“For your neck.”
“My neck’s fine.”
“Smother yourself with it then.”
In the dim light of the room, it’s hard to tell if he’s joking, but I don’t mind. Harsh humour suits me. I find comfort in it as much as I do the fresh rain and eucalyptus saturating the pillowhe’s brought me from his own fucking bed, even if I’m annoying him enough right now for him to wish I was six feet under.
He sits down again, closer this time, kicking his feet over the other end of the couch. His arm lands mere inches from mine and goosebumps prickle my skin. The good kind—thewarmkind, and the hyper-vigilance plaguing me begins to fade.
Quiet becomes peace.
I surrender, and what I thought was pain becomes the sweetest fucking ache.
I fall asleep on the couch with Skylar.
Notwithhim. But knowing he’s there. Knowing he’s gone the second I wake up. That everyone is. Because it’s the morning and I’ve slept longer than I have in…fuck, I don’t even know.
My eyes are still closed.
I open them and take in the living room.
The couch I’ve sacked out on and the pillow saving my neck from the mother of all cricks.
The note on the coffee table is in handwriting I don’t recognise, but I fuckingknowisn’t Skylar’s.
Breakfast in the fridge.
Definitely not Skylar. But it’s not Jack’s either, and I doubt it’s Sol’s. Fella reads like a professor, but he doesn’t write that well.
I take the note to the kitchen and open the fridge. It’s not my first rodeo with an action that should be mundane, but the top shelf of the thing still freaks me out.
Yogurt.
Protein shakes.
Cream cheese.
The way they’re deliberately jumbled, as if whoever put them there doesn’t even want themselves to know how stark their presence is.
White food.
A shiver slinks down my spine, and not the hot kind I usually get around Skylar. The kind that wipes my brain of functional thought. No. This is something different and it’s an effort to tear my gaze from the vanilla ghouls leering at me from that top shelf.
Thankfully, when I do, I find another note to distract me. Signed this time, from Oscar with a big fat kiss at the end.
Better today than tomorrow, Oscar X
The note is on top of a mackerel sandwich, and as I slide it from the fridge and glance around the kitchen, I see the evidence of whoever made it.
A clean pan by the sink, breadcrumbs on the chopping board.
The scent of cooking lingers in the air and it bends my brain a little. I’m used to sleeping amongst chaos. In the field, on base, and crammed into a roaring aircraft with another bloke using my balls as a pillow. But here…until last night, every fucking sound has kept me awake, so it makes no fucking sense to me that I’ve slept through Oscar and whoever else going about their morning around me.
Unless Skylar’scured me of an insomnia I’d come to accept was permanent.
I’m almost convinced, but despite the sorcery he’s inflicted on me since we met, I don’t believe in magic.
I believe in Skylar’s broken gaze the night we met and my own misery.