Page 12 of Love, Nemesis
“Lethe?”
“Thanks,” he whispered.
He closed his eyes and took in a steady breath, feeling in his bones how tired he was. He felt himself starting to drift off just as the bed bounced and shifted under Jamie’s squirming.
“Go to your house,” he groaned, “and blow out the candle on the way. You shouldn’t be here. If you didn’t learn how to pick the locks, you’d still be outside.”
“Do you ever want to get married?”
He rubbed the exhaustion from his face. “No.”
“I want to,” she said. “I could see you with a wife and like ten kids.”
“Yeah?” he said, the word weak. For a second, he imagined himself and the imaginary wife at a backyard BBQ, borrowing a scene from a commercial he’d seen a lot in high school. He was grilling in an apron by a white picket fence. Burgers. Or maybe it was hot dogs? He couldn’t get as far as imagining kids running around with a dog—if he recalled correctly, it was a golden retriever.
She shoved him. “Wake up. We’ve barely talked all week.”
He tugged on the covers, rolling her toward the edge of the bed. “It’s getting late. You’ve kept me up long enough.”
“It’s not even really dark yet!”
Lethe sat up, giving her a stern look. “Jamie, we’ve talked about this. Go. To. Bed. If you don’t listen to me, I will shave all of your hair off so the other kids laugh at you, and then your orphanage mom won’t let you ever talk to me ever again. Understand?”
“Okay. All right. Fine, but she already told me I can’t, and look where I am.” Jamie swung her legs off the bed and skipped to the door.
“You really don’t help my reputation. Get the candle.”
“If you cared about your reputation, you wouldn’t steal things,” she said, nodding to the caramels on the floor near the bed. A few had skirted out at some point, and Lethe hadn’t bothered to pick them up.
He raised his eyebrows.
She grinned back at him sheepishly. “Night.” She blew out the candle.
Lethe fell back against the pillow, staring into the darkness. He settled in and tried to let the exhaustion pull him under. He rolled to his left, settled, and then rolled to his right. He thought about that old commercial again.
He imagined his face pasted on the griller’s like a bad collage.
He rolled over again. He tried to avoid thinking about anything at all.
The quiet made his heart race. A chill hooked itself into his skin.
He cursed loudly into the room and rolled out of bed.
He whipped his lighter off his bedside table and lit the candle, pressing his arm to the wall as he rested his forehead against his wrist and exhaled. He shivered and sank down against the wall, breathing, waiting for the feelings inside him to settle and pass. He imagined that day in the park. The sun and that red balloon, drifting so bright into an endless sky. The carnival rides. The laughter.
He rolled back under the covers, pulling them over his head to shield him from the light.
That balloon kept drifting away, and away, and away. Lethe’s mind spun with the image, his skin starting to feel hot. He gritted his teeth and cursed, shutting his eyes tightly against the sensations that crackled under his skin like electricity.
The room seemed to radiate around him, and everything breathed with pulsing color. Lethe’s bones felt like a barrier he wanted to fight his way out of, and as he held his head, the world around him shook and trembled.
A moment later, the door creaked open. Lethe heard Manaj’s soft socks across the floorboards. The mattress shifted as Manaj sat at the end of his bed and peeled back the sheet over his head.
Manaj sighed as he placed a cool hand over Lethe’s where they rested over his ears. Lethe didn’t open his eyes, the world still shaking around him.
“You won’t kill us,” Manaj said, and Lethe found his mind suddenly tethered to the old man’s voice. “You won’t hurt a petal on the most fragile flower.” He walked through the script calmly. “You won’t kill us,” he repeated. “Life is precious. All life is precious. No exceptions.” Manaj paused. “Now stop this nonsense.”
The shaking in the room ceased. Lethe cracked his eyes open slowly to see Manaj searching the room. A glass of water on a nearby table still rippled, but soon settled. Manaj drew a bottle from his belt and refilled Lethe’s flask.
