Snatch is right. I’m too close to this, but I won’t abandon them. Not now. After everything. I’m too entangled in their lives.
“Robin?”
Peering over the top of the cover, I find Illusions silhouetted in the doorway. “Yes?”
“Can I join you?” he asks quietly with a searching look.
Tugging open the cover is my silent reply. Without another word, he slinks from the door crawling onto the mattress fully dressed to spoon my body from behind. I feel his muscles relax, his warmth saturating through the material of his shirt into my spine.
“I’m sorry for all those things I said before,” I apologize softly his presence setting me at ease. “I didn’t mean them.”
There’s a pause before he responds lightly, “You only spoke the truth. It was going to come out eventually…I have a bad feeling.”
He sounds almost like a child who’s had a nightmare in search of comfort from imaginary monsters.
Reaching up lazily, I trace the back of the hand he’s draped over my waist. “Tell me.”
“I can’t feel him anymore.”
His words send a shiver of foreboding along my spine. Rolling over onto my side, I face him searching his worried expression in the shadows. “Morpheus?”
He nods. “Will you find him with your ocean of courage? Without him, we aren’t whole.”
“I’ll try,” I promise, hoping to alleviate his anxiety along with my own.
“I want to kiss you, but if we can’t keep you, it won’t be a good idea,” he whispers, our breath mingling as my lips find his in answer.
I kiss him long and deep. An innocent touching of our mouths fitting so perfectly together like puzzle pieces.
Closing my eyes, I lean my forehead against his.
“Thank you,” Illusions sighs.
“For what?” I question, voice husky with desire.
“Being you.”
Leaning in, I kiss his lips a second time, my heart fluttering. Out of all of them, Illusions has always come across the most naïve. The world falls away as we lay, our limbs entwining. Slow and soft, comforting. A hand drifts to my hip drawing me in closer. Breath quickening, a moan breaks from my throat when he nuzzles my neck with kisses. I can’t resist him. The constant attraction l feel around them, as crazy as it sounds, never dims.
“Sleep.” Illusions shifts away from me, abruptly climbing off the mattress leaving, in his wake, a feeling of cold, emptiness.
Hugging the pillow in his place, I imagine it’s his chest. A delicious warmth spreads through my limbs, my eyelids drooping with sudden tiredness. When they flutter open, I’m no longer in the bedroom.
The classroom is one I haven’t seen in years. Cheerful children’s paintings decorate the walls. They bring with them wounds so deep they never really healed. Childhood trauma I’ve done my best to keep buried.
Little legs kicking in the air at the next table catches my attention. Susan swinging her pretty red shoes back and forth clearing the floor by several inches. Blonde haired and blue eyed, she’d been nothing but a bully.
“What are you staring at, freak?” a soft voice questions just behind her.
Shifting in my seat, I meet Margo’s spiteful green-eyed gaze.
No one had really cared about how vulnerable I was at this age. All the popular kids had seen was easy prey. The odd one out who didn’t fit in like the rest of them. Home had been turmoil. Not constantly but enough to make my life unstable. I’d become the problem child. Hurt is still lodged in my heart at their treatment. My cry for help swept under the carpet to keep up the pretence my family were nothing but normal.
“Freak. Freak. Freak,” my classmates’ chant around me.
Margo twirls the end of one of her pigtails around a slender finger. “You killed us.”
“It wasn’t my fault,” I tell her earnestly.
“Of course, it was. You lost control and set it free. It knew what you wanted. You hated us. Wanted us all dead for making fun of you.”
The color leaches from their skin, cheeks becoming hollow, eyes lifeless. Dropping to the ground, they lay strewn across the classroom floor. Dead. All dead.
Clasping my hands over my ears, I screw my eyes shut. Memories reel through my head. The sinister wail, taloned bony hands, and the monster that had destroyed the last scraps of my childhood.
“This isn’t real,” I assure myself out loud. “This can’t be real.”
Peeking through my lashes, I find myself standing in a hallway. My dazed gaze travels along the length. Mirrors stretch as far as I can see, the first few distorting my image in