Knife's Edge

CHAPTER SEVEN

I sit up with a sigh when I'm confident the pain has passed for now. I bring my hands up to hide my face as I tuck my knees against my body, wanting to hide. Embarrassed, I mumble an apology into my fingers.

Dylan scoots closer next to me, one hand moving to my back, the other curling around my ankle. "Don't be sorry. Sorry for what? You have nothing to be sorry for."

I drop my hands to my knees and turn my head away from him, biting back a bitter laugh. It's either laugh or cry.

One night: is it really too much to ask for? One night that I'm not plagued by my past, a night that I can be normal – that's all I want.

"Do you want to talk about it?" he asks, his voice soft.

"No," I reply – it's my usual response.

He knows that I have problems with my shoulder – when it hits like that, so brutal and so sudden, I can't hide it – but I've never told him why. I've never really told him much of anything.

He thinks he wants to know but he doesn't. He doesn't really want to know how broken my body is, damaged from injuries suffered so long ago. He doesn't want to know the story behind why my shoulder is so fucked, or how I got the scar on my stomach – a chapter of my life that even I don't know because my own subconscious has repressed it.

He doesn't want to know that I have far too many fillings in my teeth for someone of my age, because neglect meant that I wasn't introduced to a toothbrush until the age of seven. He doesn't want to know that it caused dental problems so severe, even my adult teeth were fucked after my baby ones had all but rotted from my mouth.

He doesn't want to know this shit because I don't want to know this shit. Nobody wants to know this shit.

It's repulsive.

"Are you sure?"

"Yes."

He drops it.

He doesn't push; he doesn't dig for the information that I want to keep buried. He simply holds the map and patiently waits to see if I'll show him how to read it. I don't – I won't – and so the treasure remains hidden in the same place it will always stay: the back of my mind where it rightly belongs.

"Do you want to stay for a bit longer?" he offers. "Mum and dad won't be back for a little while, yet."

I both do and I don't but, either way, it doesn't matter. I promised Stella I would be home before eleven and, realistically, I need as much sleep as I can get before my exam tomorrow.

"I can't," I sigh, finally looking back at him as I pull myself together. "I need to get home."

Again, he doesn't argue. He simply presses a kiss against my lips – one so tender, so caring that I can barely stand it – before standing up to get dressed, passing me my jeans as he starts to search for his own.

The walk home is quiet (not the good kind) and I hate myself for being an ass and ruining such a perfect evening. Maybe Dylan should run off with that waitress from the restaurant, after all. She wouldn't be such hard work, such an imperfect smudge on his otherwise simple life.

"You know that I think you're perfect, right?" Dylan finally speaks up as we stand at my front door. He hasn't said a word the entire walk here, as wrapped up in his own thoughts as I was in mine, and I'd half expected us to part ways without so much as a single word spoken. "Nothing you tell me will ever make me think otherwise."

His words are as sweet as they are wrong.

"I love you," I tell him – because it feels like the safest thing to say. "I'll see you tomorrow?"