Page 41 of Under The Twilight Rainfall
My throat starts to close up and when I pull on his arms, Valen lets me go. I stuff the camera back into the bag and drift away on the water.
Valen doesn’t interrupt, just lets me have my moment, and when I come back he smiles and runs his hands along the surface of the water, near me like an invitation, but not touching.
He’s always so fucking thoughtful and endearing. His patience with me has been unrivaled. I don’t understand why he hasn’t throttled me. Everyone I’ve ever worked or lived with hates it when I get into a funk and need to step away.
I’m wasting time. I have things to do.That’s always how it goes.
But not Valen.
Valen acts as if he could happily wait all day for me to work through my shit, and I don’t know how to take that.
“Do you remember my sixteenth birthday?” I hover my hand near his, just shy of closing the distance.
“I do.” His lips twitch into a smile, fingers brushing mine. “Ma and Pa went all out. Had enough food for a family of twelve and at least two cakes. I swear there might have been a third.”
I remember the day well. My first birthday in the Olaño home. Half of my foster families had forgotten, and the other half may have gotten me a cupcake and said a rushed ‘happy birthday’ at best before shoving me off to school. The Olaños were the first to put anything special together for me.
“I threw one on the ground and locked myself in my room for the rest of the night.”
Here’s the thing: kids learn how to process a lot of shit in their formative years. So when all that shit is chaos and hurt and abuse, you have no fucking idea how to handle the easy stuff when it gets thrown at you. I didn’t know why I was so angry back then, why watching Valen smile as they sang ‘happy birthday’ made me want to rip everybody’s heads off.
“You were a lonely, scared kid,” he says softly, curling his fingers over my own.
“And instead of running off with your friends to get high like you did every night, you sat outside my bedroom door and told me all of your birthday horror stories until I fell asleep.”
He shrugs. “Even then. Ma woke me up off the floor the next morning.”
“Why?”
“Because you needed me.”
My throat feels dry. I know it’s true, but... “I didn’t.”
His smile is sad as he lifts our hands to his mouth, and his lips slide along my wrist, over old scars long since faded. But the look in his eyes tells me he remembers.
“You did.”
I do, I want to tell him. I absolutely still do. Ever since the day I left, I’ve needed to find him again. To find the peace and comfort only Valen has ever given me.
“But why did you care?”
“You know why, Dex.”
He kisses my wrist again, gliding his mouth down my forearm until our chests touch. He abandons my hand to place his warm palms on my cheeks. “I’m not subtle.”
“No, you aren’t,” I reply, but I need him to say the words. Need him to convince me that I’m not playing tricks on myself, that I’m not seeing what I want to see instead of reality.
He doesn’t, though. He strokes my cheeks with his thumbs, rubs them over my lips and down my throat until they rest on my clavicles.
“You aren’t the only one with a heart to protect,” he says so softly the wind carries the words away almost before I hear them.
That’s the moment I see him with his guard down, when all the colors of pain he’s spent years painting over come bleeding through, and here I am preparing to hurt him all over again. I left because Valen had gotten too close, and I was afraid of what I would lose if I let myself stay. And in the process I broke the exact thing in someone else that I was trying to protect in myself.
Running is what I do. It’s who I am. No one’s ever wanted to keep me before. No one except for him. I thought time and distance would erase the infatuation, show him that I’m nothing special, nothing worth keeping.
But seven years later, here he is: heart dripping from his sleeve, and even though he’s holding back, if I ask him for it, he’ll give it to me.
I can’t ask him for it. Because I can’t make him any promises.
