Page 76 of Theta

Story slides her hands under the waist of my underwear to cup my bare ass. "I'm seriously impressed, Kills. For real. I wouldn't have thought of that."

"Because you're a law-abiding citizen. You're an essential worker who’s dedicated her life to helping others. I'm the unemployed nepo-baby hooligan who's only stayed out of jail because my daddy's got a lot of money."

"You're a hell of a lot more than that, Killian," she murmurs.

"Glad you think so."

"I know so." She nips the tip of my chin, withdraws her hand from my underwear. "Time to eat, Fred."

"Time to eat Fred, or time to eat…Fred?" I tease.

We sit side by side on the edge of the bed, eating in easy silence; the meal Enzo made for us seems like a different lifetime.

"You think Enzo's gonna be okay?" I ask.

She nods. "I do. We got him to the hospital pretty quickly, and we stopped, or at least drastically slowed the bleeding."

"We have to see to his daughter and mother-in-law."

She nods without looking at me. "Playing the other side here for a second, but if Pugli is after us, it seems stupid to lead him to her."

"He knows where she is already. And we promised Enzo."

"But as far as anyone except Enzo knows, we shot him while escaping. If we stay clear, it's very likely Pugli won't know he was ever compromised. Just that he wasn't that great of a guard."

I glance at her. "True, but how does Pugli deal with failure?"

Her eyes shift to mine, and she winces. "Damn. You've got me there."

"I don't like it either," I say. "All I want is to find some safe way of getting ahold of our parents. It's one thing to train for stuff like this, but it's a whole other thing to go through it, y'know? The stories our parents tell, the media versions…none of that can adequately convey the fear and uncertainty."

Her eyes lock onto mine. “You're scared?"

I nod. "God yes. Not all the time. I'm not scared right now, for example. But that fuckin' boat launch was the scariest thing I've ever experienced, the ride to shore second. Even the actual getting snatched was more shocking and disorienting than scary. And the being trapped in the dark container, that wasn't fun. But…" I shrug. “You can't really sustain abject terror for that long. Once I realized that they weren't going to drag me out and start chopping off fingers to send to my parents, I was more just bored and disoriented. It's not natural to be in the dark for that long." Finished with my food, I set the empty clamshell aside and lean my elbows onto my knees, face in my hands. "I haven't really had time to process any of this, though."

"It gets delayed," Story says. "Our subconscious knows we can’t afford to have the emotional reactions yet. Once you really know you're safe, it'll all come out, one way or another."

"Do you…do you remember everything from when you met Anselm?"

She slowly finishes the last few fries, dragging them through ketchup until the red sauce kisses her fingertips, and then tilting her head back to drop the whole thing into her mouth. “Yeah."

The restaurant where I got the food didn't have a soda fountain, only warm cans and bottles. Story cracks the can of Coke Zero and takes a noisy, slurping sip. "Good lord, that's nice. It'd be better if it was nice and cold and crispy out of a fountain, but even a warm soda is a fantastic thing."

Another long pause.

"I was supposed to be asleep. Mom worked late that day. Whenever that happened, she'd have our neighbor check on me. Usually, I'd go to her house for a few hours and watch old Disney tapes, and then when it was time for bed, she'd bring me over to our house and get me in bed and asleep, and then she'd keep watch from her place until Mom got home. Not a perfect setup, obviously, but she was an old lady not exactly equipped to handle a seven-year-old with extreme PTSD.” She sips again, then rotates the can in her hands, fingers gently dimpling the tin with a metallic crinkling noise, her gaze on the floor, unseeing. "I couldn't sleep. I kept…" she clears her throat. "I kept having nightmares every time I closed my eyes, so I was reading books under my bed."

“Under the bed?"

She nods. "I had a flashlight. Baby blue with Cinderella on it. I'd drape my blankets over the sides of the bed so it was like a cave under there, and I'd look at books until I could sleep. It was the only way I could feel safe. Even now, when I'm afraid, my instinct is to hide in a small space. I don't, obviously, but I still feel the urge, twenty-two-years later."

"Does the sound of gunfire—" I cut off. "That's a shitty thing to ask. I'm sorry."

She leans against my side. "No, it's not shitty at all. Yeah, honestly, there will always be some part of me, however small, that will be that five-year-old whenever I hear gunfire. I do know that Dad intentionally exposed me to gunfire when he and Mom were both with me, as exposure therapy, of a sort, I suppose. And it worked. I don't…I don't have the PTSD reaction anymore. But I…I feel it, yeah."

“God, Story."

She rolls a shoulder. "I was so, so lucky. No one else on earth could have gotten through to me the way Mom did. She understood my trauma. She knew exactly how to love me. How to support me. She knew when I needed to be alone to figure it out and when I needed her. If I'd gone into the foster system?" She shudders. "God, I'd be a fucking disaster." Another silence. "Eight people died in that shooting. Six men, two women. There were another six injured, including a ten-year-old girl and a six-year-old boy." She swallows audibly. "There were hundreds of people in the mall that day. And you wanna know the worst statistic of all, Killy? In the twenty-two years since the shooting, four people who were there that day have committed suicide. Four. One of them was the six-year-old boy. His parents were both killed, just like me. But unlike me, a round went through his mother's head and into his chest. He survived, but he never recovered. He hung himself three years ago. Jimmy Trainor, his name was."