Page 176 of What We Bury
Micah was first. Micah, who held me when I was still half blood and half panic and somehow knew better than to tell me I was okay before I could stand to hear it. He texts me things like Did you eat? and once, at midnight, I can still taste you, and not one of those messages has ever made me feel like a problem being managed.
Just held.
Apparently that’s a thing I get to have now. Who knew.
Holden was the opposite delivery method. He handed me the truth with the wrapping torn clean off—told me to my face what I was to them in the beginning. Witness. Liability. Participant. Threat. And somehow being named all four made me feel bigger instead of smaller, because he wasn’t flinching from the partsof me everyone else keeps waiting for me to apologize for. He looks at my temper like it’s a feature. He calls me wildcat and something behind my ribs bares its teeth every single time. I have chosen not to think too hard about how much I like the marks he leaves. On Wednesday a toothbrush appeared in my bathroom.
He didn’t admit to putting it there. Of course he didn’t. Holden operates in evidence and denial, and apparently now one of those things lives in my medicine cabinet. This morning he kissed me goodbye like coming back tonight was the most obvious fact in the world, like leaving pieces of himself in my apartment wasn’t a confession at all.
Then there’s Milo, who has spent most of the time between visits turning my phone into a gallery of cursed images—a dog in a bow tie, a hardware-store sign that says SCREW IT, a tragic selfie in front of the security-camera wall at Best Buy, captioned “triggered”—and who can make me laugh so hard I forget, for whole minutes, that I am a person who killed someone. He’s too loud and too much and he takes up more room than the laws of physics should permit. Yesterday he dropped to his knees on the sidewalk outside the diner and screamed my name down the street, and I can’t decide whether that’s the most mortifying or the most romantic thing anyone has ever done for me.
I was viscerally furious at him. And he didn’t joke his way out of it. He let me be furious. He gave me my space. Then he looked dead-on at the worst thing he’d done to me and just—took it. Milo finds my darkness and starts stringing it with fairy lights. I don’t trust it. But I keep reaching for it anyway.
Knox doesn’t deal in words. What Knox hands me—and I didn’t know I’d been starving for it until he did—is room. A man that size, that dangerous, and he walks beside me close enough that our arms brush and never once crowds me, never fills a silence just because he could. His quiet isn’t the punishing kind.It has weight to it. Gravity. A steady place to fall toward when the world tips sideways.
He’s also the one who taught me what being watched does to me. An alley, his hand between my legs and the entire street one turned head away from seeing everything. He started that. He doesn’t even know he started that—that he’s part of the reason being seen can feel like desire instead of danger. But the camera over my bed only reads as a gift because I asked for it. Because I control it. Because nothing goes live unless I decide to turn it on. And then, like he’d frightened himself, he folded back into all that careful quiet and hasn’t let himself off the leash since. He kisses my forehead at my door and leaves. Every time, I stand there wanting to haul him back inside and show him I won’t break.
And then Eli.
Eli is the ache. The locked door. The hand that gets an inch from mine and then retreats like touching me would cost him something he can’t spare. His jacket is still draped over my chair. He hasn’t asked for it back, and I refuse to read anything into that. He claims he’s a monster. But that monster seems afraid of precisely one thing, and that thing is me.
But he watched me last night. The feed Milo set up for me also told me exactly who clicked the link and how long they watch. The monster peeked through the bars of his own cage and let himself look.
I don’t know what it means, and I’m not going to insult myself by pretending I do. I just know I’m not finished.
A car rolls past, headlights dragging across the sidewalk, and for once my body doesn’t lock up. I notice the absence of it—the flinch that doesn’t come, the small, fragile pocket of ease sitting under my ribs where the dread usually lives.
They didn’t fix me. I don’t think I want to be fixed.
But somewhere in three weeks, they handed me back pieces of myself I’d stopped believing I was allowed to hold. The biggest one is this: last night I turned that camera on because I wanted to. Because the thought of all five of them watching lit me up in a way that was mine.
Not Brock’s. Not fear’s. Not survival’s.
Mine.
Tonight I’m going to choose again. Except tonight, two of them will be in the room.
Because tonight is Milo and Holden.
A couch. A movie none of us will actually watch. Two men who have no business making sense together and somehow do—a lit match and a folded blade. They bicker like it’s foreplay and look at me like I’m the punchline and the prize and the one problem they both want to solve with their hands.
I’ve been circling it all day. What it would feel like to be between them. To let Milo talk until the nerves burn off. To let Holden watch the thought arrive on my face before I’m brave enough to say it out loud.
By the time my building swings into view I’m warm all the way through and restless in a way the walk had nothing to do with.
My hands shake as I ready my keys.
Not from fear.
For once, not from fear.
Tonight, I might be brave enough.
I take the stairs two at a time. My keys are in my hand, but the door is already unlocked. They’re here. They beat me home. I knew they would—told them they could—and still, the knowledge sends a thrill through me that I feel all the way to my toes.
I push through the door.
The apartment smells like butter and oregano and something sweet. Music is playing—low and warm, classic rock, Holden’s playlist. Candles glow on the coffee table, which means Milo raided my bathroom cabinet.
