stuck to his chest with sweat, and he smiles when I hold out my bottle of lemonade for him. He chugs half of it. Davy noses at Wallace’s leg until Wallace pets him.
“It’s supposed to be flag football, you know,” he says. “I should ban you from the field for disrupting play.”
“Nah, that would be way less fun.” I reach out and pick at his sleeve. “You smell like hell.”
“You should come play with us,” he says. He hasn’t moved away from me the few times I’ve reached out to touch him like that this week, but he goes still in a way that means he knows it’s happening. He hasn’t made any moves himself. There could be a lot of reasons for that, I guess, but for now I’m letting him keep them to himself.
“I don’t think it’d work out.” If I tried to play, I’d get trampled. It’s good to know your limits, my therapist says. This is mine. “Lucy’s killing them, though.”
“She is.”
“You’re yelling.”
“So are you.”
Lucy appears at the edge of the field. “Hey, dummy! We’re ready again!”
“Coming!” He hands me the lemonade bottle. Only a few dregs swirl at the bottom. I should probably go home and prepare for an empty refrigerator once Wallace and the rest of my family get back to the house.
Wallace stares at the field for a long second, then turns back and, before I can react, leans down to kiss me. He tastes like sweat and lemonade. It’s quick. Easy. He pulls away, eyes down, voice soft.
“Surprise,” he says.
The relief registers. I wrinkle my nose and laugh. “Like hell.”
“Please, you know you love this.” He flaps his sweaty shirt in my direction before turning and jogging back.
“I love you,” I say, but he’s too far away to hear it.
That’s okay. He knows.
I finish Davy’s walk and let him off his leash inside the house so he can trudge after me up to my room and collapse on my bed for a nap. My comforter has been covered in white fur for weeks, so what’s a little more going to hurt? I throw the window open and turn on my oscillating fan to get some air circulating in the room, then push my desk chair out of the way and spend ten minutes doing stretches. Stretching makes everything feel better. My neck, my back, my legs. Everything that always cramped up when I sat at my desk for too long.
My parents have been looking into ergonomic desk chairs. Mom wants to buy me an exercise ball to sit on. I keep telling them I’ll use whatever they get me, because they’ve been trying so hard this whole time to be helpful. They know they’ve done wrong, I can see it in their faces every time they talk to me. I don’t want them to feel bad anymore. It might take a long time to get to that point, but it’s worth it.
When the stretches are done and I feel like my mind is breathing, I climb up into my chair and turn on the computer.
For the past week or so, this has been a daily ritual. Sit. Look at the computer. Turn it on. Every day I try to go a little further, but not so far that it causes me distress. After I turn it on, I look at the desktop for a few minutes, or play a few games. The other day I used it to Google better walking harnesses for dogs. I talk to Max and Emmy again, but not anyone else. No one from the Monstrous Sea forums.
I haven’t been back to the forums. Today I open up the browser and let the cursor hover over the bookmark for the forums, but I don’t click it. I still feel that if I do, I’ll only get upset. So I leave it alone.
I want to go somewhere, though. Somewhere that isn’t a search engine, or a reference website. My attention wanders away from the computer monitor, to the books lined up beside it. The books that are the only things on the desk besides the monitor itself. I moved them there when I got tired of the desk being so empty. Children of Hypnos.
There. There is where I’ll go.
My fingers remember the address like I’m thirteen again and I go to the Children of Hypnos fan forums every day. The page comes up right away. It’s still there, after all this time. All the threads, all the posts. The