I mean, well played, fate. Well played. Okay, I give in. I’ll accept the pitiful scraps you throw my way.
And I’ll be damn grateful.
***
My knee is broken. The doctor explained it to me. Blunt-force injury. Broken ligaments. Broken meniscus. Broken everything.
Like I am. Curled up on my bunk bed in prison, I feel the pain radiating upward, right into my soul. Still don’t know how long I’ll be locked up this time, but it’s looking bad. I’m seventeen now, and it seems the state has decided I’m old enough to be tried as an adult. The lawyers aren’t optimistic.
No adult to take my side, support my case. Parents absent. My mother gone.
She’s dead. If she were alive, she’d have come back for me, called me. Visited me. Right?
Right?
The guards step come down the hallway, and I shiver, curl up tighter. I’ll get out of here. I won’t be here forever. Shane. I hope Shane is okay, but I know he’s not. His Native blood is easier to see than mine. Plus he looks younger than me. I hear stories circulating among the prisoners, and I know he’s living a nightmare.
Shane’s mine to protect. My only family. But there’s nothing I can do to help him.
Nothing’s okay. I’m not safe. This isn’t safe. The guard is coming closer and closer, and I don’t know if I can survive another night in this place.
Need to get out. Need to get up. Need to move. But I can’t. Can’t move. My knee burns. My heart hammers. A scream is building up in my throat.
Fuck, fuck, fuck! Let me out. Let me—
“Seth. Wake up.” Feather-light touches on my face, my hair. “It’s just a nightmare.”
Nightmare?
My eyes are blurry. I lift a hand to rub at them, and it’s shaking. My heartbeat is pounding in my skull, in my ears. It’s not the images that linger. It’s the feeling of helplessness, despair and terror—an acid taste in my mouth, a cold burn of fear that has my skin breaking into goosebumps.
Not a nightmare. Memories.
I’m not there. I’m not trapped. I didn’t stay in prison. The pain I feel is part of the memory. I can move. My knee isn’t broken anymore.
I’m not broken.
Repeating that to myself in case I forget, I cautiously twist onto my side on the bed and crack my eyes open. Light stabs through them, right to my brain, and I groan, throwing an arm over my face.
The mattress shifts and someone—Manon—pads quietly around the bed to stand in front of me, a beautiful shadow against the gray light of dawn seeping through the blinds.
“Want to talk about it?” she whispers and sits down on the bed beside me.
“About what?”
“Your dream. You kept saying you had to get out. And you were searching for someone.” She hesitates. “You seemed to be in pain.”
Dammit, she seems as shaken as I feel. I scared her, that much is clear, and I wonder what I looked like, thrashing about on the bed, muttering things. Like a crazy person, I guess.
Awesome.
“You said it. Just a nightmare. It’s over now.” I sit up and straighten my bad leg, flexing it just to make sure I’m right—that the pain I remember in my knee is only a pale ghost of the agony I’d felt back then.
Yeah. Bearable. Survivable.
“But…” She puts a hand on my ankle, and I jerk instinctively away. Too soon.
“Don’t, okay? Just don’t. I…”
My voice goes out, and my lungs are too small for breathing. I pant in the sudden quiet.
She pulls away, her face stricken. “Okay.”
I’m still shaking like a leaf. Not free of the memory yet, like I thought. My body remembers, taking longer to believe it’s over. It reacts as if I’m still there, in that bunk bed, my life gone to hell, my body beaten and battered, every touch causing me pain.
Even as I want to comfort her, repeat the lie, tell her I’m okay, I can’t. Not when I’m barely holding it together. I need a minute or two for the shudders to pass, for my heartbeat to slow.
But by then she’s standing up, fiddling with the tiny buckle of her narrow belt. “I should be going,” she says quietly.
I wince.
“Need to get home and change, then talk to my studies advisor,” she goes on.
Of course. She has other crap on her plate, better things to do than to be wiping vomit from my face and being shoved off when she tries to help me. She has a life. I’m only a temporary problem, an accident that belongs to the past.
What the fuck? Stop pitying yourself, Seffers, for chrissakes.
You knew all this before you jumped in. You knew this thing between you and her could never happen – even if she wanted you. Even if she didn’t have an almost boyfriend.
You don’t belong in a relationship. You’re an ex-con. You have a rap sheet. You don’t deserve her and aren’t what she needs.
I shake my head as she sits on the rickety chair by the door to put on her shoes. Slim ankles, fine hands, slender fingers tightening the old-fashioned straps. Low heels, a flash of silver, and then a curl of dark hair falling over her eyes.
Beautiful.
“Don’t look,” she whispers.
“Why?” She’s right, I shouldn’t, but I can’t stop – looking, wanting her.
“My feet. They’re ugly. Blistered and callused from the pointes I use.” She winces. “Used.”
“You look fine to me,” I whisper.
Her eyes flash to me, vulnerable and confused. Then she sighs and gets up, her expression closing off, going distant. “Asher texted me to say Rafe will be here soon.”
“Okay.”
Something feels off, but I don’t know what. Is she still upset?
“Will you be all right?” she asks.
Yeah, I will be. I need to say something, keep her here just a while longer so that I can gather my scattered wits and apologize.
But she’s gone long before I can, before I draw enough air to speak, and by then it’s too fucking late.
Story of my life.
***
Rafe is all business when he arrives. He makes me get up and shower, and frowns when I limp on my way to the bathroom.
“Fucking leg still bothering you? Damn, man, are you going to PT and doing the exercises I showed you? You should be better by now.”
“I’m fine,” I snap, out of sorts since Manon left, a sourness in my mouth that has nothing to do with the concussion and more to do with her absence from my side. The fact I upset her. And the nightmare.
I think back at it. Haven’t had so many of those this past year. Not until now. Christ, that call, the knowledge my mom is alive, rattled me real good.
“Seth, dammit. Watch it.”
His words register a second after pain shoots up my hip from having hit the handle of the open door.
Ow, fuck. Just what I need.
“Jesus, man.” Rafe guides me to the toilet, slams the seat closed and pushes me down on top. “What’s going on? Spit it out.”
“Nothing’s fucking wrong.”
“I said, spit it out,” Rafe leans over me, crowding me in with his large frame, “or I’ll call Zane, and you know how he gets. He’ll be here in five minutes to chew you out over the fact you didn’t tell us your leg still hurts. And then there’s the accident you didn’t think to mention, and the funk you’re walking around in.”
Fuck me. “I’m telling you, I’m fine.”
“Let me see.” And before I can protest and shove him away, he’s pushing up my sweat pants leg, baring my knee brace. His eyes widen. “A brace? When the hell did this happen? Last I knew the break was higher up—”
I do shove him before he catches on, but yeah, you guessed it—too late again.
“This isn’t the leg you broke,” he says and shoves me right back, so that my back hits the toilet tank, and I hiss out a breath. Now my bruises from the other night have bruises.
Dammit. “Rafe—”
“I said.” He pokes a finger into my chest, and his jaw clenches hard. “Start talking.”