Saint arched a brow. “Ran away?”
“What would you call it?”
“Going home.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why did you leave?”
Saint took a breath, then flinched as his reply snarled in his throat.
I gave him a minute, but not an inch of space. If we were gonna get through this, I needed to feel him, and I reckoned he needed to feel me too.
Saint closed his eyes, rolling onto his back. I propped myself on my good arm and watched him, pushing his sleep-mussed hair back from his face.
Eventually, he sat up, a jerky movement I expected to end in him shoving me away and leaping from the second set of van doors that opened onto the wilderness.
He reached for the rustic shelf above us instead, fiddling with a Bluetooth speaker until music filtered out.
“Pixies?”
He shrugged. “I like them.”
I figured he'd leave it at that, but he took a breath and continued, reclaiming his space in my arms as if he’d never been gone. “I had a nice foster family once. They gave me a cool name and their taste in music.”
“What did you give them?”
“Nightmares.”
“Really?”
Saint hummed and entwined his leg with mine. His gaze flickered to my injured shoulder and he gripped the muscle below it, absently massaging the tension away.
It felt so fucking good. I fought an eye-roll.
A low moan.
Lost.
I took a breath that rattled my soul. “Tell me about them? Your family? I never knew you had one.”
Saint found his cigarettes. He jammed one in his mouth but didn’t light it. On closer inspection, I realised it was a half-smoked joint, and fuck it, if it helped him talk, I’d get stoned with him.
I drew a Zippo from my pocket and held the flame to the blunt.
Saint lit up and sucked down a deep lungful of herbal smoke.
He closed his eyes again, releasing it in slow, fragrant tendrils. “They took me in when I was four and kept me for three years. First word I ever spoke was their name, and when I started school, I wrote it on all my stuff as soon as I could form the letters instead of my own. It was like some part of me knew they were as good as I was bad.”
I wanted to tell him that a child that young couldn’t be fucking bad. But interrupting him was a risk I couldn’t take. If he shut down, there were no guarantees he’d ever talk about this again.
Saint took another drag on the joint before passing it to me. “They were nice people. Irish. Funny. Warm. They loved me, and I thought I could do it, you know? Be one of them.”
I wrapped my lips around the blunt, inhaling deep. Out of practice, the weed hit me hard, and I took a chance I might’ve swerved if I’d been straight-headed. “What happened?”
He shrugged. “I heard a teacher telling them that I’d be a liability as I got older. That everything they were afraid of would be worse and they’d spend the rest of their lives worrying about me. I didn’t want that for them, so I stole a knife from the school kitchen and stabbed myself in the neck.”