Page 89 of Sucker For You
Breathe, in and out with the swells. . .
“Better?”
The question was no louder than the lap of water against her ears.
Not a demand for her tobebetter.
Just asking.
She could have pretended not to hear him. She could have let the pain continue its retreat and allowed silence to take its place inside her. It would have been simple. Easy. Comfortable. Instead, she nodded.
“Yes.”
Because. . . she was.
But if the pain had leached from her body, it must have exited through the sinkhole of exhaustion under her sternum. Migraines always left her tired, and this had been a horrible episode. The worst since she’d started taking Ceretobicin. Somehow, though, despite the freezing swells and her biting and her nails, Wes remained with her, uplifting her so that herexhaustion was a release instead of a drowning, holding her safe, staying at her side even now that he’d seen. . .her.
She was limp. The confession slipped out.
“I haven’t told you why I don’t like cameras.”
“Huh?” Of course, he was confused. “Buttercup, you—you don’t need to. . . especially not—”
Isabel ignored him; she couldn’t have halted these words any better than she could have held back the tide. “I was almost adopted out of care when I was young. Six years old. But they sent me back to the federal home after my first migraine. I didn’t know what was happening to my body. They didn’t know, either. I was scared, and I scared them. They tried to help, at first. To comfort me. They told me I was all right. But I wasn’t. The pain didn’t stop, and I couldn’t stop screaming. Over and over. . . There was no blood, so they thought I was acting out. Wanting attention. Misbehaving. They tried to make me be quiet. I bit them. That was when they took me to the hospital.”
“Isabel. . .”
“The doctor put me in a paper gown. Sat me on a cold metal chair. I’d fallen out of bed when the migraine started, and she photographed the bruises for my file. But the flashes, the blindness—I thought the pain was returning. I was scared. Shaking. She just told me to sit still. She asked the adults what had happened to me, why I’d lashed out. She didn’t ask me. I don’t even know if I could’ve explained it. But she didn’t ask. When she eventually diagnosed me with allodynia—with whole-body nerve pain from migraines—she told the adults. Not me. Like I wasn’t there. Like I couldn’t hear them talking. Like I couldn’t hear the parents saying that it didn’t matter why I’d acted the way I had that night, that I was dangerous, was. . . So they were sending me back to the system. But Icouldhear. Iheard everything. The doctor agreed that with this new diagnosis, I’d be difficult to manage in a private home. That I was better in government care.”
“But you weren’t dangerous.”
She exhaled. “No, I was so scared. . .”
Wes’s breathing beneath her hitched, paused. Then, “Are you scared now, Isabel?”
Laughter, heat, wanting.
Danger.
She opened her eyes to answer him. He deserved that much.Moon radiance, kelp, salt—and all around them, tiny bioluminescent creatures illuminated the swells with a sheen of glimmering, evanescent blue. She turned to him. Treading water with her, Wes. . .glowed. An aurora of plankton constellations painted his naked arms, dotting his cheekbones with stars.
Beautiful.
She should be afraid.
She wasn’t. She was only tired. And desperately, helplessly, incandescently grateful.
“I’m not scared.” Her whisper rose off the waves. She followed it, righting herself. Then she reached for him. She reached for the swirls of gleaming light that articulated the knot and compass inked on his chest, for the seawater in his eyelashes. Maybe it was the current or a single kick that urged her closer, narrowing their distance until there was none, until her arms were around his neck. Maybe she was delirious in the cathartic aftermath of her pain, too; this time she didn’t fight against the pressure of the tide or her own yearning.
She should have, probably.
But she was too tired to pretend, and Wes was here.
Still here.
“You stayed,” she told him.
“Yes.”
