Hands shaking, I quickly turned the next page, and what I saw dropped me to my knees. It was my hand, my hand wrapped in Maddie’s. I traced the outline of our joined fingers with my finger, then drew back my hand. I held it in the air and wondered what it would feel like holding Maddie’s. My eyes fell back to the picture and the lump thickened in my throat.
Finally, I turned the page one last time, and a pained moan slipped from my mouth. It was me, it was her, both standing. And I was holding her. My arms were wrapped around her waist. Her hand and cheek were on my chest. Our eyes were closed, but we looked… happy. Happy to be touched by each other.
Unable to look at that image anymore, I pulled the sketchpad to my chest just as the creaking of the bathroom door told me it had opened.
I snapped my head back, still clutching the sketchpad. Maddie’s eyes went wide when she saw what I was holding.
“Is this what you want?” I hushed out.
Maddie’s face flushed with redness and, bowing her head, she whispered, “It is what I dream. Everything I wish could happen for me, to me… with me, is drawn on those pages.” Maddie shrugged. “I live my life on the pages because I am too afraid to live them in real life.”
My breathing stopped, then I rushed out, “You… you want to touch me? You want me to touch you? Like your sketch?”
Maddie’s gaze then fixed on mine and she laid her hand over her heart. “In here I dream it could be true. And I pray… I pray that maybe one day it could happen for us.”
Pulling back the sketchpad, I stared at the perfect pencil drawing of me holding Maddie and shook my head. “I would hurt you,” I croaked, “the flames, the evil—”
“Are not there,” Maddie interrupted. Keeping her head down, her cheeks still flushed, she shuffled forward and said, “I held you before and I was fine. You have laid your hands upon me and I was fine.”
I opened my mouth to argue, but something inside stopped me. Maddie moved forward again. “And there is nothing you could do to me that has not already been done before.”
My stomach clenched, wanting so much to believe what she said. Maddie moved the final few steps until she stood right beside me and asked shyly, “Do you… ever think about me, too? Do you ever wonder what it would be like to touch me, too?”
I gritted my teeth and nodded my head. “All the time,” I confided, “I think about it all the fucking time.”
Maddie lowered herself to the floor in front of me. With her hands tightly clutched in her lap, she kept her head lowered and whispered, “Would you like… would you like to try?”
Chapter Seventeen
Maddie
I felt my heart would rip free from my chest as I waited for Flame’s response. As much as I did not think I could do this, that I would not be able to touch his hand, or more, I wanted to try so badly. In this moment, after seeing him so torn apart, reverting back to the memories that kept him jailed behind high walls, I wanted so badly to be able to hold him. He deserved my affection.
I believed that I too deserved affection.
Flame’s nostrils were flared as he stared down at my sketch. I joined him too, seeing what hope occupied my mind most days.
Then just as I felt Flame would not be able to try, he placed down the sketchpad and took a deep breath. As his near black eyes met mine, I shivered. His eyebrows pulled down. “Why’re you shivering?”
Smoothing my hands over my bare arms, I replied, “I am cold.”
Flame glanced over his shoulder to the fire I had lit just before he came in and he got to his feet. I could see how weak he was after he had expelled himself on his floor. And I also imagined the gravity of what we were about to try was making him just as nervous as I.