Page 62 of Caution Tape

My words trail off once again. I have gathered every conflicting idea in my head, wrapped them in question marks and hurled them at him. I half-expect him to simply get up and walk away.

“What am I thinking?” he muses. “Breakfast. I was serious about that.”

I’m going to kill him. That’s it.

He reads the look on my face and bursts into laughter.

“Yeah, yeah, I know what you mean.” He scratches at the shadow of beard starting to grow along his jaw as the smile fades. “It’s weird; I have emotions. I can feel them, but they’re muted. The volume on them is turned way down and they’re very, very far away.”

He reaches his hand out in front of him, mimicking grabbing something out of the air.

“The only way I feel emotion is if I chose to. Does that make sense? Things will happen and I have to manually decide; am I going to feel this, or not? And if I do, it’s like I have to coax it into cooperating. After a while—“ He shrugs. ”—I stopped choosing. I got very used to that distant feeling.”

“Why did you stop?”

“I didn’t mean to. Now I’m this. That’s the only way I know how to explain it.”

Nolan grins as the sun begins to beam on us, closing his eyes and tilting his chin upward, relishing the warmth.

“I never wanted to exist, really. I was placed on this earth and told to walk around and learn these things and go to school and work a job and find a wife and do this and do that… and I never saw the point.”

I move closer to him, our shoulders now touching. Every time he speaks it’s as if he’s taking paragraphs of tangled, racing thoughts out of my own head, reading the etchings off the inside of my skull.

“I thought I could hide with Natalie. I thought I was so good at pretending that I could slip amongst all those people who seem to know how to be alive and exist among them but—“ His tone shifts, and he sounds almost bitter. ”I would’ve let them carve out this part of me. Snuff it out so I could go to barbecue’s and listen to Natalie talk about work.”

I nod. “Then Cora comes along and ruins all of that.”

His arm curls around me and pulls me very close, so that I can feel his chest rise and fall as he breathes.

“Yes. Yes, you did.”

It’s a nice moment. I can choose to accept it and enjoy it, or I can opt out and ignore it. I want to lean into Nolan and give up fighting. It’s every girl’s dream to be swept away by the blood and chaos.

I slide a hand across his stomach and cling to his hip, enjoying the warmth of him and the way he shifts to curve his body around mine. This is the part where something breaks. There can’t be days like this, of coziness and comfort. Not for me.

Not with Nolan.

Right?

There’s an urge to push this toxic relationship off a cliff; to dump lighter fluid all over something already burning.

We haven’t spoken in minutes, a tender silence that could preoccupy me forever if I didn’t want to ruin it.

“Nolan?”

“Hmm?”

“Do you have fantasies?”

He doesn’t stumble over his words or try to get me to explain further to buy him time to think of something to say to me. Nolan nods. “Yes.”

“Like what?”

“The usual. Threesomes. Wearing someone’s face and seeing if I can pass for them for an entire day. Fuck their wife and rip the mask off at the last second and just... scream.” He rolls on the hood of the car, facing me directly. “People ask questions like that because they want to talk about something. So, let’s hear it.”

“Clowns.”

“Clowns.” He reaches out and squeezes my nose. “Honk honk.”

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