DREAMS of 18

by A. Kent, Saffron

  Because all along he’s been telling me what I deserve, and I’ve finally realized what he deserves.

  He deserves the truth.

  I told him to paint my nails the other day.

  We were on the bed, getting ready to sleep. He’d just come out of the bathroom, all bare-chested and wearing those plaid pajamas of his when the inspiration struck me. I was propped up on the pillows, wearing his shirt that I stole from him as soon as he got home from work – no panties – lifted my leg up and wiggled my toes.

  “Will you paint my toes, Mr. Edwards?” I asked, swirling a lollipop in my mouth.

  He prowled toward me, making all the lust inside me wake up. Not that it ever goes to sleep when he’s around but still.

  He reached the bed and looked at my lifted leg once before focusing on my core, which I was accidentally-on-purpose flashing him.

  “Do I look like a dumb college kid to you, Jailbait?” he rasped, glancing back at me.

  I lowered my leg onto the bed but kept my thighs open for him. “You look like a sexy hunk of a man right now and I want you to paint my toes.”

  I thought he wouldn’t; I was just kidding.

  But he grabbed the shiny nail polish bottle from the side table where I’d left it the last time. Then, he climbed on the bed and knelt between my open legs. He clutched my ankle, widened my legs even more so I was open for him and put it on his hard thigh before getting down to work.

  He meticulously painted every little toe of mine. Every single one as he bent over me and stroked the tiny little brush just so.

  He wouldn’t even look at her, my pussy, that he’d spread my legs for, and for some reason that made her wetter, sloppier.

  But more than that it filled me with so much love for him that once he was done, I legit attacked him. I pounced on him and kissed his entire face, ruining his work on my toes in the process but whatever.

  Then I told him that I wanted to ride his thigh and come all over it and he let me. He let me ride his bare thigh until I came and spread all my juices over him before he fisted my hair and looked me in the eyes. “You’ve had your fun, Jailbait. My turn now.”

  I thought he meant he wanted me to suck his cock but he growled, “Sit on my face.”

  Not only that, he actually made me.

  He maneuvered me and positioned me until I was sitting on his face while he ate me out and made me come again, this time on his jaw and beard, while jacking himself off.

  Meanwhile, we’d forgotten about that nail polish bottle and in all of our shenanigans, it had spilled, staining the sheet.

  I see the stain now as I wake up the morning of my nineteenth birthday. The token from the night when he painted my toes after he said he wouldn’t.

  His side of the bed is empty and it’s cold, meaning he’s been gone a long time.

  He’s probably at work.

  He’s probably found out by now. About me, I mean. And he’ll talk to me about it when he gets back.

  Strangely, I don’t have any fear in me.

  The fear went away yesterday when he saved me from Richard and my own mind so I could forget that I’m ill for a little while.

  I didn’t even feel anything other than a pounding heart when I set the plan in motion last night after I turned nineteen.

  I thought about how to tell him. How best to convey everything that is inside of me, and the answer was simple.

  My journals.

  I could give them to him and he could read it all for himself. So I left them on the coffee table, the complete stack of them along with a few other things.

  Now he can know everything.

  He can know that at sixteen, I saw him and fell in love. At eighteen, I kissed him and a scandal broke out that almost broke me and at nineteen, I’m telling him all about it.

  I throw off the covers and climb out of the bed.

  The floors creak under my feet and that sound somehow brings me to my knees.

  The creak of the floor, the wooden slats of the headboard, the unpolished door of his closet. Things that I’ve come to love.

  It’s open now, the closet door, and I can see my dresses hanging with his plaid shirts.

  I put them in there as a joke, telling him that if he keeps buying me all these dresses, then I’m taking over the closet. His reaction was to flip me over and fuck me doggy style on the bed with his thumb in my ass, while he made me watch our clothes together. Every time my eyes would fall shut, he’d tug on my hair that he’d wrapped around his wrist and tell me to keep watching.

  He’d ask me, Which one’s your favorite, baby?

  And when I’d tell him – the one with pink roses on it – he’d ask me why. He’d ask me to describe it to him exactly like he didn’t know what it looked like.

  They still look pretty, my dresses along with his shirts, hanging there.

  Everything about this place looks pretty. I can’t believe I thought that this cabin was falling apart. I mean, Graham has done major work over the past weeks and there’s still more to be done but I don’t even care.

  I like this cabin.

  I love this cabin.

  I love it because this is my home. This has become my home in the past weeks.

  My things are everywhere.

  On the nightstand and on the floor, and when I walk out of the room, I see my pink bottles of shampoo and conditioner in the bathroom. Even the air smells like me: strawberry.

  This is my home.

  My home.

  I don’t know why I keep chanting it over and over in my head. I don’t know why it’s hitting me only now that this cabin in the middle of the woods is the first place that I’ve belonged.

  But it is.

  It hits me even more when I walk down the hallway and I find him there.

  My feet come to a halt.

  He’s here.

  I thought he’d be gone. I thought he’d be at work by now. I thought I had time.

  I had more time to prepare myself.

  God, he’s here and he’ll have all these questions and I thought I was without fear and I was up until I saw him but I’m not.

  I’m just so, so weak.

  So weak that I whisper his name. “Graham.”

  His back tenses.

  He’s sitting on the couch, facing away from me. His shoulders seem to be slouching, bent forward, and I realize he’s got his elbows propped up on his sprawled thighs and his hands lying limply between them.

  But all his muscles bunch up at my whispered call.

  I see them rippling under the thin t-shirt he’s wearing. He usually sleeps bare-chested but by the time I wake up – always later than him – he has one of his old t-shirts on along with his plaid pajamas.

  He stands now and slowly turns toward me. He looks… lifeless.

  So blank and empty, almost.

  It makes me weak in the knees. They almost buckle. I didn’t think he’d look like that. I thought he’d be… angry.

  Yeah, that’s what I thought.

  I thought he’d be mad at me for lying or maybe he’d be disbelieving or something like that. I didn’t think he’d look so defeated.

  Yeah, that’s kind of how he looks.

  Like he’s lost all the battles and all the wars and now he has nothing to live for.

  “You’re home,” I whisper uselessly.

  “Your bag. This is what you have in there.”

  His voice is flat. No modulation, no high tone at the end alerting that it’s a question. But it is one and he’s waiting for me to answer him. Even though he knows already.

  Fisting my hands, I nod. “Yes. I-I carry them everywhere.”

  By them, I mean my old journals. The ones I used to write in before I went to Heartstone and stopped writing altogether. The ones that held my dreams and desires and him.

  I can see my journals all scattered around on the coffee table, and I know he’s read them all.
/>   “And the pills,” he continues in that flat tone of his.

  At this, my chest heaves with a broken breath. There are pill bottles everywhere too, alongside my journals. I left them sitting on the side of the stacked journals for him to find.

  “Yeah. I-I need them sometimes. When things are bad.” He keeps staring at me and so I go on and explain, “I was on a regular medication. B-before. But they took me off and now, I have these. For when things are not good.”

  I keep my pills right alongside my dreams, all contained in my fat hobo.

  I don’t know why I do that, why I keep my dreams and my medication together. Maybe it is to remind me of something. Of things I can’t do now. I don’t know, I just lump them together.

  “I haven’t had to take them in a while,” I tell him before he can say anything else. “I just took one when I was driving out here but other than that I didn’t need to.”

  That, at least, is true.

  I took the pill because I was anxious. I was freaking out about the journey and about seeing him, but after I actually saw him, I didn’t need it anymore.

  After I saw him, something calmed in me even though I thought he hated me in those early days. But I had something to fight for, then.

  I had a purpose. A goal. To give him peace, to make things up to him.

  Maybe that’s why I didn’t need them.

  “Is that why you put it in the closet.”

  By it, he means the hobo. The thing I can’t do without.

  He noticed that?

  Of course he noticed that. He notices everything about me. Of course, he noticed that I hid the hobo in the closet of his other room when I came in weeks and weeks ago to help him detox. I put it in there so he wouldn’t find out. So he wouldn’t stumble upon it accidentally and rattle its contents.

  “Yes.”

  He’s silent after that and I gauge the distance between us like I did the first night I saw him at the bar and we were talking about him touching that queen-like woman. I look at him, standing by his couch and me in the hallway and I try to think how many steps it would be before I can touch him.

  How many steps before I can feel his warmth again, breathe the same air as him, feel the beat of his heart beneath my palm.

  “What’s Heartstone.”

  He asks the question after what feels like ages. And again, it’s not a question because he probably already knows the answer.

  I stopped writing in those journals the night they sent me there. That’s my last entry, going to a psych ward, and then I stopped. Until I picked it up again the day Brian called me and I found out that Graham was watching me as much as I was watching him.

  I breathe out a long, long breath. “A psych ward. It’s, uh, it’s in upstate New York. Heartstone Psychiatric Hospital.”

  “You were there.”

  “Yeah. Yes. I was.”

  “How long.”

  “F-for a couple of months. They have this, uh, six-week program but I wasn’t making much progress with it so they extended it and I had to stay there for another six weeks.”

  “When was this.”

  I swallow and grip the hem of what I’m wearing. I realize it’s the plaid shirt of his from yesterday.

  I put it on after he fucked me in the truck, wished me a happy birthday and carried me inside. We took a shower together and he washed me up before fucking me again in the shower, slow and lazy like we had all the time in the world. Then, I put on his shirt and we had microwave-heated pizza – the one he bought for us before we got sidetracked.

  His soft plaid shirt that still smells like him gives me the strength now that I probably wouldn’t have had otherwise. That and this emptiness inside of me after being full of him for so long.

  “L-last year. In the summer and a little bit of fall.”

  In fact, I was the second last of our gang to leave Heartstone. Willow was the last one; she had some major incident a night before she was supposed to leave.

  “Why? Why were you there?”

  The first question he’s asked me that sounds like a question. That sounds like his voice is changing. His expression is still blank though, still lifeless, but something is going on inside of him and I don’t know what it is.

  Don’t be selfish, Violet.

  Tell him. Love him.

  Let him kill you, it’s okay.

  “Because I have Panic Disorder.”

  Finally, I see a sliver of a movement on his face. I think it’s a wince; I can’t be sure. It was very tiny and it was over in a flash. Gone before I can really tell what’s going on.

  But in any case, it’s out there now.

  I’ve told him.

  He knows.

  And now that he does know, I tell him the rest. I tell him even though there’s a chance that he might still think I’m defective and weak.

  “I…” I swallow and pull at the hem of his shirt. “I’ve always been kinda shy and away from the world. Well, except when it comes to you. Uh, anyway, I’ve never liked people. I’ve never liked their eyes on me. Mostly because they always looked at me like I was this weird girl with the mousy blonde/brown hair and these giant brown eyes that always make me look like I’m startled or something…”

  I chuckle nervously. “But it’s mostly because I’m not used to it. I’m not… used to being seen. Not really. So when I kissed you… that night and I suddenly became this, this thing that everyone was seeing, I couldn’t handle it. I couldn’t deal with it. It freaked me out.” I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand and go back to fisting his shirt, fraying it with my fingers.

  “It would freak me out so much that I, uh, I think I got my first panic attack when I was at the grocery store. Someone saw me and recognized me and started talking to me. And I just couldn’t deal with it. I ran out of there and I couldn’t breathe. I felt like someone was sitting on my chest and my stomach was churning and… yeah, it was awful. But then it happened again and again until I couldn’t get out of the house. Until I only felt safe in my room or when I went out at night.

  “And one night, I was sitting up on the roof and I was drinking because Fiona called me to brag about her and Brian. So I went up to the roof, and I was sitting there and I saw someone on the street. And then, that someone saw me. They saw me up there and they started walking toward the house and I lost it. I don’t even know what they wanted but I got so scared anyway. And I didn’t wanna come down from the roof but I had to. I-I had to because someone was there and they were walking toward me and I was so angry at people for not leaving me alone. It was my time, you know. It was my time to be out in the world and watch the moon and write in my journal but I couldn’t even do that. So I got into my car because I wanted to drive away from there. I got so tired of everything that I wanted to get out of that town. But a few miles down, I skidded off the road and I was going to hit this tree but I didn’t.”

  Finally, I stop to take a breath. I stop to tell myself that it’s over. Or at least, it’s almost over. So it’s more or less a breath of relief.

  Although, I’m not out of the woods yet.

  Because he hasn’t said a word.

  He hasn’t changed his expression either. He’s doing what he was doing the second he turned around and saw me: staring.

  He’s staring at me but then again, his fists weren’t clenched when we started this.

  They are now.

  They look even more ferocious than mine. My puny ones that I’m using to take apart his shirt.

  I’m not sure what they mean, his fists. If it’s good news or if he’s beginning to think that I’m so weak and pathetic that just because someone was walking toward me, I freaked out like that and almost rammed my car into a tree.

  But I stare at those fists and continue, “They took me to a hospital. Sent me for a psych eval and everything. Then, they gave me the option of going to this facility so I could have a structured environment and I took it. Mostly b
ecause I wanted to get away. So basically, I’ve been lying to you. I’ve been lying to you about everything. There’s no… There’s no college. There’s no vacation. There’s nothing. I’m not sure if I’m even going to college. Because people still scare me.”

  I crawl the toes of my right foot up the calf of my left, feeling exposed and self-conscious and suddenly so shy in front of him. Something that I’ve never felt before and I hate this feeling.

  He’s the one person I never wanted to hide from or lie to and I hate that I have done both.

  “What happened with Richard? That was kind of a mini-panic attack. I can’t look people in the eyes and I can’t talk to them because I’m scared. It makes me anxious. I have these things, my therapist, Nelson, calls them crutches. Cap and sunglasses. I wear them when I go out. Which isn’t a lot. I don’t go out a lot. I mostly just stay home. I order things online and I talk to people through notes.”

  At this, I have to laugh a little. Billy, my pen pal.

  “I do all those things because I don’t like being here. In the world. I was fine on the Inside, at Heartstone, but I’m… kind of struggling on the Outside. At Heartstone, everyone was like me. Everyone had problems and no one looked at me like I was different. But then, I got out and I realized everything was still the same. The people in my town, their judgment and gossip and all of that. They still thought that I was a slut and they still called you names and all the rumors were still alive. So it was just easier to stay home and lock myself up in my room rather than going out and facing my problems. Facing the loud world and all those people. It was easier to just pretend that it was okay for me to use a crutch and never talk to anybody other than a few people I met at Heartstone. It is easier to pretend that I’m fine than dealing with the real problem: my doomsday brain. Anxiety is so exhausting, you know and I just didn’t wanna be tired anymore. I guess, I was just weak. I liked taking the easy way out. But if you really think about it, I’ve always been weak, right? Shy and hiding away from the world and being busy with books and music and all that. So it makes sense that I’d be weak now, in the face of my illness.

  “And the reason I didn’t tell you any of this…” I lick my lips and make sure that I don’t look away from him, “is because I thought you’d think I was weak and a coward, as well. I thought you’d think I was defective. You’d think I have this crazy illness and all these stupid phobias and that I’m pathetic. I’m flawed and I don’t know, a million other things that I think about myself anyway. So yeah, I’ve been lying and hiding things and you should probably hate me now.”