Page 50 of A Taste Of Darkness

27

CARDIAC ARREST

Milo Marucci

We made it back to the apartment without being seen by another person.

Sterlie kept babbling nonsense for the rest of the way, but at least she didn’t throw up, so that was a win in my book.

She also ate some pasta that I heated up in the microwave as soon as we got here. We couldn’t possibly eat out, for various reasons, but at least she had something savory in her stomach now.

As we entered her bedroom and I led Sterlie inside, she instantly let herself fall onto her bed. A huff jumped out of her throat the moment her back hit the mattress. Her legs hung off the bed and I was sure she would’ve simply accepted her fate and gone to sleep like this had I not been here.

“I’m going to touch you now,” I warned before I reached for her wrists and pulled her up to sit.

Sterlie’s eyes were wide open, curiosity gleaming inside them. “Why do you keep saying that?”

“So you know.” I carefully began to remove her jewelry, starting with her bracelets. “And so you can tell me if you don’t want that.”

“Nobody ever tells me they’re going to touch me. And your touches aren’t even bad ones either,” she said, something heavy in her voice. “If I do this…” Sterlie laid one of her hands flat on my stomach. My breathing stopped mid-inhaling at her touch. “You’re not telling me to stop, and I never told you I was going to touch you either.”

In an attempt to distract myself from getting hard, because her stupid, perfect hand lay on my body, I removed her earrings. “You can touch me whenever you like, that’s why.”

“Do other people have permission to touch you?”

I shook my head.

“Not one?”

For a second, I truly thought about her question. The last time I allowed someone to touch me was a while ago. A long while. I didn’t even remember the day. I was still young.

I never even allowed a woman to touch me when we were intimate.

I didn’t like to be touched, didn’t see a reason why someone was supposed to put their disgusting hands on my body. But with Sterlie, God, with her… I couldn’t get enough of it.

“Do you hug Flora?” Sterlie asked.

“Rarely.” Flora was my best and only friend in Canada. In the whole world, actually. After I escaped to Canada, she was the first person I met.

I didn’t mean to befriend her, honestly. I was going to keep my distance from the Adams family for Sterlie’s sake, while I could still be close to her in some ways.

Flora was a really headstrong woman, though. She didn’t back down, no matter how cold I’d been toward her. She said the fact that I was trying to ignore her only made her want to be my friend even more.

It turned out, her friendship was the most precious to me anyone’s ever been. She never got scared, even when I told her that I killed rapists. In fact, Flora had been impressed and asked if I’d gotten medals for doing God’s work yet.

But all that didn’t mean that she and I had the kind of relationship other people did. We talked, a lot, but if she ever tried to hug me unless a hundred percent necessary, I’d smack her out of the window of the sixteenth floor at Tartarus; headfirst.

I never tried to use her friendship to help me get closer to Sterlie either. It wouldn’t have been fair to either of them.

“You don’t like when people touch you, huh?” Sterlie tried to remove her hand from my stomach, and I didn’t know what came over me, but I pressed it back to my body.

Her eyebrows pulled together into a confused frown, eyes glassing over.

“I can’t control other people,” I told her. “I don’t know where they’ll touch me, how firm or soft, if it’ll just be an accidental brush or intentional. I can’t calculate their movements, or their willingness to act when I tell them to stop. I’m the one thing in life that I have control over. My thoughts, my words and actions, who I touch, and who’s allowed to touch me. If I can’t control what’s happening in the world, the least I can do is control what happens to me.”

Taking a deep breath, I pushed away the memories I tried to bury several years ago. It worked, at least for the most part.

“But why don’t you care when I touch you?” She laid her other hand on my arm, then decided it was a good idea to test how far she could go by hectically moving her hands all over my body. Touching as much surface as she possibly could. She moved underneath my shirt, but not for long, then went back to patting her hands up and down my arms, my chest, and even my legs.

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