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“Hurting me?” I shrugged. “No, you tickled me.”
That seemed to make him worse.
His face flushed.
His pulse pounded in his neck.
He spiralled; I reached for him. “Hey…it’s okay. Talk to me…”
Swallowing a groan, he leapt to his bare feet.
He paced and refused to look at me.
I’d felt many things for this man. Most of them were not very nice, and some far, far too intense, but in that moment, all I felt was panic.
The stranger from the cave kept smothering the man who’d asked me to play along with him. The man from the bar who’d made my very soul shiver drowned beneath a blackened murderer. “Henri…”
“Don’t,” he hissed.
“What’s happened—?”
“Be quiet.” He raked a hand through his hair, unable to hide his shaking. With effort that etched his eyes with stress lines, he sat back down and painted another bruise on my hip.
He kept his eyes trained on my injuries. Lips pursed. Chest heaving. His insides screaming so loudly he deafened me.
You need to get him to talk…
Doing my best to ignore the creeping fear that he was slipping away, I scrambled for something to say. Something he’d find interest in. Something that would cease his descent into whatever nightmares he fought.
I came up blank.
My mind danced with sparks.
Yes, sparks!
Blurting, I said, “My wand.”
His forehead furrowed. His grey eyes flickered to mine. But he didn’t speak.
My mind filled with memories of that day. A happier time. A safer time. Those happy feelings bubbled over, and I found myself doing exactly what he’d said I would: I willingly shared a piece of who I was in order to bring him back to me. “I was nineteen when I got my tattoo. I got it the week after I passed my gemmology degree.”
I waited for him to ask for more details.
He didn’t.
Instead, he hyper-focused on another bruise, and another, and another. Making a personal vendetta against them as if by removing them he could erase everything that’d happened.
“I got a wand because Krish drew me a picture when I went to sit my exams. He said to imagine my pen was a wand, and it would write all the correct answers.” I smiled so big my cheeks hurt. “It worked. It brought me luck. And I decided I wanted to keep that luck with me forever.”
No response.
Yet I had the sense he was listening…clinging to every morsel I gave him.
“You might say that my luck didn’t work. That it ran out, and that’s how I ended up here.”
Nothing.
His lack of conversation and the wrongness of his silence forced me to continue filling it.
