“What did you mean earlier?” I asked. “About loneliness.”
She lay on her side, head propped on her hand, looking up at me. Something twisted in my chest at that image. It wasn’t casual. It was…comfortable. And I liked that.
“Well, the way I see it,” she said. “No matter how many friends or family or just people surround us, we all have that thing we can’t tell somebody, a jagged shard of glass cutting our soul. You know?”
Shit, yeah. I did. Too well.
“So we bleed silently. Alone.” She sighed. “But…if you’re lucky, you might find someone who has a similar piece of glass to your own. So then you don’t bleed alone. That’s what’s so addicting about loneliness. The hope against everything that maybe one day you won’t be alone.”
A heaviness weighed her lids, and she messed with her springy curls still wet from her shower, as if distracting herself. What was the jagged piece poking Snitch? The thing she felt she couldn’t tell anyone?
“Have you found someone, Snitch?”
She rolled her lips, uncharacteristically silent. When she finally spoke, her husky voice was barely louder than the crash of waves.
“Are you bleeding, Grayson?” she asked.
I met her eyes, voice rough. “I don’t know. Am I, Snitch?”
Snitch got to her knees, sliding between the open space in my legs. I could barely think on that before I was wrapped in a hug. I went stiff. Suspicion and uncertainty froze my muscles.
“What are you doing?” My words were stiffer than my body.
“Hugging you,” she said.
“I know that. Why?”
“Because for this moment I’m Story, and you’re Gray, and right now it’s okay.”
I couldn’t remember the last time I was hugged. Probably when I was five, before Grandfather put a stop to “such nonsense.” I didn’t know how to react, so I stayed frozen. She smelled like marshmallows, and warmth suffused through my body.
She pulled away too soon, head tilted. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”
I itched to drag her back, crush her against my body, close my thighs so she couldn’t leave.
Fuck. She was sliding into my bloodstream.
My voice was hoarse. “What am I going to do with you when the sun comes up?”
She fell back to the floor on an exhale, pulling the blanket I’d given her back over her body.
“When the sun comes up, I’ll go back to being Snitch, and you’ll go back to being Mr. Crowne.”
I opened and closed my fist, trying to steady the throbbing. I didn’t fucking like that.
I wanted to stay like this.
Bleeding together.
“Get up here,” I grated.
There was an audible pause before she said, “Like, on your bed?”
STORY
* * *
I swallowed and said again, “On your bed?”