Welcome to Gaia! ::

30

However, everything did happen exactly as she said. I ate a cup full of ice chips, which were heaven after days and days of nothing; then I stayed awake until the morning with Kahmè, who was sleepy but stubbornly stayed up with me, and we watched movies and played videogames on the TV across from my bed—which was what she’d been doing all day. She fell asleep a bit before the sun rose, and I let her go—and a few minutes later, I decided to join her.

When I woke up, the heart monitor was gone, and I was sore in the strangest places. My whole body felt unreal, throbbing but not hurting, and I knew that the morphine was wearing off. But I felt too heavy and stiff to press the button for more—and anyway, it didn’t hurt yet.

For the longest time I just felt TIRED. Not the light, dreamy, wake-up-early-on-Sunday kind of sleepy, where you just roll over and go back to sleep, but the kind of aching, miserable exhaustion that was much more familiar to me—the way I felt when I’d had nightmares and woke up too late after only six hours of sleep, sore from a fresh beating or groggy from some new illness. I felt like s**t again. And for once, the thought of where I was brought me no sense of comfort or safety. You might not be able to walk, I remembered, and, feeling sick and scared, I rolled over, seeking the button.

But, for the first time since I’d woken up here, when I tried to move, I felt pain, real, stabbing, PAINFUL pain—not in my arm or head or legs, but erupting in my stomach, different than it had been originally, colder, more stabbing, more calculating. I whimpered, curling up in a ball, and at the same moment Kahmè sat bolt upright in the armchair.

“Wha?” she said, and then, “Evan, what’s wrong?”

“Ow,” I said pathetically, making an enormous effort to pull myself together. “What happened?” I gasped—the pain was beating the breath out of me. It wasn’t as strong, but it was getting worse.

Kahmè scrambled over to me and poked repeatedly at the red button, gently rubbing my back. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” she soothed me. “They’ll make it not hurt, I promise.”

“What happened?” I asked again, wincing as the pain stabbed at me again.

“They took you for a surgery while you were sleeping,” she told me, and I knew that it was true—it would explain the aching twinge in my left leg, as well. “It’s okay, Evan,” she promised me once more, panicking as she saw my face twist in pain.

The door opened, and a nurse swept in; already prepared, she walked briskly to the IV and emptied more morphine into it. I gritted my teeth together against the pain; Kahmè petted me anxiously, helpless, not knowing what to do. She glanced at the nurse, but neither said anything; instead, the nurse waited, shifting her weight from foot to foot, until the morphine slowly worked its way into my system and my limbs could relax. I let the numbness take me, my whole body shivering, my brain scarred. It had only been a few minutes, but in them, I had remembered, and I had been hurt and afraid—and now I couldn’t forget what had gone through my head.

As I lay there, Kahmè curled up against my back, I thought about where I was and why. I remembered what Dad had done to me, in awful detail, and tried to make sense of the pieces that had come to me after. And I remembered the pain, and what the nurses had said. I was badly hurt, that was obvious. My stomach was so damaged that I’d be eating rabbit food for months; my legs were so hurt that I couldn’t walk on them for just as long, if not longer. I needed triple-strength morphine to function…I would need vitamins and supplements and who knew what else when I got out, as well, though I would probably not be allowed them. My arm was badly broken; who knew when I could use it again? And my head had been smashed…I’d had a concussion, been in ICU….

It hit me then, pierced me straight through the morphine-daze as it had failed to do before.

I had almost DIED.

I could have been KILLED. I could have ceased to exist, bled to death right there on my own kitchen floor. The same floor that I scrubbed every day, in the same kitchen I cooked in every afternoon, in the same house I spent most of my time in, just below my room, my sanctuary for more than six years. Everything familiar, everything in balance, perfectly in proportion, if really ******** up—and still, I had almost died. If Kahmè hadn’t been there….

I thought about not just my house, but my whole world, the tiny little microcosm of America that was my life. We had hospitals. Social workers. Policemen. Officials. And still this had happened. I had still been an inch from death, and none of them had done anything. They couldn’t. And I couldn’t tell them, I was deaf, dumb, blind, helpless. Dad had all the power here. He had almost let me die….

I couldn’t wrap my head around it. What if I had died? What would have happened to Kahmè, to Dad, to people at school…to me? Where would I have gone? Would it have hurt? Would it have been better or worse than suffering through that? How long would I have to wait until Kahmè rejoined me—or would she? Did heaven and hell exist? Which would I have gone to? What if there was no God?

My head spun. I couldn’t breathe. I had almost died. I couldn’t believe it, couldn’t swallow it. I held my breath, listening hard for Kahmè’s breathing—and then, when I was absolutely certain that she was asleep, I broke down and allowed myself to cry. And I kept crying, right until the morphine started swirling around in my head and forced me into oblivion again.

Thus began my full-time obsession with death.

It would be awhile before I started to see death in everything—in birdsong, in sunlight, even in Kahmè. It would be awhile before it utterly consumed me. But it started that day: I couldn’t stop thinking about what had happened, I couldn’t stop reliving it in my head. I had nightmares about it; the thoughts crept up even when I was distracted, even when I was thinking of something happy, even when I was drugged out of my head. There was relief; they came and went, only staying for a few minutes at a time if there were something to recapture my attention. But the thoughts persisted, and it changed me. Made me terrified, made me stressed and tense.

The only absolute relief I could get was only temporary—I could only escape the thoughts for sure if I had just been given morphine, if it had just kicked in…or if I were with Kahmè and not in pain, and we were talking about something else, so deeply that I didn’t even remember where I was. But with Kahmè, it wasn’t as certain; she could say something or make me think something that would send me spiraling back again, my thoughts completely out of my own control. Death lurked; it waited; it pounced. And it rarely missed me.

And of course, there were the times when the way Kahmè laughed or smiled or something she said made my heart throb, my chest tighten, my voice and hands falter…and I would remember what I told her, and wonder if it were true. And then, inevitably, I would start to hate myself. So stupid, so foolish, so idiotic—how could I have said that to her when I didn’t even know if I meant it? It could have ruined everything. With another girl, it would have. Dumb luck and sheer innocence and ignorance alone had saved me from that stupid, stupid, stupid mistake. I wouldn’t let myself think about it; if I ignored that it had happened, then with a little luck, so would she.

It didn’t matter if I meant it or not. I told myself that I hadn’t; I told myself that I was inexperienced, ignorant, borderline retarded, that I didn’t even know what love was. I forced it out of my mind—I made myself forget. But the question was still left unanswered—did I or didn’t I? And no matter what I tried to convince myself of, the fact of the matter was that I couldn’t answer this question; I could only tell myself that it didn’t matter anyway, and push the dilemma away. Psychologically self-destructive? ME? God forbid.

But none of this—none of the distraction, none of the drugged oblivion, none of the suppression—could stop me from dreaming.

I could have hundreds of them in just a few hours, a thousand scenes in a single play, a million different glimpses. Sometimes they were good dreams—Kahmè and I were in my room, in my backyard, in her room: somewhere warm and familiar and bright. These scenes flashed through my mind, each with a story behind it, some memories, some hopes, some futile wishes. In some of them—the ones that lingered the most—I could leave my door open, I could walk around my house with her with no fear, I could kiss her in the middle of the street if I wanted to…these were the ones where my dad was gone—gone, or a different person completely. Or where the entire world was gone, had burned in a fiery cataclysm that killed everyone but left the beauty of the world intact. It disturbed me that I wanted this—that I basically wished that my dad were dead and gone, that I was so unhappy with what I had when I shouldn’t be, and that I was psychotic enough to enjoy the thought of an apocalypse. But I dreamed of it all the same, and sometimes when I closed my eyes I could still see Kahmè and I drenched in sunlight, completely and utterly alone together.

Some were more…carnal. More physical than emotional. I had never dreamt about a girl before, not even Victoria, not even after hours and hours wasted with daydreaming…these were even more disturbing than the ones where my dad, where everyone in the world, had disappeared. I dreamed of Kahmè and I kissing for hours at a time, never once getting bored or tired or needing anything but each other—sometimes these dreams were vanilla, more innocent than we’d kissed before, and sometimes I was pressing her against the wall or she was pulling my hair or we were doing something, somewhere, that made the entire situation feel like softcore pornography. I dreamed about sneaking into her room at night and crouching on top of her, kissing her for all I was worth. I dreamed about slipping my hands beneath her clothes, so vividly that I could remember, even after I woke up, just what her breasts felt like…I dreamed about stripping her completely, seeing her naked, kissing every part of her. Kahmè wasn’t SEXY, I couldn’t imagine doing anything more than kissing her, I couldn’t imagine sex with anyone at all. And yet, after a particularly racy dream involving my parents’ enormous bathtub candlelit and filled with bubbles, I still woke up with the first erection I can ever remember having. I was so freaked out and drugged on top of that that it went away almost immediately, but it still worried me—I nearly died with relief that Kahmè was still asleep, and nearly died with embarrassment when I saw her and remembered what I’d just been dreaming about.

No, embarrassed was the wrong word—mortified and humiliated were much more accurate…as well as disgusted. When I was between waking and sleeping I could think about it without guilt, with no less than absolute joy, and with more than the average amount of pleasure…but when I was properly awake again, I hated myself for those dreams. What right did I have to prey on her like that? She had been nothing but good to me; how could I violate her like that, even if it was out of my control? In my mind, undressing her in dreams was just as terrible as undressing her in reality, if not more so—she couldn’t stop me in my dreams.

In fact, in my dreams, she didn’t WANT to stop me…but that only made it worse. Why would my subconscious want her to want me? Why should she? Was she even capable of it? And why should I care, why should I let it get so out of control, why did it matter if it was all so wrong? Why couldn’t my brain just let me forget about what I’d said, why couldn’t it let me keep our friendship intact? Why was it trying to make everything so messy, did it want our relationship to be completely unsalvageable? Kahmè was my best friend, the best thing that had ever happened to me, and the only person who had ever made me happy at all since my mom had died; I wasn’t about to ruin that with lust and stupidity, I wouldn’t do it, I would do everything I could to keep what we had sacred, to keep her around. No matter how I thought I might have maybe felt about her, I knew that the very, very last thing I would ever want was to drive her away from me.

But even those dreams, with all their disturbing reverberations, were much better than my nightmares.

When my dreams started going wrong, time would almost stop; I sank so deeply into the dreams that I could no longer tell them apart from real life, that I felt every sensation and lived every moment so clearly that I never even knew that I was dreaming until long after I woke up. Sometimes they kicked in right as my eyes closed; sometimes a sweeter dream turned sour. I woke up crying one morning after a dream where Kahmè and I had been talking, leaning closer and closer, and then I had kissed her…and she had punched me, screamed at me, told me she never wanted to see me again. No matter how much I begged her, no matter what I said or how much I cried and even screamed, no matter how hurt I was, she wouldn’t listen to me—she hit me again and again when I wouldn’t let her go, hurting me more than my dad ever had. And when I told her I love her, she slapped me so hard it stung even when I woke up and shouted, “I HATE YOU!” so loudly that it hurt my ears. In my dream, that was when she left, slamming the door behind her…I woke up what felt like hours later, still seeing myself all alone, crying and begging for her to come back. It was the sort of thing I’d do…the sort of thing anyone would do, if they had no pride at all. And even with all the pride in the world, how could anyone let someone that incredible just…walk away?

That was the worst of those dreams…there were several others like them. But the worst by far were the ones with my dad. In my sleep, I relieved every beating he’d ever given me, one by one in no particular order, so vividly that the only way I could tell for sure that I had woken up was if I had stopped being hurt. His shouting echoed in my head whenever there was nothing to distract me; worse still was the memory of all the wounds I had attained, every hit I’d ever received on playback behind my eyes. And, night after night after night, for years afterward, I would relive the pain of that most recent, most awful beating, the one that had hospitalized me, and remember, Oh my God, I nearly DIED. It terrified me, it kept me awake out of pure fear, and when I woke from it I was shaken for hours afterward—it was one of those nightmares that stayed with you like a lurking shadow all day. Even now, I can never forget how much it haunted me…how much my subconscious warped it, making the memory of that night a living hell. I don’t think anybody can ever forget something like that.

It’s hard for even me to believe that all of these dreams were crammed into a single week…and they weren’t. I had them again and again, in hundreds of variations, for the next two years. But even if I didn’t have them all at once, every night as many of them as possible were crammed into my brain, leaving me exhausted before I even woke up. One night I spent a full ten hours trapped in a living hell and woke up screaming and sobbing—it took a lot of lying and reassuring to convince not only Kahmè, but several nurses that I was all right. Especially Kahmè, as she’d seen that before…but I didn’t have the heart, or the courage, to tell her about any of my dreams, good or bad. She didn’t need that strain on her. No one did.

I don’t really remember the days following that final surgery—they were a blur of medicine, nightmares, and half-asleep conversations with Kahmè, who never had any inclination to leave. I couldn’t thank her enough for that…honestly, I didn’t even try. I couldn’t focus on anything, I could barely even make myself keep breathing sometimes, though the last thing I wanted was to be on a respirator again. I didn’t practice moving or stretching; I didn’t fight the pain, or whine about it. I just curled up under my blankets and tried to survive until something changed.

And something did change, after I had been awake for a little more than a week—one day, when I was resting and Kahmè was asleep, a nurse came in to check on me, and after asking all of the usual questions, she said, “Your doctor says that you’ve been resting for long enough, dear. Do you want to try and stand up? Don’t worry, I’ll help you.”

“R-…really?” I said hoarsely, and, with difficulty, propped myself up on one elbow. I was skeptical about my ability to walk—over the past few days I had barely been able to move my toes—but I wanted to give it a try: I desperately needed a shower.

“Yes, you should be fine, as long as you don’t try to walk on your own—I’ll go get a wheelchair.” I sighed—I hated wheelchairs—but didn’t protest as she wheeled one in from the hall…she knew better than me, after all, and I didn’t think I could walk with the cast and the bandages and everything anyway. The nurse was very gentle as she raised the bed until I was more or less sitting upright, then helped me to sit up all the way on my own. It made me a little dizzy, as I had been lying down for almost two weeks straight, but I didn’t complain—it felt wonderful to stretch out all my muscles, even if it made me sore.

“Does that hurt anywhere?” the nurse asked me, and I shook my head.

“Not much,” I elaborated. I felt better than I had in days. “Just a bit sore….”

“That’s good, that’s good,” she said, smiling in encouragement. “Are you ready to try and stand?”

I took a deep breath, nodding once, tensing all my muscles to see if they worked. Everything seemed all right. The nurse put her hand under my uninjured elbow and, very slowly, while I clung to the railing, helped me rise to my feet. I wobbled there, unbalanced and unstable, but I couldn’t help grinning—it was nice to be vertical again, and to see everything from my usual perspective. I had forgotten what standing up felt like. I wished I could wake Kahmè up and show off, but I didn’t have the heart to—she was still wearing the crumpled dress from yesterday (her mom came by every couple of days to give her new clothes and things) and had shadows under her eyes. I could only imagine the strain I had constantly put her through.

The nurse let me stand and stretch, supporting me the whole time as best as she could, then asked me if I wanted to sit on my bed or in the wheelchair. I chose the chair; I was sick of beds. While I played with the wheels, the nurse fitted me with a sling for my right arm, which fit snugly around my neck—I didn’t mind, as it had been so long since any kind of strain had been put on my body. I wished that I could run, or at least be outside for a little while, but I was sure that that was out of bounds.

“Now, what do you want to do?” she asked me when she was done. “Where do you want me to put you? Do you want someone to push you down the halls?”

“No, thank you,” I told her—I was so very very sick of hospitals. “Is it okay if I take a shower?”

She frowned as she thought about it. “Well…we’d have to put something over your cast…and remove the catheter,” she mused to herself. “And put something over the IV as well. But yes, you could do that—but only if you promise that you’ll use the bench and you won’t stand up unless you have to, and if you are very careful. Can you do that?”

“Yes,” I said eagerly, and she smiled at me before she left to get a bunch of hospitaly stuff, like fancy plastic bags with finger holes and a big waterproof band-aid, which went over the IV attachment on my arm. While she fitted me with all of this and finally ditched the catheter—for good, I hoped—she gave me stern instructions about the wheelchair. I wasn’t allowed to push it myself, or have anyone else push me, for longer than five feet or so, and I wasn’t allowed to use my injured arm or my legs to help me. I mustn’t strain anything at all, especially my stomach, and if anything started hurting I had to stop whatever I was doing and call a nurse. Only a nurse was allowed to move me, whether it was into the wheelchair or out of it. I was permitted to sit in the armchair but not at the desk chair. My IV had to go with me everywhere I went. I was allowed to go into the bathroom whenever I could manage getting in there myself, but I couldn’t stand for longer than it took to go to the bathroom. I had to use the foot support things, and had to have the brakes on when I wasn’t going somewhere. No horseplay, no leaving the room, blah blah blah. I nodded studiously, though I was too excited to consider listening to her when she was gone—as if I needed help getting up and using the bathroom and SHOWERING. What was I, six?

When she ran out of breath, she wheeled me carefully into the bathroom, then helped me stand again so she could take off the hospital gown for me. I wanted to protest—I stared at the wall and grimaced and blushed the whole time—but I realized just as much as she did that I couldn’t do it myself, and there was no one else to help me. She, at least, was better than Kahmè or Mrs. Sandred would have been. She kept talking to me, still giving me orders, more to fill the silence than anything: she told me that my IV would have to follow me around but stay outside of the shower curtain, and she was going to let me do everything on my own once I was situated but was coming back in half an hour to put me back in bed. She put everything I needed within my reach, including the little remote with the button, which I should use if I fell. Then she parked the wheelchair to one side, close to the shower, put some towels down so I wouldn’t slip, and helped me hobble into the little space. I turned my back to her and folded my arm self-consciously across my lap as she sat me down on a little plastic bench beneath the showerhead, told me briefly how to work the faucet, and promised to be back in thirty minutes.

Then she left, and I let out a breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding. I realized, with a sickening lurch of my empty stomach, that she had been the first person that I knew of to see me completely naked since I had been eight years old, sharing a bathtub with my mom. I tried not to think about it as I turned on the water, shivering until it had warmed. For the longest time all I had the energy and willpower to do was sit hunched over and let the water flow over my head and back. It felt amazing; I could feel the dirt and sweat and grime almost peeling off of me. When I could summon the energy, I lifted my one functioning arm and began methodically scrubbing my hair. It took awhile to get my head as clean as I wanted it to be—I felt compelled to wash it three or four times in a row. It felt so good to be clean again. Then I had to scrub the rest of me, which not only took forever, but was exhausting and slightly painful. The nurse had promised me that the pain medicine would last for long enough, but it still wasn’t very fun to test the limits of how much I could move without hurting myself. My stomach was the worst—it burned and throbbed very faintly at first, but the ache grew stronger the more I tried to ignore it.

Finally, I had run out of places to clean, and my legs and stomach especially were aching too much to ignore. I rose unsteadily to my feet, clinging for dear life to the built-in ribbed-plastic railing, and climbed shakily out of the shower, I toweled myself off as best as I could, then wrapped the towel around my waist and settled in the wheelchair, shivering and feeling very exposed. I sat like that for a minute before I remembered that someone was supposed to come get me—had it been half an hour yet? Maybe she was waiting outside. Hesitantly, carefully, pushing myself off of the wall, I wheeled myself over to the door, opened it, and peeked outside.

The nurse wasn’t there yet, but Kahmè was awake, sitting on the edge of the bed, and her head snapped up as soon as she saw my head poke around the door. Before I could say anything at all, she shrieked, “Evan!” and dove for me, pinning me against the back of my chair. My stomach throbbed mercilessly in retaliation; I had to gasp for breath, struggling to find my voice while Kahmè babbled in my ear.

“EVAN I was so worried I thought you were dead or they took you away for surgery again or they put me in some other room all by myself! Why are you all wet, did they let you take a shower, where did your dress thing go, what happened to all the tubes and stuff, what’s that on your arm, why are you in a chair thing, does that mean you can move around now? Why do you have to have a drippy thing then? Does this mean you can go home soon, are you—?”

“Kahmè, calm down,” I choked, and she leaned away from me, seating herself beside me in the wheelchair. I blushed, remembering again that I wasn’t wearing any clothes, but she didn’t seem to think about it.

“What happened, Evan?” she demanded again, looking up at me with her huge, bright, shiny eyes, giving me the irresistible puppy-dog look. I had to close my eyes for a moment to get my thoughts straight.

“Um…wh-when did you wake up?” She had been out like a light—if she hadn’t been practically comatose with exhaustion, we would have woken her up in the first place.

“Like five minutes ago,” she told me, and I could see the sleepiness in her eyes to back it up. “They wanted to change the sheets.”

“Yay.” I was hoping they would sometime. I absolutely HATED being dirty.

“But Evan, what HAPPENED?” she insisted, and I sighed, trying to remember where to begin.

“Um…a nurse came in like out of nowhere, and she said I didn’t have to be connected to all that stuff anymore, and that I could take a bath, so I did…and I can get up now, and be in a wheelchair, but there are all these rules…I’ll tell you after she comes back,” I added in a mumble, feeling awkward and naked.

“Comes back?” she inquired.

“Yeah, she’s coming back to help me get in bed, I can’t get up on my own…um,” I added, blushing furiously, “maybe I should….”

But I didn’t get a chance to kick her out and bolt into the bathroom again, because the nurse chose that moment to enter, her arms full of clean laundry. She paused, looking startled, when she saw Kahmè and I, making me blush and hunch over my knees, looking away—but then she recovered herself, spreading two fresh blankets on my bed and folding them over to make a place for me to slide in. Then she crossed to me, a fresh gown over one arm. She made a sweeping motion at Kahmè. “Up, please,” she said, and Kahmè, who understood by now, immediately crossed to the armchair and curled up with her eyes covered, looking like a little sleeping mouse. I couldn’t help smiling as the nurse handed me a little toothbrush; she sat me down and let me brush my teeth and rinse my mouth out, which was the absolute best thing that anyone could have let me do. When I was done, she helped me, clumsily, to my feet, and started buttoning my gown for me. I waited for her to finish, then looked up from my feet and glanced at Kahmè.

“Kahmè, look,” I called softly. “I can stand up.”

She popped up, looking swiftly around, then spotted me standing up on my wobbly chicken legs, grinning like an idiot and about to fall to the floor from exhaustion. She beamed at me, and I swear it sent a real, tangible flood of warmth to every part of me.

“Can you walk?” she asked me, sitting up on her knees and peering at me over the back of the chair. She was just so damn cute; it made me feel warm and happy all over.

“I’m not allowed to.” But I threw her a devious grin behind the nurse’s back. She snickered and winked in reply.

The nurse poked me back into bed, tucking the blankets firmly around me and reminding me that ONLY A NURSE could get me out of bed again—I guess she suspected what Kahmè and I had been secretly plotting. While she was slowly turning me into a burrito, I asked her a few more anxious questions, eager to be out of this place, or at least to retain some version of normalcy.

“Can I wear normal clothes? Can I eat now? When can I leave?”

“No, no, and not anytime soon,” she said firmly, at first, but when she saw my dejection she reconsidered. “Well,” she murmured, “I think that pajamas from home would be all right. Something very comfortable.”

“Okay. Can I make a phone call?” I added, biting my lip. I didn’t want to have to call Dad…but I couldn’t let Kahmè sneak in, either. Especially since the last thing I wanted was for her to go through my underwear drawer.

“Sure, sweetie, you can use the phone all you like, just remember that it goes on your bill,” she told me.

“Okay.” No worries about that; my dad and I were not about to have a heart-to-heart, and I had no one else to call. “What about food? And when can I leave?”

“You won’t be here for very much longer,” she soothed me. “Once your condition is a bit more stable—and once we can get you eating and drinking regularly, and you can function without medication—then we’ll let you go. You’ll have to go through a few tests before that can happen though. I think those are scheduled for the day after tomorrow.”

“Okay.” So three days, four days maybe. I could live with that. Besides, it wasn’t as if I were returning to something infinitely better—I was just tired of laying down. “And what about food?” I insisted—this was very important.

She thought about it for a moment. “Well,” she hedged. “I guess a liquid diet would be all right…I’ll send in a dinner order for you. It won’t be anything fancy, now.”

“That’s all right,” I assured her. “Can she have a tray too? Something without meat in it?”

“Of course, dear,” she said, glancing over at Kahmè again. “Do you need anything else?”

“N—” My stomach throbbed suddenly, and I changed my mind. “Just some medicine,” I muttered, and she understood. She already had a dose ready for me; she gave it to me, then stepped away. The last thing she did was lay the little remote with the red button by my side.

“If you need anything, be sure to call,” she said, and then she was gone.

There was silence after she was gone; Kahmè did not bounce over to me as I had expected. I glanced at her and saw her giving me a strange, uncharacteristically serious look, which made me certain that she had something to say. I swallowed hard, waiting.

Finally, she climbed carefully off the chair, coming to sit at my feet. “Do you feel okay, Evan?” she asked me softly.

I nodded. “I feel fine,” I told her. “I’m all right.”

She nodded too, not looking entirely convinced. “It’s just…for a long time, you’ve been…kinda….” She hesitated, searching for words that eluded her. “You’ve been having bad dreams,” she finally said. “And you’ve been really sad. I was worried.”

I frowned. “Bad dreams? How do you know?” If she were telepathic or psychic or something, I was going to jump out a window for sure.

“You…you always make this face when you’re having nightmares,” she explained, staring at her feet as she kicked them absently against the side of the bed. “Like you’re…hurting, or something. And you say stuff.”

I felt my eyes pop open wide. “I sleeptalk?” I gasped. That, I knew, would be very, very bad. Who knew what I might reveal in my sleep?

She made a face, shaking her head. “It’s not anything that…that I can understand,” she explained. “It’s not words. It’s just like…like you’re TRYING to say something.”

Not words? That was fine. So long as no one could understand me, I didn’t care what my subconscious was trying to tell the world. “And what about…when I have good dreams?” I asked her cautiously, not sure that I WANTED to hear this. But I had to know.

She gave me a sad look. “You don’t have those a whole lot,” she whispered.

“But when I do?” I pressed, and she gave in, staring at her feet again as she thought about it.

“You look…happy. More happy than you are when you’re awake, most of the time.” She frowned, looking upset; did she know that I dreamt about her, or did she imagine someone else?” You don’t talk…you’re really still. But you…you start smiling.” She looked up at me again, her eyes huge and filled with pain. “I don’t ever see you smile anymore,” she murmured.

The nurse had left my bed as far upright as it would go; it was easy for me to lean forward and take Kahmè’s hand in both of mine. “Kahmè,” I said gently, “I AM happy. I’m okay now, I’m safe. I promise.”

She frowned at me, shaking her head. “It’s not the same thing.”

I couldn’t argue with that. But it should have been. “What’s really bothering you?” I asked her softly. I knew her well enough to be certain that she was hiding a bigger issue behind smaller ones—I didn’t know if she did that hoping to find a more thorough solution, or if her brain just didn’t KNOW what the bigger issues were, or how to phrase them—and I knew that it was easier and better to address her fears directly instead of talking in circles around it and hoping to strike a nerve somewhere.

She bit her lip, her eyebrows furrowing as she concentrated. I gave her a minute, waiting patiently, knowing that it would take her a little while to get it just right.

“Evan?” she finally asked, her voice small.

I squeezed her hand comfortingly between mine. “Yes?”

She took a breath, staring holes into the blankets—and then she looked right up at me, and for a moment her eyes stunned me, the look in them warm and cold and hard and soft and bright and powerful all at once. “When you said that…that you loved me—” My stomach lurched; I felt suddenly sick with stage fright—“did you mean it, Evan? Do you really love me…? Do I make you happy?”

I don’t know what happened, I don’t know what in the world she said to make it so, but hearing it like that, from her own lips, suddenly snapped everything into perspective—Do I make you happy, Evan? My name, clumsy in my mouth and harsh and terrifying from my dad’s, flowed like music from her lips. It meant something more—just as her name was so much more powerful to me than anyone else’s had ever been. And the question itself—Do I make you happy?—was so simple, so easy to answer. Why shouldn’t the other question be?

I had been wrong. It DID matter if I loved her or not, and it mattered just as much that I knew…that I said it out loud. I had to choose one way or the other. But it wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be.

I had looked down for a moment, to clear my thoughts, then met her eyes again. It took all the nerve I had to say what I needed to say, but somehow, I managed to tell her, my hands squeezing hers so hard it must’ve hurt, “Of course you do, Kahmè. And I do love you….” My voice was the softest and gentlest I’d ever heard it. I saw the shock on her face before I lowered my head again, too cowardly to see her real reaction, my shoulders hunched against her unspoken words.

But she didn’t say anything. Instead, she softly pulled her hands away, then—just as my heart stopped for a moment in reaction—she crawled quietly across the bed, curling up at my side, and wrapped her arms around my waist. In a response from some instinct I had never known existed, I wrapped my arms around her, too, and pressed my cheek against her hair. Here it comes, said my brain, waiting for the letting-me-down-easy speech, but I couldn’t worry about that with her so close.

She smiled, closing her eyes and resting her head against my chest. And then she said the last thing I would ever have suspected.

“I love you, too,” she murmured, as easily as reciting an old nursery rhyme, as saying your name…as easily as a breath, as a flower opening in the sun. So easy, as if it were nothing, as if it was expected, understood.

I hadn’t felt the pain, or even noticed it until there was relief—inside me, something tight and barbed and aching had unwound, leaving pure warmth in its place. It felt as if I were glowing—as if I could no longer be the same Evan as this morning. I felt myself grinning and wanted to laugh, but instead I hugged her close and kissed the top of her head.

Her reaction surprised me. She lifted her face and stretched her neck until her lips touched mine; I leaned down automatically, shifting to accommodate her, and she opened her lips and kissed me properly, her eyes closed, her expression blissful. I pressed one hand against the back of her head and held her close to me, kissing her for all I was worth, my very soul shuddering at the taste of her lips.

And in that moment everything around me disappeared, I was no longer in a hospital room because of a dad who hated me, on an uncomfortable bed in a dimly-lit room, with an IV and a paper gown and an empty stomach and three defective limbs. I felt more human, more alive, than I ever had before—as if my heart had been ripped out, but now it was back again without a trace of a scar. I was the happiest I had ever been, unable to recognize myself, transformed by those three little words until I felt as if I could be a new person entirely. A new Evan.

An Evan who was no longer alone.

Woo~ new reader. thanks charry <3

Thank you, Oukow. <33333 I luffles you to death. And Evan. I love him a lot too. I need to get unfrozen on this one, bring it back to life again. Somehow when I'm working on one story the others kind of stay in place

Current story: (wait for it)

AMETRIS REWRITE! On the main page. Wooooo.

This story is so horrible in its imagery its hard to imagine how evan survived through all that and endured. Its painful to think about even but its a work of art in the psychological aspect in reality. I can hardly bear to think of the imagery of evans dad continuously beating him to a pulp in a drunken rage. But its a reality we must face. You have improved on the image that the story needs to offer. violence. the pure and simple fact of violence in an innocent boys life, its hard to swallow but being that its truth and we need to be made aware of these cases happening and the horrors of it. In other words, a necessary evil we must learn of.

I know man, I know. *pat pat*