfort.
“I’m good with boxer briefs, thanks. Dental floss in my ass doesn’t work for me.” He reached for the remote. “You okay watching a movie?”
“Sure.” I should have been sleepy. That was my constant state of existence lately. But I was wide awake.
Waiting for him to kiss me. That’s what I was doing. But he didn’t seem like he was going to do anything other than channel surf, with me leaning on him, his other hand stroking my hair.
It was stupid to want him, stupid to want more.
I should be grateful that he wasn’t taking our relationship in that direction, that he was clearly just interested in companionship or something.
Because what the hell did I really know about him?
But what I knew was that he made me feel like I could look people in the eye again. He made me feel like I wasn’t going to break into a thousand pieces at any given moment. He made my hands stop shaking and helped my breathing slow down.
He made me feel like a crumbling wall that has suddenly gotten new mortar between each brick and feels stable again.
And if he could make me feel that way, maybe I could make myself feel that way, too.
Chapter Five
Phoenix
Selfish asshole, that was me. I should have gone home. I should have deleted her number after we ran into Davis in the park, but man, when she looked at me like that—like she thought I was something amazing instead of a piece of shit—I couldn’t help myself. I couldn’t leave.
I couldn’t stop myself from touching her either, though I was working damn hard at making sure it was nothing more than holding hands or my arm around her.
So maybe humping her head with my hand wasn’t exactly keeping it cool, but I’d been dying to touch her hair since the minute I’d met her, so fucking sue me for going for it. She didn’t seem to mind, which was insane. Why she wasn’t terrified of me by that point, I couldn’t figure out. No self-preservation at all.
Except since it was working in my favor, I couldn’t exactly fault her.
When she started to doze, pressed against me, I shook her hand a little. “Hey. Let’s go to bed. You’ll have a headache tomorrow if you sleep like this.”
In the glowing light of the TV she glanced up at me, her eyes glassy and wide. She smiled. “Okay.”
The urge to kiss her was so strong I felt my temple pulse as I clenched my free fist, digging nails into the flesh of my palm. I couldn’t do that to her. I couldn’t drag her down to my level.
“Come on,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady, even. I led her down the hallway to her little room and she stumbled along behind me.
The bedroom was small, cell size. When I stepped inside, I felt the tension inside me getting ready to explode. The room surrounded me, trapped me, and I felt guilty for grabbing at her in my sleep that morning, for taking advantage of her niceness, for exposing her to a guy like Davis.
For enjoying spending time with her, for wanting her so bad I could practically taste her on my tongue.
She crawled onto the bed still in her sundress and peeled back the sheet. Once under it, she settled down onto her pillow with a sigh. Her hand reached out for mine. “Aren’t you coming to bed?”
One, two, three small breaths out nice and slow. “In a minute,” I told her, and my voice sounded completely normal. How I had no idea. “I need to take a piss.” I leaned forward and brushed her hair back off her forehead. When my hand started to shake I pulled it back.
“’kay.” Her eyes were already closed.
I retreated slowly, trying not to make too much noise. I eased her door almost all the way shut, then went into the living room. Even though I wanted to punch the shit out of something, there was nothing to punch. Nothing to throw. So I did push-ups, at a grueling pace, three reps of thirty each. Then I went up and down the stairs twenty times, grateful for the old, dingy carpet so Robin couldn’t hear me.
The doctors could take their meds and shove them up their ass. They’d made me take them in jail, and I hadn’t felt any different. Intermittent explosive disorder? Go fuck yourself.
The only thing wrong with me was that my mom was an asshole and I’d been left on my own too much. Nothing else.
Someday I would fall in love like every other idiot did at one time or another. I just couldn’t let it be with Robin.
But I knew how to control my emotions. I always had.
I went back upstairs, peeled off my shirt, and eased myself into bed beside Robin, still breathing hard. She was out cold, and I lay there and let my muscle fatigue become the focus of my thoughts. The way my shoulders burned, the strain in my calves. The pain crowded out the other thoughts, and I finally relaxed.
Careful not to move too much, I turned my head and watched her sleep. I hadn’t had a lot of opportunity to sleep next to a girl. In high school my girlfriend had stayed over a few times when my mother wasn’t home, but her parents had busted her and that had been the end of that. Angel had stayed with me once, but she had gotten pissed at me for taking too much space and had kicked me in the shins hard before stomping off to sleep on the couch.
But Robin seemed to like me in her space. She shifted toward me on the couch when we watched TV, she had turned toward me on the blanket in the park, and in bed she curled her legs up and tucked her hands under her chin, but always facing me.
I studied her face in the dark, wanting to memorize it, to sketch it later.
She was beautiful. She was naive.
She felt like my reward for surviving jail.
I stayed awake for an hour watching her, before drifting into oblivion.
Another nightmare shattered my sleep. In this one I was watching my mother being raped by Iggy, half conscious from the beating he’d given her and from the drugs. Her body moved sluggish with each thrust, his grunts making my stomach roil, but there was a cell wall between me and her, so I couldn’t help her.
Then it wasn’t my mom anymore.
It was Robin, and her eyes were dead of any of the sweetness I’d seen, even void of the sadness she had shown me. They were just empty. Black holes. There was nothing there as that bastard abused her body in the most violating way possible.