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“What is that?”
He holds a jar the size of a lip balm container, and a roll of bandages.
“It’s medicine, close your eyes.”
“Why?” You ask, wary of the substance in his hands, wary of sympathy–is-pity and scorn. Wary of him, of anyone who knows you like he does and still sticks around. The inevitability in the darkness of the alley terrifies you, the shadows that dance across the sharp edges of his face. He is so much older than ten now. You feel like a child trapped in this body that startles you everytime you catch a glimpse of your own reflection. When did he grow? When did you?
“Just close them,” He says. Irritation blurs into an obscure unquantifiable something else in his tone.
His shin presses into your thigh and the alley is much too small for the both of you, and you shut your
eyes and he is still there.
His calloused, boxer’s-broken fingers brush the hair from your face and his touch is like a hearth and
did he ever realise it? You know that he did, that he does. You just don’t understand why. He follows - who else? - follows you to your created hells and magnanimously forgives you each time. Why do you do this? Why do you pull him down in this inertial game of run and chase when you know you are only leading him into the lion’s mouth? Why do you accept his generosity for what it is not and will never be? Why do you do this, to the only person you have left to fall back on?
The world is lightless and this is what your mother lives in and this is what you will live in and your life is over and you are entirely alone. You’ve pushed away everyone that ever gave a damn about you and run and run to get nowhere but the foot of an unclimbable cliff, and you may have been able to scale once but that was it, your energy is spent. You own their dog, their name, and yet God Dog still owns you. Your faith, family, friends, all of it gone in a haze of smoke.
You are falling into a pit of pitch-black despair and you wish that someone was looking down to catch you but they’re all just watching to see if you’ll crash. Do you hurt when you break, or are you good enough? Do you care at all that he’s going to marry Mira someday and you will always be alone, or are you good enough to survive this and everything else that comes your way?
The day you ran away someone told you that you were grown up, now, that you could never cry again. And yet your face is wet and there’s salt on your lips and this is the long overdue moment he walks away and doesn’t look back.
The medicine is cold as ice on your skin.
“Yohan.”
He doesn’t say it, but you can hear it all the same. Come back home.
You can’t let yourself want it too badly, not now when he’s around. It would be too easy to let him take you back, to make you give up all this. What would you be then?
“I can’t,” you say, and you laugh because if you start to sob you’ll never stop. “It’ll break mom’s heart.”
He sighs. “Can’t you stop trying so hard, just right now?”
So you do. You press your face into his shoulder, and he envelops you into his arms, hides the world world away behind his back and runs his hands through your hair. You can smell the iron of your blood, the yellow-tinted bitterness of the medication on your skin, the expensive fabric softener that clings to his clothes and reminds you again that you shouldn’t be so close, or you’ll taint it. But he holds you like you are precious, like you are something more than a filthy thing whose worth ends at the ends of your knuckles and all your broken bones. You cry like a child; for the blood on your knuckles the first time you raised your fists against a flurry of stones, the cuts on your feet as you ran down the mountain with Eden in your arms and nobody chasing after you, for your mother’s shrieks, Mira crying and Zack’s eyes narrowing like he was building a fortress with his own being, looking away from you, who waited in the shadows so long that they consumed you. Zack’s crumpled form in the boxing ring, when you both realised that he couldn’t save you. The years you have spent alone, sleeping on dark streets and starving for days and how cold it has been, no matter how many layers you hid in.
His touch is warm as a hearth, but it won’t last. Eventually, you will draw back, walk into the shadows and refuse to look back. Someday he’ll stop chasing after you. You’ll lose everything you have left.
But not now. Right now, you have him and he isn’t letting go. So you hold on for as long as you can, pretending that the sun will not rise again.