Sheltered (18 page)

God.
God.

“Evie! Jesus Christ—what are you doing out there?”

She had to turn then. He’d opened the window, and everything looked even more embarrassing than it had a second ago. You couldn’t hike one leg over a ladder with your cheating boyfriend watching you.

“Oh, hi,” she found herself saying, all falsely casual. Though naturally, she hated herself for doing it. “I was just…checking this was your apartment.”

Lord, no wonder his real girlfriend understood the situation. His real girlfriend had probably developed the program designed to make Eve Bennett into a normal person.

“Are you serious? Get in here, baby. Come on—come here.”

He put a hand out to her, and dear Lord she wanted to take it. He just looked so big and warm and comforting, not to mention fully dressed. Maybe the sex he’d been having was just some newfangled tame kind, that didn’t really count.

Even though she knew it kind of did.

“No, really. It’s fine. You go back to…your girlfriend.”

Ugh, it sounded even worse on the outside. And Van’s face creased too, as though the idea was crazy—which only gave her unnecessary hope.

“Girlfriend?” He paused, obviously considering. “You mean my roommate, Tim?”

Words automatically flooded up through her body. She couldn’t have stopped them if she’d tried.

“You’re having
sex
with someone called
Tim
? Oh God, I don’t know if that’s worse or bette—”

“Evie, Evie—no.” He was laughing, but by that point she’d disappeared into some state beyond panic, and it wasn’t a comfort. She covered her face with her hands, just to keep some of the humiliation in. “Tim is currently—” He paused, to throw something at someone she couldn’t see. “Breaking our ‘no screwing around in the living room’ rule. Jesus Christ, man, get some clothes on.”

She heard Tim somewhere beyond him, complaining that Van had driven his date for the evening away. Tim sounded…well. He sounded like Van, only smaller.

Which proved true, when Van finally managed to haul her in through the window. Tim was a foot shorter than Van and a whole lot skinnier, with a shock of half-blue, half red hair.

And a completely naked body, covered only by a tiny round cushion.

“Oh, um, I guess…” she tried, but no other words would come. Too much had happened in the last five minutes for them to successfully form, and the action was made doubly difficult by her extreme need to look anywhere but at Tim.

“You must be Evie.”

Oh God, he knew her name. Van had told him her name. And Van was also doing other stuff, like holding her hand really, really tightly in one big fist—like a reassurance, she thought.

While her heart tried to sing in her chest.

“You’re even lovelier than he said,” Tim said, and she couldn’t help it. Her face flamed red, despite the deep freeze she still seemed to be in. What did he mean, exactly? She knew what she looked like, right at that moment, and it didn’t seem anywhere near lovely.

Though she garnered one important fact, from his words. Van had not only shared her name with this guy, but what he thought of her too. And apparently, the word was positive.

“Are you seriously hitting on my girlfriend right now? Put some goddamn clothes on, you look like a maniac.”

She went rigid all over. The redness on her face reached apoplectic proportions. Had Van just said
hitting on
? As in,
trying to get sex
?

Dear God, she couldn’t give this man sex. She could barely give it to Van, and he currently smelled so good she just wanted to shove her face under his t-shirt and eat whatever she found there.

“Dude, I wasn’t—”

“My terrified girlfriend doesn’t want to hear it. Get out of here.”

She got the vaguest impression that Tim was holding up his hands, out of the corner of her eye. Though she hoped to God she was wrong, on that front. Hands plural meant he no longer had anything to hold up the cushion.

“Sure, okay, we’re cool, we’re cool—sorry, Evie!” he said, and she had the strangest urge to laugh. After everything that had happened tonight, this weird other person with his multicolored hair and his obvious fear of Van was making her laugh.

Plus, he said her name as if he
knew
her. Not as if he’d just heard it, but like he knew. Van had spoken of her. Extensively. And he almost definitely wasn’t having sex with any other women.

Her heart sung for real then.

“Can’t believe you thought I was cheating,” he said, as they watched Tim disappear into what looked like his bedroom. She couldn’t feel guilty about the assumption, however—not even when he looked at her with something like hurt in his eyes.

“I’ve had a long night,” she said, surprised when it came out all tremulous. She’d thought the up-and-down feeling had gone the moment Tim made her laugh, but apparently not.

It was still there, and boy did it change his expression. Now he looked so wrecked by concern that
she
wanted to cuddle
him
. Nothing should ever make Van feel like that, nothing.

“I’m okay. I mean, I’m fine.”

“Yeah, we’ll see how fine you are. Come on—this way,” he said, then tugged on her hand. Led her into a room that she at first didn’t recognize for what it was. It had no fuzzy carpet on the floors, and no cute pictures on the walls. In truth it looked more like a drafty old hall than anything else, though once her eyes adjusted to the darkness she could make out his bed, beneath the window.

No drapes, around the latter. Just glass, black and bleak and cold-looking. His furniture was minimal, and the stuff he did have seemed stripped down, worn, not quite right. As though someone had thrown it down some stairs before he’d decided to take possession of it.

She’d never been so relieved to find herself anywhere, in all her life. When he sat her down on the edge of his blanket-piled, brass-framed bed, she could smell him on the sheets. Could see him, in every inch of the room. He’d drawn on some of the walls—spider webs and intricate flowers, a whole garden blooming all around her.

Love
, she thought, as he clasped her face in his hands.

“Let me look at you.” He paused, considered. Though she had to say, the considering didn’t look cool. That line of pain had formed all the way down his face and beyond, and he kept stroking her hair away from her face—almost like a nervous tic. “What happened? Tell me what happened.”

She suspected he didn’t really want to know. Thankfully, however, she didn’t have to tell him right away.

“God, you’re freezing—just wait there a second, okay?” he said, then went to the open door on their right. She saw tile when he snapped a light on, and the edge of something slick and white—a bathroom, she thought. He had a little bathroom, connected to his bedroom.

It really wasn’t such a bad place, at all. She even liked the dusty feel of the floorboards beneath her feet. And when he called to her, his voice echoed strangely in the big, drafty room.

“Did you bike all the way here?”

She thought about saying no. He just sounded so…
broken up
about the whole thing.

“Sort of.”

“Jesus, Evie.”

And now he sounded worse. He looked worse too when he emerged from the bathroom. The tenseness had spread to his shoulders, his back, and he moved too jerkily for her liking.

“Here, here—warm towels. Get your shoes off.”

He helped her get the thing done. For some reason, she couldn’t manage the buckles herself. Or the sleeves, on her jersey. He had to pull it over her head and off, and he was the one who wrapped the towels around her.

“Better?” he asked.

She nodded, wordlessly. Tears were stinging the backs of her eyes, and talking would only make them come out.

“Hey, what is it? Come on—tell me what’s happened. Tell me what you were doing climbing the fucking fire escape, for God’s sake, I—” He took a breath, and turned away briefly. “You know all the things that could have happened to you?”

She thought about her father’s fist. Her mother, meanly smiling.

“Yeah, I know,” she said, but that was enough on its own to make something warm and wet streak down her face. It didn’t even embarrass her all that much, because he obviously thought she had cause.

And even more so, after he’d tried to pull her to him. He just put a hand to her nape and drew her in—the way he’d done before. But of course when he did it, fire streaked over her scalp. She couldn’t stop herself from making a sound, or jerking away from him.

After that he knew. He didn’t even have to check, though he did. He turned her head and looked at the place he’d accidentally touched, and judging by the expression he then had it wasn’t good, back there.

His eyes were closed when he turned her back to face him.

“You’re bleeding,” he said, simply.

Of all the things he then did, she liked the bath the best. Every ache she’d ever had seemed to melt away in the water, and under his careful hands. He soaped her back, her shoulders, and maybe some other places in between.

Places that woke up, despite the throb still going on at the back of her head.

Of course he saw to that too. He separated her probably ruined hair into two pieces, and laid something cool and good over an area of ripped scalp that now felt the size of a dinner plate. And then once all of that was done, he wrapped her in a towel. Actually lifted her from the bath in a way that almost made her get all blubbery again, before laying her on the bed.

She had to take it back, at that point. The bath wasn’t the best thing. Lying with him spooned up against her, listening to the rain rattle against the glass and his voice like a rolling wave…that was the best thing.

“Feel better now?” he asked.

She didn’t know why he even bothered. Wasn’t it obvious? Her limbs felt like syrup. She could well have fallen asleep like this, if it wasn’t for the little hum of something else, in the background of her body.

It would probably always be that way now, she suspected. Whenever she saw him or felt him, all she could think of were the things they’d done together. How he’d looked, when that thick glut of pleasure had gone through him.

“Much,” she said, and wriggled closer to the curl of his body. He’d wrapped a blanket around her too, but it was the warmth of him she craved.

“Can’t believe you biked all the way here.”

“It really wasn’t that far. After the fifth mile I hardly felt it.”

“Is that why your legs are like noodles now?”

“Hey, my legs aren’t at all noodle-like. They’re perfectly workable, look.”

She lifted her right one about an inch. Felt him laugh deep and throaty, against the top of her head.

“Yeah, you’re ready to run the marathon, there.”

A silence fell, then. It didn’t remain for long, however.

“He find something I left? The wallet, maybe? I thought I dropped it outside the bakery down the street, but maybe…”

Again she thought about not saying anything—or maybe even lying a little. But then later she’d have to give him what she still had in the pocket of her trousers, that now lay on his bathroom floor.

“Yeah. The wallet,” she said, and felt him go tense behind her.

“Fuck.”

“Don’t. It’s okay. I’m okay—”

“Yeah, how close did you come to not being okay?”

She didn’t mean to pause, as though thinking it over. But pausing and thinking happened anyway.

“He didn’t even react, once I’d pulled away from—”

“Wait. You pulled away from him? He had hold of your hair and you kept going?”

She didn’t know what to say then. The way he put it just sounded so…not the way it had happened. It sounded bigger, coming from him, and sort of like she’d made a really strong move, when really she’d just done the whole thing out of fear.

And she wanted to say that to him, she did. She even had the words poised on the tip of her tongue, ready to spill out—
I was just frightened, that’s all
.

But they dried up in her throat, when he next spoke.

“I love you,” he said.

Just like that. Just like nothing at all, after some weird thing about getting her hair pulled out and running away. She’d found it hard to speak before, but after those three words she didn’t know what to say on any level.

It made her so very grateful, when he just carried on talking.

“Never said that to anyone before.” He paused, obviously struggling with the concept. But that was okay, because she was too. “Not even my parents.”

Of course, the moment he said it she knew. Normal people—they said I love you to their parents all the time. They laughed and hugged and told each other how much they cared, and no one ever got smacked around or turned to ash inside.

But then, he wasn’t normal. Like her. He’d always been like her, and she just hadn’t seen it because of the clothes and his composure and how brilliant he was, in every single way a person could be brilliant.