*
I’m led up and down staircases, down long dank halls, but somewhere along the way, the air feels less stagnant. The floors go from dirt and rough to smooth and cold beneath my feet as we silently trudge along.
After what feels like eons, we come to a stop, and I’m sore everywhere. Utter exhaustion plagues me. My eyelids are heavy, and like a trapped dam, my eyes are filled with so much pressure, but no tears are coming out.
I’m still waiting for reality to sink its claws into me.
Waiting for that inevitable punch to the gut that this is actually happening.
Keys jingle together. The hand that had been wrapped around my arm lets go, and I instinctively wrap my other hand around it, running my fingers over the sore spots as I listen closely.
A lock clicks open, and a door opens moments later. I’m half-expecting to be shoved in. Instead, the hand lightly pushes the lower part of my back. I take a disoriented step forward, and I’m so damn blind, I’m scared I’ll fall into a bottomless hole. But the floor continues on beneath my feet, and I take another stumbling step… and then another.
“You will remove your cover when you’re told to,” the voice demands. “Understand?”
My voice is small, shaky. “I understand.”
The door slams shut.
And I wait.
I don’t know what, exactly, I’m waiting for.
*
Time slows right down.
I feel like I’ve been standing for decades.
It’s only when I feel faint that I hear the softest shuffle in front of me. I tense straight away, disturbed by the realization that I might not have been alone this entire time. The footsteps are soft. Sometimes I hear them, sometimes I don’t, but I’m distinctly aware that I’m being watched.
My skin prickles as the air brushes along my bare skin as though swept by the force of another’s movements.
I lick my lips, twisting my head to the faint sound. My body is heavy, my heart beats wildly in my chest as the strongest scent falls over me. Musky and familiar. I can almost taste that scent on my tongue because I’ve lapped at it hungrily in the past—
The cover is suddenly torn from my head, and I startle, sucking back a gasp as my eyes connect with the broad, muscled chest in front of me. It’s covered in blood and so many scars—some familiar, most not.
I should look up, but I don’t.
My eyes remain pinned to his muscular torso, and then slowly, I follow the scars along, entranced for a single moment by the sheer size of him.
God, there’s so much blood.
His skin is nothing like the sun-kissed tan I remember fondly by the end. It’s pale, the blue veins along his thick forearms protruding, looking like arctic rivulets beneath his skin.
I continue along his torso, vividly aware that he, too, has gone utterly still. I still don’t dare look at him. I’m too frightened, too filled with cowardly shame because—because I have so much regret, and I’m not prepared for this. Not at all.
I don’t realize I’m shaking until I feel my teeth chatter and my jaw is sore from it. I continue to inspect him, continue to look over his giant, bloody frame, but I’m not staring at his face—I’m not confronting the past head-on.
“I’d go back to us throwing rocks in the ocean, Skye. Just you and me. We were still innocent, weren’t we? I was still good, wasn’t I?”
I nodded, fighting back tears. “You were good. We were innocent.”
“It was just us.”
“Yeah.”
“Us, Skye.”