I Am Grey

by Washington, Jane

  “They offered you a job so soon after you finished your doctorate?” I knew that there was an arch to my brows, but I couldn’t help my surprise.

  It wasn’t that he didn’t seem like a high-achiever, he just seemed too intense, like there was a storm inside him that was barely bottled with each morning that he stepped out of his house. He looked like his life had been handed over on a silver platter, but I already knew that his memories were more agony than privilege. Why had his trauma made a success of him, while mine had ruined me?

  “I interned here.” He was closing up, his eyes shutting down the conversation. He didn’t want to be questioned anymore. “I’ve been working here for the last four years. I earned the damn office.”

  I acted without thinking, taking the three remaining steps needed to reach his chair, my right knee slipping to the chair beside his right thigh. My hands were on his shoulders, the muscles tensing beneath my fingers, my left knee moving to the other side of his lap. His entire body seemed to grow hard, a stillness seizing him.

  “Do you deserve it?” I asked. My voice was gentle and cool, reminding him of all the lines he had overstepped; all the rules he had broken; all the ways that he had thrown his privilege back into the face of whoever had given it to him.

  His hands were tight on the arms of the chair. He wasn’t pushing me off, but he also wasn’t pulling me closer.

  “Don’t do this right now.” The words were forced out through his teeth, his voice soft. “Not here. Not now.” Not ever. The last words were unsaid, but his eyes had spoken them all the same.

  Rejection crashed through me. I made to move off the chair, but his arms moved suddenly, twisting around me, pulling me all the way against him. He was … hugging me. I became as still as he had become only a minute earlier, and then, without warning, I shattered. I had cried a storm of tears since the incident, creating a flood to drown myself in over the past year, but this was different. I wasn’t just crying. I was shedding fragments, too broken to feel the emotion attached to each piece as it broke away from me. This one glinted like anger—that one tasted like fear. I was pulling out shards and handing them to him with my eyes closed, and the miraculous thing was …

  He was accepting them.

  He held me tighter, one of his hands cupping the back of my head. It was so tight I could barely breathe, but I felt like it was the only thing keeping me within my skin. I had the oddest sensation that his arms were keeping me together, that they were the stitching trying to cover up the multitude of cracks I had just revealed. I was more cracks than colour—more dark space than person. I had become the gap between the sentences I spoke every single day.

  I’m okay.

  I’m okay.

  I’m okay.

  All of that unspoken space was leaking out of me now, flooding out through my tears and spilling over on every heaving breath.

  I was definitely not okay.

  “I don’t deserve to be here,” I choked out quietly, and Nicholai froze, his hand tangled in my hair. His breath halted in his chest.

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “I shouldn’t be here. Shouldn’t be alive. Shouldn’t have been me. I should have died. Me. Not … not …”

  I was losing coherency as quickly as it had arrived, and I was starting to spiral again. I welcomed it, diving into the heavy fog that settled through me. Maybe I had a disorder. Maybe I was in shock, still. Maybe I was psychotic, demented, or damaged beyond repair. I didn’t care. I needed to escape myself. I needed to push back all those truths that wanted to resurface.

  As far as I was concerned, that girl had died.

  She just needed to stay dead.

  I didn’t have a very clear recollection of what happened after I broke down in Nicholai’s office. He held me until I stopped crying and grew numb, and then I was in his truck and he was driving me home. We stopped on the way and picked up food, and then we were walking back to my RV. I hadn’t invited him there. He hadn’t asked.

  I watched as he passed between the trees, the small pathway to Fred and Shel’s lot barely able to contain him. I hadn’t ever thought of him as big, but that’s exactly how he seemed to me now. He was big, and alone. His broad shoulders were brushed by the leaves in the same spots where I had soaked his shirt in tears. His hands were stuffed into the pockets of his pants, his suit jacket and the plastic handle for the bag of takeout clasped in his left hand. When he glanced over his shoulder at me, the shadow from the setting sun sent his features into darkness. I could pretend, in that moment.

  “What is it?” he asked, his voice low. He had stopped walking.

  Probably because I had.

  I stepped into his darkness, crossing my arms tightly over my chest so that I could tuck my hands in against my body. It was a physical effort to not reach out and touch him.

  “I wish you were a stranger,” I whispered. “I wish I didn’t know you at all. I think you’d be perfect, then.”

  He laughed, but the sound was dry, tinged with some kind of dark emotion. Possibly anger. “Tell me why.”

  I slipped my arms around his waist, pressing my body to his. I couldn’t help it. I needed to feel his warmth, I needed more than to simply stand in the shadow he created. I needed to crawl into that dark place where he held his heat, where I could look out at the world, feeling protective muscle at my back. It was some kind of sick fantasy that I couldn’t shake.

  His hand was in my hair again, like he couldn’t help it. He made a sound, lending an emotion to the stiffness of his body: frustration.

  “Tell me why,” he repeated, his voice rougher this time.

  I shook my head, pulling away from him. Yeah, I was a coward. I didn’t care. “Thank you for today,” I told him, moving away and heading toward the RV. “I know you need to lecture me about boundaries and whatnot, so let’s go inside and get it over and done with.”

  He didn’t reply, but I could hear him walking behind me. I opened the door and stepped inside, frowning when the light suddenly switched on.

  “You didn’t even jump.” Duke’s amused voice flashed through me like an unwelcome memory.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked, refusing to take another step.

  He was sitting in the bench seat just off from the kitchenette, his back up against the wall and his legs stretched out over the seat, his arms crossed over his wide chest. Despite the amusement in his voice, he didn’t look very happy. He shifted, slid out from behind the table, and moved toward me.

  “I came to talk about the other day …” He paused, only a step away from me, his eyes flicking over my head.

  I felt panic and I wasn’t sure why.

  “Who the fuck is this?” Duke spat, his hand slamming down on my shoulder and spinning me around to face Nicholai.

  Nicholai was still half in shadow. He wasn’t moving, but I could make out his features. They were stone cold, his eyes fixed on the hand clamped over my shoulder.

  “It’s Nicholai Fell,” I said calmly. “He’s a Doctor of Deviance.”

  The change in Nicholai was instant. His blank expression cracked, his mouth hooking up slightly at the side. He stepped into the RV, moving around Duke to put the bag of takeout on the table. He then shook out his jacket and laid it across the bench seat. Duke was tightening his hold of me, drawing me back, his other hand clamping down on my other shoulder. It wasn’t exactly painful, but it was annoying. I usually didn’t care what Duke did, but his touch was making my skin crawl. I still hadn’t recovered from our encounter.

  Hell … I was calling it an encounter. I wasn’t even ready to think about it, to put a label to it and dig around for an appropriate response to it.

  “What the fuck?” Duke finally spluttered out, his fingers digging inward. “Is that it? What the hell does that even mean? Who is he, Grey. Who are you, dipshit?”

  Nicholai had turned around and was leaning back against the kitchen table, his arms crossed over his chest. At some point, he had ro
lled up the sleeves of his button-down. The lines of his tattoo were wrapping around his forearms, the promise of a rhythm laid out between those black bars, all the way down to his wrists. In his office, with the song playing from his laptop, I had been able to read that song as soft and slow, haunting as it strived to mean something. Now, it was different. His arms were tense, his muscles bunching. There was a small vein jumping in his wrist and I had the urge to open a window—his presence seemed too much, like my tiny RV wouldn’t be able to contain him. This time, the song seemed violent.

  “This ends now,” Nicholai ground out, without answering any of Duke’s questions. “Let go of her. Leave. Don’t come back. If you want a big macho speech to speed you up, you’d better imagine it, because I can’t be bothered wasting the words. Understood?”

  “No.” I could hear the smirk in Duke’s tone—the sharp edge that seemed to carry more than a threat. It was what came after the threat: danger itself. “I had my dick in this girl less than fourty-eight hours ago, and now you’re standing in her RV like you’re next in line to get your tip wet. You’re too late, man. I broke her in, so find somewhere else to stick it, because if you step on my territory again I will fucking kill you. Understood?”

  Nicholai moved forward instantly, shocking Duke into action. He shoved me out of the way, sending me into the counter beside the kitchen sink. I steadied myself, watching as the two of them moved toe-to-toe. Nicholai looked both taller and stronger, and it finally hit me that his physique had an explanation after all. I had always thought it strange that Nicholai didn’t seem to have even an inch of body fat, and that the golden tan never seemed to fade from his skin. He worked indoors constantly; he shouldn’t have looked the way he did.

  Nicholai was outrunning his demons the same way I was. He was trying to actively work them out of his system. I had seen him running on the beach myself.

  “I doubt that.” Nicholai answered Duke’s threat calmly, but it only seemed to make Duke angrier.

  Duke reached behind his back and I caught the flash of metal as his hand slipped beneath his tank. Time seemed to freeze as I battled with myself. He had a gun—whether he would actually use it or not was a different story, and whether Nicholai knew how to handle being at gunpoint didn’t even seem to matter to me.

  The only thing that mattered was that flash of silver. The smooth, clammy metal. The smell of sweat. The taste of my own tears. I could hear the sharp explosion before Duke had even lifted it from the back of his jeans. I knew that sound better than I knew myself.

  I was battling the one memory I refused to let in, and I was battling it in the one moment that I really couldn’t afford to spiral.

  I needed to stay.

  I needed to do something.

  17

  Gunpowder

  I stood with the gun in my hands and two men before me. Duke had his arms pulled up, like he really believed I would shoot him.

  No, that wasn’t right. It was like he knew I would shoot him, because I would. I really, really fucking would.

  Nicholai wasn’t even looking at me. He was turning on Duke like he really believed I wouldn’t do anything.

  No … that wasn’t right, either. He knew I wouldn’t do anything.

  Was it possible to be entirely what one person expected of me, and yet entirely what another person expected of me, when those expectations were in direct opposition to one another? I had no idea, but I felt with absolute certainty that I was both versions of the girl they thought I was. I was a murderer—someone who wouldn’t even think twice, because my empathy had been switched off. I was only a shell of what a person should be. And yet … I also wouldn’t hurt a fly. I had been through too much of my own pain to ever inflict more of it on another being.

  My arms started to shake, the cold leaking away from me. Uncomfortable heat was building up beneath my clothes instead. My vision blurred and then refocussed on Nicholai, who had slammed Duke up against the closed door of the RV—I hadn’t even noticed him close it, just like I hadn’t noticed my own hand darting out for the gun hidden in Duke’s pants. Duke’s arm was twisted behind his back now, his face lined in pain and anger, growing more pained and angry by the second. Nicholai was muttering low in his ear, both of their eyes on me. Nicholai was unfocussed, simply looking in my direction.

  He was spiralling, I realised.

  Duke was very much focussed, his eyes on the gun I had snatched from him. It was pointed directly at his face. I wasn’t sure when I had moved it, or why, but he had noticed. Nicholai continued to speak, his words too low to catch. Duke grunted in pain, struggling to free himself as Nicholai hitched his arm higher up his back, and I finally made out his last few words.

  “Give me a reason not to break your arm right here, right now.”

  “I’m done here,” Duke spat out. “Just get the fuck off me.”

  Nicholai didn’t need further prompting: he backed off, pulled open the door, and shoved Duke through. I heard the sound of a body hitting my concrete platform, and then Nicholai was closing the door again. He turned to me, and I watched as he fought to bring himself back under control.

  It took only a second; he was better at it than I was. He moved toward me faster than a man should move toward a loaded gun being held by a crazy person, but it soon ceased to matter. He took the gun from me and set it on the counter, and then my face was in his hands.

  “It’s over, Mika, come back to me.”

  It should have been easy to stop the spiral with him standing there, with his hands on my skin and his eyes holding mine, but that wasn’t the way it worked. There was some part of me that wanted to believe that he was telling me it was safe for me to break down, that he would catch me—but there was a much larger part of me that didn’t want to break at all.

  “One second,” I muttered, breaking out of his hold.

  I moved past him, grabbing the gun as I went, and then I was through the door before he could stop me. I ran through the path back towards the parking lot, half expecting Duke to jump out of the trees and surprise me. I made it to Duke’s truck and aimed the gun at his back tyres, shooting both of them before rounding the cab and shooting the front two tyres. I considered smashing the windows but Nicholai was at the entrance to the path and lights were beginning to turn on—I could see the glow of them through the trees.

  “Let’s go,” I muttered, tossing the gun into the bushes and moving to Nicholai’s truck instead, my hand on the passenger door handle.

  He moved to the driver’s side seemingly without batting an eye, unlocking the doors and starting the engine as I climbed in. His hands were relaxed on the wheel as we escaped the lot, his expression neutral, as though we did this sort of thing every day.

  “Can you put off the lecture for a while longer?” I asked, examining the side of his face that I could see.

  He nodded once. “If you agree to eat a fucking meal for once.”

  “Can you just drop me off at the diner? I’ll call a friend and stay at her place tonight.”

  The change in him was instant: his jaw tightened, his grip on the wheel became tense.

  “You’re not my patient.” The words burst out of him, rough and short.

  I blinked in shock, but recovered quickly. “When I asked you to put off the lecture, I meant for more than a few seconds.”

  “I needed to say it.” He glanced at me as we rolled to a stop at a red light. His eyes were such a light blue they almost seemed translucent with the traffic lights glaring through the front windshield. “I need you to stop coming to the centre. I can’t be your psychologist. I can’t fill that role for you, not if you really want me to help you.”

  “You really did quit because of me.” I could hear the surprise in my voice, but I only felt numb. He was distancing himself from me. I didn’t blame him.

  I could hear sirens in the distance, getting closer. Nicholai was quiet, thinking of a response.

  Eventually, he said, “Yes. I left early because of yo
u—I left a job I was already planning on leaving. I left because I kissed you. I know I can’t change your life and save you—only you can do that, but I thought I could do something, at least. I thought I knew what you were going through enough to predict your behaviour … I just couldn’t predict how you would affect me. If I had stayed at that school I would have laid you out on my desk. I would have needed that stupid chair you sat in all the time to be wet before I let you go back to class—fuck.” He slapped his hands against the steering wheel, shaking his head.

  The light turned green and the truck jolted into life again.

  “You said it would never happen.” I was still staring at the side of his face, needing his eyes to return to mine. My limbs were aching, itching to climb over to his seat. My breath was shorter than it should have been, but there was also an accusation in the words I spoke.

  “It won’t.” He cut his eyes to mine, showing me the heat and anger to be found there, before he looked back to the road. “That’s why I left. That’s why you can’t come to the centre. We aren’t going to happen but I’m not letting you go. I’m not leaving you alone. I just can’t help you with the rules and guidelines hanging over us. I can’t help you if I can’t even touch you. Everyone else, sure … just not you. I don’t really understand why, why you, but that’s how it is.”

  “You left your job for a girl you barely know, and you think I’m the crazy one.”

  The truck slowed and a laugh spilled out of him, unwilling. “I know you better than you think. I’ve known a thousand different versions of you—”

  “I feel so special—”

  “A thousand different versions of trauma, but I wasn’t in charge of any of those people,” he cut across me, shaking his head again. “They all had other people who were supposed to keep them safe. You don’t have anyone.”

  “You’re technically not in charge of me, either,” I countered. “You’re not one of my people. I don’t have you.”