Page 89 of Stalked By Shadows

Fuck. And now that was in my head. I washed it again.

After a while the door opened a crack and Micah poked his head in. “Pizza is here.”

“Okay,” I said. There was a towel wrapped around my waist, and I leaned over the counter trying to see my scalp and make sure I wasn’t infested with lice or some shit. It was one of my few phobias after an elementary school incident had shut down the entire school for a week.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

I sucked in a deep breath, wondering if it was worth sharing this fear and making myself sound crazy. “I have a phobia,” I admitted. “Of lice.” I swallowed as uttering the word made me feel like squirming. “I don’t know where I’ve been…”

He blinked at me a moment before stepping into the bathroom and closing the door. He shut the lid on the toilet and motioned for me to sit. I felt heat burn my cheeks with embarrassment. What if he found something? I’d be a thousand times more horrified, even though I couldn’t remember where I had been for the last month. Those couple of months I’d lived on the streets I’d worked hard to remain bug free, using homeless shelters as much as I could and staying away from others.

Instead of searching my head, he combed my hair, and even used my beard trimming scissors to cut away some of the length. He massaged some of the hair stuff into my scalp, taking his time to run over every inch of it without the fear or hesitation I had.

“Nothing,” he said.

“You’re sure?” I gripped the towel, heart racing.

“Yes. Your hair and scalp is pretty dry, but I have a good hair mask that can help. It’s at home.” Instead of leaving my hair down to dry, he tugged on it, combing it away from my face, and wove it into a French braid, leaving the tiny tail of it on my neck. “This should keep it from tangling too much.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Sorry…”

“It’s okay,” he said. “We all have something.”

“Part of the training, right?” I asked feeling like the question put out there a thousand others. Was I still worth training? Was he still interested? Had my time away changed us enough that it wasn’t even worth the effort?

“Yes. Part of the training.”

“What’s your something?” I asked as he pulled a little bottle of moisturizer out of his own little toiletry bag and began applying it to my face.

“Birds,” Micah said.

“Birds?”

“I hate birds. They have dark eyes that seem to stare right through you. When I was a kid and we lived in this little town in China while my parents taught, they had billions of pigeons. Or maybe it wasn’t that many, but it felt like that many. Everywhere you went there was a sea of them. They’d do that funny noise and even peck at us for food.” He shivered. “I hate birds.” He applied something to my lips three times, each time I felt like my skin sucked it up. Finally he leaned forward and kissed me lightly. “Let’s eat, then get some sleep.”

The pizza tasted odd, almost unfamiliar though it was a national brand. I ate half of it while Micah ate a salad, then I got up to brush my teeth again. I’d already done it a half dozen times and still felt like my mouth was unclean, or even numb, though it looked fine when I glared at it in the mirror.

Micah made me drink another bottle of water, insisting my taste buds were off due to dehydration. I was willing to take that as an explanation over any of the thousand other scenarios that filled my head.

Finally I pushed everything aside, leaving nothing on but a pair of boxers which hung off my hips, and I crawled into bed beside Lukas. Micah didn’t bother with the other bed, he curled on the other side of me, sandwiching me between the two of them and wrapping himself around me. That was all I needed to drift off to sleep.

Chapter 28

Iwoke slowly the next morning, from a deep and thankfully dreamless sleep. Micah was still curled up in my arms, but Lukas was no longer behind me. Fear churned in my gut for a moment until he emerged from the bathroom looking freshly showered.

“You should use my shave kit,” I whispered, not wanting to wake Micah. “Make yourself look human.”

He narrowed his eyes at me, but vanished back into the bathroom. The box of pizza was open and the other half gone. Lukas always did like cold pizza for breakfast. I had never been a fan of congealed cheese.

I snuggled back down into the blanket with Micah, breathing in his scent and enjoying the warmth of his body against mine. Still no morning wood. I guess he couldn’t fix everything and make me normal. The thought almost made me laugh. Me, normal. Those words didn’t belong in the same sentence together. I saw ghosts, fire demons, and shadow monsters. Nothing about me was normal. In his arms, that was okay.

Micah sighed and shifted, stretching a little.

“Morning,” I said as he absently reached up to stroke my jaw, fingers tracing my beard and the edge of my lips.

“Hmm,” he grumbled. “Not a morning person.”

“Yeah, me neither.” But I was once again starving and Lukas had eaten all the leftover pizza. Did this hotel have one of those breakfast things? “I need to find some food. Are you hungry?”