Page 48 of Undertow

The click of a lock.

Darkness.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!”

Small fists beating, pleading, bleeding against indifferent steel doors…

“I’m sorry!”

“Shaw?”

I force my eyes open again, jolted by the present. I’m shaking so hard now, I can barely stand. Is it cold in here? No, the chill is coming from inside me.

Julia frames my face, forcing me to look at her again. To confront her sympathy.

A deep ache punctures my chest. Her concern stings as it trickles over my crusted soul. I don’t even know how to absorbkindness anymore. Protective shells don’t distinguish cruelty from compassion.

“Hey. It’s going to be okay. We’ll figure it out,” she says softly.

Before I know what’s happening, I’m enveloped in warmth. Drowning in something that doesn’t hurt when I breathe it in. Her arms tighten around me, and I can’t stop my own from clinging, grasping at a splinter of light. Another crack rips through my wall. Another foreign sensation.

Comfort. Peace.

I bury my face in her hair, inhaling flowers and citrus until the air no longer crushes my lungs. Her fingers drift to the base of my neck and run in soothing patterns over my skin.

I feel like a child for the first time in my life.

“Your girlfriend is a lucky woman,” she whispers into the battered silence.

No, she’d be a cursed woman.

She’d be another chapter of blood spatter written on my fractured heart.

I can’t sleep.

Every time I close my eyes, I see more cold, dead eyes staring at me. Patrick, Kristen, others I didn’t even know. So many soulless stares peering back, each with a promise that one day it will be me locked in a forever-gaze at nothing.

What story will Patrick’s blood tell?

At 4 AM, I finally give up and try a shower. Hot water can cleanse more than a body, and I stand under the scalding spray for a long time. It stings my open cuts, exposing several I ignored until the burn brings them back to life.

But I like pain. It’s a badge; not of honor, but of surviving another day. If I didn’t hurt, I don’t know how I’d be able to tell I was alive. Pain is all that separates the living from a corpse.

I tried to be quiet, but Julia is waiting on the couch when I return from the bathroom. I already folded the sheet and blanket, making a neat pile on the backrest. She studies me in the soft glow of the floor lamp, her gaze running over my wet hair, down my chest, to the towel around my waist.

“You’re up early,” she says.

“Never slept.”

She nods, tracking me as I cross to my suitcase to pull out a change of clothes.

“I couldn’t either.”

“No?”

“No.”

I tug on my boxer briefs and let the towel drop. Her eyes are glued to me, flaring hot through the dim light. She pushes up from the couch, and I stiffen at her approach.