Page 3 of Pippin & Nacho

“How do you feel?” he asked.

I yanked my eyes off his body and turned away from him, glancing back at my calendar to hide my flaming face. “Fine.”

He will never want you like that. You’ll never be able to map out his cute little moles. You’re only his friend—best friend. Best friends don’t like each other that way.

After he added some powdered cream and sugar to his coffee, he sat at the table across from me, examining me with eyes I could get lost in forever. They were fathomless. I gave him a beaming smile so he’d never know how he made me feel like melted butter of desire on the inside. It made no sense, but I had no other way to describe it.

“Did you meditate?”

“Yeah. It was good.”

His returning smile was broad and crooked, crooked like his cute white teeth. Nate always complained about his teeth needing braces, but I liked them. They were perfect, like the rest of him—perfectly imperfect.

“Do you want to talk about your dream from earlier this morning?”

I shook my head and took a sip of my now lukewarm coffee. I stood and slipped the mug into the microwave to heat for twenty seconds. When it was ready, I sat back down and took another sip.

“Have you been writing them down like we discussed?”

I shook my head again, refusing to look at him. He tried so hard to help me, but I kept failing him. I’d forgotten about writing them down. Nate even bought me a really cool notebook and pen to do just that, which I suddenly remembered sat in the junk drawer in the kitchen with two half-written pages.

Nate reached for my hand, resting on the table. I looked up to meet his smiling and patient eyes. “Tell me about your dream. Let’s talk about it.”

“Do I have to?”

“You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. I just thought it would help you process it.”

“Okay,” I sighed. “The dream was about… then.” Nate knew exactly what I referred to—the time I’d spent months at this facility made for people like Nate and me. It was a place meant to change who you were by breaking bits of you off like a stale cracker. My body involuntarily shuddered as my eyes slid closed, getting lost in the scene… the memory.

Crying, screaming, begging. It hurt so much. I always hurt. Mentally. Physically. Emotionally. Touching me in places they shouldn’t be touching. My mind is dizzy and unfocused… drugs. I orgasm into another man’s hand. I’m drowning in humiliation. Dirty. Ugly. Evil. An abomination.

That was what they wanted. They wanted me to be so disgusted with myself that I would never stray to a man. How did my parents know?

My eyes watered, and I brushed them away angrily, so fucking tired of being like this all the time. “I can’t, Nate.”

He rubbed the top of my clenched fist in soothing circles until it relaxed. “Shhh, it’s okay. I’m so sorry.”

My tense body relaxed at his touch. Nate was magic—pure, beautiful, celestial magic. He was my bright star. My North Star. My Polaris.

“Did you see on your calendar that we’re skating with our crew today? Then we have to work tonight.”

All my pain quickly vanished, and I smiled again, knowing I would soon be surrounded by my favorite people and doing my favorite things.

“Yes, I can’t wait.”

Protecting Sam and loving him from afar became pretty much my only identity, and I was fine with that. I would do anything to ensure his happiness, even at my expense, though I did have a happy life for the most part. I didn’t only help Sam because of my love for him, but because I genuinely wanted to and cared about him.

Who knew where this empathy for him came from? I just remembered sharing a bedroom with him when I moved into my last foster home when I’d been fourteen and hearing his horrific nightmares every night. The cries and whimpers pulled out this weird need to protect him. He was two years older than me, and I was smaller, but that never stopped me from this urge to shelter Sam. I’d often held him as a teen as he thrashed at night, soothing him back to sleep, and he’d clung to me because he had no one else. Neither of us had anyone but each other.

I’d been shuffled around foster care homes for as long as I could remember. Somewhere down the road, moving from house to house, the reason I was put into the system became lost, or maybe I ceased to care. Eventually, I got used to rejection, neglect, and the idea I’d never find my forever family. I soon learned to take care of myself because no one else bothered to. My rotating foster parents gave me the bare minimum to work with, and the rest was left up to me.

I’d been under no illusions that I’d succeed or even graduate high school. Foster kids rarely did well in life when they left the system, ill-equipped to be thriving adults, and many fell to homelessness, drugs, or suicide. That didn’t seem to stop me from finally grabbing our things and taking Sam away from it all. I was used to surviving over living. It was all I knew. But Sam finally gave me a purpose. I loved being needed by someone so much that it became my drug of choice. I was addicted to it.

Abuse was common in foster homes, and I grew relatively used to it. It came with the territory, though some homes were better than others. It hadn’t all been terrible. But our last foster parents finally drew the line in the sand for me. They crossed to a place that changed the tide for Sam and me. Being smacked around was one thing, but because Sam struggled to focus and remember things or do what he was told, it only served to piss off our foster parents, taking it out on Sam the most.

When he’d forgotten to clean the kitchen, which had happened too many times, our foster father finally lost it on Sam. It took two other foster kids to pry his fingers off Sam’s throat. I hadn’t been home at the time, but when I stepped into our bedroom to find him crying and saw the redness and bruises, I was fucking livid.

Sam couldn’t help it if he had a hard time focusing or remembering things. He really did his best not to forget, but he failed more often than not. I helped him with his chores and schoolwork as much as possible, but I wasn’t always able to, and I was terrible at school.

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