care of you and yet you wanted her? I stay with you all night and all I get is a pity hump in the bathroom and an accusation when you wake up?” I’m seething. My fears are coming out as anger. “All I’m good for is this bullshit—getting you laid and wiping your puke out of my hair.” My chest rises rapidly as I expel my emotions. His eyes are wide as he listens. But at least he’s finally listening. “Go to your own room, Kent. Now that I know you’re better I want you out of here. I can’t even look at you right now. What about a thank you? ‘Thank you, Raina, for not letting me suffocate last night, or overheat, or for not once leaving me alone like my date did.’ How about any of that? Get out.”
“I’m sorry.” He reaches for me but I knock his hand away. “Thank you for taking care of me. Of course I’m grateful. I feel like I want to crawl into a hole and never come back out. I’m so fucking ashamed I can’t even look at you. I puked on you?” He closes his eyes and then peeks at me. “There was so much wrong with what you said, by the way. Let’s start over.”
“I don’t want to start over. I’m too exhausted to start over. I want to go back to sleep. Could you go to your bedroom and leave me alone?” I lie back down to reinstate my point. I can’t even look at him.
“I’m so sorry. You have to believe me.” With a shaking hand he reaches over and runs his knuckles down my cheek tenderly. “Thank you for taking care of me. I didn’t deserve it.”
I nod once, trying with every ounce of self-control I possess not to cry. “Just go.”
“I don’t want to go.” He lies back down. “I don’t sleep in bed with girls, but since this isn’t my bed I don’t think it counts. I don’t want to leave you like this. I really scared you, didn’t I?”
His question is my undoing. The stressors of the past night come out of me in one painful rush. I throw myself at him and wrap my arms around his neck. “Oh, Kent. I didn’t think you were ever going to wake up again. You scared the hell out of me.”
My sobs rip me apart. At one point I don’t know why I’m crying. He’s fine. He’s safe. The nothingness is gone from his eyes. But I can still see it, and I know if I stayed out and never came home and drank with Sam like she wanted Kent would be gone.
His date would’ve left him to choke on the couch with a condom on and nothing in his eyes.
The idea sends a rocket of fear through me. I cling to him harder and sob. We both sink down on my bed as I snuggle against him, little sobs bubbling up when I think about him seizing, or burning up, or how he doesn’t think this is a big deal because he doesn’t remember any of it. To him it didn’t happen. For me it’s what almost happened.
He doesn’t talk while I cry. He rubs my back and kisses my hair. When sleep finds me I’m grateful. I dream of nothingness and black spaces. When I wake up we have shifted. We’re almost spooning, except his legs are thrown over my legs and I feel trapped.
When I try to move his body tightens around me. I refuse to like it. I refuse to feel his hard chest against my back or his strong arms holding me to him. Kent is everything I cannot have, for good reasons that have been shown countless times, and some of my own reasons, which don’t matter whether they’re good or not. Reasons rarely have to be good. Their practical impact on our decision making doesn’t change suddenly because they make more sense.
Kent is wrong for me. I need to get away from him. These are all the reasons that matter to me right now.
“Willow,” Kent whispers in his sleep, nuzzling my neck. “I miss sleeping with you.”
I freeze. He thinks I’m another girl? Who the hell is Willow? I elbow him in his stomach.
He groans and wakes up. When he sees it’s me he closes his eyes again and holds me tighter. “Raina,” he whispers, nuzzling my neck. “I like sleeping with you.”
“Get off me.” I make my