Brightly (Flicker #2) (64 page)

Filo stood sheepishly in the doorway, eyeing her uncertainly. It was odd to see him at this time of day, when neither of them was usually home. They’d barely seen each other these last few weeks. Though they shared an apartment, they’d managed to keep missing each other.

Lee had been preoccupied with Nasser, with running deliveries and the endless flurry of errands in which she’d buried herself, while Filo had thrown himself headfirst into work, picking up more jobs than he usually did. He left early every morning, often before she could cajole him into eating breakfast, and he usually didn’t come home until after she’d gone to bed, though she sometimes heard him pacing around the apartment late at night.

Now that she was looking at him, really looking, she was startled by what she saw. Dark circles ringed his eyes and he looked thinner than she remembered. Two wide, scabbed-over scrapes ran parallel down his neck, dark garnet against his pale skin. The bruises on his face were obviously days old, turning sickly shades of yellow and green, but she hadn’t noticed them until now.

Lee stared. When had this happened? How had she been so oblivious?

Wiping her face and struggling to regain her composure, she sniffed, “What’s going on?”

“It sounded like an animal was dying in here.”

“Sorry,” Lee croaked. Her face felt too hot and her eyeballs throbbed. There was a dull, uncomfortable pulsing in her temples, growing stronger. “I’ll keep it down.”

At first, Filo said nothing. Then he jammed his hands into his pockets and asked, in a low, cautious voice, “Are you okay?”

Lee considered lying. He would probably let it go and leave her alone if she asked him to, even with her sitting here all blotchy-faced and hoarse, the same way he’d want her to leave if she found him like this. But he’d heard her crying and had come to check on her. It didn’t seem right to lie.

“No,” she confessed. “Nasser and I…”

Filo tensed. “What?”

“We had a fight. We broke up.”

“Really?”

She nodded mutely, and he let out a surprised little huff. Without a word, Filo turned and left. A minute later, he reappeared and flung something at her. Lee reached up and caught it reflexively: a cool washcloth. She buried her face in it. The relief was instant.

When she looked up, Filo still lingered in the doorway. “What happened?”

“I tried to talk to him about Amelia’s offer. I thought I could convince him to take it.”

“I thought you didn’t want him to accept.”

“That was before,” Lee said miserably, as if that explained everything. Before Jason laid everything out in a way that was impossible to ignore. Before Nasser fell. Before she realized that she couldn’t watch the boy she loved more than anything in the world go on this way. “I was being selfish. I didn’t want him to stay for
him
. I wanted him to stay for
me
, because I don’t want to be separated from him. And I guess I got my wish, because that’s exactly what he’s doing. I just thought that if he understood that he didn’t have to stay for us—for me, at least—”

“So you broke up with him.” It wasn’t a question.

Weakly, she said, “I didn’t mean for it to get so out of control. But I couldn’t make him understand.” She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes, as if she could force the headache back down. “I said awful things. I hurt him.”

“Only to spare him from something worse. That’s not wrong.”

“It’s not right!”

“Lee.” Filo’s voice was as gentle as she’d ever heard it. When she lowered her hands, she saw that he had edged across the room and now stood by the foot of the bed. “Stop it. You were trying to do right by him. Any one of us would do the same thing. Whatever it takes.”

She started shaking her head. “Not Nasser,” she whispered. “He never would’ve hurt me on purpose. He never would’ve left me like I just left him.”

“You’re right,” Filo agreed. “He would’ve watched everything burn down around him if it meant staying here with you. That doesn’t mean you should let him.”

“I don’t know if it’ll even make a difference,” she said. It was hard to catch her breath. She felt like a sharp rock was lodged between two of her ribs. “I think I just made it worse.”

“Maybe not. That might be the shove he needs to get his head on straight.”

Lee sighed and slumped backward onto the bed. She wanted to lie perfectly still for the rest of the day, or maybe the rest of the week. She wanted to sleep and not to dream. “You sound like you know about this kind of thing.”

Filo hesitated, then perched on the edge of the bed. “Alice asked me to go with her when she left,” he said, after a while. “She begged me. But I couldn’t do it. I let her walk out into the snow, in the middle of the night, by herself. And I stayed behind.”

“Why?”

Squirming a little under her gaze, he admitted, “I was afraid. Alice is a lot tougher than me, you know.”

“Afraid of what?” Lee asked, trying to keep the surprise from her voice. It was strange to hear him talk this way. If there were things that Filo feared, Lee hadn’t known what they were. He had certainly never told her. “Neman and Morgan?”

“That was only part of it. I didn’t know how to live any other way. I belonged here, so I was afraid to leave.” A thoughtful expression crossed his face. “The best thing Nem and Morgan ever did for me was leave. I never would’ve left them on my own. Never.”

“You really think so?”

Filo nodded gravely. “When you live a certain way for a long time, you get used to it. You convince yourself that’s how it’s supposed to be. You hang onto it, even when it doesn’t work anymore, because it’s familiar. That’s what I did, at least. And Nasser and I are bad at a lot of the same things—so I know he needs a shove to do what he should. To get away from us.”

“Oh.”

“Give him a day or two to think it over,” Filo said. “See if he comes around. He might.”

“He might,” Lee echoed faintly. He had to. If he didn’t, she had no idea what she would do, how to repair the damage she’d done. It seemed impossible. She rubbed at her eyes.

“Are you going to start crying again?” Filo asked dubiously.

“No. I’m just tired.” Bone-tired, weary in a way she hadn’t been in a long time, as if all her strength had been drained away. Already, she felt Nasser’s absence like an organ that had been cut out of her.

Filo started to get up. “I’ll leave you alone for a while.”

Without thinking, Lee grabbed his wrist, wincing as her vision flared to into crystalline brightness. Her eyes stung and watered, but she clung to him like she would drown if she let go, and for some reason, he allowed it.

Filo watched her in silence, searching her face. She hoped he could read what she couldn’t bring herself to say:
Please don’t go. I don’t know what I’m doing anymore. Everything hurts and I’m scared to be alone.

At last, she eased her grip, letting her hand drop onto the mattress. But he didn’t leave. Instead, he sat down again and climbed into the bed with her, slowly and carefully, like she was an animal he didn’t want to spook. The bed was narrow enough that their shoulders and arms touched.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

He just shushed her, sort of gently.

They lay silently for a long time. She watched him from the corner of her eye, studying the slow, regular rhythm of his breathing. She forced herself to match it.

“We’re turning into them, you know,” Lee said dully. “Clementine, Davis and Henry. We’re getting desperate and we’re letting this make us do things we should never do.”

“You told me you would’ve done the same thing they did, if you were in their place,” Filo said. “Remember?”

“It was just words then. I didn’t think we’d ever be like this. It’s different when you realize you’d actually go through with it, if you had to.”

Filo propped himself up on one elbow. He looked down at her curiously. “You weren’t sure you could do something like that?”

“I thought I was, but I didn’t know for certain. You can’t really know what you’re willing to do until you’re in that position.”

“I knew what I would do,” he said quietly. “I always knew.”

As she looked up at him, Lee thought she knew what he would do, too. He looked so tired and so sad, but he was unwavering, always.
Whatever it takes.

Her gaze strayed to the wall above him, to the corkboard on which she pinned her favorite photos. One showed Alice and Filo, she grinning and he looking uncertain, as he usually did when faced with a camera. In the one beside it, Lee and Alice were downstairs in the shop; Jason had taken that picture, she recalled. Another photo showed Jason and Filo in the living room of the old apartment, last winter. Lee had actually managed to coax a small smile out of Filo for that one.

Her eyes fell on a strip of black-and-white photo booth pictures, in which Lee and Nasser alternated between making faces and kissing. Lee remembered that day in early spring, when the snows were melting in earnest and everything gleamed in the sunlight. She remembered looking at Nasser and, for the first time, being sure that she loved him. She had never been so happy. Nothing could’ve touched that happiness. She’d thought nothing ever would.

“Is this just what people do when something terrible happens?” Lee asked. “Fall apart? Make it worse while trying to fix it?”

Filo’s gaze drifted toward the array of photos, as if they held some answer. “That’s the problem with caring about someone else more than you care about yourself,” he said at last. “It makes you crazy. Eventually, you tear yourself apart.”

Chapter Thirty-Four:

The bedroom was dark and sweltering when Nasser woke, despite the open window. A glance at the clock told him it was almost two o’clock in the morning. Pins and needles stung painfully in his right leg; he must’ve slept on it wrong.

He had been dreaming. Lee had been in it. She usually was. Since he first saw her, he had dreamed about her all the time.

It was winter. The two of them were walking through an empty field, endless and white. The sky was white, too, so pale that he couldn’t find the seam where it met the land. There was no color but Lee, her hair shining like burnished copper. All else was snow. He had never wanted to stop looking at her. As long as he was with her, he knew where he was.

But that was only a dream. Nasser was awake now, and he felt like he didn’t know anything.

He missed her. He had started missing her almost as soon as she left, and the feeling had only gotten worse, like a cavity inside him that grew deeper all the time, hollowing him out. It had only been three days since he’d seen her last, but it felt like much longer than that.

Nasser sat up blearily and swung his legs over the side of the bed. He got up, moving to take a step—and fell forward, landing hard before he could even think to fling his arms out to break his fall.

The coppery taste of blood spread over his tongue; he realized he’d bitten it.
Oh,
Nasser thought dully, as he sat up.
Right.
Below his right thigh was nothing. He knew that. But for a moment, he had forgotten. The pain of remembering was sharper and more insistent than the one in his mouth. He could still feel the hot buzzing of his phantom limb.

When he heard footsteps in the hall, any hope he’d had of dealing with this alone evaporated. The walls were thin and Jason was a light sleeper; he must’ve heard the sound of the fall. A second later, the door swung open and yellow light spilled into the bedroom from the living room. Jason was a backlit shadow in the doorway.

“What happened?” Jason asked, as he flicked on the light. His hair was mussed, like he’d just stumbled out of bed, and his eyes were bright with something like panic.

“I forgot,” Nasser replied numbly.

Jason inched closer. “What do you mean?”

“I wasn’t totally awake. I thought I could feel my leg and I tried to get up.”

When Jason leaned down, one arm outstretched, Nasser shook his head, though the fall had left him dizzy and strangely weak. He grabbed the edge of the bed and tried to stand, but his good leg gave out and he hit the floor again, this time banging his stump against the bed frame as he fell. The surgical wound was healed enough that he wasn’t worried about reopening it, but his stump was still tender, and the pain that lanced through it blinded him.

“Goddammit,” Nasser muttered. Both his phantom leg and his stump were throbbing now, badly enough that his eyes watered. The back of his neck burned with embarrassment.

“Do you need me to—” Jason broke off, perhaps because he’d realized there was no truly delicate way to ask:
Do you need me to help you get to the bathroom?
Not when he had realized that the answer was probably yes. He sighed. “Come here.”

When he reached down again, Nasser snapped, “Don’t touch me.”

“Nass—”

“I’m fine.” He would get up on his own or he wouldn’t get up at all. “Go back to bed.”

Jason sighed again, impatiently. “You’re not fine. Just let me help you.”