A Tub of Cold Water

It wasn’t sunlight that woke me up the following morning. It wasn’t birds singing a lovely tune while I wallowed in the deepest pits of painful hellfire. It was thunder, followed by lightning, followed by water rushing down the drainpipe right beside my window that sounded like a whooshing waterfall. It was all madness and crackling fire concealed inside a dark grey abyss.

I found that when I turned my head, I wasn’t resting against a pillow or my mattress. It was a chest concealed under a burgundy Dr. Pepper t-shirt. His chest rose and fell peacefully and his pale hand was wrapped around my shoulders, dangling beside my face close enough to kiss. His nails were nibbled to bits and his hand opened and closed into a fist like it was a sleeping habit.

I remembered the dream I had, Sawyer’s arms swooping down to curl me into his chest and take me to bed. He cared for me, tended to my bruises as he lay beside me. He pressed his hand against my cracked rib and smoothed his thumb over in a silent kind of way to make it better, even though we both knew that it wouldn’t make anything better. I told him to smile and his whole pale face lit up like the moon outside. He smiled like he had outside my house and how it made his stormy jade eyes light up like beautiful stars above us.

“It was real,” I whispered in a breathy tone, the words tingling my lips as they left them.

“Hmm,” he groaned, shuffling his shoulders back into the headboard as I rolled my head back and looked at him.

My easy smile sobered as my eyes tried to blink the image away. I cleared my throat and looked down at his chest again, where my head still rested. “Good morning, Skye.”

“Morning, baby.” He yawned before carefully stretching his arms above his head, trying his best to keep his chest stationary.

I cleared my throat once more and suddenly, I could feel every ache, every sore, every bruise, and every crack in my body like it was on livewire. My voice came out, instead of rested like it was prior, rough and hoarse, like I had bronchitis, “How long have you been here?”

“All night, baby. Don’t you remember? I scooped you up from the stairs and carried you off to bed.” He grumbled in an exhausted voice, his fingers tripping pieces of hair behind my ear and curling the pad of his smooth, even, un-spliced fingertip against my cartilage and down against my earlobe.

“Oh.” I mumbled, my eyes staring down into the r of his t-shirt and tracing over it with my pupils.

I could feel him exhale and frankly, it hurt my chest the way he did it. I didn’t know what else to say. I was disappointed. I was well more than disappointed, I was angry. Angry at myself for imagining Sawyer in my bed, for dreaming so vividly, I thought it was real. Angry because I had the opportunity to kiss him—on various accounts, mind you—and missed every apt opportunity. Angry for letting it just slip through my fingers like sand at the beach, water from the waves, light from the moon.

Sucking in a slow, deep breath, I pushed myself from Skye’s chest and peeled myself from the bed, only to feel all of the pain and white hot agony of the earlier hours of the night. My legs gave way and I slammed down onto my knees with a surprised cry.

Skye scrambled from the bed and shot down to my side, his hands on my biceps, trying to pull me from my hunched position. He was cooing something hopeful, helpful, and fearful into my ear, but I couldn’t hear it. All I heard was rushing water in my ears and the sounds of an Indian battle drum on my temples, besides all of the pain in the world from my broken rib to my bruised body.

“Get away!” I yelled in an undertone of guttural throat vibrations. My thighs were shaking and my body seemed to be set to quiver as I tried to get a tight-lipped gain on my pain. Shaky breathing and hot tears left in a wake of sizzling torture and bruising sensation.

He didn’t remove himself from my side, and that only led to more thrashing on my part, which felt like electric shocks flowing through my veins. Skye restlessly tried to steady me, but he didn’t understand my tantrum was more anger than it was desperation. I was tired of his careful touch, his perfectly crafted words, and his demeanor full of equality. I had had a taste of the pure arrogance and careless gruff that sculpted Sawyer, and I had found myself yearning for more of it.

A few minutes later, the trembling had stopped rattling my bones, but my bad temper was still evident. It wasn’t Skye’s fault for my mood change. It was the fact that I wanted something so potent and deceiving when I could have the classic Prince Charming. I could have what every little girl dreams of, but I didn’t want it now.

“Damn it, Aubrey,” Skye growled through perfectly hidden anger. “Let me just help you.”

So, I stopped fighting. Let’s face it. I couldn’t fight much longer before I’d pass out from pain. I lulled my head back against his shoulder, felt my body slacken against his like it was deadweight, and whispered through unmoving lips, “Just take the pain away, Skye. Take it all away.”

Slowly, he started to straighten, which straightened my body. One tight-lipped scream passed through my lips before the world blurred and blackened.

_______________________________________________________

I could feel my dreams coming along and fading out before I could make sense of anything besides translucent skin and murky jade eyes, taunting dark red dashes and white scars. I could hear his voice that was like the night, ghostly and alluring. The dark angel in my dream was shirtless with black jeans hanging low and blood running down the insides of his arms. He was beautiful.

The room was dark, the streetlights shine flowing in through my bedroom windows. I looked around, my vision doubling, and then quadrupling, before forming a drunken haze that blurred any color together. There seemed not to be color, though. Just black, white, and grey.

That was that. It had to be a dream. As I felt my head spin, I watched someone slide and glide gracefully onto their feet through my window. Straightening his back, his dark jeans clung to his hips and tried to hug his legs. Rolling his shoulders forward, his evergreen V-neck crinkled and flattened once more, exposing a jagged scar zigzagging across the dip in his clavicle. My eyes ventured up to his, black as the night around us beneath sheens of dark, lake water green. His black hair was a disheveled, twining over his face and clouding his eyes.

Sawyer. This had to be a dream.

“What are you doing here?” I whispered as I tried to look away from him and drink in my surroundings. When I was successful, I found my bedroom was neat and orderly. Definitely a dream.

He shrugged and shoved his hands in his pockets. He balanced on the ball of his foot for a moment, weighing whether he wanted to step toward me or bolt out my window. “When you didn’t show up at school today, I got worried.”

My eyebrow arched as I swung my feet around the edge of the bed and felt cold hardwood steal all my warmth. I released a jagged whisper full of groans and sighs. Sawyer took his first step towards me, his hands outstretched as if he was trying to grab my pain and strangle it from my body. “Why were you worried?”

His hands fell back to his hips and into cloth and denim. Shaking his head, Sawyer stared downcast. “I just worry about you, okay? More now than before, obviously.” He waved his hand toward the stairs, referring to my dream from last night how he scooped me up and laid in bed with me, talking until I passed out.

My head was now shaking, more in disbelief than anything else. “I don’t want to be a charity case. I’m not a charity case.”

“Am I not allowed to care about anything besides my razor?” his voice piqued, his eyes blazing, the air between us electrifying before freezing in a nanosecond.

“I—” I stopped short, all breath leaving my body in a whirlwind of confusion and accusation. “I didn’t say that.”

“Perhaps not, but you couldn’t have implied it any better than that.” Sawyer growled before sighing so quickly, you could have felt the irritation wafting from his body. “Look, I didn’t come here to justify myself.”

I stared at him imploringly, challenging him to continue, but he didn’t. “Why did you come here, then?”

His eyes pierced through me in a haunting manner, forcing all the warmth out of my body only to be replaced by hollowed cold. “I came here to—to take care of you, Aubrey. Because I haven’t stopped thinking about you since last night, since you came to the park, since you watched me from across the cafeteria. Because when I’m with you, I don’t think about my razor at home.”

I looked him over, my eyes drying from his words, forcing the haze to thicken over most of my senses. “What?”

He blinked twice, his mouth twisted into an uneasy silence. “I won’t say it again, Aubrey. I know you heard me.”

Slowly, I felt myself pulling up from the bed and walking toward him. He didn’t move and a good part of me even believed he didn’t breathe. There were only three sounds through my bedroom that stuck out above the silence: my feet clapping against the ground, my loud, shallow breathing, and his heart hammering in his chest.

When I was in front of him, I slipped my hand up his side until it rested over his heart, my other one coiling against his neck and tugging on messy, tangled inky curls. He was taller than me by a good five inches, my eyes pulling up to the base of his throat, but he looked down into mine.

Just as muddled as his eyes were, his voice was doubly confused. “Aubrey?”

“God,” I whispered as I felt his breath wash over my recently wetted bottom lip, “Don’t let this be a dream.”

Before Sawyer could say anything, set me straight to the path of waking up, or tell me what I feared most—that I wasn’t dreaming—I pushing my mouth to his. His lips were tender and chapped, but as I slicked my tongue against his lip, they moistened and became fuller with demand. He pressed one hand to my hip and the other in my hair, twining my ginger curls through his fingers and groaned lowly between my lips.

As he twisted me gingerly and backed me against the arm of my rundown couch, his mouth urgent and insistent against mine with heavy demand, I thanked God for the first time in a long time. He finally did something right.