Secret Lucidity(53)

“Where are you going?”

“Home.”

“Cam, wait.”

“Just leave me alone,” I toss over my shoulder, giving up on the night. Even if my heart had wanted to be in it, there’s no way to salvage it.

So, I collect my coat, walk out into the bitter cold of night, and call for an Uber. When my phone flashes that the closest car is twenty-five minutes away, I curse this bleak town and start to walk.

In a matter of a minute, my limbs are shivering. Cold and alone, walking down the snow-lined sidewalk next to the dark street, I pull out my cell with nearly numb fingers not even my anger can heat and text David.

Me: Don’t ever ask me to do something like this again, because I won’t.

I slip my phone down into the pocket of my coat as I concede to despair. The first tear bites my flesh, leaving an icy cold trail down my face. My coat vibrates with his text, but I don’t have it in me to read it. I can’t keep pretending I’m tougher than what I really am.

I don’t want to cry. I don’t want to feel anything at all. But the strength needed to bury it down and keep it dormant is more than what I have in me.

Another text vibrates.

I try so hard every day. I fight against everything, but all I’m doing is allowing it to eat away at the delicate flesh that’s struggling to keep me together.

Wiping the tears the moment they surface, I grow more and more angry. Angry at my dad for dying. Angry at the guy who drank too much and got behind the wheel. Angry at my mother for allowing her broken heart to destroy her. Angry at David for being my teacher. Angry at Kroy for not having enough life experiences to understand me. Angry at Taylor for making my life a worse hell than what it already is. Angry at the piece of glass that dug in too deep, leaving me with this freakish scar.

Buzzing ripples in cadence from my pocket.

He’s calling.

The tip of my nose and ears sting from the freezing temperatures, but I’ll take this pain. I’ll take it and nurture it, because it’s so much more tolerable than the pain my soul is forced to bear.

Clenching my wool coat around me even tighter, I continue to walk, my frozen toes curling inside my heels. Cars zoom past, one after the other, their engines barely audible over my chattering teeth. But it’s when I catch David’s SUV slowing along the curb that I stop in my step. He flies out of the vehicle, and in less than one second, opens the passenger side door and puts me in.

“What the fuck are you doing?” he barks when he closes his door and pegs the heater.

“P-please don’t y-yell at me.” My voice shatters around my body’s violent chills.

David rips off his coat and uses it as a blanket, laying it over my chest. He throws the car in drive and whips it behind a small strip mall that’s beside us.

When he has us hidden away next to a dumpster, he does what he can to warm me, wrapping me up in his arms. The streetlight above us flickers as it strives to stay alive, much like my heart right now.

“What are you doing walking in the freezing cold? Where the hell is Kroy?”

My bones wrack against his arms that attempt to soothe.

“I want to go home, David.”

“I’m not taking you anywhere until you tell me what has you walking alone on the goddamn streets when it’s twenty degrees outside.” His words come out in tempered fury.

“I’m so scared.”

“Of what?”

“Of feeling what I’m trying not to.”

“God, baby. Don’t be. I swear to you, no matter how much pain you’re in, I won’t let you drown in it.”

“You promise me?”

“Come here,” he says, tugging me toward him, and when I crawl over the center console, he gathers me against his chest, cradling me in his lap. “I promise you, you’re safe with me. If you need to cry, then cry. And if it’s still not enough, cry some more. Cry as hard as you need. Hit me if it will help you get the pain out. I swear to you that I’ll be here with you so that you don’t have to go through this alone.”

I hang on to every little piece of him as his body thaws mine, but my earlier tears are gone. For some reason I can’t explain, I don’t know how to cry right now. So, he takes me back to his place, tucks me in bed with him, and holds me while I tell him about the fight with Kroy and the girls in the bathroom. He never lets go of me as he listens and whispers sweet everythings into my ear. And when he asks me to cry and I tell him I can’t, he’s accepting, never pushing me. Instead, he wraps his body around mine as we drift to sleep.





“I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU EAT your marshmallows like that.”

I give him an evil grin from behind the flame and then blow it out. “It’s better than the way you eat yours.”

“What are you talking about? This is how every red-blooded American eats them.”

“You completely ruin it with the graham cracker and chocolate.” Sitting on the hearth next to David, I pull my scorched marshmallow off the skewer and shove the whole thing in my mouth with an exaggerated, “Mmmmm.”

He laughs at me, chuckling, “You’re eating ash.”

“And it’s so good,” I tease before stabbing another marshmallow onto my stick.

It’s Christmas Eve, and when I woke up with a heavy ache weighing me down, I threw myself together and drove over here. The sadness I felt on Thanksgiving doesn’t even compare to this holiday, and I didn’t have to say a word to him. David knew everything I kept unspoken the moment I walked in. He sees straight through my nonexistent tears, and I couldn’t be more grateful for that. It spares me the pain of having to explain the whys of my mood every time I’m feeling down.