Bury Me(35)

One look, one word, one brush of Nolan’s hand along my bare arm, and I want to get up and run as far away as possible. I hate the way he makes me feel, but at the same time, I crave it. I realized my fear comes from being afraid of the unknown. No one has ever looked at me like he does, no one has ever spoken to me like he does, and I don’t know how to handle it. I can easily deal with the anger and hatred, the pain and misery. I’m used to those things: they’re a part of me and the more they’re thrown in my direction, the stronger I feel and the harder I fight.

I don’t know how to deal with someone being genuinely nice to me. It’s foreign, and it’s strange, and it puts me on edge. After two days of trying my hardest to pick fights with Nolan by calling him names, belittling him, shoving my hands against his chest, and doing whatever I could to try and get a rise out of him, I finally had to give up and just deal with the discomfort.

Instead of answering his question about knowing if he cares for me and that he wouldn’t let anything happen to me, I change the subject before I do something stupid and pathetic like cry.

“I need your help with something today,” I tell him, pushing myself up from the dock to stand over him.

He shields his eyes from the sun as he looks up at me. “Please tell me you need help moving out of your room.”

I smile and hold my arm out toward him. He wraps his warm callused hand around mine and I pull to help him up, quickly dropping his hand when he’s standing in front of me before it makes me feel like running in the opposite direction. I need the use of his muscles today, and I don’t have time to run away like a child.

“As a matter of fact, I do,” I tell him as we walk back up to the prison.

Nolan has been begging me for days to move out of my bedroom and into the spare room. He is completely grossed out that my mother’s blood still stains the window and walls of my room, and he doesn’t understand why I continue to sleep there every night.

Even with my confusion and overall uneasy feelings about being treated with kindness and respect, there’s still something about Nolan that makes it impossible for me to shut my mouth when I’m with him. He’s easy to talk to, and he never once looks at me in disgust or judgment when I speak to him, even when I’ve told him some of the more strange and awful things I’ve remembered. I told him about my dreams, the flashes of memories, the realization that something very bad happened to me growing up, and even everything my mother said to me before she took her own life.

If he isn’t going to leave me alone and I’m going to continue being a glutton for punishment by hanging around him, the least he could do is help me figure everything out and try to make sense of the things my mother told me. As we walk side-by-side through the grass up to the front porch, just remembering how everything unfolded that night makes my breath come out in short, angry pants. My hatred for her grows even stronger when I replay the drivel that came out of her mouth, not even having the decency to finally tell me everything I was missing before she selfishly shot herself. Instead, she spoke in riddles that didn’t make sense and now became yet another puzzle I’d have to figure out. I stomp so hard up the stairs, I’m surprised the old wood doesn’t crumble beneath my feet.

Nolan puts his hand on my arm, stopping me when we get to the top of the stairs. “Are you okay?”

I quickly wipe the anger from my face, shaking out my clenched hands, and smile up at him.

“Perfectly fine,” I reassure him.

I’ve opened myself up to Nolan, more than I felt comfortable with, but I drew the line at letting him in on the thoughts and feelings that run through me and stimulate me. A girl needs to have a few secrets and something tells me that informing Nolan I dream of blood and death and fantasize about revenge and hate and hurting people wouldn’t go over very well. Maybe I’ll tell him everything some day. Maybe when I’m finished using him to help me uncover the missing pieces, and I no longer need him, I’ll show him who I really am.

Nolan jogs across the porch and opens the front door, holding it wide so I can enter. I walk past him and continue moving toward the stairs, making it halfway up when I realize he’s not following behind me. Looking over my shoulder, I find him standing awkwardly at the base of the stairs with his hands in his pocket.

“If you’re going to help me switch rooms, it would help if you’re actually in the rooms with me,” I remind him.

He still doesn’t move up the stairs toward me. Instead, his eyes dart nervously around the hallway and then beyond me up the stairs.