Tiny Dancer

by J. M. Worthington

I tapped his shoulder. “Lucas, going for the zombie look?”

  His whole body jerked in response to my touch. He went to open his mouth but quickly closed it. Talking appeared not to be worth the effort. Even shifting his head in my direction seemed to be unbearable.

  I placed the back of my hand against his forehead. He felt cool, but it was no doubt he was sick.

  “Do you need me to take you to a doctor?”

  He shook his head no, causing his head to roll around on his shoulders.

  “Well, at the very least, you need to be in bed.”

  He stared at me blankly before saying, “Still trying to get me in the sack.”

  He smirked, and even in his disheveled state, I loved the way his mouth looked when he did it.

  It would almost have been flirtatious, if he didn’t tumble and fall over on me. He was exhausted, and I wondered why his parents let him out of the house in that condition.

  I adjusted my body to help him stand upright. “Again, you need to be in bed. Where’s your parents at?”

  He shrugged. “Mom’s gone to Texas again, and Dad’s with one of his whores,” he slurred.

  There was something unspoken in his voice but the hurt screamed loud and clear from his eyes.

  “Are you high?” I asked and cringed when his eyes cracked fully open.

  “No, I’m sick.” He paused to catch his breath. “I’m not the bastard you think I am.”

  Lucas and bastard didn’t belong in the same sentence but delirious did. Something told me that he was in a plight he was familiar with.

  “Come on, sweetie.” I took the can of soda and doctor’s prescription out of his hand and laid them on the counter when I came to the front of the line.

  After I paid, I turned to find Lucas leaning against the wall, rolling his forehead along the brick inlay. I took his hand to guide him out.

  I struggled with what to do. He couldn’t even walk without the help of his cane and was in no shape to drive, especially his motorcycle, but I couldn’t carry him on my back, either. I scanned the parking lot and was relieved when I saw his Jeep parked.

  “Looks like you are coming home with me.”

  Lucas slurred the statement, “I can’t stay at your place?”

  Confused, I asked, “Why?”

  “Because it’s my dad’s fuck pad,” he said as he fell into the passenger side of his Jeep, unresponsive.

  The blood drained from my face and an array of dizzying images fluttered through my mind. It was as if time stood still, and everything finally made sense between us.

  We were both running from the ghost in our past and toward the biggest monster of them all — the unknown of the future.

  I tossed his cane on the floorboard and fished around in his pocket, pulling out the keys to his Jeep. My mind never stopped playing every small detail we had shared together.

  I jumped up in the driver seat and started the Jeep. Lucas head fell over against my arm. “I think I’m falling in love with you,” he murmured.

  I’d never been in love. I vowed I never would allow myself to. But what I felt for Lucas was different from anything I’d ever felt before. He had become the most important person in my life, and I would be whatever he needed me to be. Even if it was only a friend.

  His head slipped down onto my lap. I liked it. I ran my hand into his silky curls and untied his bun. He didn’t protest. I drove his Jeep with one hand, the other hand played with each of his curls.

  Lucas was different than I wanted to give him credit for. He was one of those rare people who had no clue of how beautiful he was, how intelligent he was, how gentle his soul was, how good his heart was, he was simply … Lucas.

  Parking the truck outside of Lucas’s house, I nudged him and helped him to sit up.

  We struggled to walk up the steps to his front door. I thought he was basically passed out, but he raised his head long enough to inform me the door was unlocked.

  We stepped into a grand foyer. No doubt, it was the nicest home I’d ever been in. My eyes traveled over a long line of pictures of whom I suspected was Lucas’s ancestors. Lucas told me once that he was like none of them. He was right. I tried to find the resemblances to Lucas. There was none, but the majority of them did have the rugged ginger look his dad had going for him.

  My eyes looked out over a formal dining room. The table was obviously custom and could easily seat at least twenty people. I couldn’t help but imagine all the meals served on it.

  Lucas hutched over and his heaviness informed me I couldn’t get him much farther. I stepped through a double glass door into what appeared to be the family room.

  I paused to take in a sofa table lined with pictures of Lucas growing up. He had been stunning his entire life. There was one picture that stood out from all the rest. Lucas appeared to be around eight or nine years old. He was standing in front of a dirt bike, smiling a lopsided, snaggletooth grin. One curl fell over his left eye and I was positive I dreamed about that little boy before.

  Lucas stumbled against me, bringing my attention back to what was really important ... him.

  “Come on, sweetie. I need to get you on a horizontal surface before you fall.”

  I lowered Lucas onto the couch and tossed the bag from the pharmacy on the coffee table. I had to think my options out and needed to strip him out of his clothes. But it was Lucas, and I didn’t know if I could go there and keep my mind from entering the gutter.

  “I need to get these clothes off, good-looking.”

  He shook his head with some semblance of understanding and flashed that lopsided grin that rendered me useless. It was such a natural response of his I almost decided it needed its own name.

  “I’ll show you mine, if you show me yours,” he said. His delirium had hit the point it was making him deranged.

  He started pulling his shirt over his head, but with his eyes closed, he had little success and was unable to free his head from the shirt, he just sat there with it wrapped over his head like a turban. With modesty the last thing I needed to worry about, I shrugged it off.

  My imagination failed me. Lucas’s naked chest was stunning. Quite frankly, his entire upper body was a work of art. He seemed to have a slender build in his clothes, but there was nothing slender about Lucas in the flesh. Nothing at all. His muscular arms were large; his shoulders were broad and toned. I wished I’d invested in a camera phone because a picture of him in that state of dress would have made an outstanding screen saver.

  I wondered what other surprises lurked under his clothes and let my eyes wander over his well-defined abdominal muscles and deep V that extended into the band of his jeans and pointed to the promise land.

  Damn, Annie, he’s sick and you’re staring at his crotch.

  I blushed. Lucas was sick and in my mind, I was screwing him. It would have infuriated me to have him doing the same thing in reverse. I slipped off his boots and jerked open his belt buckle. The yanking motion as I pulled it through the loops on his jeans, piqued his curiosity.

  “Precious, I know how you can make it feel better.” He raised an unsteady hand and caressed the skin over my lower arm. “But you need to be careful because I like it rough.”

  All I know is rough.

  “You can’t handle my rough right now,” I said and unbuttoned his jeans before slipping them down his long, muscular legs.

  I sat down on the coffee table and took the prescription out of the bag to read the direction on the bottle. It was a prescription for Dilantin. Not a typical street drug. Take two pills every six hours for neuropathic pain.

  I handed two tablets to Lucas and helped him get it to his mouth. I had to hold the Coke bottle up to his lips myself. Something was breaking the strong, powerful Lucas. It was heart-wrenching.

  “Naptime, good-lookin’.”

  As I lifted his legs onto the couch, he whispered, “Stay.”

  The couch was oversized, there was enough room for me to squeeze next to him. I should've left after
where my thoughts had led, but I was more terrified of leaving him alone than acting on my impulses.

  He held my hand over his chest and fell asleep almost instantly. As his breathing evened out, I drifted off into my own nighttime slumber.

  It took a minute for me to adjust to the darkness and gather my bearings. My muscle cramps had ceased sometime in the night but my head still pounded, every cell in my body screamed out in pain, and my bladder spasmed to be let free. Then I felt a small warm body squirm at my side.

  Crap, I never let them stay.

  I glanced down at the woman who couldn’t understand the word leave and my heart stilled. My Annie. Her head was resting on my chest, her leg carelessly thrown over mine, trapping me under her.

  The night came flooding back to me. I remembered getting sick again and running to the grocery store for some meds, her taking care of me. She stayed.

  She had fallen asleep on me ... literally on my body ... and she was still here.

  No one had taken care of me since I was fifteen and my granny nursed me back to health from a bad case of the flu. I loved that it was Annie that tended to my wounds this time. She had no ulterior motive. She simply saw someone who needed help and she cared.

  I rest my head back on the pillow it was propped on and let her physical closeness fill me. Touch was the most underrated of the five senses. Everyone was aware that losing the sense of sight, sound, taste, and smell was a handicap. However, the truest disability of them all was having no one to hold you when life got too much. Lack of touch was a handicap I believed Annie and I shared.

  “Lucas,” her voice was raspy and still full of sleep.

  I held onto her a second longer, not wanting the moment to end. “You took care of me.”

  Somehow saying the words cemented in my head what she meant to me — she had become my world.

  She sat up on the side of the couch, and my body instantly felt cold and alone.

  “Don’t leave me, precious.”

  She peeked back at me over her shoulder and placed her hand on my forehead. “No fever but I see the delirium is still sit in.” She picked up her cellphone off the coffee table and looked at the time. It was 4:58 AM. “I need to make a pit stop in the little girl’s room. If you would point the way.”

  I pointed down the hall, told her third door on the right, and suddenly realized I had been stripped down to my boxers. I slipped on my pants, thinking about Annie undressing me, then retreated for a long overdue trip to the restroom myself.

  As I watched my piss splash into the toilet bowl, I closed my eyes and thought about how peaceful Annie’s face looked as she slept on my chest. And the realization of it all hit me: I’d lived in the same house my entire life but I never knew what home felt like until Annie fell asleep in my arms.

  I shook my head. Annie only wants to be friends.

  I found her in the kitchen pouring a can of chicken noodle soup in a bowl.

  “Swanky kitchen, hope you don’t mind me making myself at home,” she said and placed the bowl in the microwave.

  Mind? I loved seeing her in my place, surrounded by the stuff I’ve grown up with.

  She started punching the buttons on the state-of-the-art microwave over the stovetop. The tale-tell sign she had grown frustrated was when she bit down on the corner of her lip. I walked up behind her to punch the time into the microwave. She leaned back against me, and I was lost.

  “I’ve had some issues the last few days and had some killer muscle cramps. I shouldn’t have taken my meds until I was back home.”

  I’ve never been one who believed I should explain myself to anyone. My life was no one else’s business. However, I wanted Annie to understand. I wanted her to see that a part of me was worth all the trouble.

  When the microwave beeped, I took the bowl out and placed it on the bar, then held the stool out for Annie. As I gathered a spoon and napkin out of the drawer, I stumbled backward.

  I caught myself and heard Annie laugh. The sparks flew. Only this time, they didn’t shoot to my groin but stopped in the middle of my chest. It was surreal.

  “Dude, you really need to go back to bed. You still look like shit, and I would hate to be the cause of something happening to the infamous Mr. Lucas Carter. The lynch mob would be out for blood.”

  I shook my head and tried suppressing a smile. “I’ve already told you that I wasn’t sleeping with you. But I do think I need to lay down.”

  We ate our soup, and she followed me to my room. It was six AM by then but I wasn’t ready for the night to end. Having her in my room did weird things to my heart. “Stay, I sleep better when you’re near.”

  She stared at me, and for a second, I thought she would bolt but she nodded her head and crawled under the covers beside me.

  “I sleep better with you too.” Kissing me on the forehead, she said, “Why didn’t you tell me that was your dad’s house?”

  I racked my brain, trying to remember when I told her that fact. Nothing was coming but she knew and I wouldn’t lie to her about it.

  “It was your home. I didn’t want to taint it with his shit.”

  “I understand why you freaked out that first night. But in case you were wondering, I would have slept with you.”

  “I know. A guy can sense those things.”

  “But I’m glad we didn’t because something tells me that you wouldn’t have talked to me again and I like us.”

  She was right. If I hadn’t freaked out about her living in my dad’s house, I would’ve slept with her and thrown her away like I have so many before, and I would have missed out on the best friend I’d ever had.

  Annie deserved more than me, more than some hookup in the back of some guy’s car, some asswipe’s tree house, someone broken.

  “I’m broken.”

  When I finally said the words, I’d thought a million times, it blew even my mind, but I wanted her to know.

  The way she stroked her hand over my jaw caused me to flinch. Never had I had someone touch me with such tenderness. “What are you talking about? You’re not broken.”

  I closed my eyes unable to look at her and say the following, “Yes, I am. The day I told you I flipped? I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.”

  Then something magical happened. She softly but briefly kissed my lips. It was chaste and quick and the best.

  Broken was an inherit trait I’d learned to live with. MS was as much a part of my body as my legs and arms were. The limitations were a challenge I fought every day to overcome. I hated it. I hated the symptoms. I hated the pain. The embarrassment of when my legs refuse to listen to my brain were the worst. I just wanted to be the guy who didn’t have to hold his breath when I climbed up into a tree house, dashed up the stairs, but I was broken and unrepairable.

  “We’re all broken in some ways. Some of us just have more visible scars than others. I know it’s not the life you signed up for but life often gives us obstacles we don’t want or even deserve,” Annie said and smiled. That earth-shattering smile. I loved when she smiled at me like that. It made me feel like I was the most important person in her world. Made me feel like a king. I wanted to look at that smile every day for the rest of my life. “We can be broken together,” she added.

  Broken with Annie didn’t sound so bad. Anything sounded great with Annie.

  “They changed my meds three days ago, and it has really kicked my ass.”

  “Is that what made you sick?” she asked.

  I nodded. “For the last three days, I haven’t even been able to get out of bed.”

  “But you still called me every day.”

  I nodded again. “Hearing your voice is the best medicine. It makes me forget all the bad.”

  She laid down and curled up to my side.

  “When you went to rehab, it wasn’t for drugs. It was a physical rehab?”

  “Yeah,” I said and kissed the top of her head.

  “Why didn’t you correct me when I assumed it was for drugs?”


  “Because people will believe what they want to. As long as I know the truth, that’s all that matters.”

  An hour easily passed by, and as it did, our bodies gradually melded into one intertwining blanket of warmth and familiarity. My body ached. I was exhausted but savored the feel of her head tucked softly on my shoulder. Slowly, so slowly, sleep came over us both and held us captive until well after lunch. Then we were woken by her unnatural shrill.

  Chapter 19

  Annie Prieto

  “I won’t have you sleeping with her under my roof,” a lady screamed from the foot of the bed.