The Boy with the Hidden Name by Skylar Dorset

Author:Skylar Dorset
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: Sourcebooks, Inc
Published: 2014-09-29T20:53:20+00:00

CHAPTER 12

The world is loud and it is soft. Sometimes there are people shouting all around me, and sometimes there is nothing but the whisper of a breath beside me. Sometimes I am so hot that I feel that my skin is on fire and I push at everything near me in an effort to find some relief, and sometimes I am so cold that I shiver until it hurts and it doesn’t matter how many things are wrapped around me.

It is lonely and I am all alone, although it seems to me that whenever I think that, Ben’s voice drifts through my head, a low murmur. I’m here. I’m right here.

And he is.

I open my eyes, and I am in my room. My own bedroom, at home, on Beacon Hill. It is dim in the room, twilight, or else early morning, just before dawn.

I feel hollow and fragile, like if I move I might be ill, so I stay in exactly the position I’m in, concentrating on breathing and trying to remember how I got here. Because I wasn’t here. Was I? I don’t think I was. My mind is a massive tangle; getting a handle on the recent past is like trying to stagger my way through brambles.

So instead I try to focus on as many present sensations as I can—the slide of the sheet against me and the cradle of the pillow underneath my head. I am on my side, tipped toward my window, and my hands are…caught up in something I know I should recognize…

I close my hand into fists, and someone sighs, the mattress shifting a bit under me.

I look down. Ben is in a chair next to me, and he is clearly sleeping, leaned over, his head on the bed next to me. It looks as if it should be uncomfortable, but after he finishes stirring, he seems to fall back into a deep sleep. I look at my hands, closed into fistfuls of his hair, and then slowly, carefully, I uncurl my fingers and disentangle them. Ben sleeps on.

I stay very still, no longer just because I don’t want to get sick but because I don’t want Ben to wake up. Although it appears to me that I’ve been sleeping for many hours, if not days. Honestly, I feel exhausted, and I don’t feel up to another argument with Ben. The truth is I can’t quite remember how we left things. Everything from the moment he gave me the coat is a vague blur. There were kisses, but there was also…there was…I told him, didn’t I? That I couldn’t trust him anymore? Did I make him understand that? I am too tired to try to untangle the complicated interweaving of heartbroken devotion.

I am concentrating so hard on trying to remember how the conversation with Ben ended that I’m not sure how long I lay there staring at him before I realize that he’s awake. He has turned his head, still resting on my mattress, and is regarding me calmly, his eyes pale, barely a hint of color, and inscrutable.

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