Once upon a time, there was a boy with pink-dusted cheeks that waited for Skylar outside class every morning to walk her to her next one.
Breathless laughter echoed in her room after he would climb in through her window every evening, eyes crinkled...
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There's someone painting a galaxy of comfort across my temples when I start to feel again.
It's the familiarity of the touch that reaches me before everything else; tips of the fingers caressing my forehead before sliding between the locks of my hair and tenderly scraping at my prickling scalp, leaving behind the lightest of pressures on the crown of my head and then repeating the motion all over again.
When the faint ringing in my ear fades, I hear two voices talking in hushed murmurs around me, and even though they sound like they're coming from the surface of the water I'm still drowning under, I can tell that one of them belongs to River.
Somewhere deep in the vents of my strained chest, the last remaining knot of panic loosens and makes way for more vacuum.
I must have made a sound or some sort of movement because momentary silence greets me next, the support under my head shifts a little, and the grounding touch against my forehead comes to a halt.
Although opening my eyes feels like far more work than I'm cut out for right now, I do it anyway; slowly and just enough to make sure that the blurred face before me is actually River's.
"Sky?"
I have to blink a few times before I can make out the expression on his face, and the desperation I find in his eyes mirrors the one in my chest so acutely that it makes my throat seize up all over again.
"Remember when we talked about how I've only seen you cry like, thrice in the past decade or so?" he asks, discernibly trying to keep his words light. The last part of his sentence makes his voice sound just a touch away from falling apart, but he keeps going like he doesn't know what else to do. "I'm never joking about that ever again."
A single breath of laughter, a delicate little imperceptible thing makes its way past my dry lips, morphing into a choked sob just as quickly as it had come. When my vision blurs once again, I hear a strangled noise leave River's mouth, only a second before my fingers crumple the fabric of his shirt and he maneuvers me into a sitting position like I weigh nothing; on my side with both my legs thrown across one of his and my head tucked under his chin.
The monsters that I've been running from have caught up to me after all these years, but it's the boxes of memories they carry that frighten me more.
"Tell your father it was a mistake." I squeeze my eyes shut like it would make both the image and the voice go away, and try to fight away the shiver that goes up my spine when the memory
Kissing Finch hadn't been a mistake. Falling in love with my best friend hadn't been an immature snap decision that I sat back and regretted later. It was the one thing I was sure of with no bounds out of everything in my life.
The only mistake that I made was trusting the notion that my parents' love was unconditional.
It's a mistake that I pay for even today, with silent tears streaking down the bridge of my nose to my temple and soaking through River's shirt; a mistake that I know I'll regret making for the rest of my life.
