Sheltered(59)

“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.