Together We Caught Fire

by Eva V. Gibson

  There was an easy fix, of course—one solution, and one alone to refresh my body and realign my world: sleep. Natural. Simple. Unacceptable.

  Sleeping felt like dying. So I stayed awake.

  25

  “ ‘DYING / IS AN ART, LIKE everything else. / I do it exceptionally well.’ ”

  The words slipped out ragged, sanding the rasp from my throat as I paced back and forth between the metal room’s worktable and supply shelves. It was a less than welcome place for that particular poem—not the room itself, but my weary mind, already brimming with stifled horrors.

  Connor’s voice wove into my whisper, picking up where I paused for breath. He spoke the next line without me.

  “ ‘I do it so it feels like hell.’ ”

  I turned to catch the arch of his eyebrow peeking out the top of his safety goggles. His sleeves were rolled to the elbows; his hair, as always, at odds with the universe, and it didn’t take more than a look to spark the air between us.

  We hadn’t kissed since that horrible night—a week and counting of accidental glances and unfinished sentences. I’d forced myself through the warehouse door the morning after the party, determined to cling to what I could of his world—the living space and the metal room, Paul and the spinning wheel and the constant creative buzz. I refused to let another trauma retool a place I loved into an etching of ruin. I’d face whatever waited. I’d been through worse.

  But for all my bravado, I couldn’t set foot in that bathroom, no matter how badly I needed to go. I couldn’t even look at the door.

  To his credit, Connor had played along without prompting, projecting a skewed, careful version of our pre-declaration dynamic. He sure as hell hadn’t dealt any extra emotional confessions from the bottom of the deck, and what he’d said before was already primed for burial—he had yet to try recapturing what could have been a sacred moment. He hadn’t let those words spool out a second time, or said anything else sweet, or romantic, or even remotely special. He hadn’t made any of it real.

  And here he was now, stealing poetry from my lips. Sending it back to me on a voice rough from too many quiet hours.

  “Nice.” My approval tugged a smile, real but guarded, from the edge of his mouth. “You know Plath?”

  “Do I ‘know Plath,’ she asks. I’d be her modern incarnation, if I could write worth half a damn.” His torch met the table with a soft clunk beside his unfinished work. “Interesting choice, though.”

  “I didn’t choose it. It’s for school.”

  “Got it. Need to talk?”

  “No. I need to keep moving. I need—” A surge of whiskey splashed its way from my stomach to my mouth; I swallowed it without thinking, winced at the secondhand burn as it slid back down. Sleepless delirium with a chaser of Jack and Coke probably hadn’t been the best idea, but since when had that stopped me. “God. I need it all to fade.”

  “What time is it? You’re usually out by”—he squinted at his phone—“4:37 a.m. Christ, Lane. Why are you still awake?”

  “You’re still awake.”

  “I’m working. You’re okay here, right? After—”

  “I don’t know. No. I’m not okay anywhere. I can’t sleep.”

  It was pitiful how quickly the fatigue set in, as if it had been constrained only by the words themselves; locked-letter chains that shattered when they hit the air. I felt his eyes follow me as I drifted past, gathered myself into a perch on an unoccupied stool. Hid a desperate yawn behind the swing of my hair.

  “Hey.” Connor set aside his goggles and stretched, popping the tension out of his spine. “Come to bed. Get some rest. I can finish this tomorrow.”

  “No, I mean I can’t sleep, Connor. I won’t. I need to stay awake, at least until this feeling passes. If it passes.” My eyes blinked and shuddered and realigned, slid over his brow and his bones. Caught and held steady on his worried mouth. “It’s okay that I stay, right? If you need to work—”

  “It’s always ‘okay.’ ” He stepped closer, slipped between my knees. Slid his hands in slow, careful arcs over my back as my arms rose to rest on his shoulders. The world doubled, then snapped back into hectic focus. “If you need me, work can wait.”

  My answer pulled up short at the edge of my breath, lingered long enough that I could have stopped it snaking through my teeth. It was a thought formed all wrong. It was the truest thing I knew, and the most confusing.

  “I don’t know what I need.”

  His slow smile dropped a curtain over eyes that never wavered, and if something in them flickered and faded, it was too small a thing to count.

  “I do.”

  I let him consume me; let my mouth list open and my eyes fall shut, lost track of time and reason and my hold on existence. Connor’s skin was warm, his hands solid, and what did it matter if love changed the angle of his arms? Would it be so bad, really, to feel its burn on his lips, or catch its sharp, sudden flavor beneath his tongue? Would it be so bad to never speak of it again?

  His hands slid from my waist to my hips, then lower, and he was scooping me off the stool. He was turning and walking, taking me with him as I clung to his neck, breathed deep, filled my lungs with his clean, familiar scent. It was too easy to see him as a jumble of hollows and rage and delicate bones—to overlook the strength in his arms or the grip of those hands. The way they balanced my weight through the room, down the hallway, past the looming arch of the bathroom door.

  The living space was dark and still, the mattress, thick with quilts and memories. All of it begged me to rest as he picked up the Plath where we’d left off, his whisper heavy with the lovely lilt of death. Maybe he was right—the words rolled dark and slow against my neck, an audible prequel to the follow-up drag of his mouth; my teeth caught the corner of my lower lip, and everything blazed at once, hot and bright as the burn of a star. Maybe this was exactly what I needed.

  The poem slurred to a hiss, unfinished, as I pulled him off his feet. Pulled him into the slope of my body and the rise of my knees, as they fell open to graze the edges of the world. His face above mine, then, eyes hooded with needs of his own. Poised to bring us back to reality with his own pretty words, and I couldn’t let him do this to me again. Not here. Not now.

  “Lane, I—”

  His voice crumbled to nothing against my mouth. My hands clawed through his hair, fisted against his scalp; his blistered their way down my body, our desire blending, then burning together, and yes—this was what I needed. Sensory obliteration. Silence.

  “Don’t let me fall asleep. Please.”

  He didn’t.

  * * *

  Life lived at the edge of lucidity was hardest when I counted hours—in the beginning, when I still bothered to measure time. Everything after that was a stretch of existence, of measured breaths ending in a gasp, a cold sweat, and the flicker-fade of light at the edges of my eyes. The blip of my mother, in every reflective surface.

  My mind was ellipses; my voice, the pause of a comma.

  Soon enough my body rebelled, dropping me over and over into tiny craters of oblivion. I lost myself throughout the day, at school and work and home—those random, minuscule bursts of unconsciousness, eyes open but sightless. It was blinking without blinking, snapping back on jolts of adrenaline, sharp and sudden as falling in a dream. Nights were a pattern book of utter hell—a half hour here, an hour there—sometimes just enough to let my guard down; let the bolt fall off the door, leaving it ready to swing wide open at the faintest tap of her knuckles.

  My yoga practice, already suffering the demands of our busiest market season, dropped off entirely—it was too relaxing, too close to rest, and I had to do what I had to do, and that was goddamn stay awake, until wakefulness itself became its own special nightmare.

  It was a hand on the hot coils of the stove burner, the broken spiral branding the space between my thumb and wrist. An accident, I’d lied, as Skye broke fat stalks from the aloe plant, her worried eyes just short of suspicio
us.

  It was my half-blue fingertips, wrapped too tight in a twist of yarn that knotted with itself and refused to break without the frantic tugs of my teeth.

  It was bitten lips and cheeks, quiet fingernails scraped along the thin skin of my wrist. Swallows of blood from a ragged tongue. Tiny bursts of pain, designed to drag me back to the world.

  It was familiar—the rolling boil of my approaching cycle. The ribs-to-knees cramps that started days before the bleeding. The distinctively different cramping of my stomach and intestines, opening acts for the mainstage event. The bottle of painkillers buried in the trash; the anticipation of an ash-and-lava landslide, guaranteed eye-opening pain, and maybe that would finally be enough. Maybe I’d actually eat for a change—stuff myself, even. See how much more my body could bring up, because I couldn’t exactly puke in my sleep. It would keep me on edge, at the very least.

  It was all those things in an unsettled blur. Feelings came and went in flashes, and it was hell; still, though, it wasn’t all bad, because the lack of feeling is the lack of things. And things that don’t exist can’t hurt.

  I hurt myself in other ways, and found them to be more than adequate.

  26

  MY PATTERN BOOK WAS GONE. It wasn’t in my purse, or on Connor’s rolling cart. It wasn’t buried in the futon’s perpetually messy blanket pile. I scrounged through the bottom of my messenger bag, fingers fumbling over the disarray of useless pens and knitting needles and a goddamn ball of yarn, all tangled up with a king’s ransom of tampons, which were finally being put to use after a three-day stress delay that had me frantic over every possible outcome. Try keeping your eyes open around the clock after a dozen hours spent vomiting up chunks of your own soul. Then try doing that while still embracing the acid bath misery as preferable to the bloodless, ominous alternative. Girl power.

  “It’s not here. I can’t find it. Every day of my life is a collection of things I need that I can’t. Goddamn. Find.” I upended the bag, spilled its contents onto the futon. Nothing. No pattern book, no scrap paper, no motherfucking phone charger, and why. Why was everything always so lost. “Goddamn it.”

  Connor paused in his sketching, concern tweaking the corners of his mouth.

  “Hey. Everything okay?”

  “No, everything is not okay. My notebook isn’t in here, and my piece-of-shit phone is dead, and I can’t. I can’t make a supply list, Connor, and I need to make a fucking supply list.”

  “Jesus, calm down. There’s a notebook in the metal room. Or, here—go ahead and use this.”

  I glared at the sketchbook he offered me, then redirected the glare his way, stuffing my things haphazardly back into the bag.

  “I’ll wait. Wouldn’t want to stumble upon my sideboob. Or Sybil’s sideboob, or whoever else’s sideboob is in there.”

  That one soared out with unexpected wrath, freeing itself from a nest I’d tried so fucking hard not to build. I tossed my head and stared him down, ignoring the spread of heat across my chest—it wasn’t my business. It never had been, and the number of fucks I had the right to give sat solidly in the negatives. Still, that the issue hadn’t long ago burst into bitter flight was nothing short of miraculous.

  “Pardon?” Connor withdrew, eyeing me carefully. “Lane, are you okay? Who’s Sybil?”

  “You know who Sybil is. You know.”

  “I actually don’t. Paul.” His voice was calm and unhurried, yet wary, pitched neutral in the way you’d communicate a plan of action when staring down a poised and rabid dog. “Do you know a Sybil?”

  “I do not.” Paul’s head did the slow lean out from its usual place behind the sculpture-in-progress. “Can we back up to the sideboob part?”

  “You’ll have to ask your boy about that,” I sneered. “Sadie told me he drew mine in his little book. Why he drew it is anybody’s guess.”

  “What the fuck?” Connor blinked at me, genuinely bewildered. “I never did that. I drew you, but not your—here, take a look.”

  I took the book from his outstretched hand and flipped through it. Experimental sketches and lists of ideas. A series of steampunk animals, composed of gears and bolts and clockfaces. Strange furniture. Dozens of pages of jewelry designs, some marked with names and measurements and price quotes, some no more than half-formed ideas. Grey and Sadie’s wedding ring extravaganza. And me.

  Me in profile, me sleeping, me laughing, me knitting. Me gazing out the Forester window at a starry sky. Most clothed, some hinting at the lack of them—a bare shoulder; the line of my spine; the dip of my waist, smoothed into an exposed hip. The closest thing to a nude study was a profile sketch of me in his bed, propped on my elbows, smirking over my shoulder at him. I was naked but covered, swathed in a blanket from the hips down, everything above my rib cage hidden by the swoop of my hair and the angle of my arm. No sign of my breast. Not a hint of anything.

  “I’m not finding sideboobs in here,” I muttered, eyes darting to Connor, then Paul, then back again.

  “Because there aren’t any. Apparently, the word means something different to my sister.”

  “Oh. Well. I’m sorry I yelled about it, then. I’m not feeling very—” I swallowed hard against a surge of nausea. Tiny lights skittered along the edges of my vision. “Sorry about the Sybil thing too, I guess.”

  “Lane, I have no idea what you’re talking about. I’ve never met a Sybil in my—” Comprehension and fatigue drifted together over his face, blending into a sigh. “Sabine. You mean Sabine.”

  “I do in fact mean that name, thank you very much.” Way to make your outburst matter, Lane. Fuck, I was tired.

  “Yeah. Thanks, Sadie.” Connor left his stool and sat next to me, feet on the floor, leaning backward on his hands. A casual pose that contradicted every facet of his face. “It’s no secret, okay? I’ll tell you all about her, but I’m not sure why you care.”

  “I don’t.” The lie leaked out on the heels of an uneven breath. I swallowed and rubbed my eyes, redirected my words so they veered closer to the truth. “I mean, I don’t need to hear about her. It’s not an issue.”

  “Good, then we can drop it. Or if you’re still dying to make your little list, I’ll go get that paper, and you make me one of all the guys you used to fuck. How many sheets do you need?”

  The words prickled over my scalp, ate a trail straight to the base of my spine as I swiveled to meet his glare. Paul melted silently out of sight.

  “Really? Really, Connor? I can’t even express how little that has to do with you.”

  “I’m aware. Just like Sabine has nothing to do with you.” His eyes darkened. “But as long as we’re on the subject, at least Sabine no longer lives with me.”

  “That’s not the same thing.” I floundered over the words, which only deepened his glare.

  “You’re right, it’s a very different thing.” His silence was pure restraint, lasting all of a breath before exploding into anger. “I hate it, Lane. I hate that he’s all over your space, and I hate the way you look at him, and I fucking hate how he has a special name for you.”

  “What, ‘Elaine’? It’s my name, Connor. My dad calls me that.”

  “Yeah, well, I’ve never met your dad, aside from that two seconds on Halloween. You’ve never bothered to introduce us.”

  “I didn’t know you wanted to be introduced. We agreed this wasn’t that kind of relationship.”

  “It’s not.”

  “Then why would you say what you said to me?”

  The words burst out of me—poisoned marbles, spilling across the floor. We’d been dancing around that moment since it happened; it hung between us like smoke, stubborn and dark and hard to breathe.

  “Okay, time to stretch my legs.” Paul emerged once more from behind the sculpture, grabbed his jacket off the back of the chair. “This is out of my jurisdiction.”

  “Fuck. I’m sorry.” I stood and caught his arm as he passed on his way to the door. “This is my fault. I’ll go. You can—”
<
br />   “Shut up, Laney. Go on, work it out.” His giant arms tugged me in, squeezed the fight from my bones as his head ducked to my ear. “He’s a mess, but he’s your mess if you want him. If you don’t, you need to tell him. Now.”

  He left me standing there, afraid to turn and face the silence at my back. The headache spread from my temples, stampeded inward behind eyes that burned and itched and pleaded to close. I turned, braced for the glare, or the stonewall, or any variation of ocular weaponry native to Connor’s arsenal.

  Instead, I found him downcast. A vulnerability I’d never seen bloomed bright across his face, working its way into my bones.

  “Why,” I said, softer. “Why that moment, of all the moments in the world?”

  “I know. I was never going to—but, Lane, it was all I knew to say.” He raised his head, hesitant and hopeful, shredding me. “Loving you was the only thing that made sense.”

  “Oh.” There it was again—that same warm thrill spinning through me, slipping along the current of his words. “What happened to keeping it casual?”

  His eyes fell closed at the reminder of how we’d begun—the morning after, at the market, when we’d stood together and proclaimed ourselves nothing more complicated than friends.

  “Is that still all this is for you?”

  “No,” I said, quiet. “It’s more.”

  “Come here.” He opened his arms, and I fell to my knees in front of him, leaned against the familiar angles of his chest. He hunched around me, cheekbone a hard ridge against my scalp, hands smoothing down the length of my hair. My fingers clenched his shirt reflexively; I forced them back to neutral. “Tell me what you want. Total honesty.”

  “I don’t know what to say.” I pulled back and searched his face, felt a burst of panic as I watched his walls go up, incrementally, at the sound of my guarded voice. Felt him fall away from me with every short, barely controlled breath. “Don’t look at me like that, Connor. I wasn’t expecting any of this.”