“So who’s this new dude?” Tyler asks, and fidgets on his couch, trying to be casual.
I roll my eyes. “Just some guy I know, that’s all.”
And it’s true.
The part that Tyler doesn’t know, though, are those nights the “new dude” and I spend shut away from the world, cut off completely by thick black curtains and no desire to go elsewhere.
No light can make its way through those curtains. The tension in my stomach when he wraps himself around me threatens to burst like a thin balloon of control.
There’s no way of telling if he’s lying. No way of protecting myself.
And I don’t care.
We almost never speak during.
There’s no need. My body answers his and follows him.
It says,
“Whatever you want.
Anything.
Everything.”
Moving together in the dark,
silent,
to keep a secret from the monsters in his closet,
safe.
We lay for hours,
sleeping,
talking,
fucking,
holding,
laughing,
caressing,
fighting,
smoking,
flirting,
staring,
singing.
Dead to the world,
and never more alive.
I shrug and change the channel. Tyler just doesn’t get it.