I darted inside and locked the door again, looking around and alert as I climbed the stairs.
When I cracked her bedroom door open, I immediately spotted her body under a sheet on the bed. The shadows of the rain on the window danced across her form as she lay on her side, and I closed the door quietly, stepping up to the foot of her bed and watching her sleep.
Heat coursed through every inch of my body, seeing her there, looking so warm and peaceful.
She was so small and gentle and delicate.
But there was fire in there.
She never lied or pretended she was someone she wasn’t. She couldn’t see what I was, but she felt it and recognized it in herself, and we were able to find each other and feel that it was right. I didn’t know how it happened, but it was why I was always drawn to her. Since we were kids. She saw everything.
I picked up the bottom of the sheet and pulled it softly from her body, seeing she was in a white, silk night shirt, loose and flowing down her arms but bunched up around her waist. I stared at her. My territory.
If my friends touched her like I touched Rika tonight, I’d kill them. Without pause.
She let out a little whimper, taking in a deep breath. “Is that you?”
She pulled her shirt down and propped herself up on an elbow, her head moving around the room.
“Yeah,” I replied quietly.
She followed my voice and smiled.
I set my knee down on the bed, coming down on her as she settled onto her back, and I rested my body on top of hers as I planted my elbows under me and held both sides of her head. I slid my fingers into her hair and touched my forehead to hers, breathing her in and feeling her body underneath mine.
She scaled her fingers up my back, whispering, “What’s wrong?”
I closed my eyes, having no idea where to start. “I fucked up,” I whispered back.
She rubbed me, and I soaked in her heat, the rain hiding us from the world, and still wondering how she got inside me—inside my head and my…
“Need to hide for a while?” she asked, a lilt of comfort in her voice.
And I nodded. “Yeah.”
For as long as I could.
We kissed, softly at first, but my body became aware of hers, and she wanted to feel everything, her hands going under and inside my clothes.
And as we stripped, and I thrust inside of her, I knew without a doubt that this is who I would’ve been if I hadn’t become me. If I hadn’t learned to cope with pain in all the worst ways growing up in that house and denied taking any responsibility for the man I became.
I would’ve gone to school, played basketball, laughed with my friends, and snuck into my pretty little g
irlfriend’s house at night to make love to her, delirious in no other need than to be good, because I wasn’t so twisted that I needed anything else to be happy.
This is what I might’ve had forever if I hadn’t lied.
A few hours later, we laid together, the rain lighter now as she rested her head on my chest and ran her hands over my body, memorizing every line and chord.
“The scars on your body…” she said quietly. “Your scalp, under your arm, your groin. Places people don’t see.”
I stroked her arm with my thumb as I held her, already knowing where she was going with it. I stopped cutting when I was fifteen. The night my mother left.
But some of the marks never truly healed. It was a good thing I was smart about where I did it, so my clothes always covered it.
“I had a classmate in Montreal who had scars like that,” she went on, “but she didn’t bother to hide it. It was everywhere. She had to leave and go to a hospital.”
I stroked her arm still, my breathing even and calm.