Page 47 of Close Quarters

For someone oblivious to just about everything, he’d certainly managed to connect the dots quickly. All I could do was give him a sour smile. “Yeah. I found out literally minutes before I joined the wrestling thing.”

Elliot stared at me for what felt like forever before letting out a deep sigh. “Well, that certainly…explains some things.”

“It doesn’t explain shit,” I shot back at him with a glare.

“I said explain, not excuse,” he said quickly. “The one thing that always bothered me about that day was it just…wasn’t like you.”

“You don’t…didn’t know me at all,” I said. I didn’t know why I needed to correct myself so urgently. It wasn’t like he knew me all that well now, even though we were living and sleeping together. Admittedly, maybe because of our circumstances, he had caught onto a lot more about me than my previous bunkmates.

“Yeah, but even when I’m denser than a brick wall, I still pick up on things,” he said, wiggling his hands around his head. “It comes and goes, little…I don’t know. I guess Riley would call them insights. You were angry and hostile from the first time I saw you, but I never saw you take that anger out on someone else, not physically. So to have you just…hit Riley like that, especially when he hadn’t done anything other than win a wrestling match, it seemed weird.”

“And why would you bring that up now?” I asked suspiciously.

“I guess because I stopped thinking about it. I remember thinking it was a really weird reaction from you, but I stopped questioning it. Now, when you bring that up…well, it makes sense. You just took a huge blow. From the sounds of it, the only people you’ve had in your life are your sister and grandma. Losing one…well, I don’t know. I don’t know what that’s like.”

“You lost your mom,” I pointed out and then thought about it with a wince. “And your dad.”

“I was really young when I lost my mom,” he said with a shrug. “Hard to remember much about her. And yeah, I guess I lost my dad too, but…it’s like her. I lost him when I was young, even though he was around physically. So it’s kind of hard to…I don’t know, it’s not the same.”

“I guess not,” I admitted reluctantly.

“So, I’m about to come over to that bed and sit next to you,” he said, standing up.

My eyes widened. “What? For what?”

“Shut up,” he muttered, crossing the space between us and plopping down on the bed beside me.

“What…are you doing?” I asked, not sure if I should be annoyed or alarmed.

I chose both when he leaned his head on my shoulder, threading his arm behind mine and around to hold my elbow. “Again. What are you?—”

“I used to have really bad dreams too,” he told me in a voice so quiet that if he hadn’t been inches from my ear, I wouldn’t have heard. “It was never about my mom or even my dad. Sometimes they were. I used to dream about drowning all the time. I’d always end up in some deep water somewhere. Sometimes it was a wide river and sometimes just…water. Usually, I was alone, but there were sometimes people I knew with me, but I never remembered who was there when I woke up.”

“That’s a lot of ‘sometimes,’” I told him, unable to help smiling a little.

He chuckled, his breath brushing over my bare skin. “I had them off and on for years. It almost always went the same way. If there were people with me, they’d disappear right before things went bad. Maybe I’d fall in the water, something would drag me into the water, or my boat or whatever would break. I’d fight and fight and fight to stay afloat, but I always got weak and went under. I used to wake up yelling, waving my arms everywhere like I was trying to swim.”

“When did they stop?” I asked, not because I thought mine would stop anytime soon.

“They still show up. I don’t know if I’ll ever be rid of them.”

“Probably not.”

“Wanna hear something weird?”

“If it’s coming out of you, it’s going to be weird.”

He chuckled, nudging my shoulder with his cheek. “Well, ever since I got arrested and went to prison…I’ve only had the dreams a few times. Used to be at least once, usually two or three times a month. But the first night after my sentencing and from that point forward…I’ve had it…three times? In the past three years? It’s weird.”

“Who knows why brains work the way they do,” I said, frowning. “Didn’t you say you turned yourself in?”

“Yeah, everyone else in the group too. Kinda glad the judge was nice and gave me a different prison than them. Otherwise, I might be a whole lot…well, dead. Or worse.”

I didn’t need to know what could be worse than death because this world was filled with awful fates people suffered all the time, probably thinking death would be kinder. “I don’t know. Maybe that has something to do with it.”

“You think?”

“I mean, if bad shit can make my dreams pop up, why couldn’t something good make yours go away?”

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