ya wanna see a magic trick, kid?

“Hey Sully!” A bubbly squeal crackles sharp over the screen. “Or… Mr. Sullivan, potential employer.” 

The voice lets out a knowing, nervous chuckle— but the colored bars of a VHS test pattern overlay its owner. 

“Yeah, let’s do that. ‘Mr. Sullivan’. I’m very professional.”

But whoever it is, they’re clearly not, because it takes all of one, two, three poignant smacks before the neon bars fade and are replaced by the grainy pixels of a small girl standing in a bright, poster-clustered room. The camera captures more nostril than face. 

“Oh, this fucking thing—”

One last smack for posterity. The screen shakes. The colors warble. And by the time the camera’s tripod has stilled, the voice’s owner has moved to a more flattering distance. The voice’s owner is a She.

And She smiles with a lot of teeth. A bright yellow shirt clings anxiously to her skin and only makes the flustered red of her cheeks pop harder.

“Okay— HEY, SULLY! So, I hope you got my tape. It’s kinda an old reel, so I’ll be attaching my full dialect vocabulary and an additional performance below. I can do Southern, Russian, Queens, New Jersey, British RP, Cockney, Transatlantic, and, um, I’m still working on my Irish, but I’m a decently quick learner.” She changes her mind with a self-conscious grin. “Regularly quick learner.”

“I’m willing to relocate for the position as long as it’s paid for. I’m not exactly—” But she cuts the rest off with a pursed lip, shrugging as if too obvious to explain. “But I’ve always wanted to travel, so I will make a passionate, energetic, and proactive treasure-hunting adversary. I am knowledgeable in Greek mythos, Roman, Egyptian, Christian, Jewish, Japanese, Chinese, Norse, Hindu, but I’m of course always learning more because I… just think it’s really cool. I’m also conversational in Spanish, Italian, and Japanese... ‘Vaffanculo’.”

She salutes winkingly. 

“I have experience in self-defense, but consider myself well-armed, to boot.” Her arm abruptly flies into frame, proudly raising a bright pink tube of pepper spray from her pocket, before toggling it with a fairy-like clinking sound against its carabiner. “And as a long-term survivor of high-functioning Agoraphobia, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Borderline Personality Disorder, anxiety, depression, and being four foot eleven and a half, I know what it’s like to be resilient. I believe I sent you my college essay about it along with my headshot and resume. No babylonian possession curses getting inside this skull.”

Her knuckles rap hollow against her temple with a cheery, if somewhat overcompensating chuckle. They fall just as fast. 

She stops laughing. 

“A-anyway, I’m sure you’ve already made your pick by now, but I just wanted to reiterate my interest in the position. I’m willing to learn and do whatever it takes to be a productive member of your team. I’ve always been… fascinated— fuck-I-suck-I-wish-I-could-think-of-a-better-synonym-right-now— by what you do and would love nothing more than to be a part of something so important. Magical. Greater than… this. I hope there’s a place for me in there.” She changes her mind. “I know. I know there’s a place for me in there.”

An uneven breath prefaces an abrupt tuck of loose hair behind her ear and a loud clasp of her hands in front of her. She shrinks under the glaring ring light and the bright clothes and the too many posters, crumbled nail polish she picks at before forcing her palms into fists with a ravenous, apprehensive inhale. Trying. Failing. But then—

Shay smiles. 

And Shay succeeds.

“And now, I will be performing ‘Out, Damned Spot’ from the seminal classic Macbeth. In case you decide to follow through with that mission in Stratford-upon-Avon. And by ‘in case’, I mean ‘when’. Again, for today, my name is Shay Valentine. Thanks for your considera—-”

Victor snorts, smoke wafting from his beak like a settling dragon, La-Z-Boy beneath like a pile of gold… and firmly hits the eject button.

⋆⋆⋆

She only falls behind because she accidentally trips over another eviscerated limb. Easy mistake.

The metallic churn of whirling helicopter blades follows close like heel-barking dogs. Barking dogs like Dictator Hawn’s howling german shepherd snouts she can taste at her toes, the airy puff she imagines at her ankles, teeth tearing into flesh. A bullet passed and a ripping hole through a head. She runs faster. 

Platinum blonde hair befalls her high-angled face, profile sharp and cut like the throwing knives she so heavily accompliced back in Central Sudan. The grass was trimmer there, the smoke: less choking. A younger her would have excuses to tell, stories for every fellow spy, every fellow huntswoman of why her beautiful face was smeared red with blood. Maybe then there would’ve been sympathy for the glaring scar sliced across her eye at the ripe age of fifteen. Too young to know what it meant to slice another man back. Slice another man open. 

But then again, she was never young. 

There was never time to be. 

Her revolver has exactly three rounds left. Or four. Or is it two? She doesn’t dabble with specifics when specifics don’t matter. When she breathes, feet sprinting over leaves and vines and fluidly over less-than-subtle landmines, it parts her panting, rosemary-red, glossed lips into grins. After ten years in the biz, she already knows she can count on another ten— even if her last draw tonight was a blank. Her hair is coiffed and voluminous. Soft and silky, as well. 

Almond-shaped nails pluck a grenade from her belt and pull the pin like she would the cap off a tube of lipstick. Voluptuous Sin-Sister: her favorite shade. But the burgundy blood of the half-dozen gunners exploding behind her is a close second. The periphery of vermillion flames behind her: less so. Doesn’t go with her skin tone. She runs faster still. 

BANG! — But the enemy’s bullet whizzes past victim-less with only an offhand twist of her neck. Her hearing: better trained than even the Dictator’s hench-mutts. She listens to the jingle of her own silver hoops tapping in heartbeats at her jaw, tinkling rings with every jump her body propels. The enemy’s breath. Her own life pulsating in her chest. It was what her government-sanctioned, professional assassin, less-than-freshly-murdered father taught her, that night on the dock when he said he was just going on a “casual Tuesday night shark tank dive”: Just believe. 

Tell the world you’ll live and the world will listen. 

But that was before the fangs tore through him on the ocean floor. 

BOOM!

And the absolute second she can pull her ravaged, thin, exquisitely-proportioned body from the detonated landmine’s rubble, her enemy’s name leaves her lips.

“Hawn.” — She spits, a bloody glob amongst the soot.

“As I recall, we’ve discussed before that I prefer Doctor Hawn.” 

She grunts in pain when she attempts to wrangle herself onto her knees— blood, sweat, and ash where life once foliaged— but it’s with an effortlessly sensual femininity. The smudges of ash perfectly highlight her heaving, sweat-kissed bosom. She blows a loose strand of hair from her elegant face on the retort. 

“And as I recall, your doctorate in dictatorship proved little admiration.”

But Dictator Dickhead remains unfazed, only a razor-toothed sneer in its place— sharpened down by the finest of evil dentists. Amelia tries not to think about the sharks. 

“Big words for such a little girl.” 

“Small words for such a big, strong man.”

Hawn sneers to combat something else. Amelia doesn’t bother with the label. Might damage his fragile ego to say the feeling aloud. But unfortunately, for her, she won’t get a chance to. Because just as she dares her foot from static shock— 

“Men, cuff her. You know how she likes to fight it first.” And with the simplest snap of his fingers, his word is law. It’s as if the very trees themselves dematerialize for bulky camo print and bulletproof vests, towering above. Herself: a butterfly pinned to a frame. “They always do.” 

She knew she should’ve packed something to blend in, too. She could’ve lied and said the green was for luck.

‘Aww, and for our tenth hate-iversary I was gonna go easy, too.” The lying part: already down pat. As for luck: a late mistress, as always. 

But for the great Amelia Danger, forever a consistent one.

“Guess neither of us will be needing this, then.” 

And without another word, her squeezed fist is lifted to the jungle’s waning light, flickering overhead fluorescent, and with it, an adjoining tangle of brass beads and brilliant gold engraved into the head of a snarling tiger tacky costume jewelry limping sadly from a single rusted chain.

“You… thief!” 

The TV sings with the whines of a fooled Doctor Hawn, speakers clipping loudly due to the restraints of the era and more-than-shoddy boom mics, and Shay gives a sightless thunk! with the butt of her palm when the colors begin to fizzle alongside the rest of him. But then again, it was the flaws of the past that made it so nostalgic.

The room’s a 12’ x 12’ suburban box. But today, it’s the jungles of Africa.

“I don’t know her by any other name, Hawn.” “I don’t know her by any other name, Hawn…”

Shay murmurs right in time, snark bitten between large teeth and a smoking pre-roll as she inspects the box before her: PAWN AMERICA PRIORITY MAIL stamped defensively across the front, as if the hostility of upper case letters will be sufficient ammunition against their local neighborhood porch pirate.

But perhaps not.

Shay seamlessly slides the switch of her trusty pink pocket knife with a soft click!, and the other half of the package’s spine gives way to the remaining haul. Inside: more globs of cheap jewelry— if anything were to resemble the gold of Amelia Danger’s Head of Waghoba, it’d need to be sandblasted off from a layer of muck— a gaggle of pagers, an unpinned brooch that bites her when she dares a closer hand, a polaroid camera, and a couple of crystals, price tags from the tourist shop barely half-scraped off. She sighs. Certainly not worth the egregious hassle of stepping outside. 

Even if the CFO of Pawn America only happened to live two doors down. 

And half-drowned in lint at the bottom, a name and phone number on a piece of cardstock. Today, Shay tells herself it's merely practice. She always wanted a camera, anyway. 

“Dani-uh-el! This is Becca Monaghan wit’ Pawn America!” The Boston accent rolls off like butter, and she nearly wacks herself to the background sound of gunfire. Dammit. She told herself she was gonna start working on her Irish. Suppose old habits die hard. “I’m-uh callin’ boutcha package ya sent us.”

“Wha—?” The aforementioned Daniel responds around what is obviously a 2pm beer bottle. Her sneer: sweeping hills. “Uh… yeah, right, sure! Any winners?”

Now that Shay thinks about it, she’s pretty thirsty herself. 

“Winner winner, chicken dinner!” “Winn-uh winn-uh, chicken dinn-uh, Danny Boy…”

She twitters amongst the whining calls of Dr. Hawn as she leans up to retrieve a half-empty plastic water bottle from a nearby shelf, the joint: into the daycare of an ashtray. She takes a swig to allow Daniel’s sigh of satisfaction to properly sit.

“Oh, thank God, because—”

“Yeah, what are these, real amethyst?” The ‘50% off’ sticker peels off in one easy swing of her fingernail. A single scoff off-receiver. “Those can spot us a pretty seventy-five each, easy. And you sent us a mountain of ‘em.”

“Oh… really?” And Arrowhead spring tastes like heaven against her lips as doubt pulls loose from his own. “Well, I mean, depends what you’re offering for them. You know, they’re a—”

“Family heirloom?” Shay finishes, a simple crinkle of her fist and the sale sticker is at home on the carpet. “They always are.” 

“Y-yeah. So I’m not willing to part for at least a hundred each.”

Awww, Danny boy thinks he has a say on the matter. 

The silence as she sucks down the remaining water tastes sweet and clear, his little gulps of pathetic mouth-breathing music to her ears. She swings toward the TV: upon, a hundred gunmen readying their weapons, Amelia Danger: perfectly-painted lips dropped in a surprised “O” as she notices the horizon cap past the palm fronds. An idea upon her swiftly-raised brow.

This was always Shay’s favorite part.

“Well, listen Danny, it’s a tough economy out there right now. Ya know I got a family ta’ feed myself.”

“Of course.” Daniel replies, teeth chattering nervously upon the glass rim.

Shay’s eyes follow as Amelia swings the Head of Waghoba teasingly to and fro, Dr. Hawn’s mismatched eyes slivered suspicious. Easy. Too easy. Amelia’s mouth parts for an innocent, white-flag-waving grin. 

“But I like ya. So I’m willing to do…” Shay sightlessly dances her hand among the junk, feigning inspection. “Six hundred for the whole thing.”

“R-really? God, thank you so much, Miss—”

Easy.

“Monaghan.”

Like breathing.

“Rebecca Sunshine Monagha—”

“HAWN!” 

Don’t worry. Shay makes sure to twist her head towards it for extra believability.

“Oh god, who the hell are you?!” After what feels like eons of practice, the tonal match is borderline seamless.

And in one flawless motion, one spinning starburst of a second, upon the screen: Amelia Danger catapults the Head of Waghoba through the leaves— and directly off the half-hidden cliff beyond. Screams (and more than a few barks) fall by the dozens. And Shay just barely manages to bite back a smile as Daniel gasps on the other line’s end. 

“No… no, wait you can’t!” — A curt smash of her thumb against the volume button. 

THUNK!

The sound of Amelia’s grappling gun soaring through the air back towards the tiger’s head trades identical for a realistic punch. Shay wails phonily, clutching a make-shift wound upon her cheek, and Danny mirrors in wonderfully earnest fear.

“Please, no, not the kids!”

“GET HER!”

Dr. Hawn’s voice clears like raucous lightning through the receiver as Shay raises it high to the television speaker, static spraying thunderous with the mercenaries’ quickly obedient gunfire and ripping flaming holes through jungle foliage.

“Miss Monaghan?!” Danny boy: pathetically.

“No! No! NOOOOOO!” Shay cries, draping an arm over her forehead.

Amelia’s victorious laughter sings in seeming villainy as the grinning, glowing Head of Waghoba meets the sharp prick of her grappling hook— dozens of burly dumb-dumbs barreling towards its quickly-emptying space, and off the side of their own death— and reeling it right back into her awaiting claws. The VHS whines within when Shay orders a fast-forward.

“You sick BASTARD!” “YOU SICK BASTARD!”

Practice has proven just the right edge of soprano turns Hawn’s mirrored call invisible. So Shay makes sure to jack it an extra two octaves.

“You’ll never take me alive!” “YOU’LL NEVER TAKE ME ALIVE!”

Eh, why not make it three? 

Just for funzies.

“That was always the plan… Danger.” — Hawn: Certain, icy, deadly.

And for the grand finale, Shay swings the now-empty water bottle up to the receiver and gives it one, good, solid twist.

CRACK!

There is silence on the other end. Exactly three seconds before a voice warbles from the beyond.

“Miss…?

Nothing.

“Miss Monaghan?”

Nothing but the sizzling static of an overrun VHS. 1986. Classic.

“Becca?!”

And before Danny the Dumbass can utter another made-up name, she’s already hung up the phone. 

From the TV bellows a cacophony of cheers, hollers, hoots. Shay’s favorite, Shay’s medicine, an actor’s only meal: applause. Amelia: hopped into the passenger’s seat of a speeding Jeep, driven runaway by the ever-handsome Professor, Daisy Mae and Eduardo exchanging celebratory high-fives in the back.

Luck: a fickle mistress. But, friends: far, far less so. 

“DANGEEEEEER!” 

And right in sync, Shay and Amelia stand, turn, and give a long, well-deserved bow. 

And… scene. 

They could both use a victory meal. The one with actual organs decidedly more so. Her thrift-picked rainbows: wall to wall; a dozen lamps; a blaring speaker. Her fabricated world: made jungle-rous. Made hers. Made into the thing she has control over. But with a simple swing of the door, her safe world immediately bleeds for—

Quiet.

And where there once was color, adventure, life, now stands little else but a deck of cards, a lifeless shell, of a one bedroom apartment. You’d never think the same specimen could possibly live in both. 

But then again, she doesn’t really. She survives.

Reluctant, overcast sunlight turns her Oliver orphan of a cramped kitchen even more sickly-looking. A single fluorescent bulb, audibly begging for death from the ceiling. A spider scurries unseen. Shay’s starved. But dread fills everything empty when she opens the fridge hinge for what she already knows to be true. A tube of butter. A can of mandarin oranges. A half-crunched baggie of dollar ramen, flavor packet lost somewhere between the stove and the over-stained counter. Shay’s starved. All at once, she feels sick. Her belly: a hole in a tiny, miserable, quivering body.

Reality. That’s what it is.

Shay’s scared. But she said that last time, over uncooked ramen noodles.

“Well… What’s next, Danger?” - The Professor’s voice peeps uncertainly from the next room over.

And Shay can do little else but sigh, fingers freezed in the artificial wind. She reminds herself Amelia Danger probably always carries a switchblade, garden stake, bat, taser, brass knuckles, shlock (combination lock and sock, a prison tradition) and pepper spray every time she goes to the grocery store, too. 

But still she does what she does best: she lies— and tells herself she must always take the three Xanax tablets before she goes, too. 

⋆⋆⋆

Earbuds, switchblade, chapstick. Earbuds, switchblade, chapstick. An ancient ritual. A witch’s curse. A brutal combination. Every day, every night. When the morning rose, and when it was slain out of the sky by an army of merciless stars that night. Earbuds, switchblade, chapstick. Earbuds, switchblade, chapstick.

Earbuds in the left, knife in the right. 

Earbuds in left, knife in the right. 

Because— obviously— you should put your defense closest to the dominant hand, because a person has more strength, more dexterity in their dominant hand. Earbuds in the left, knife in the right. A box cutter in the backpack. A fire poker under the pillow. 

Shay [REDACTED] is “spunky”.

Shay [REDACTED] is “quirky”.

Shay [REDACTED] is most of the lies on the expertly color-coordinated resume that she tells herself might actually get her a job. If one’s definition of ‘job’ is ‘a life’. Keyphrase being most of.

There was once a time where mentally disturbed constituted “quirky”. At least in a movie or two. Probably some midcentury musical. Probably one of the better ones.

Her fingers fidget and dig their way around the switchblade’s handle, and the air buckles in her throat when she realizes the tip isn’t facing outwards— which means that if she had to use it, it would take an extra 0.24 seconds to flip it towards the attacker. 0.24 more seconds: the difference between life and death. And so she flips it, removes her hand, wipes her sweating palm on the corduroy, puts it back in to make sure she could wrangle it in one sweeping motion if she needed to. Checks again just to make sure.

It’s a nearly sunny Sunday on the 4pm bus back from downtown, so she bares grinning teeth and too many bags and unsheaths a trembling “Thank you so much!” to the bus driver whose eyes are too bloodshot to even tease them off the road, before she slides into the leftmost upper level, row six, seat twelve. Because at 4pm, that’s where the most sun hits through the window. And Shay just luh-oves the sun. She just might love it more than anything. Maybe even more than disco. Concrete arcs and dashes and lines sweep by the towering palm trees of Pershing Square Park, dotted in burnt blood orange along the railings, somehow miraculously made more magical behind a glass pane. 

Or maybe just safer.

Shay finagles her grocery bags up the leftmost upper level, row six, seat twelve because she’s a liar. Because if she stays on the lower level, she won’t have sufficient visual vantage for an attack from the back, but if she’s too far back on the uppermost level, she won’t have sufficient distance to run through the back doors in event of an attack from the front. 

Obviously.

Golden yellow passes in warm, uneven slats where the skyscrapers’ blockade, and Shay crosses her legs thigh over thigh once she sits down— no, someone will able to see up her skirt, so she crosses ankle over ankle, no wait, because if the bus were to crash, she’d be propelled into the railing and her feet would break like twigs, snap, snap, she can practically hear it, has too vivid an imagination, so back thigh over thigh they go— but then again if a truck were to crash from the side and flip the bus over, then—

Snap.

She freezes and keeps herself thigh over thigh, even when an elderly gentleman beside her, face clouded over in menacing stubble and an even more menacing sneer: his eyes linger a hair too long. The slide over the bridge out the city pinpoints the dip between grandeur and suburb; soon, the steel highrises make way for 7/11s and sketchy-looking car dealerships parading fluttering air dancers in place of customers and the same endless, identical four-way intersections, sun sizzling yellow like a bad filter over a Hollywood movie set in Mexico. And as she watches them glide over the sewage-stained waters of the LA river, Shay uses her endless, overflowing, most whimsical of imaginations to imagine the worst.

Worst Case Scenario Handbook. Yellow cover. Page 5. 

Page 5: How to Escape a Sinking Car

She slides her earbuds into each ear, smacks her thumb into the ‘play’ button at her hip, and in a strike of honking cars and the sound of blaring trombones three thousand miles and an entire lifetime away, Diana Ross sings the soundtrack to a world better than hers. In her pesky, self-mutilated fingers— a swift chomp! of nail off the thumb of her right hand— a little, yellow book, and the tales it tells of how she’d survive if her bus plummeted off the edge and the world decided it didn’t want her anymore. Shifts back to ankle over ankle. Thigh over thigh.

Amelia Danger always gets to sit spread-eagle. Much more comfortable that way.

Disco croons paint the slits of dark shadows back in sunlight, caroling crackling from her walkman, and suddenly the little inked cartoons of drowning Buicks start to paint over in… something else entirely. The sun gives mercy between sporadic suburbs, the last few trees left in Los Angeles County, greens and yellows slashing sweet across the pages like stage lights. Before her very eyes, the words transform. Her world transforms. And there’s no better introduction to Step One, than the belaboring glides of a slide guitar.

Step 1: Open the windows, duh.

So, you’re taking your car for a swim. How… considerate. While a traditionally unideal pastime, if you are to consider such a feat, anyway, know that experts always recommend to keep your windows ajar while driving by open water—

So her eyes dart, a meerkat’s, wide and anxious, over the tops of heads and spot square where the panes of glass already trade for open air. The barest hint of release of strain from between her shoulder blades. 

“Check.” — She whispers under her breath. Careful, calculated, like speaking Shakespeare.

Step 2: Say goodbye to your swanky ride.

But if you prefer to live on the edge, and find that your windows won’t roll down in the event of an unfortunate swerve, use your foot, shoulder, steering wheel lock, or alternative weighty, phallic-shaped object to break one open.

And because she knows she can skip step two, there’s room now. 

“Check.” — Dark, distinctive, personal, like spouting poetry. Edgar Allen Poe.

Room for fantasy. An image idles beside her eyes: of her own furrowed brow and a Bruce Willis grit as she tells the passengers to stand back, a strong, certain palm thrown behind. Not for any particular purpose, but perhaps just for the sake of a flourish. Because hell no, she doesn’t understand the metrics of water pressure. She doesn’t know how many weights she’d need to sling to deadlift a car. Hell, she doesn’t even know how to shoot a gun.

But theatrics, fantasy, art, that burning, all-consuming, completely and utterly unnamable feeling in her chest that tells her she is alive: those are things she understands. 

Because those are the things that are real. 

Rising action star and sufficiently-breasted ingénue Shay Valentine (so she has enthusiastically settled on for this week) draws the garden stake she always carries from her bag and strikes the glass once, the sound of water rushing and gurgling below the tires, the wail of a police siren already calling past the middle distance. The passengers gasp in terror and joy as she plunges a second strike. Again. Again. And on the fifth and final, the center cracks open in a brilliant string of spider’s web. The water rushes, the crowds call, but the determined smirk so beautifully, so elegantly, so naturally etched across her lips never even thinks to falter. The bus-goers: wild, ravenous in their cheers. A distant trombone solo: tearing victorious through the plummeting water. All of life: a beautiful, beating, alive thing. A thing she is a part of.

Her thighs, splayed open across the seat. Because it’s more comfortable that way. 

God, she loves the fantasy of being comfortable.

But disco comes in at a damn close second.

On the intersection of Americana and Brand, a smashed Toyota wafts too thick with smoke to see its owner. To see if there’s blood. Pieces, all over the pavement. A policeman shakes his head to a curious pedestrian, who doesn’t even bother taking his headphones off first to ask.

“Excuse me?”

Her world, the real one: drowning buses— and not even making the news. 

“Sorry, excuse me?”

She moves back to ankle over ankle. 

“Sorry, but do you know which stop to get off for the Americana?”

And when her ignorance still bears no fruit, she submits, and plucks a single earbud free before turning uncertainly to the voice behind. Low and behold: the same scraggly man on the bench beside, eyes no longer leering, villainous, familiar. But rather, wide and welcoming. A soft cradle of a question.

And Shay’s heart sinks with guilt.

“Totally!” But she’s no green. The switch comes easier than breathing, everything lilting in proper, sufficient gentility, bearing a toothy smile as she twists to give full attention. She loves it when people smile at her. And so it only makes sense to smile back at him. “Brand and Harvard. Maybe… five more minutes? I can give you the heads up, if you want.”

He’s people. And Shay loves people.

“Great. Much appreciated.” He bears an earnest grin and any lingering weight lifts free as air before she can so much as graze her eyes back down to Step Three. 

Step 3: 

“Ya know, my wife and I used to go there all the time.”

And Shay loves people. She goddamn loves people. So, it’s stupid when she thinks she feels her teeth begin to grind.

“Aw, that’s so sweet!” 

Maybe she says it an octave higher than her normal register, which some people might interpret as phony. But that’s just a coincidence. She turns her head back to her book. And Shay reminds herself, between layers and layers of neon-colored sticky note, what a rancid, judgemental little insect she is. 

That’s what the pills are for.

Step 3: Get

“Ya know, it’s so nice to know there’s still good-hearted young people out there.”

…Oh.

And it is then that everything halts in its tracks. And Shay’s heart swells, alights like sunshine. What feels like the first time since she left her front door, she finally, truly breathes. And relief— that fickle, unruly mistress— trickles down between her shoulder blades in cooling rivulets. As if her very purpose, fulfilled. As if she was wrong.

She was wrong about everything.

“It’s getting harder and harder to find people who are willing to help others. Thank you.” 

Oh.

Oh.

And this time, when she replies, she looks at him. She really, really looks at him. And Shay smiles. Because she always liked it when people smiled at her. 

And the man with the wild hair and flower-picked meadows of stubble smiles right back.

“Of course, sir. I couldn’t agree more.” Purpose. People. Shay goddamn loves people, and the reasons are too many, too obvious to answer why. “I hope you and the missus have just the best day ever.”

Because when the mystery man smiles right back, it’s with wide, yellowing teeth, warm, button-pink cheeks, wrinkles that crinkle around the eyes, an embroidery laced that means joy. Joy that she made. Her lips ache at the sheer stretch, the sheer unrestrainedness of her smile, but she couldn’t possibly care less. Welcomes it, in fact. Because that’s what means she means it. That’s what means she did good today. She hopes he has the best day of all fucking time.  

In some distant reality, the water rushes forth, tumbles en masse into the socks and soles of their shoes, chaos erupting from the center of the earth… only to spring forth as quickly in its place: a brilliant myriad of light. Hope, sifting like sunbeams through the haphazard shards of broken glass, a whistle of wind like an old forgotten cowboy theme, signaling the way for exit. Signaling the way back to living. Because today is not the day it happens. Shay would smartly prop her foot upon the nearest seat, and extend her helping hand to the trembling citizen beside. Maybe she’d be a middle schooler in wilting pigtails. Maybe she’d be a girl her age, tears trading for mascara. A senior citizen carrying groceries back to his family of ten. Maybe it doesn’t really matter. And sure, maybe everybody dies eventually. 

But just not today.

“...You’re very pretty.” 

Shay’s body shoots forward when the wheels slide into a particularly hard stop at the corner of San Fernando and Brand— and she wonders what it would feel like if her shin snapped in half against the seat in front of her.

She doesn’t look at him when he says it. 

Thump thump, thump thump.

“You have a boyfriend?”

Thump thump, thump thump.

In fact, she tries really, really hard not to exist—

At all.

“Yeah, I do. He’s eight feet tall, but we’re working on it.” 

But she’s never quite able to do that.

“HA!” He bellows back an air-puncturing laugh. “Feisty!”

She’s pretty sure she took the Ativan. Two Ativan, actually. Pretty sure. 

“I like that.” (Not that she asked.)

The last therapist said to start with three and then, just go down to two, but the last therapist before her said to start with two and go down to one, but whenever she started with three instead of two, she felt—

“Love that.” He corrects, all teeth.

Oh God, she felt—

In some distant land, the water swells. It’s up to her calves now, dicey and dark, and the  girl with pigtails the woman her age the Trader-Joe’s-bag-laden crypt-keeper the face-less crowd of pedestrians horribly melt and mask and morph into each other. When she offers her hand, it’s not humanity that meets it on the other side. First their faces, then their shoulders, then their arms— becoming one in a sickly rat king— reaching out, just to pull her down with them. The water is rushing. So cold, it steals her very breath away. But she can’t leave without them. It’s not fair. The water: plunging daggers at her fear-locked knees. 

No, she lies. She can’t leave, because she can’t move. She can’t move. Because her body is no longer hers to own anymore.

“Look, I’m sorry if this is a bit forward—”

‘I’m sorry’ is what good people say. ‘I’m sorry’ is what kind people say.

“But my wife and I have been looking for a third—”

Thump thump, thump thump. The water is rushing. All he said was that she was pretty.

“HA! I’m kidding! Totally kidding!” 

Thump thump, thump thump.

And she should be grateful for that. She should be grateful for that.

“What are you, old enough to be my daughter?”

Her fingers, so small, too small to be anything useful, dip into her pocket, flip the switchblade’s tip forward from where it’s twisted back. 0.24 seconds lost. There was so much sun on her seat. There was so much wonderful, beautiful sun on her seat today—

“How lucky would I be, right?”

It was so beautiful.

She didn’t get to enjoy the sun enough. She thought she had more time to enjoy the sun.

“Though I’m sure your father would kill me.”

Did you know that in the state of California you can legally only carry a knife with a blade less than 2 inches in length?

“How old are you?”

Because if you stab someone with a knife with a blade more than 2 inches in length, you risk hitting vital organs and seriously injuring them.

“How old are you?”

And wouldn’t it just be the most fucked-up thing in the whole entire world— 

“Nineteen?”

The most lawless, decrepit, heart-breaking, earth-shattering tragedy the world has ever known—

“No… fifteen?”

Than for a young woman to kill an innocent man on the bus—

“Just kidding! Just kidding!”

All because he said she was pretty.

“Ha… I crack myself up sometimes.”

But that would never happen, because even in her wildest of fantasies, in the world she’s forced to build herself because there was no room anywhere else, the water’s fervor, its hunger, finally overtakes her meek, trembling, feminine 4’11’’ body entirely— and plunges it into the depths of the sea. 

“Yeesh, you seriously just gonna ignore me?”

Shay tries to catch the trumpets past the droning buzz of the air vents, the honking cars signaling death wishes to strangers for delaying their trip to Dick’s Sporting Goods for thirty seconds, but there is no longer any point. The song is over. And all that’s left in its place is reality, and a world that’s too big, too alive, for someone as small and insignificant as her.

The man sighs, an earnest, aching, forlorn thing.

“It’s so unfortunate that most folks can’t take a joke nowadays. The world was so much better when I was your age.”

And despite everything, crumpling her beating butterfly heart into a soggy, shallow, worthless paper ball… is guilt. 

There was never any point in reading the rest of the page, because she’s had it memorized since the day she got it, age eleven— realized there was a difference between being a child and a daughter—and decided she would never be a victim again.

Step 3: Get the fuck out of there.

But maybe it was never really up to her. Maybe that was the point.

“Check.” —  As she slams her itty bitty fist as hard as it will go into the stop request button. And if the world was kinder: a genuine bonafide witches’ curse.

Her chest heaves, writhes painful, black and barren, knuckles clenching til’ she can see the bones, shame slithering hot like wriggling maggots under a rotting corpse. On the sidewalks outside, the neighborhood bums sizzle on the sidewalk. Thump thump, thump thump. She sees their skin scramble for life against sunken ribs. Thump thump, thump thump. And she never did see the unfortunate driver of that smashed Toyota. If a tree falls in the forest—

“Th-thank you!” Her voice, a pitiful baby bird, for a bus driver who probably wouldn’t care if she lived or died tonight; it topples out of her throat, two octaves too high and heavier than groceries. Someone snickers. She feels embarrassed to be alive. Thump thump, thump thump. Maybe it would’ve been better if she had just eaten the butter. Thump thump, thump thump.

And for the thirty seconds it takes her to scurry off her seat, hop off from the door’s edge and smash her toes into the burning pavement below— bus wheels tearing past the summer heat before she can even check what street she’s on— she contemplates honor. Love. Life.

The things that make people kill.

Thump thump, thump thump.

Her world was going to be different. She swore she was going to be different.

Just not today.

“FUCK YOU!” 

A barrage of endless tears bruise her paper skin blue and black, grief a force too heavy against fragile, sniveling… prey like her. Eyeliner burning like brands into her eyes. Her bones struggle against a single bag of groceries— she’s an embarrassment, an embarrassment, it doesn’t matter, she doesn’t matter— and so in what universe were they ever built to carry such debilitating rage?

“FUCK-YOU-FUCK-YOU-FUCK-YOU-FUCK-YOU!”

She’ll kill him with her milk. That’s what she’ll do. He’ll be stopped. They all will. And she’ll win. And the sun in the seat will be all hers. Forever. And ever, ever, ever. And nobody will make her not want to leave the house again.

“FUCK YOOOOU— Ah!”

Shay practically slings her arm out of its goddamn socket on the jug’s journey to Glenoaks Boulevard. And it doesn’t even hit the tail light. She squeaks in pain, hand going hard to her opposite shoulder, and in the distance, a wet PFT-PFT-PFT!-ing noise as the hollow, plastic thing goes step-stoning off the indignant blacktop. 

“Fuck… you!”   

But who could possibly believe a little nothing like her?

And Shay [REDACTED] cries. She cries and cries and cries, because it’s what she’s best at. 

She’s no hero. There’s no sweeping orchestra, no waterproof mascara. She doesn’t save beautiful men from drowning buses with garden stakes. She’s the girl who cries on the corner and imagines braver, stronger, better people doing it, instead. And what she was built to do— was hope she doesn’t look too insecure when her fingers flutter down to yank her skirt from where it’s ridden up her thighs. A few feet away, the unmistakable rumble of a gaggle at teenage boys parked on the sidewalk beneath her, guffawing at something under their breath.

She sticks her hand into her right pocket, flips the handle when the tip is pointing the wrong way. Takes her hand back out. Puts it back in again. Flips it twice. Takes it back out again. 

And Shay decides she knows the truth. The world was never as big, as alive as she thought it was—

SNAP! 

The sound of a neighborhood squirrel scurrying up behind prompts her knife in a frantic flash from its pink recess, and her jaw drops open in quivering shock when the button snaps ajar: and out pops the blade, snapping into two perfect symmetrical halves on the pavement. 

CLACK-CLACK.

—She was just smaller and more dead than the rest of it.

She refuses to be a victim. 

She refuses to be a victim.

Earbuds, switchblade, chapstick. Earbuds, switchblade, chapstick. A brutal combination, every day, every night, hidden under her pillow in case of a break-in. Earbuds in the left and knife in the right. Earbuds in left and knife in the right. Garden stake in the right pocket of her backpack, taser in the left pocket of her backpack, shlock in the inner right pocket of her backpack, baseball bat (a single sock rolled over top, just in case the assailant managed to grab it in time) in the inner left pocket of her backpack, zipped to the hilt, even if it kept falling out anyway, pepper spray on her house keys, brass knuckles on her work keys.

And her breath starts to choke in panic at her chest, because she realizes she forgot the second switchblade in her right boot. Second switchblade, right boot. Everytime, no exceptions, because it’s closest to the dominant hand, and a person has more strength, more dexterity in their dominant hand. 

If only she were a person, too. 

A person like she imagines other people got to be persons.

✶✶✶

Shay clicks shut the top lock, the bottom lock, the deadbolt, the door chain, the door guard, the flip guard— and for good measure— the portable lever lock that she had bought from the hardware store for $9.99, just in case. And maybe if she had bought the more expensive one like she knew she should’ve— she knew, she knew she fucking should’ve— she might even feel like it made her safer.

For a moment, all she can do is stand there, made obsolete in the silence of her stagnation-rotted apartment. Someone else’s air conditioning unit, muffled by her meticulously locked, shatter-proof windows, buzzes unsympathetically in the distance. She can barely see the meager furniture in her living room, the black hole pulsating in the center is too big. Gravity swells. Grows and grows and grows, and Shay can do nothing but shrink.

And shrink.

And shrink.

And shrink.

And everything— her half dozen eggs (because the employee stocking the full dozen was looking at her kinda funny), the last tenant’s deflated loveseat (because she couldn’t bear being locked alone with the movers), her single scotch-taped poster weakly curling off the bottom right corner (lest she catch tetanus if she steps on a loose thumbtack), her grey laminate flooring, the cheapest one any landlord in the entire county could possibly shell out for (because landlords fucking… suck)— everything, everything is humanity-lessly crushed beneath.

She’s home, and it’s not any better.

Thump-thump, thump-thump. 

She’s not even strong enough for her own living room.

Thump-thump, thump-thump. 

So why, oh why, would something like her be strong enough for life? 

And Shay crumples lopsided onto the floor.

Somewhere across her cheap, grey, laminate flooring, her tub of hummus dully rolls to safety. But there’s no point in attempting to ask it where exactly that might be. She clasps her half-empty, dirt-smeared milk bottle in a deathgrip as she holds herself, hugs herself against the pounding anxiety. Frantically finagles her backpack off the free shoulder, fingers scavenging for whatever pill happens to rattle today at the bottom. She’s learned the tactics. Trained, memorized, made it muscle memory, like a trained assassin. 

Or at the very least… like a heavily hairsprayed treasure hunter. 

The hollow plastic squeaks when she wrests the spout to her lips, half-choked on a swig and a swallow. She imagines the forever-grinning veneers of Amelia Danger. 

One: white — like milk. 

A crumple, a crunch!, as her bitty tennis shoes find purchase against an o’erturned grocery bag. She imagines the mud, the rock, the twenty-foot-tall, moss-dewed statues of a once-beloved god. 

Two: brown — like paper.

She fights to secure her breath with quivering lungs, like a bird floundering against a cage, molting feathers in its wake. She’s trying to help. The pills were there to help. Stop fighting it. Stop fighting it. Stop fighting— 

He was just being nice.

Three: green, like— her shoulders start, fingers tremble, and the facts always outweigh whatever frivolous flowers she plants in her mind, but she tries, oh god, does she try— green, like—

Bile.

Her body heaves, and she just barely manages to make it to the garbage bin before her body dives completely overboard. 

Shay’s never tasted the sting of pure acid before, but when her tears finally fall deep enough to crest her lip, she knows she doesn’t need her expert imagination to know they’re identical. Her heart pounds so violently in her skull, a throbbing egg, broken open on the counter for breakfast, that she gets her wires crossed, tactics a-muddle. The hench-mutts are barking. She doesn’t remember where she put her grappling hook. She doesn’t remember the lines. 

Shit. Was it five things you can see, three things you can taste? No, two things you can smell, one thing you can taste? No—

Four: sour— she imagines the waving reeds of Oxalis Stricta, sour grass, dotted down the intersection on the way home from school, back before she became a— 

No, no, no. 

Green, like— She was counting co— It was green like—

Green, like the jungles of Africa. Green, like the soundstages in Hollywood pretending to be a loose, sort-of-maybe, bastardized idea of the jungles of Africa.

Bee-buh-beeeeep!

Something buzzes barely among the ravenous rings of tinnitus, angry wasps at the back of her skull. Just another, and another, and another predator she can’t outrun. Shay drags a wrist across her bitter lip before fumbling for her pager, desperately thrashing off its riptide of denim. 

IT’S VICTOR.

And her meager living room crumbles away as she frantically smears the screen clear of a fallen tear— four: blue, no, salty, no, or was it— relief flooding whatever strangled, minute body her illness left remained. An unnamed number, sitting confident, still in the dead center of evergreen glass.

JOB IS YOURS. YOU IN?

She pointlessly clears her throat against the phlegm, a rock back to sitting, a manic rush at her wilting lines of mascara, as if he could really see her, fingers smashing hard to flip out the keypad and page back a lifeline. She stops, breath knocking askew up the hollows of her throat. Stares down at what she’s created.

IS HE NICE?

Her hands shake. Reconsiders. A sickly glob of sniffle. 

Stupid. Erases it. Rewrites.

IS HE LETHAL?

She’s barely pressed send before: Bee-buh-beeeeep! 

Magic, the way his reply still glows unmistakable past the vaseline lens of her tears:

LIKE A GODDAMN PITBULL. YOU IN?

And she thinks about how the sun was so beautiful today. It was so beautiful on the seat. She thought this morning she’d maybe try going to the park today. Just for a minute. Just to try. She only lasted fifteen minutes last time because the sun was coming down and the lightbulb over her bus stop was broken. She was going to do better this time. She was gonna touch the grass with her fingers. Even if there were bugs. 

She was gonna. Even if there were bugs.

The sun was so beautiful on her seat today. 

Shay gazes up from her spot on the floor— in her mousehole of an apartment, floor to ceiling, hell to heaven grey, doused in darkness, lest her haven: a lighthouse to an animal bigger, hungrier than her—- and twiddles her toes in her milk-covered soles. Perhaps just to remind herself she’s still alive, and not a corpse in a self-built tomb. 

The sun was so beautiful.

And she counts. And she breathes. 

Five: yellow… like the sun.

The monstera leaves cradle the midday sun like cribs cushioning crooning babes…. because there are few gentle metaphors fit to describe a place filled with so much bloodshed. So it’s a miracle the timing panned out that you just so happened to save the best one for last. 

Libertalia. A name Sam has jested over one too many bonfires would be the perfect pattern to tongue in place of the alphabet. You bemoaned what a shame it was that it ever took that long. He proceeded to lob a spoonful of beans at your head.

But Nathan’s speak of it swayed… softer. Upward curls of lips he fought to fold down like the wings of a terrible origami crane. Breathless putters under cover of sighs. Rolling eyes and disbelieving huffs when the hope steered too possible for his timid heart to handle. Or maybe just as an excuse to rag on his brother.

But Nate is never as opaque as the fake names feign. 

Leaves crunch under falling boots, mirages of sunshine yellows and rotting browns sifting beneath mossy greens where the floorboards split in twain under decomposing nails. The twitter of distant song birds: proof of life after hundreds of years post-demise. You can’t help the swell of hope at the thought. That there was never truly an end. That flowers would always bloom one day, no matter how bloodbathed the earth.

You toy that thought between more anxious machinations as you trail through hills of yellow hibiscus, half-way pretending and half-way convincing yourself you tread your own path. And are not just following Nathan’s as he hovers through the vines. His feet carry him so gently, and do not trample like yours. As if his footsteps kiss the very ground he walks on, foliage spongy and a blessed cushion after so many hours of running, so many briar thorns, so many mosquito bites, so many bullets lodged out of skin with the press of a switchblade. 

But you could forget every pain if it meant seeing Nathan the way you see him now: gaze entranced and enchanted through every sun-reaching tree, lips parted in life-altering awe, the barest twitch of tongue between teeth as you fathom what words, what compliments, what flying expletives he feels too small right now to actually speak aloud. 

It is selfish what your mind calls for in place of proper appreciation. A hundred-year long mission. A lifetime’s goal satiated. And yet every inch of your body screams for otherwise. You fold your hands behind your back and let the uncertainty sit acidic at the base of your stomach. It’s not like there is any friendlier place to put it. You’ve already tried. And like the scratch of a mosquito bite, you allow your sight to meander back to Nathan, knowing the taste of venom will only make the following itch that much more excruciating.

You look at him, and his lip has curled in the quaintest, softest, tenderest lilt of a smile, gaze braiding through the vines and blooming curtains above, placing flowers upon every point his mouth finally reaches open and properly gasps. And your heart sings to see the man who has smothered so much of himself, folded himself into thirds, hotdog-style over hamburger, built himself the voice of reason, the man who told himself he was above desire, that the lack of it made him a better man—youI see his lips part, his cheeks stretch, crinkles of unspun crow’s feet to spread across his eyes, and you see the man you so selfishly love smile. You see the man you so stupidly love want again.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” — And selfish you are, the way you shatter his silence with so stupid a question.

But he only smiles back, that continuing crow’s feet, blooming brighter than any hibiscus.

“I’ve seen better,” he answers, gooey and warm like chocolate chip cookies.

“I haven’t,” you too-honestly reply.

Your eyes don’t stray from his.

And that’s when his forlorn boots finally turn to face you. You concern yourself with some bird of paradise a hundred miles away. 

“I—” But Nathan just as quickly shakes his head. Some distant doubt needling at the recesses. 

“What?” 

His mouth puckers at the corner. Shame. Hotdog over hamburger.

“I—” He shrugs. “I don’t think I’ve, um, ever actually blacked out before.” 

“Those gaping head wounds I’ve seen would say otherwise.” You reply, folded arms, teasing foot forward, back, toe to heel. Wings of a terrible origami crane.

“Heh. When I drink, I mean. Never seems to happen. Pretty sure I was cursed by witches as a kid with this terrible thing called ‘perfect memory’.”

“Well, that’s… unfortunate.”

Nathan chuckles. Looks down to his feet. Thinks for a moment. Looks back to you, eyebrow furrowed.

“You think so?” — Really, truly looks at you.

You feel fragile in his gaze. Mosquito bites at your ankles. You wriggle your toe against the side of your shoe.

“You found Libertalia.” A half-hearted smile saves you from an answer. “Congratulations, Nate.” 

He merely stares at you from across the flowers, yellow petals reclined beneath his feet. Napping, dozing, never crushed. Despite everything, you still don’t believe he has the capacity for such cruelty. 

But perhaps your delusions are precisely why you’re so good at ignoring his blistering stare. 

“I remember,” he says. And to your frail, feeble, trying heart, it’s nothing short of threat.

Everything crumbles:

“You don’t have to if you don’t wa—”

“A deal’s a dea—” 

“I don’t want to if that’s all this is—” 

You both go silent, and the pain, the embarrassment, ironically, the shame is too great to stand here so small amongst the most beauteous of beauties… and wonder whether it is childish to still want him to kiss you over promises you two made over stolen moonshine three months ago. 

Yet when you look up, he is already there waiting, blue eyes imploring you for everything you’ve fought so desperately to hide. 

He tucks your chin between his index and thumb. Strokes there so sweetly, tears begin to brew.

“It was just a joke.” You don’t even convince yourself. “I promise.” 

“You can make better jokes than that,” he says. You laugh despite yourself.

And the tears. The tears. And the gentility you’ve wanted for so long, finally upon you, only forms them faster. He leans in, and despite everything, smells like heaven. Places a soft, chapped kiss to the curled cusp of your cheek. 

“I’m sorry,” you whisper. 

“Don’t be,” he replies. 

His sweet heat is smothered beneath the waterworks. A quick peck you’re too busy sniffling past to savor. His palm reaches out to cradle your cheek, and every kindness he bestows makes you long for the switchblade. That’s the pain you know. That’s the pain you can handle.

“God, I’m so proud of you.” — That beautiful, gentle, genuine voice of his, rich like molten gold. 

You smile at him. He smiles back— a dopey, boyish, toothy, goofy, wanting, aching, imperfect, too-many-teeth-on-picture-day, beautiful thing. 

And it’s just the courage you need to take his face between both hands, and finally tear him back to you.

You’re barely able to manage a proper kiss, your lips are too puckered from smothering giggles. He’s infectious. He’s sick. He’ll give you diabetes. He’ll give you a goddamn heart attack. You’ll die happy, anyways. There’s too many hands over too many curves and you’re shying away before you’re shoving forward again and you have a hundred hands and he has a hundred more and yet it’s still not enough to touch everything you want.

You’re slobbering. You’re a dog. You’re his dog. A wet, rabid dog slobbering open-mouthed for the air you can’t get enough of when your fingers finally taste the sweat at his lower back, the inward curve of his cottoned waist. You drown in that sweat at his lower back. You’re an animal for that sweat at his lower back. You’ve groaned for that sweat at his lower back for three months like it’s water to live and you don’t want water, you want him, and Nathan is giggling against your mouth and that sweet, perfect lower back is trembling with tickles and you’re hungry— you’re so hungry— and you can’t tell if his body has already shrunk from how much of it you’ve eaten, or if he’s merely shrinking you two together, and pulling your red-thread-of-fate leash down with him to the jungle floor. 

You scramble and writhe through the greenery beneath, fitting haphazard puzzle pieces in places they don’t go, shoes skidding against dirt, fingers tearing through hair. His hair, his hair, his hair. But no, now his legs lock against yours— a grunt as he hits a tree root and readjusts back again— thigh against calf, and then you’re thinking about his calves. His calves, his calves, Nate’s calves. Those calves that run. Those calves that save you. Burning and burning and throwing forward, anyway. You’ve never thought calves were sexy before. 

You’re on top of him now. He looks up at you like you’re his god. And what you thought before doesn’t matter. 

“How are you?” — You press into the ether, your mingled drool hanging off your lower lip. 

“W-what?” — He chuckles breathlessly, preposterously.

But you’re not in that world anymore.

“Don’t laugh.” —  You command against his mouth. 

You smash him into another kiss, rough and volcanic, and he whines and moans like the pain you haven’t been lucky enough to know.

“How are you?” Again, you plead for his every earnesty. His dog: digging the ground up for bones. “What does it feel like?” 

Another shattering kiss. Another aching groan vibrating from his big, beautiful chest. You wonder if his nose will bruise tomorrow. 

You wonder if he could possibly care if it did.

And when you finally pull back, when the kisses become impossible because your mouths are too morphed by laughter, his face has spring-loaded into scrunched nose wrinkles and a hundred teeth and the corners of his eyes messily embroidered into the soft blanket of his skin. And he finally seems to understand what you’re asking. 

“I did it.” He smiles, dazed. Drugged. Weed, heroin, speed, cocaine. “We did it.” 

He allows himself to want again.

“That’s right—“ You coo, hands a-scavenge over his cheeks. “My baby boy did it.” 

Nate takes a big, quivering, aching, trying, guilt-ridden swallow. His eyes: red and bulbous with fat, unshed tears. He’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen.

His pink lips hover around the beginnings of a letter, but don’t have the strength to touch it.

Your perfect boy’s not a coward. Never. Not ever. He just needs the help. 

“M—“ “Mommy’s so proud of you, Nate.”

And then he releases this… sound. 

Brittle— and jagged.  Terrible— and wonderful. This soft, strange, strangled creature from his lips. The kind of thing you never would know came from him if you didn’t see it with your own two eyes. If you didn’t feel it thunder beneath your own loving, torturous fingertips.

His hand comes up fast. And time stops cold. His palm, tender— despite sweat and dirt and callus and blood— at your shoulder, it’s the only glass between you and the lion at the zoo. Nathan frantically shakes his head and this time, the tears, the tears, the tears are all his.

“Gentle.” He warns.

But you are not foolish. You know what words mean.

You know what words mean to him.

“You don’t scare me, Nathan,” you promise harder than the trembling force at your shoulder, a careful thumb whispering over cheek when you fear any further touch might shatter him. “It’s okay.”

Another swollen, heart-stopping swallow.

“Again,” he says. Offers out into an unfeeling world. You give back tenfold.

“Mommy’s so proud of you, Nate.”

“Again,” between wets of his lip. He’s sinking, sinking too fast to survive. “Again, please.” 

Not without another hand in his own.

“I’m so proud of you. I’m so proud of you. Mommy’s perfect little angel.”

Breaching him out of the well and back into life.

And Nathan Drake is an escape artist, a con artist, a runaway— and you see every part of his soul make one final death rattle to protect the things he’s always been. Because running is easier. Because running is safer. Because running is what makes people survive.

“It’s not too much. It’s never been— you’ve never been too much. Let me help you.” 

But it doesn’t make them live.

“Am I—?” He attempts to ask. His eyes, a red-ringed flurry for the trees beyond. Tries again. A terrible whisper. “Am-I-dead?”

“No.” You answer, sure as, well… death. “No, never, angel.” 

He still doesn’t seem to believe it. 

“You can’t.”

And it’s what you say. Because you believe it.

Nate’s feet skid and writhe, seeking pointless purchase against the ground beneath, even as your weight keeps him tied to solid earth. You don’t realize both your hands are interlocked until your fingers start to sting. 

His laugh: water-logged. Another shake of his head.

“I don’t believe you.” — Paper-thin, like he’d blow away in the wind. 

But then, the wind blows. A certain bluster, a ghost of bird’s call through all those sunshine yellows and mossy greens. The wind blows, and he is still the most there, the most alive man you’ve ever met. The man who believes in the things no other man has ever thought to believe in for hundreds of years. The man who believes in the edge of the universe, and goes right up—

And touches it. 

“But I do.” 

You grace him with far gentler grins than the burns your words reap. 

Again, the trees shake, Mother Nature’s laughter. Giggles and gossip. Staking bets, exchanged petals for earnings won. How long it’d take. Who’d kiss first. And the wind cheers through every biblical branch, and sends your cut in endless showers of yellow petals. 

“Let me. Let me in, Nathan.” — You attempt past your aching throat. — “Let me finally make you see you the way I do.”

He smiles, a yearning pucker at the corner of his mouth, when words don’t do justice for years waited. Reaches out, plucks a petal from the crest of your hairline.

“You’re too nice to me.” — And it’s a declaration so polite, he makes doing anything otherwise impossible forever. — “Please don’t ever stop.”

Before he immediately drops it, trades for your cheek, and pulls you into a warm, gooey, chocolate chip cookie kiss. 

It’s a love-drunken skirmish for his belt; everything: through liquid, like if you moved too certainly the spell would break and you’d wake up back in bed in some drafty, rat-nibbled tent somewhere. But his every kiss pushes oxygen back into your lungs, and the joy, the excitement, the fear coursing through your blood is still not enough adrenaline to start you from your dreams made reality. It’s all real. He’s made do on his campfire deal. And it has extended far, far beyond the simple kiss you asked for. 

Perhaps he really did gift you his luck over dandelions back in Italy. 

“Do you have a—?” He asks.

“No.” You fumble back. Clink, clink, clink — the sound of that stupid, stupid, goddamn belt unlatching. 

“Maybe— we c-could always wait ‘til—“ 

“You can make better jokes than that, Nate,” you respond, smiles bumping against his upper lip.

Another breathless, tremorous chuckle in reply. His adorable belly: a timid curve of flutter-shy air. Before you know it, he’s ravenously nodding into another kiss.

“Okay—“ As if he’s convincing himself that he deserves it just as much as he’s convincing you. “Okay—“

His palms part through the flowing rivers of your hair, grasp at the nape there, stop to… read you as you finish unraveling his cat’s cradle below: the buckle gives way, two silver snaps of rusted button, zipper, zipper, zipper. 

You’re drowning in the waters of your mouth. You’re dying. 

“I love you,” he says. 

But it’s far too much to acknowledge.

At last, he springs forth into your sweating palm, and you nearly black out from the sheer lust, the complete and total conviction that this is anything but reality, a dream, a blood-lossed final meal when the endorphins run too high for the gaping bullet wound to close. The wanting’s so big, it’s going to claw and crawl out of your throat to swallow him whole, to eat him alive, and leave you a mound of playdoh-y flesh on the jungle floor for the mosquitos to questionably pick at Tuesday morning when you’re through. He’s not dying. But you are. There is no question, no riddle, no cipher to solve for that.

He squeezes the back of your neck. Your sight shoots back to his.

“I love you,” he repeats.

Your mouth: a numb, done, buzzing thing. You feel your heartbeat in your tongue. The right words don’t form. Just a pathetic, whining bundle of sound. Your breath quivers upon every rung, every handhold it attempts up your throat. You’ve never been as good at rock-climbing as he is.

“I love you.” 

This time it is one of desperation. Cranes his neck to better meet your wilting face.

You don’t realize you’re shaking your head until another petal falls loose, releasing him to usher your own pants down your hips. The embarrassment already creeps up the back of your neck, makes it difficult to swallow, the skin of your cheeks spark striking red. Yourself: a child. The gall you garnered the bravery, the fantasy, for for months is already waning thin. 

All you wanted was a kiss. It only took three months to realize one kiss could never be sufficient means to the end you truly wanted. 

After three months, his brother made you just like him. You started wanting more. 

“You’re not your brother, Nate. You don’t have to say things you don’t mean.”

“Maybe I should be.” His shoulders heave; your hands atop shake. And the man you love breathes, considers, before raging on like the storm that brought you here. “I’m so sick of pretending I don’t want things just as much as he does.”

A shiver rakes through your body. Those ceaselessly soft eyes made razor sharp, made the thing that sets bombs ablaze. 

He claws his fingers through your hair on the subsequent crash. A daring groan where usual affections draw him muted. Even through fire, through bullets, through pain, through the adrenaline-drunken backrub you offered on the plane back from Scotland, he has a habit of smothering his sounds. Said that energy was better used for other things. It wasn’t like anyone was coming to save him if he cried, anyway, he’d say.

But this time, the whines are plentiful as you retreat to softer measures, pressing a soft kiss to his forehead as the tips of his fingers knead into your back like kittens’ paws.

“Then, tell me,” you purr. He mirrors the noise tenfold. “Tell me what you want, Nathan.” 

Another writhe of his hips against the grass. He’s an escape artist. He can’t escape this. 

“I want—“ Chest heaves against the overwhelm, eyes batting against the falling petals, your world of green, your paradise made real. “I want you to… make love to me.”

It’s a breathless toy of self-aware chuckles, daring the words between half-grinning teeth when the earnesty feels too unfamiliar to speak without pause. Abrupt fear passes before his eyes. His leg jerks. You adjust.

“Sorry— hip’s still a little busted from that fall in the cave.”

“My poor baby.”

But it is heat, revenge, not sympathy that crowds your call. You dig your claws into the base of his waist. He laughs. Twitches at the touch.

“Otherwise, I’d be the one on—“ “Oh, no, you wouldn’t be—“ 

Your mouth cuts him off. Any laughter: snuffed clean. He moans like the goddamn switchblade. Blistering heat upon blistering heat.

You reach down for where you left him.

“Go on.” 

“I want you to—“ Courage short-circuits that beautiful brain, makes the remainder dribble down his quivering chin. 

“Be brave for me, pumpkin.” And your lips: down his neck. 

“Feed me.” He oozes, aches.

“Feed you?”

You grasp harder, dare the tip between your folds. Just a dare. His eyes flutter shut, and he shudders.

“Fill me.” His words: paint in a bucket, sloshing and sticking and congealing in uneven globs. Filling your world with fume. With color. “Make me not so…”

Because he is an artist. He always has been. It’s words that’s the thing that escapes him.

“Empty anymore.” Yet he finds them, anyway.

“Oh, angel—“ You practically weep in return.

And those gentle, dexterous fingers: the ones you’ve seen graze stone like glass, pluck flowers before briar thorns, spend twenty goddamn minutes sketching a single goddamn tree because it was too beautiful not to get ‘just right’, press a lonely strand of hair behind your ear when all you wanted in the whole wide world was for it to be his way of kissing you in the longlost days when he couldn’t—

They reach back up through the roots of your hair, and gently stroke every place your fear, your rage, your pain have needled, nestled over three months of war, and tell you there’s no place for them there anymore. 

“I guess…”

Again, those beautiful, knowing eyes: blazing blue made timid red. The smartest, most capable man you’ve ever known, made uncertain. Made small. Made just an ordinary human, begging for someone to see him.

“I guess, after everything we’ve been through together, maybe I want you to tell me you love me back.”

A bittersweet pucker at the corner of his lip, a sorry shrug. 

“That wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world… would it?”

Just an ordinary human, begging to be worth even a fraction of a fraction of the things he loves. Of the things time cradles so much better, so much gentler than ordinary— human— life. 

“God, you’re so brave, Nate.” You cry, caress your shaking, soothing palm from cheek to chin. He wilts like fauna, eyes begging for mercy from a world too big. “I’m so proud of you.” 

And he beats bereft a breath of hopeful air as you hover just before his lips. His low-lidded eyes: bouncing and blue and alive like the sea. You pull back. He presses forward. Sight searches. Long lashes act as paddles. And before your very eyes, Nathan Drake learns to swim. 

“I want you to love me back.” — This time, certain. Ferocious. Like the facts he reads. 

You trace a tender thumb into the divot of his chin. Before he, at last, does the brave thing, and meets you halfway: tilting down to suck the tip between those soft, full, pretty, pink lips of his, and wringing your heart out of every last drop of love when he looks up and silently begs. Begs for all of you.

And how could even a god deny him?

“That’s my boy.” 

Before your other hand presses him forward, and you sink down in one long, slow, agonizing arc. 

Again, that strange creature: his warm, molten, deep voice pitched unfamiliarly high and brittle, it releases from his lungs, knocking past every rung of its cage, every rung of his throat, desperate, misshapen, as if it’ll never have the chance to escape again. It is so beautiful, you blockade your hands around either side of his head, just in case its first stings of sunlight will shrivel it back to the dungeon it made. Back to the punishment it knows.

You roll your hips. Nathan’s body hiccups beneath. His eyes turn to glass. 

“Sorry, my hi—” 

Before knee bends, thigh lifts. He releases a shuddering exhale. Love squeezed like orange juice from the force. Gentility: so much crueler than pain.

“Thank you.” 

But his voice is too beautiful to be wasted on something so menial. And so you give the kindest, gentlest, noblest, most loving, most patient man you’ve ever known something to waste it on.

“Oh—” 

You squeeze around him, a thrust of your clit against his hipbone, a smart lift up before you slam down again. His hands practically galvanize to your waist. You wonder what he reads there. What beauty he would permanently sketch if you gave him the tools. 

“Oh-my-god.” 

There, that growing sweat makes him glitter amongst every sunny beam, turns him into the treasure you’ve sought, as if the very island itself rewards you both for surviving its every attempt at avoidant attachment, its hungry thrashes for another sailor to appease its maws. Another whistle of wind, another curtain of fallen petals. Another buck that makes his warbling eyes better fit for morning dew than human sight. They glisten too beautifully for anything less.

You wonder how long since this softness has seen the sun. What number he’d name the ache. What bruises he’d take repeated for this moment to last forever. Body: up, down. Sounds: blooming, wilting. You wonder how the man you’ve loved must hunger. 

“Fuck.”

The most you’ve ever seen him partake in was the sat-on granola bars Sam didn’t want. 

All of a sudden, it’s like your heart take control without you, and your blood sings beneath heaving skin as a hand trembles high from its spot on his shoulder— and moves the hem of your top asway. He swallows hard, eyes go wide. So blue you could swim in them.

“Is my baby boy hungry?” Your mouth dribbles speech in your drunken stead. Plucks a single breast from its cup. You are sick. They have made you sick. “Are you hungry, beautiful?” 

It’s clear he’s going to drown himself in his own saliva. His own salivating. Or was it salvation? You don’t remember the words. Your head is too fuzzy. 

“You’ve gone so far, for so long, been so alone…”

And for the briefest moment, he stutters forward, worries back, swallows again. His unending intelligence, his merciless self-awareness: the enemy. Seafaring eyes: swimming against the shoreline. An old dog can learn new tricks. He changes his mind. Changes his ways. 

Wants. 

“Take what you need, angel.” 

And at long last, Nate presses his sweet, pink, pretty, plush mouth to you, a messy rush, and you gasp. Your whole body goes a-shudder. Every molecule of your chest thrums and tingles, warmth radiating behind where the wet of his mouth makes the breeze dash it cool again. He spares his sight only the briefest frenzied flicker forward before returning home safe to yours.

“That’s my good boy,” you murmur tongues through aching air. “Mommy’s so proud of you.”

And he looks up at you with the most painfully blue, fearlessly lovestruck eyes you’ve ever seen, moaning through yearns with a mouth, a heart, a purpose so full.

“My precious boy. So strong. So brave.” You coo, manic in your love. “Mommy’s perfect little angel.”

It all comes blooming, birthing forth like flowers on the vine. Easy, easy, easy— like nothing in your lives ever was. Warm and breezed, against the months of blistering heat and tossing seas. Wasp stings, warring bruises, infected cuts— the things you’ve seen be forcibly torn from this man would make a younger you faint, and yet somehow, impossibly, the worst is only yet to come when another sound leaks out and Nathan, well— 

“Oh, my baby, my baby, my sweet, sweet baby—”

Nathan starts to cry. 

It’s a quaint, quiet thing, Nathan crying is. And you ponder how many times you’ve marveled, late at night, alone in your tent, how either of them managed to sleep so soundly with a severed tendon. A broken ring finger. A bullet that didn’t quite exit all the way, and it had grown too dark that night to try the switchblade yet. And you’d have to wait to try until tomorrow. You assumed what anyone would: that they were simply invincible, and that pain was only something that happened to people who weren’t having enough fun. 

You meant it when you said Nathan couldn’t die. There had never been evidence of the contrary.

But when your palm softly cradles the back of his head, and you croon, and you praise, and you sing for the universe to bestow greater gentleness upon him, you see the man you’ve built in every mind’s eye to be unbreakable. And you see for myself now that he is anything but. 

He suckles your breast, fingers kneading at your waist, and though he does not sob, nor complain, nor break free to monologue to you over tea all the ways he’s suffered, you see the skin below his lashes. And you see it start to shine. 

A single tear appears, pooling at the edge, before it politely crests and spills forth in a timid river down his cheek. A second one collects just as fast. His lashes: rat-tat-tatting at the door, a flurry against the third, like there was still a way he could coax it back in. Even in his grief, he restrains himself. 

But maybe it’s just all the decades of dirt-worn sleepovers on private property that’s trained him for silence. After a lifetime of sleeping on floors, your heart can’t help yearning for how he might react to love on a proper bed. 

“My baby boy will never go hungry again.”

Your bed back home. You swallow dryly against something else. 

Lift high. Plunge down. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Pleasure, pleasure, pleasure. You wonder when it happens: when Nate tastes his own tears against your skin. But still, he does not stop. Only allows his paining eyes to shutter, his sore legs to fall open, and himself to succumb to the warm and the wet and the wonderful. 

He throbs inside of you, a rapid, too-alive thing, digging, searching for somewhere to go. In the drunken haze of pleasure, you realize late he’s finally bucking back into you. That goddamn busted hip of his: still hiccuping off-kilter in desperate, uneven rhythm, any inconveniencing discomfort stifled by his mouth upon your chest. In, in. Deeper, deeper. Broken, broken. Fixed, fixed.

Until the moment he finally pops free, and he places his chin against your sternum, worshipful eyes high to yours like the mortal he is. The breakable mortal he could never be in as worshipful eyes as yours.

And your precious boy attempts the sense of sound. A sound. And it is a sound—

Of fear. 

“Mm—” 

Eyebrow furrowed, eyes shellacked, hips chasing, chasing, chasing… something. It is too obvious what happens next. 

“Mh-mm—” 

Before he again attempts to hide from the inevitable, forehead gluing to your collarbone. Attempts. Fails. Throbbing, throbbing, throbbing.

“Did—“

Your hands cradle the nape of his neck. Trade his heat and sweat and fight for gentle breeze. The strength to try again.

“Did I—“ 

And those big, beautiful, glistening eyes, when they finally open, are full of the thing he doesn’t know how to ask for. Again, chin at your sternum. Sacrifice at your altar. You know what happens next. But just because you know the punch is coming doesn’t make it any less painful when it lands.

“Did-I-do-good-mommy?” 

“You did perfect, precious.” So you bestow the finishing blow. Mercy. “Mommy would be so proud of you.”

And what creature could possibly be stronger than what happens next?

Nathan’s hips roar against yours, arms choking your waist in a searing, ironclad hug, and that sweat at his lower back— it becomes ink when he has nothing else to mark with, heaving up between his shoulder blades, tonguing at the crest of his neck, peppering up through his hair, making his forehead weld to your kiss-massacred neck. He becomes the most him you’ve ever known: on the finale, flirting, flitting, fitting art through those perfect fingers into every last crevice of your skin. Hickies and bruises and scratches… and hugs. And he finds a way to make the art you knew he could. 

Your love comes inside of you. And in return, your body will break him. 

But he is invincible. He is invincible. He is invincible to you. And so your reality cannot be anything less.

That brittle, beautiful, monstrous sound of his explodes out, moaning, whining, twisting, screaming, aching, crying, weeping, dying, once, twice, a hundred times— squeezing around him in every way you so sickly, shamelessly practiced all those drafty, rat-nibbled tented nights ago— before there is nothing left to wring out, nothing left to smother. Nothing left to hide. He shudders, shudders, earthquakes, before finally falling to pieces beneath you. 

Mercy. In a world too cruel for it to possibly exist. 

But that was just the way your love was: it made the impossible happen.

You found Libertalia.

Those pretty, pink lips of his are already nestled back into your neck, stamping hearts in need of an inkpad, by the time the horrifying, soul-destroying realization dawns on you. Hands find his head, coax soft, fluttering sighs into the places they burn greater than they ever relieve. You should’ve been satisfied with the switchblade.

“I love you, too, Nathan.” 

Because at least that pain was mendable. 

And still, this uncatchable fish, this man you love shoots and ladders wet kisses up your jaw, traces that big, stupid, goofy nose of his up to your earlobe. And his chest vibrates warm and deep and the most delicious chocolate chip cookies you’ve ever eaten against your own when a tickle spurns giggles from whatever shape there marks the spot. The darn fool’s made you his map. If you had the energy, you’d smack his shoulder for bringing his work home with him. 

Home. Home.

Your thigh twitches back when that busted hip gives a sudden jerk, an ache so wonderful filling every porous seam made muted under time and its own material remainder. And when you pull back, you see what his want has left you. What his want has attempted to make you. To make you stay.

You shakily ease off of him— Nate’s fingers: a desperate cling, some cumdrunk bid to keep your bodies one. The way they were intended. Before God decided there must be two. He whines in wanton protest, but to see what he did will only make it easier. Easier for him to clean up after. 

“Look at the mess you made, baby. You got so excited.” 

“‘M sorry.” — More air than speech.

It’s a soggy clamor back to standing, one hand on each broad, shaking shoulder. But just as your thigh lifts over, and his palm cusps high to support, that beautiful head of his abruptly tilts past. He finds something beyond the garden. And you swivel to catch what he sees. 

Past the rotting wood and the yellow hibiscus and the blacksmith forge and the horse stables and the blues and browns and mossy greens, stands nothing less… than a man. Tall. Mouth agape. Nate says nothing. Blue eyes fearfully flicker up to yours. 

Your perfect boy’s not a coward. Never. Not ever. 

He simply needs the help. 

“But you’re still gonna be a good boy and clean up what you did.” Your thighs stumble halfway to a proper spread, and your precious boy gazes high, longing, befuddled, betrayed. “You’re gonna set a good example for your brother now, aren’t you?”

The leaves quiver. The wind whistles. Placing bets. A timid inhale. 

Then— 

“Yes, mommy.”

Before his sweat-kissed palms find home in the backs of your thighs, and your perfect boy who finally found the garden, he—

“Jesus christ.” — Some buzzing gnat in the distance. 

He eats the apple. 

He eats the goddamn apple. 

“Mommy’s going to protect you now, isn’t she? Going to make sure nobody ever hurts her darling boy ever again.” 

Nathan moans as you grind your hips hard against his face, that pretty, little tongue working overtime to swallow every last drop of himself out of you. He mumbles something. You can’t hear it.

“You’ve done enough. Never have to fight like that, want like that, pain like that ever again. You did it. It’s finally enough now.”

Chest heaves. Sweat blinds. You dare a shaking hand to wipe it free before clawing back between his locks. He eats. He eats. 

“It’s enough— It’s enough—“ 

The man you love eats the apple. 

And still, when your hips still, that man you love merely continues to rock. Neck high, chin down, neck high, chin down. Rhythm, rhythm. Obedience, obedience. It’s what he knows. It’s what he’s good at. Purpose, purpose. Pleasure, pleasure. Fixed, fixed, fixed— 

“Nathan, that’s enough.”

Before he stops. And peeks up. That pretty, pink tongue: darting shyly back into his mouth. A loose curl sat at the corner of his lip. Somewhere along the silence, a trembling knead of his clawless fingers, home at your thighs. He doesn’t remove them. 

“God, you’re so beautiful.” But you don’t even think to say it. It just comes out. Knowledge. “How anyone could ever want to hurt you is a mystery to me.”

The knowledge you should’ve been satisfied without.

“I want more,” he replies. And your heart of glass skips a terrible, terrible beat. Perhaps it’d be better if you were never so self-punishing as to attempt to interpret.

“Just like your brother.” So, you give a trying chuckle, instead. “So greedy.”

“No.” 

Yet, to everyone’s logic but your own, it makes perfect sense why the gentlest man you’ve ever known would only seethe in return. He has no capacity for harm, for anger, for violence— this, you still believe. So you know that when those soft, loving, clawless fingers rake down the backs of your thighs, pulling them back where they belong, puzzle pieces, it is none of these things that spurs his beautiful mouth back home to you. 

“Like me,” he corrects. 

It is righteousness. 

Holy, the way he goes to kiss you there like he kisses you. Romantic. Tender. Nathan. Like the small of your back is the back of your head. Quiet. Cradled. Nathan. More lip than tongue. But when he braves the shame and gives you tongue— 

My god, when Nathan gives tongue— 

You black out from the sheer force of your orgasm. There is no other allegory to describe. You choke out a deep, golden, molten groan. Honest. Nothing like the little kitten mewls you so childishly hoped he’d hear past the weeping nylon when the rain finally thinned. No. Nothing like that. Rather, hungry and hopeful. Ravaging and ravenous. From the deepest center of the oldest earth up through the chapped hinge you should’ve bothered to smear more watermelon-flavored chapstick around before it capsized over the edge of a sinking boat. In the space between where humans invented the alphabet, and where they decided the word ‘oh’ meant an orgasm. 

Oh.

“Oh.” 

Your legs give out, and you sob in utmost gratitude, utmost relief when he still manages to cushion you home to solid ground beneath. Your body trembles in his love-strong arms. Yet, despite it all, unbreakable. Your hand flinches against his chest. You were so sure you shook off that sprained wrist by the time you left Scotland, too. But you are human. Fortunately or unfortunately. You thought wrong. 

He ghosts a kiss across your temple. Lingers there.

“What happens next?” He asks. 

And here, the grass, the flowers, this secret world you have found: a bed to finally lay your bruised and battered bodies. The impossible: mercy. Gratitude fills every crevice the sweat and blood don’t. 

“Hm?” — Already halfway-asleep.

“After we find the treasure. Say we escape Rafe, return flight on Sully’s plane, maybe Sam tragically loses his tongue in the line of fire, so he can’t talk anymore—”

You laugh.

“What happens next? Do I just go back to… Louisiana?” He half-heartedly ponders. “What happens after that?” 

“Well, it’s summer.” You say. “I think the answer would be Mardi Gras.” 

His turn to laugh.

“I mean, do I just go back to do paperwork? Microwave dinners, yelling at the TV how I totally would’ve won that round of Jeopardy if they had finally accepted my application? Sounds a little bleak.” 

“Not to me.” 

He huffs an unconvincing laugh, draws his wrist across his mouth, before looking down to you. 

“What will you do?”

You look up at him. You speak nothing. 

“Any chance you’ve gotten bored of me yet?” — An uncertain smile at the edge of his lip.

“Depends.” You say. “Any chance you’d give me the chance to?” 

And it’s as much a confession as anyone in this line of work can possibly make.

“What? To get bored of me?”

“Something tells me that’s something that’ll take an awfully long time.”

The petals fall. You can only wonder what the bet was.

“I… got time,” he says.

“Well, that’s too bad for you,” you reply, nestling closer into his warm, broad, unbreakable chest. “I like being bored.”  

The grass, the wind, the sun, the birds. Quiet. Peace. Life. You edge your hip off his aching one. But he only adjusts to press further against yours.

And you like being bored. Because you like being human.

“Are you bored right now, Nate?”

And in return, he sighs, braiding all those roving summer sunbeams with the smiles he finally stops learning to smother. The ones with too many teeth. The ones he told you over stolen moonshine once his mother said were beautiful.

“Not even in the slightest.” 

The day they were taken away—

It was raining. 

It was raining so hard, Nate Morgan thought His car had been plunged underwater. Raining so hard, Nate waved to Beluga Whales as he passed. Blew kisses to the Manta Rays. Pressed fingers against the glass to better watch the spinning swims of the Galapagos Penguins. And Nate saw every boo-tee-full creature beneath every wayward sea mix and mingle and marvel and dance, come together for that one day just to wish him their goodbyes. He saw it all because it was raining that day. He’s pretty sure it was raining that day.

And it was raining that day because that’s usually the way a good story starts.

Not necessarily because it’s true. 

“Dad, where are we going?” Nate mumbled around his suckled thumb.

But He said nothing, only flicked His own up the turn-y signal and turned them all onto the highway.

It was the first time Nate had ever seen Sam actually fasten his seatbelt, which was the weirdest part of it all. Sam hated doing the seatbelt. Said if he was gonna die, he might as well know what it was like to fly first. And that had always made sense to Nate. So he’d quietly unplug his seatbelt halfway there to the Taco Bell, until She would squint a cowboy squint from the pass-ing-ger seat, and Nate would quietly plug it back in.

No one is squinting cowboy squints from the pass-ing-ger seat today. So Nate has no reason not to undo his seatbelt. Nice and loud, just so He’ll hear. So maybe then it’ll give Him a reason to answer. 

CLICK! — Worse than stealing a Rocky Road from the corner store. 

“Dad, where are we going?” 

But not even the Beluga Whales braying and neighing at him from the side window are enough to pull His eyes from the road. Sam: deadly silent beside him, expression unreadable as he faces out the opposite pane. He wonders what animals he can see. How many spins the Penguins are doing. How many clams the Otters slam against the glass to try and break them free.

Nate’s sweaty, stubby fingees slide around the golden tube in his hands. He wasn’t supposed to steal. But Sam said it wasn’t stealing if it was already his to begin with. And to Nate, that always made—

Left. Right. Left. Right. And the pinky chunk of kree-sanny-mum red: Up. Down. Up. Down.

“I hate you.” — Sam says. Simple. Like he was only counting how many otters outside the window there were.

The Man says nothing.

The car pulls to tide somewhere Nate’s never been, tired tires rolling over mounds and mounds of what feels like chunky peanut butter. For a moment, he can almost taste the cream. Crunch, crunch. Crunch, crunch. He peeps his eyes past the fogging glass, watches mountains of brick soar through the sky, forks and knives in place of their white picket fence, even though Nate always preferred to eat his peanut butter with a spoon.

Up. Down. Up. Down. That tube of lipstick goes.

Nate’s lip wobbles. The kree-sanny-mum red, slotting all the way Up. His eyes: fat and stinging. And Nate reaches up to press the flattest edge of all that boo-tee-full, uneven kree-sanny-mum into the center of his forehead. He presses so hard. He presses so, so, so, so, so, so— 

“We’re here.” — He says. Simple. Like when He told him how many quarters it cost for Her to buy it.

Nate doesn’t quite know where “here” is. He’s too afraid to ask if it’s the Taco Bell. 

The cool air hits Nate like a soccer ball to the face as soon as Sam thunks! open the side door. He wields a single rolly suitcase, one for the both of them, because Nate said he didn’t think he’d need that much, anyway. One shirt, one pants, five books he unwantingly changed to two when he realized Sam needed more room. It was confusing why Sam packed so many pairs of pants for such a small away. Just a little away, He said. Like a weekend. Or a Wednesday. Which was the longest day because it was the longest word. 

Why would you pack so many pants just for a Wednesday? 

But Sam and Nate are still plopped onto the black rolling seas of crunchy peanut butter, anyway, a gravely parking lot in front of a big brick building. And what’s odd: there are no Beluga Whales, no Galapagos Penguins, no spoons for all that sea of peanut butter. Somewhere in the distance, bells chime. And Nate doesn’t really understand why He looks so sad, and Sam looks so… not Sam. 

Because he doesn’t really look like Sam anymore. He looks like a little boy or something.

“So, I guess this is it, huh?” — He says, without even bothering to take His hands out of His pockets.

Sam says nothing. Nate isn’t sure what he’s supposed to say. He could’ve sworn it was raining before. What happened to all the penguins.

And His face looks at them. It looks at Sam and Nate. Dark brown eyes and a head full of smoke. They look at Sam and Nate. But that doesn’t mean that He does. Not really. And that was the difference that day. 

He just didn’t know it yet. 

Because when His back turns toward them, and He leaves them behind on all those miles and miles of peanut butter, that day, it didn’t look any different from when He forgot to get cooking oil at the grocers. The exact same. The exact same as always. Just a little forget. Just a little away. And like every time he forgot cooking oil at the grocer, because Nate loved too hard to wait that entire forever of twenty minutes long—

“Wait!” “Nate, don’t—“ 

Nate goes to him for one more hug. One more hug at those holey, holey pants She never seemed to quite sew up enough to stay. And The Man leans down, and hugs him back. And despite how Nate loved the Beluga Whales and the Manta Rays and the Galapagos Penguins and the Clawless Congo Otters and the Leatherback Sea Turtles, and would love nothing more than to spend every second of every day of the rest of his life counting and blowing kisses and waving to them from behind his pane of glass—

“I don’t understand.”

He’d trade all of them and more, just to drown in His arms for another minute longer. 

“You will when you’re older.” 

But he doesn’t believe it. He doesn’t believe it. He doesn’t believe anything anymore. 

Yet when The Man pulls back, any ounce of cotton-candy, bunny-rabbit soft love in his eyes… is traded for disgust. Nate’s lip wobbles. And his tiny heart trembles in his too-small chest as He hocks an ugly glob of spit onto His thumb, and rubs Nate’s forehead clean of Her kiss. 

A shake of his head. Simple. Like he was counting how many little boys he was leaving on the curb. 

“You… ain’t gonna make it, kid.” 

And without another word, the man gets in his car and tears off into the dark— little pieces of crunchy peanut skidding from the tires.

For a moment, there is nothing. Absolutely and entirely nothing.

Nate wonders if he should’ve packed another book. 

And there is no peanut butter. It’s just rocks. But it sounds so much better when he says it was peanut butter. 

“Fucker!”

Nate throws his hands over his ears, but it’s too late. Sam roars back to life beside him, and every evil, terrible word he hurls is only barely smothered underneath all the rocks he throws. He uses all the rocks in the world. More rocks than Nate can possibly think to count. 

But that does not make things different.

And when, at last, the gravel beneath his sneakers dips and sullies and drags back over to him, Sam trailing that big, heavy, righteous anger behind him like a slain dragon’s tail— 

“Come on, Nate... Let’s go.”

His only knight surrenders. 

And Nathan is left alone. 

Cold air. Quiet. Gravel beneath his feet.

With a shaky fist, Nate holds his golden tube up to the unfriendly light. Up, up, up — the final crumbs of Her kree-sanny-mum red, as up as she’ll possibly go. His fist shakes. Everything shakes. Kiss it, make it better. Kiss it, make it better. Kiss it, make it— 

And so Nate follows, smashing the red’s meager edge against the big white way of his forehead as hard as it’ll possibly go. And when he’s certain he smashed hard enough, he smashes it even harder than that— back and forth, back and forth, back and forth— across every inch of that great big forehead. The biggest kiss they could ever make. For the biggest, stupidest, ugliest head there ever was. And it’ll fix them. It’ll save them. It’ll fix him til’ there’s nothing left to fix—

SNAP.

And Nate gasps in terror as he makes kisses so hard… that the entire bit snaps off the tube and down into the sea of gravel below. 

“No!”

His stubby, sweaty fingers grasp down, down, down, around Her last remaining chunk of kree— kree— Chrysanthemum red. But it’s too small for what he wants. And he’s too big. And the perfect, pristine Her— 

“No, no, no—!“

It crumbles into pieces between his fingers. 

Still, he tries again. Again. But each time he tries, it splats and slathers, like finger paint— smaller and smaller, deeper and deeper. It shrinks. Tomato pudding smudged under every nail. She was so perfect before. He can put her back together again. 

But Nate can’t see. He can’t see where the rest of Her went because there’s too much water in the way. Grasps fingers down into peanut butter. It only smothers farther between the chunks. He can move fast enough this time. He can touch gently enough this time. He’ll be better. Please come back, please come back— 

But pretty soon, there is no Her. No kisses left. No loving lipstick. Just mounds of old, stinky, reddy paint, rotted between his ugly, ugly fingers. 

And nothing is ‘like’ anything. It’s just rocks.

It’s not raining. It was never raining. Nate just couldn’t tell because there was too much water, 

water, 

water, 

water, 

water, 

water in the way. 

And the saddest part of it all, the thing that Nathan remembers most about that fateful, gravelly day: is how he knew, no matter how many stories he told himself, no matter how hard he fought to believe them, no matter how beautiful they were, the reality was— it somehow still wasn’t enough water to hold even a single Buluga. 

Which is precisely how he knows there wasn’t any at all.

⋆⋆⋆

Nathan awakes to the crack of thunder, cool light splattered in slats across blood red walls and blinding his world in white. He’s roused out of bed in a panicked hiccup, only to immediately drown himself back under thin, billowing blankets, as if his body still hasn’t shaken those stormy nights back in Michigan. And unfortunately, it’s one terrible thing that remains the same as it was, too: still, a little boy too afraid to get out of bed to smack his fist against the thermostat. 

Too afraid of the monsters under the bed.

But reality reels Nathan’s heartbeat back to stable as his eyes catch sight of all that unfamiliar art deco wallpaper, all that unfamiliar, mold-infested furniture. Cheap rattan chairs. Crunchy polyester carpet. Wilting florals clinging fruitless end to end, floor to ceilin,, peeling at the edges. Strangers. Unfamiliar. He takes a deep, shuddering breath. He’s not there anymore. He’s not waking up screaming for his life to end anymore. 

It’s been so long since he didn’t wake up screaming.

He swings his hodgepodge of long, rickety limbs over the edge of the mattress and attempts to shake himself from sleep, joints creaking and feet crunching over the stiff, unwashed carpeting as he lazes over towards the thermostat. But just as his thumb hits the upward arrow, skin plushing into soft silicone with a stinging beep!, he awakes to something else. Something far, far worse.

His soul nearly jumps out of his skin on the swivel. Because staring back—

Is the monster under the bed. 

Over. On top of. The monster on top of the— the monster over— the monster of the bed. The bed that isn’t his. Perhaps what he calls it doesn’t really matter.

Goosebumps immediately litter his skin, the hairs at his nape running to escape his neck, but it’s too late. The heater clicks on— a sudden rush, a thunderous wind— and regret shoots through his stomach like a rusty knife. The falling anvil. He did precisely what he should never have done again: he reminded the universe it left him alive. 

“Hello.” — He says. Yet it’s more desperate fawn than genuine greeting. Fear sets forth sandbags at the base of his throat.

But the hundred beady eyes that stare back at him between hills and hills and conjoined limbs of billowing motel comforter say nothing in reply. Below, within the heaving folds, its uncertain limbs, something glints. Heavy, labored, anguished breathing makes up for language. Something between those sheets… pains. The creature fights for air against tussling pillows, and in some evil, fucked-up way, it’s the sound of the fight that makes him relax just a fraction of an inch. Because it’s the sound of the fight that sounds familiar. 

And it’s familiar, because it sounds like him. 

Well, because it sounds like her.

The monster under the bed is the New Girl.  

“Sorry.” A distant voice tremors. “Didn’t mean to wake you.”

But it doesn't quite sound sorry at all.

It takes Nathan a second to register Shay’s form crosshatched through the dark, some bundle of bedsheets crowned over the top of her head. Her body: how a quaint hill with a farmhouse on top might be drawn in a cartoon. And those disquieting eyes, looking a lot kinder once his own have time to adjust. Or perhaps he’s simply given her sufficient time to cover those dark-rooted devil horns.

It’s the first time in a year that he’s woken up to any life besides his own— and unfortunately for her, he’s not feeling too up for conversation.

“You didn’t,” He replies. But the hairs on the back of his neck still haven’t gotten the memo.

As he heaves back onto the mattress and thumps down in a heavy, sighing slump, he actually believes the impossible will happen. That he’ll fall asleep, outspread arms and crooked neck already sinking in like quicksand, and awake to nothing but sunshine and rainbows a full week and a half later. Yet as soon as a crack of lightning lands somewhere down in Kousa, he knows it’s a lost cause.

“Fuck.” — Shay squeaks, her outline against the blinding white vibrating like a tuning fork. 

He ignores it. Squeezes his eyes shut. Honk shoo, mi mi mi… and junk. But it’s a fool’s errand, because the rustle of her blankets as she stands up, as she walks across the red sea of crunching carpet, as she loudly jingles the pull of her suitcase, as she clicks on the wobbling desk lamp, shedding the black behind his eyes in burning red—

“Whaaat?” — He moans from against the bedspread.

But she doesn’t answer, the ruckus of folded clothes flying and flumping onto the floor muffling his complaints completely void— another crack of thunder shakes the room— sans mentioning the manic energy permeating off her like some sick perfume. Nathan can practically smell it. 

It smells… like coconut.

“Hey!” Another groan as a flyaway cloth ricochets off his head. “What the hell are you doing?” 

His groggy pleas are left unanswered, forced to re-right once again, scratching vaguely at the sparse stubble beneath his chin and preparing for whatever disaster will inevitably lay before him. He reluctantly opens his eyes. Wishes he had picked a gentler synonym. Because where their busted-piece-of-shit room once lay, has been traded for an avalanche of every color cloth imaginable, colors that would sooner burn his retinas out than aid in anything else. And lost in the center: little Shay, puffy comforter still trailing out behind her in a snowballing mermaid’s tail, wrestling through her baggage til’ her hands clasp around her desired find.

All air leaves her in a crushing sigh of relief. She shakes her prize. A tinkling sound resounds in its wake. Nathan leans over, arms crossed over his chest, a slave to curiosity. But he doesn’t need to be curious for long, because all of a sudden, a bright orange, tubular shape rounds past her shoulders and into the light—

And every part of Nate stops cold.

He holds his breath, still as death, as she places it back onto the carpet and reaches for a plastic water bottle amongst the mess, breaking silence like jagged glass as she twists the cap off with a jarring, satisfying SNAP! He says nothing as she plucks something from the shape into her palm. Says nothing as she pops it into her mouth and takes a swig from the bottle. Stays still in some deep, unnameable terror and yet petrified, completely incapable of turning away as she hiccups forward in an unexpected cough. His blood tingles beneath his skin. His ears ring. His face enflames. 

He says nothing.

She looks so… different, a cocooning caterpillar within polka-dotted PJs. She’s wiped her hoards of makeup clean, and her eyes, while still cat-like, almost seem to bloat with unshed tears. Years of sleepless nights hammock in dark circles beneath each set of thin lashes. Lips: wobbling too much to bare her endless rows of teeth. And cheeks: still those inhumanly garish, perfect circles of pink.

“Dammit!” — Nathan jumps as she hacks, clutching her throat with an unhappy curse. She goes for the bottle once again. And those cheeks, so pink, now shine wet beneath her almond-shaped corners. She’s horrifying to watch, lips breaking open and neck finally swiveling to bare him a weak grimace he wishes she’d keep just closed. Stop trying, his heart begs, eyebrows furrowing as she struggles to swallow a second swig.

And he asks, even though he doesn’t need the answer: 

“What is that?”

“Xanax.” 

Thunder pounds. Lightning flashes.

Like it’s… normal or something. His stomach curdles. 

Nate’s heard that word before.

And he can only fight to breathe, fight to survive when at last she finally succeeds against the plastic. She recooperates, wiping her nose on her sleeve, some faded, oversized sweatshirt from some midwestern college he doesn’t fully recognize, and he’s forced upstream against the butter-thick silence. The only sounds: her inhale for air… and the sputtering whip of warmth through a vent. 

From all that terrible nothing, suddenly, another crack of lightning. And she gasps. There’s a mad scramble as her body shuffles for the edge of the bed, and settles her back against it like a barricade. Her mouth moves, some nonsensical tangle of self-comforting breath. But Nathan stays still as stone as the sound shakes the room, merely meanders on over to the nearest wall, and squeezes his crossed arms together. 

Suppose it wouldn’t be polite if he walked over, clicked the lamp off, and told her to shove it. Probably wouldn’t make for a great… tenth first impression, either.

And fine, after all that transpired tonight, maybe Nathan almost feels a little—

He shakes his head and squeezes his eyes against another blazing crash. Shea fails to smother a whimper.

Crap.

The rain falls. Thunder crashes. It’s a night he’s spent far too many times before, but it’s the very first time he’s ever had someone to share it with. And in some far-off, fucked-up way, there’s almost something kind of… safe about it. Teardrops stained against the glass. The violent, aching thump of his still-beating heart. The darkness. The loneliness. The smallness. Familiar. 

She finally breaks the silence.   

“Sorry.” She says. “Minor panic attack.”

CRACK! 

The anvil falls. A blast of light.

“Oh.”

Familiar. Like the name of what She took.

“Not that you would care.” 

Nathan shivers despite the growing warmth. 

But she’s like a car accident. He can’t look away. His gaze glares down into her wreckage of clothes, heart somehow black and empty and overflowed all at once, cruelty already born on his breath— until she sniffles again. Another wipe of her midwestern sleeve. He realizes he doesn’t even know how old she is. And whatever retort, whatever mulling acid in his stomach disperses in an instant. 

He really doesn’t know anything at all. 

Just a couple years earlier, Nathan would be out right now grabbing his fourth, fifth, sixth whiskey shot from Sully’s outstretched fist— but instead, it’s 3AM, and he’s in sweatpants, and he’s watching a stranger cry on the floor of a raggedy motel room. He’s watching her have a—

He refuses to say the word.

Shay’s body hiccups in another sob, her hand latching hard over her mouth to smother it, eyes crinkling to a shut. Uneven breaths wrack her form. But as the seconds pass, inch by agonizing inch— the rousing bump of the blinds smacking against the window composing pitifully compassionate symphony— the sniffles start to fade. And in slow motion, her free fist raises up to press hard against her chest. As if checking to make sure her heart is still beating. And all his air chokes painful inside his throat.

He’s done that before.

Silence. Silence is what follows. Silence so swallowing and raw that for a second, Nathan almost believes so much rain has fallen that they’ve been plunged underwater. Something he can’t quite name simmers over the room like fog, sizzles like television static when your hand gets too close. He wishes he could disappear. He wishes he were somebody else. He wishes the pain would go away.

But from nothing, Shay speaks, and catches him before he can contemplate further:

“Do you, uh… heh, do you know the story about Anubis’s weighing of the heart?”

“No, I don’t.” 

Of course, he does. No idiot going to Egypt for an archaeological expedition doesn’t read up on his mythos, at least a little bit. But something deeper compels him to let her speak. 

Or maybe he’s just tired.

“So, um… heh, okay, so back in Ancient Egypt, the Egyptians believed that when a person died, before they were allowed into heaven or whatever, their heart would first have to be weighed by the Scales of Justice. This was Anubis’s, the god of the dead—”

“Dog god.” He murmurs.

“Dog god.” She confirms with a point of her finger. “This was his duty. He’d place the heart on one side of the scale, and the feather of Ma’at, justice, on the other. And if you were a good, virtuous person, the feather would be heavier than the heart, and you would be allowed into the gates of Duat for the rest of eternity.”

“And if it wasn’t?”

She sputters out a sick laugh, somewhere halfway between preposterous and pained— but Nathan already remembers the answer.

“Then your heart would be fed to a giant crocodile.”

“Oh.” 

He scratches his nails back-and-forth across his folded forearm when the stillness becomes unbearable. It doesn’t help.

It’s just a story. Just some old myth she read in some dumb, old book once.

But— something vile within him whispers— if it weren’t… it wouldn’t really be that simple, would it? The people in his stories, in his almanacs, all the ones he loved outside of them: they were complicated. It was what he loved most about them. King Arthur, Joan of Arc, Robin Hood, his— It wasn’t so simple. Bad things happened to good people. It was just a fact of nature. For, how can a person place a number on what makes goodness? How can someone say stealing a piece of bread on the brink of starvation is as bad as rampaging thousands of innocents? As bad as tearing apart a family just trying to survive? Just wanting to be together? Just wanting—

But what could he possibly know that a God didn’t? Would his heart—?

He’s not superstitious. He’s not. He just—

“You ever feel like that in real life?” She whispers past the rain. “Just… all the time? Just waiting to be fed to it?”

CRACK!

A terrible light blinds through the slats and paints their walls in stripes of black and white. Nathan stares back. And it’s 3AM, and it’s raining, and he’s in sweatpants, and instead of getting black-out drunk with Sully on his very first night back as a free man, he’s watching a complete stranger cry on the floor of the cheapest hotel they could find.

A stranger that was almost maybe nice to him tonight.

And he remembers. He remembers how desperately he wished he wasn’t alone on the night he forgot his address.

“Ya wanna see something cool?” 

“What?” 

“Do you want to see something cool?”  He doubles down with a smirk.

The heavy hotel comforter unfurls over her shoulders, turns her blonde hair into frizzles at the top, and all of a sudden, Shay cracks an uncertain smile. A smile like she almost wants—

To try.

“Yeah… I do.”

⋆⋆⋆

ZZZZZZZZZZ— PT!

Nathan’s teeth seer swift through the packing tape, and the rest of the roll is broken from its remainder with a sound like a screaming gnat.

ZIP!

It’s the first time that night that the rumble of porcelain dryers exceeds the decibel of their own bickering rambles. The dark brown walls painted false wood beg little of Nathan’s sight, cozy muted colors punctuated ‘round and making him feel warmer than he actually is. Or maybe it’s just the socks Sullivan gag-gifted for those cold Michiganian nights. He wiggles his toes, and the plastic, beady eyes of those goddamn cotton sharks give an ominous twinkle. ‘Ay, Nate, looks like we got a jumper! HAW HAW HAW!’— Sully’s voice booms through the memories. Nathan had just rolled his eyes. 

It’s embarrassing to have someone see him in something so ridiculous. But it’s not like he had any alternative. 

THUMP! — As he tosses the tape roll onto a shut washing machine. 

“So this is actually supposed to work?” 

And the wilting thing beside him is an extremely droopy-lidded Shay. The bundled brown leather he loaned around her shoulders makes her look like a sentient, semi-deflated basketball— pink-faced, frizzled head popping out from the seams. A crying baby chick hatching from an egg. And her voice creaks wetly as she inspects Nathan’s flitting fingers.

“Sure it does. This is level one professional thieving. You don’t work in this business long if you can’t even master the beginner’s tricks.” 

One end of the tape immediately sticks to the other, and it’s in the trash before he’s reaching for the roll once again.

“So criminals got a real hankering for carbs?”

“That’s right.” — He plays along in search of normalcy. But the wispy chuckle she exhales is an entirely empty one.

“Ya know, this bad boy saved my ass back in Morocco once.” As soon as the next piece is plucked from its roll— ‘ZZZZZZZ— PT!’ — he’s clawing for seconds. Carefuller. Easy peasy, just like old times, even as the hand holding the dollar bill adjacent quivers. “Right near Casablanca. You probably don’t know this, but it’s actually a real city and not just a movie.” 

He teases, but when he turns for her reaction, she’s only staring past him.

“Yep.” Blank, curt, cold. “I’m aware.” 

So he preoccupies himself with ripping another piece and tries not to wonder why he’s so fixated on the puffy red circles sitting sick beneath her eyes. The way her once bubbly voice pitches raw and jaded.

“Well, I know you’re being… mopey, but I’m gonna tell it to you, anyway.” 

And as soon as his hand comes down, the lights come up, and he sends the tape skidding down and plunking dull, echoed, anticipated on hard steel below— because if there’s any way he knows how to fill an awkward silence, it’s with an excellent story. He doesn’t even choose the dramatic flourish that explodes from his palms when he starts. It just happens. 

“Picture it: Casablanca, 1995, I still had my frosted tips then. We were on the search for a trove of gold we had tracked all the way down to the secret underground labyrinth of the Medinah Temple.”

The squeaking coils beat the drums to his whispering build. Sounds and waving hand gestures: amateur and ungainly, but only to those who wouldn’t know a good, atmospheric story if it mugged and shot them in an alleyway.

“The head gang boss was this big, heavy set guy with two prison tears under his right eye, but he was dumb so he got them needled on upside-side-down. Heh, nearly blew my brains out for calling him Cupid once. Anyway, this dipshit sends his trained pack of killer Rottweilers after me— I swear there were like a hundred of ‘em, all starving for fresh meat— and I’m just tearing through this Old Medina souk, everywhere I step, I’m breaking lanterns, trampling stalls, it's total chaos. They’re at my heels. And all of a sudden… there’s a dead end.”

This would usually be the part where his company would gasp for more, hands clutching pearls. And what did you do next, Drake? Oh my god, your stories are all so amazing. How is your dick so big? But she doesn’t even look at him, only responds with the clicking, clacking sounds of absentminded nail-biting. He presses on, despite.

“I’m thinking ‘Shit, I don’t even know how to say ‘sit, stay’ in Arabic yet. I mean, I’m good with bitches, but this was a whole ‘nother ball game.” 

Thank god he’s turned away from her when he says it, because he flinches like a fucking car wreck. Usually this would be the point someone would dish something cleverer back. She doesn’t.

“A-anyway,” he says. “Just as I’m wondering how fast I can write my will on my palm with a sharpie, I see a bathroom sign tucked in the far back corner. I book it. And I mean book it. I’m getting “kos omak”-ed left and right but there’s no time to even translate because I’m already diving for the door. But as soon as I bust through, I nearly shit myself. Crap. There’s no way through. And every stall door has been removed for construction. I honestly would’ve shit myself if I had had the time to do it.”

Nope. Bad. 

Bad, bad, bad.

His arm dangles back for the roll once again for a second piece, but it's only so he has something to do with his hands. She laughed before, didn’t she? There was once a time where he was good at this, wasn’t there?

He tries again.

“S-so I’m thinking I’m dead, right? Nowhere to hide, no signal, hell, I don’t even have any ammo left on me. All I have is my wallet, a gun with no bullets, and the roll of duct tape the maintenance staff left to keep the soap dispenser attached to the wall. And those beasts are right behind me, with ol’ Cupid not far behind. I’m toast. Dead meat. 100% Grade A Dead Drake. Until—”

He sea-urchins his hand over his head in an imaginary lightbulb. Ding! 

Yeah, she’ll definitely like that.

“I see the vending machine. And I scramble for that tape and the single dirham note I had left in my wallet and leeched it for all I could before the stupid parade showed up.” He grins gingerly. “Cupid bashes down that door with a single kick, but as soon as he steps in, full furry entourage behind, I’m nowhere to be seen. He takes a step forward. Then another… suddenly, one of the dogs starts barking when they hear something crunch in the last stall. The whole pack follows. And all over the ground: little pieces of cheddar cheese popcorn.”

He crumples the tape into a ball and plops it onto the floor. Maybe a visual example could help. Or maybe he’s just desperate to hear another sound besides his own voice. Here comes the good part, here comes the good part—

“But nothing else to be seen. Cupid peeks around the stall while the dogs grab a late lunch. You see, I’m a very generous treasure hunter, so when he sees the empty popcorn bag floating in the toilet and I allow my foot the privilege of escorting his face into the toilet bowl, I toss the last fistful down his pants. Ya know, for the starving Rottweilers.”

But there goes the good part, and she’s still gazing past like he isn’t even there. There’s still the button, the cherry on top, everyone always loves the— 

“Moral of the story: I’ve always been a dog lover.”

And boom, there it is, his pride and joy. He toiled day and night for a satisfactory end like that one. And it’s great because he is a dog lover, so: moral of the story— dog lover— it’s brilliant. Totally brilliant. Super duper stupendously brilliant. And it was such an amazing day. He remembers it like the back of his hand: the wind in his lungs, the smell of burning incense, of gunpowder, of joy. She’ll love it— 

But it’s a whole beat before Shay even seems to realize he’s finished talking. His beaming grin melts into an uncomfortable grimace before her head even picks up from her palms, and her face swivels up to his with the most empty little doll eyes he’s ever seen.

“That’s cool.” She replies weakly, wiping her runny nose on the sleeve. 

He expects more. A laugh. A chortle, even. A standing ovation. A groan at the very least to prove she’s still alive. But nothing fills the lingering silence except the sounds of clothes tumbling within the maws of metal beasts. It’s quiet, and the palms of his hands still sting red from grappling brick traction. The smell of fresh fabric softener fumes the air. 

“It is.” But it’s not trying in the way he was so astounded by earlier that night. Only sad, shameful. This time when she tries, it’s not enough. “Super cool.” 

The clothes tumble. The fluorescent lights sting. She doesn’t speak further.

Rumble. Rumble. Rumble. 

Nathan doesn’t know why the pit in his stomach won’t go away, even when he turns to grab the roll once more. He killed that. He killed that. Was it something he said? Was it not as awesome as he remembers it? He begins to layer a second sheet of tape over the dollar’s edge. Turns it around in his hand. Stares at George Washington’s apathetic face glaring back. 

Guess the whole ‘bitch ballgame’ thing fell a little flat but—

He hears another sniffle out of the corner of his ear, and the much deeper sound of a self-punishing “fuck”. A wounded, desperate exhale. He tries to recenter on the sound of tacky stick as he refolds the tape over the bill’s end back onto itself. It’s 3:32 AM now, and the familiarity doesn’t feel safe anymore.

The story was supposed to fix it. He was supposed to fix it.

It was his favorite.

Rumble. Rumble. Rumble. 

But some smidge of relief comes shooting back, because as soon as his quest’s complete, he gets his excuse to speak: “There!” 

The air bubbles dematerialize with a slide of his thumb, and there it is. His greatest weapon. Their greatest fear.

“One vending machine master key: at your service.” He brandishes like a sword. It immediately wilts in his hand. 

“That’s a dollar bill, Nathaniel.”

“Astute observation.”

But her phlegmed indifference doesn’t deter his quest, only refills it with purpose. He holds down the wrinkled, jade tip as he slides it into the machine’s slot and pulls back on the clear tape remainder. It yanks out with a teasing slide, reluctant silence in his path. The glowing neon green $0.00 stares back antagonistically. Again. Tears out fruitless once more. Lowers it taut to the top of his thigh and saws til’ the paper lies flat. Fumbles it back in again. Yanks the tape so hard he’s afraid he’s going to pull the machine’s entire wiring system back out with it. 

It slips right out: $0.00.

“Crap.” He murmurs liltingly, his own grit defending desperation. “Okay, just a second.”

She snorts. But it’s something.

BUH-BEEEEP! — And on the fourth try, his prayers are finally answered. $1.00 glows proud on the screen, and the crumpled bill: a survivor in his hardened fist. He knew at least some of that story was true. 

“Strawberry or Chocolate Fudge?” He’s not hungry— despite his measly dinner of corner store chicken broth, his choice— but Nathan still throws his question behind, palms rising to plant against the machine’s glass, and it quickly fogs under his own warm, wanting breath. 

“What?”

He turns with a smirk: “Poptart.” 

“Oh!” And the lingering tension, warping melancholy across her face softly melts into something else. Melts and shifts and returns and pinches the skin of her forehead, clenches the crux of her jaw. Until it relaxes once again, left only in its place a forlorn sigh. “Um…”

But the silence stretches. And it stretches. And it stretches just a little too long. Her dark eyes grow hazy, a hundred miles away. And probably not for poptarts.

Nathan’s heart squeezes achingly, self-disgustedly when he realizes he wants nothing more than for the way she looks now to be about poptarts. 

“Hey? You still here?” He waves his hand over the invisible brick wall between them, and her gaze snaps back up to his. She’s not here. And sickly enough, for the first time that night—

He almost wishes she would be.

“Kinda.” A not-much-of-a-smile forces grazed over her soft features turned hard, turned distant, turned dying fire… and back again in shame. She smiles, she does. But it never quite reaches her eyes. 

The smell of hot lint sends Nathan’s lungs nauseous and fumed. He feels sick to his stomach. Too many emotions in too few of hours and everything inside him atrophied too stiff to want to stay and deal with it. He could still go back up to the room, get the sleep he so desperately wants. He could. He could find a way.

But Nate’s too lonely to give up now.

He’s been lonely for so long.

A loose penny or a tube of chapstick skitters across the tin of spin cycles somewhere in the foreground. And the air hurts when he breathes, dry and sore. Has he been yelling this entire time? Everything is scratching metal on metal, nails on a chalkboard. His stomach growls discomfortably and he quickly clears his throat to cover it. But it doesn’t work. And everything stings hot, dry… embarrassing. 

“Alright then,” he mumbles.

Embarrassment of talking so much. Of being such a mouth breather, the slimy sweat across his palms, the fact he didn’t shower before so his head’s more grease than hair. Of practically swimming in the same stealth turtleneck he fit into perfectly not even two years ago. But most of all, embarrassment of sitting in his own putrid, pitiful patheticness for so long that he doesn’t even know how to interact with another human being anymore.

At least not with words.

Yeah, he doesn’t think he can stomach anything— a careful smile crosses his lips; an idea— Unless fairly won, of course.

“Here, your turn.” 

And Shay jumps when his wrist comes flicking towards her. A peace offering: a roll of clear packing tape stolen from the housekeeping cart. Red rings still haloed beneath mascara smudge she immediately wipes on her— his— sleeve. 

That shit better be washable. 

“Come on, nail-muncher, give me something to be threatened by—” He tries again, this time with a competitive sizzle, and there’s just enough of a flicker of vigor in her eyes to make him want to try again. “As you so eloquently put it.” 

Hope just barely passes over his heart the second she gives him a simmering, suspicious… then all at once mischievous look in return. Her hand moves towards it. 

His pulls away.

“I can get it in two tries.” She croaks, somewhere halfway between whining and complete overconfidence, voice breaking through the phlegm and making her sound like an infant swamp frog. 

“Cute, kid, but I changed my mind. I don’t wanna see you cry again when you lose.”

He doesn’t think before he says it. It just comes out. 

And he’s smiling until the second she isn’t. Somewhere in his chest, something flinches— before her face falls glassy and hurt, opposedly dark eyebrows knitting in the middle of her forehead. Like one of those mice brandishing a sewing needle as a sword in an old cartoon.

But the red circles under her eyes: those are real. And he suddenly realizes he doesn’t want to see that shade of red under her eyes anymore.

Crap.

“Which means you’ll just have to prove me wrong.” Nate reaches forward and drops the round, unwieldy weight into her palm, gaze blistering with an ambitious twinkle. Fumbles for his wallet and draws out a crumpled single. “It gets exhausting being so good at everything all the time. It’s been lonely at the top.”

And a part of what he says might even be true.

It takes Shay a second to adjust, her tired hunch awkwardly traded for energy, rumination clouding her once-vibrant eyes in the same way it did before the top of her head was propelled into the ceiling vent. But still, the corner of her lip lifts. And she’s too transparent for him to not be able to see it: she’s thinking about it.

And ya know what? Maybe his joke will actually be funny this time.

“Bawk, bawk-bawk, bawk…”

Her nostrils flare and a brow lifts, and Nathan hasn’t ever been so proud to be such an asshole when her second smirking corner joins the first. And she perhaps, maybe, just maybe smiles— that same cowboy showdown simmer still in its wake. Shay grabs the roll from his hand. 

“I’m always on top.”

And Nathan smiles in return.

‘Atta girl. 

Anything looks big in her trailer home of a fist— the tape bears better resemblance to a truck tire— but still she swings to her feet with ease, boots pounding echoed into the bellowing dryer below. It’s a slog to meet him at the parallel wall: a dozen artificial, crunching colors daring, staring back at her for challenge. It might as well be two birds of paradise competing for a mate— and the vending machine is almost winning, actually.  

In an instant, she’s wrestling with it, stubbed nails drawing blanks to even pull the first piece up. She spins it in her grasp in case the end starts somewhere else. Picks at it. Spins it again. Nope, it definitely starts there. He wishes he could use a word to describe the way he grins as he watches her struggle other than ‘evil’... but there isn’t.

“Shut up.” — Shay mutters the second she catches his eye.

But her anger only inspires pure, unbridled skill, and she manages to lift it on the fifth try. Or maybe it’s just Nathan’s doing. It’s like he said, he’s always had a way with bi—

Nope, nope. Not that.

He sits patiently smug, leaning on the nearest porcelain top, as the tip of her tongue cusps out between her lips. Concentrated. And just as she’s about to give it her first shot:

“You have to add a layer on the other side or it’ll stick in the slot.”

“Yeah, I know that.” — She grits irritably, even as the tape clings to itself and she has to yank it back off.

There’s a long pause. A couple of dryers swing to an audible stop.

“Do you?”

Another reluctant beat.

“I do now.”

And hey, maybe in this state, that’s the closest to a ‘thank you’ he’s going to get. The corner of her lip flickers self-awaredly. His instinctually, victoriously mimics. And so she follows his advice, her disheveled replica mimicking his— with only a few thumbprints and a stray hair or two to tell the difference. But as soon as she reaches forward, the top edge about to be swallowed through the dark, plastic slot:

“And one last thing—” Nathan stops her once again, grinning devilishly. “We have to make a little game out of it.”

She pauses a beat too long.

“Always an ulterior motive, huh?” — Strangely pointed.

“Nah, nothing weird, promise. Kiddy stuff. Nice and easy. And the prize will be good enough to make it worthwhile—” 

“Weed?” She gasps hopefully.

And that actually earns a snort out of him: “Heh, the next best thing…” 

He’s distrustful, manipulative. Nathan can admit that. If you knew him and his eons of professional lying, who wouldn’t? But as always, in every way he can never quite shake, curiosity has gotten the best of him. And if there’s anything Nathan can’t handle: it’s having a puzzle he can’t solve. 

“The winner gets to ask the loser any question they want.” He scans her. Raises his index and middle fingers with a surefire cross. “Full honesty.”

For a moment, her eyebrows furrow, evidently just as distrustful of him as he is of her. Her ball in a court in a sport he’s never played before. The first time in years that he’s ever cared to know more about a person. Even if simply for his own physical safety. All those rows of nibbling rabbit teeth.

But still, a gremlin-esque grin cracks open like an egg across her face: “I’ve never lied in my life, Drake-athan.”

“And you’re not gonna start now.” He knowingly parades with a preemptive winner’s glow. “We each get three tries. Whoever gets the most wins.”

It's tempting— he can already tell as she stares through the glass— eyes hunting over Almond Joy goals and bullseyes of Funion rings. She licks her lips, turns towards him, an idea wavering dangerous at her cat-like corners. But just as her mouth parts to spill its secrets, the wind is sucked out of her, and her eyes bug in a late-realized swivel toward a red striped bag in the top corner.

“Strawberry shortbread cookies!” She shouts, hands and face pressing fogged against the glass, bodyslamming into steel. She comes alive. It’s horrifying. “Fuck yes! Do you know how fucking good these are?” 

An uncomfortable sneer dares past his lip. Her eyes maniacally bug for his answer.

“They’re no nude men tied to sticks,” Nathan replies.

But only a dreamy sigh wracks her body in response. The girl who spoke of plastic yellow stars like gold has finally rematerialized from the cosmos.

“They’re the single most delicious, most beautiful creation in the entire universe. Do you understand how lucky we are right now?”

He chuckles uncomfortably: “Didn’t you say that about Karnak Temple?” 

She stops. Thinks. Shakes her head like Nathan’s the one who’s crazy.

“You dont get it,” she says.

Fuckin’ weirdo.

Another disquieted chuckle: “You’re bizarre. Put it in.”

But despite his best effort, he chuckles from something else, too. Relief.

And because she’s such a weirdo, she turns and clicks her jaw with a theatrical wink— “Oh, I sure will.” — before spinning for the bright display once again. This time her idea appears in the form of a pursed lip, gears turning kaleidoscoped behind her eyes before they finally settle. A quest partaken. 

“Ya know, Sully did say he wanted some more meat on your bones. And since room service isn’t running again til’ seven… let’s take the lot.”

Shit— Nathan can’t help himself, jaw gritting against his own instantaneous sugar rush— that sounds fun. But no thrill crosses his heart, only the immediate burning shame, defense of: 

“I’m not that skinny—”

“You practically have a smaller waist than mine, Nathan.” She raises an amused brow back his way, and that sends him into furies all over again.

“Dra—” He starts.

“Nathaniel.” She finishes.

And all the air is sucked clean out of the room. Defense. Offense. Fear. Guilt. Rage. All the energy he doesn’t have for any of it right now. All the energy he doesn’t have to do any of it justice. Justice.

Because it’s not just a name to him. It means something. 

It’s more important than he is.

It’s a several second staredown before Nathan even realizes that every sound in the room has stopped cold. Every air fluff, every thumping dry, every spin cycle complete. His body can’t move, his lips can’t speak… and it’s awful. Like his body isn’t to use.

Because that name isn’t his to lose.

And he looks at her, the new girl, the actress. And he knows now how well she plays pretend. Pretend in the motel room. Pretend at the gate. Pretend in the pants. It’s play, nothing more. A joke. A bit. Nathaniel, because it’s long for Nate— and that’s funny. Not because it means anything more to her. 

She’s not giving up. 

Nathan sighs, and her face flickers fire amongst some sort of cautious optimism. Maybe it can just be their little inside joke. Nothing more.

“Okay.” 

Because if she’s so good at playing a role, than fuck it, so can he. 

He has to be.

He huffs— “Diggin’ your own grave, though.” — before he immediately 180°s, sneering back in tow. Because he’s not giving up, either. Fuck no. And since he’s such a gentleman, he gestures for their arena, their clink of carbs, on a sideways slide. No newbie ever gets first dibs, but it certainly wouldn’t hurt his pride to see her fumble. Or maybe he’s just the nicest man who’s ever lived. 

“Don’t worry. You’re always free to forfeit.”

“No, I don’t think I will.” But she meets him immediately, eyes sizzling silent in a not-so-not-evil smile. “I want to see you cry when you lose.”

“Goddammit.” 

He grins despite himself. And he’s not quite sure if it’s out of whiplash, or the fact that the vending machine screen barely even blinks from its green, square-snaking $1.00 when she stiffly inserts… and weakly recoils back the bill. 

Oh-thank-god-that-would’ve-been-so-embarrassing-for-him.

“Sorry, I’m just kidding.” She adds sweetly. Probably just to smother her own defeat. “I don’t wanna see you cry.” 

“Sure.” The way she rolls her shoulder as if she just threw it out only gives him another reason to roll his eyes. And he rolls his eyes because it’s always been more comfortable than doing anything else. “Oh, and by the way? You know what else you could do to earn your place, new girl?”

“What?”

And Nathan’s not all the way certain— he hasn’t drunk water in eight hours, doesn’t remember his last solid meal, and contrary to popular opinion, he, in fact, did not sleep on the plane ride over here— but for a second, he could almost hear her voice… change. Dark. Knowing. As if waiting for some distant bomb to drop. 

But for what reason, he could never possibly guess. 

So Nathan doesn’t even try to. 

“Know that… Chocolate Fudge is my favorite.” His head cocks tauntingly. “Since you were getting something anyway.”

And whatever darkness he must’ve just imagined there melts before his eyes. Shay turns to him, smiles like the devil, a gargoyle with a secret, jaw clenched against a disgracing laugh. He’s good. Almost half the rat that Sully is. Because sure, if she wants the strawberry shortbread, she can go ahead and take ‘em. But she has to earn them first.

Because you only receive good if you earn it.

“Oh, you’re fucking on.”

And it takes Nathan a second before he realizes, tape disaster held tight like a preparatory pistol in his fist, bullets aiming for nothing but expired chocolate fudge poptarts—

He no longer sees the red below her eyes.

⋆⋆⋆

Nathan and Shay both bear a striking resemblance to the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man by the time they’re back in their freshly-made sauna of a room— snack bags billowing out of their jackets: the weakest disguise of all time. And damn, is the excessive heat a welcome reprieve.

“Woof, close game.” Shay murmurs fatiguedly, followed by a much louder cacophony of about a dozen or so plastic goodie bags being projectiled all over the floor. 

“What? Fifteen to Three?” Nathan snickers as he follows suit, spilling out twice as many as soon as he lifts the bottom of his sweatshirt. 

Her responding giggle is mostly smothered by the cookie-pretzel-chip avalanche.

Perhaps it’s simply exhaustion that propels the room into a sudden quiet— Nathan instinctively clicks the thermostat off on the way in— but barely a problem that bears noting. In fact, he realizes, it’s not so bad at all. His chest doesn’t feel so heavy anymore. 

With a voluminous sigh, she promptly splays her body across the stained carpeting, leaning her cheek against her hand and grappling a pack of Twinkies from the massacre. It’s warm now. Nathan’s more awake than he’s felt in months. But a lone drop of sweat curves down the side of his neck and abruptly sends a dismissable bubble of… something back towards the surface. 

It’s hard to negotiate the two. How he feels about it. The quiet. The not-so-quiet.

Shay passes her sink faucet of a nose across the too-big sleeve as she proceeds to tear a bag open. 

“Can you please stop wiping your snot on my jacket?” Nathan’s lip quirks in a grimace, before he slumps himself down onto the floor across from her, knuckled fist following up to support his sagging chin and warping his cheek into a chunk of smushed, beige playdoh. 

“That’s a boring choice for your big question.” — as she toggles the pastry between her lips with a self-satisfied grin. 

“That’s not my—” 

“Fuck off, I have a deviated septum.” 

And it’s left at that. A pretty big mouth for someone so… pink.

Nathan blows a raspberry out the corner of his mouth, but this time his complaints inspire no back-tracking apology. She nibbles at the tail end of a crumbling biscuit and moans to herself when she swallows a happy chew, unaware of the impending clouds.

Strawberry shortbread cookies earned him his rightful interrogation. 

The sputtering fans, clicking to still, no longer orchestrate his perturbedly bubbling blood— and it’s only when the silence and the calm and his win earned with a one dollar bill sink in that the… feeling begins to return once again. It’s quieter now, but that doesn’t fight the fastly growing ache in his head. Thumping beat in his chest. He wanted her quiet, sure, but now it’s too quiet. The ceiling is too tall. The walls are too big. The room is too quiet, and Nathan—

Nathan is too—

He heaves a less-than-steady sigh. 

Jesus, what a drama queen. 

“So, question time.” She cheekily tosses out the moment she finishes cupping a lone splat of cream filling off the carpet and popping it back into her mouth. Something foreign, frightening, flickers up his spine. It’s not germaphobia.

So… question time.

Where there was once excitement, thrumming and anticipatory and ready to pull her threads loose and reveal the inevitable betrayal beneath, there is only something else. Something entirely unnameable. She tosses a crumpled bag of Doritos towards him. He feels no instinct to take them. Because Nathan doesn’t want to ask for her inevitable ulterior motive anymore. No. 

No blackmail. No backstab. No secret affair with Sully. 

No.

He wants—

Nathan’s too-big heart beats inside his too-small chest. He swallows around a drying throat.

He wants to know why she has that little orange bottle.

His jaw creeks open. His heart hurts.