When I woke the next morning, the sun was shining into my bedroom, and when I glanced over at my alarm clock, I was met with the sight of Kane instead. He was laying on his stomach, his hands tucked under the pillow his head rested on. He was still sound asleep.
His scruffy facial hair was neither a beard nor a five o’clock shadow. It fell somewhere between, and he looked young when he slept—none of the tension showing. It was funny, because he’d clung onto this cool laid-back persona over the years, and yet, his stress was like this fiber woven through him that held his skin together. I could see it even when he smirked at me, even when his eyebrows shot up in amusement or challenge. It was a part of him now.
I watched him for a while, my body tense as I tried not to move and wake him. I couldn’t look at him like this, so intently and closely, were he awake. Awake he intimidated me in some way, because I didn’t fully understand him anymore, and yet, I knew him. Reconciling those things wasn’t going well for me, and it frightened me, because at any moment I might find out there was nothing left of the boy I knew so many years ago, and I wasn’t sure I could handle that realization.
I inched out of bed carefully, and when I was out of the room, I pulled his clean clothes from the dryer along with a sundress I’d tossed in with them. I hung the sundress on the bathroom doorknob, and I placed Kane’s clothes at the foot of the bed where he still soundly slept. I closed the door to nothing more than a crack, hopped in the shower, and then tossed the sundress over my head quickly before I twisted my damp hair back in a sloppy bun.
The bedroom door was still cracked when I left the bathroom, and when I passed through the living room, my eyes caught on my old photo album. It was open on the coffee table to a page that held a picture of Kane and me from high school. We were working at the gas station, and in the picture we were both behind my counter, leaned over with our elbows on the countertop and our chins held in our hands. We were laughing more than smiling. I couldn’t remember for the life of me who’d actually taken the picture, but I still remembered the day clearly. It was taken not long before our world fell apart.
I sat on the sofa, picking up the album and setting it on my lap, and then I stared. I didn’t bother turning the page, and it was many minutes later before I moved again. Kane walked in the room, fully dressed in his now clean clothes, and he stared at me as I held the album. I stood, setting it quickly on the coffee table, my heart pounding. He looked down at the album, and when he swallowed, it looked difficult.
“I was… I was going to make some coffee…” I stammered as I skirted around the sofa and walked toward the kitchen. “I have vanilla, or… or normal… I mean, regular… Just the…” I said over my shoulder. I couldn’t seem to spit the sentence out.
“Regular is fine,” he said.
I knew he was following me, but the sound of his voice was closer than I’d expected, and I spun to see him just behind me. His face was unreadable, and his eyes searched mine as he looked back at me.
“Okay,” I said quietly, turning back to the counter where the coffee maker was. I opened the cupboard door above the coffee maker, and I reached for a filter.
When his hand gently cupped my elbow, I stopped breathing and I froze. His body closed in behind me, and he placed his other hand on the counter beside me, boxing me in. When his lips touched my ear as he leaned down to the side of my face, I shuddered and a whimpering gasp escaped me.
“Can’t we just forget about the monsters,” he whispered, his lips touching and teasing my earlobe. “All I want is to remember us.”
When the hand he’d placed on the counter beside me slowly ran down my hip and then inched up under the skirt of my sundress, I turned to face him, pushing the skirt down and holding the hem in place. He stared at me, his eyes still flitting back and forth, searching my face for something. My chest was rising and falling, expanding and contracting as I struggled to breathe, and when his eyes slowly shifted down, they settled on a spot just in the middle of my chest.
He reached out, placing his palm flat on my breastbone, and he watched as it lifted and fell with the tempo of my laboring lungs. He looked back up to my eyes, and he stared for a moment. When he pushed his body hard to mine, pressing me into the counter, I gasped. It was a low purring groan I heard as he held his forehead to my temple and breathed against my cheek. I could feel each and every pant of breath as it hit my skin, and it sent a shudder through me.