Superhero stuff

 

 

TWENTY MINUTES later Micky is no longer shivering as he sits in my nest, every blanket I possess draped over his skinny shoulders. My supplies from bartering and fixing the few things that I do are piled neatly in the corner. I feel a little self-conscious about them. About everything.

As I hold out a hot cup of tea to Micky, he tries to hold my gaze. The weird closeness I felt when we were holding hands hasn’t gone yet. It’s exciting and terrifying—like a really bright light coming at you so fast you can’t see what’s behind it.

Maybe there’s nothing behind it. Then again, maybe there’s everything.

“Don’t you ever worry they’re going to take all this away from you?” he asks.

I’m not sure who he means by “they.”

“I don’t think about the future much,” I reply. It’s true. The present is consuming enough.

“You’re not like anyone else. I’ve never met anyone like you, you know that?” he says.

In the warm glow of my little battery-powered lantern, I stare at my fingers—at the way they briefly touch his as he takes the plastic cup from me, making me shiver all the way to my toes.

If he knew how many times I’ve wished I was like everyone else, I don’t think he’d be saying this or making it seem like being like me is a good thing.

“I was really worried when you phoned me,” he says.

I meet his gaze, then look away. I get the feeling he’s asking me with his eyes if I want to talk about it. And I do. Surprisingly I want to tell him everything. Every. Single. Fucking. Thing. But… I don’t know where to start, so I say nothing.

“I know I talk a lot, but I can be pretty good at listening too.” He dips his head. It’s such a shy gesture that it makes my heart trip over itself.

“I don’t know how to tell you,” I admit eventually.

I can’t believe there is such a beautiful boy in my room, looking at me as if he wants to know what’s going on in my head more than anything. Yet, at the same time, I know he’s real. The hard, heavy way my heart beats in his presence makes this as real as it gets for me.

“You can trust me,” he whispers, dropping his head again. “After last night I need you to know that. What you did for—”

“I want to trust you,” I cut in before he can thank me or say anything else embarrassing. I run my thumb down the seam of the tiles in front of me. “It’s just—” I meet his gaze. “—don’t be… grateful, just—” I take a deep breath. “—be my friend?” I shrug, feeling awkward. “I don’t want you to think you have to do anything to make up or….”

Wow, I’m so bad at this, and Micky is watching me with the most patient expression I’ve ever seen.

“It comes under ‘stuff you do if you care about someone,’” I say, looking at the tiles again.

“I care about you too.”

I clasp my hand over my mouth to stop the laughter that bursts out of me. I don’t even know why I’m laughing. Maybe it’s because it shocks me that he says things like this so easily. On some level I’m scared that he says things like this to everyone, but the bright warmth that fills my chest doesn’t care right now.

When I glance up, Micky looks amused, his eyes sparkling like sunlight on water.

“You don’t know how glad I am that I broke my phone,” he whispers, still smiling.

All at once my good feelings nose-dive. Instead I feel awful, because he didn’t break his phone, did he? That was me.

I owe it to him to trust him. All I’ve done is lie.

“I broke your phone,” I say quietly. I push my fingers against the floor until the pain from my sore arm bites into me.

“What?” His eyebrows furrow, making him look so sweetly confused.

“I fixed the screen, but then I broke it. I didn’t mean to,” I add, maybe a little pointlessly. Well, I kind of hope Micky wouldn’t be here with me if he thought I was the kind of person to do stuff like that on purpose. “I wanted a picture of you,” I mumble.

I remember the list of things I wrote down, all the possible reactions I thought Micky might have. The gentle shrug he gives me was definitely not one of them.

“It’s no big thing,” he says. “Just an accident, right?”

“I lied to you.”

That’s the worst thing. I’ve lied about lots of stuff.

“Because you thought I’d be angry?”

“I was scared you’d think I was a creep.”

Micky shakes his head. “I would never think that. You gave me your phone. And like I said, I’m glad it broke. We wouldn’t be here otherwise. I wouldn’t be sitting here, feeling like this, with you. We wouldn’t have found one another.”

Found one another? It’s funny, but that’s exactly how I feel when I’m with him: found. Micky deserves more, though.

Leaning forwards, I reach around him into my nest and pull out my pad from where I stored it earlier. Carefully I unwrap it from the plastic bag protecting it.

I hold it in my hands, staring at the curling, ripped cover, the badly drawn sharks. It’s battered and it’s been through a lot—much like me, maybe. I find myself smiling again—it sneaks up on me. Micky probably thinks I’m missing a few neural connections by now, and he’s probably right. I hold the pad out to him and find myself blushing as he takes it almost reverently.

His bony fingers trace the faded shapes on the front cover. “I remember this. Shark hunting, right?”

I nod.

“Loki and his superhero stuff?”

I notice he didn’t say supervillain, even though “supervillain” was the joke. But we aren’t pretending now, are we? God, I hope we aren’t pretending.

“Sort of.” I want to tell him my pad holds my every thought and a whole lot of confusion that’s been in my head these past few weeks. It probably doesn’t even make sense, but perhaps it’s a start.

Somehow I know this is the biggest risk I’ve ever taken. It feels so much bigger than following Dollman and looking for sharks. Bigger than telling Micky I lied to him. I’m letting someone into my head. Someone after Dashiel—and perhaps closer, too, than I ever let Dashiel. But after what happened last night in the snow, everything seems different. Changed. There was a barrier, and now it’s gone. I hope it’s gone.

I get up and wander over to the high window. My hands shake. I can’t watch Micky reading. It would do some serious damage to my already virtually imploding heart. His easy acceptance so far has completely thrown me.

Snow falls steadily now through the starless dark. I stare outside and think about the foxes I saw the other day. I wonder where they’ve gone now.

“Is this me?” I hear Micky whisper a while later.

“Yeah,” I answer without turning around. My breath makes hot clouds on the net of reinforced glass in the window.

There could be no mistaking that I’ve written about him. Endlessly.

I guess he knows everything now.