Six hours passed as I haunted the streets of Dals, circling the same roads in an endless loop until the light gave in to the dark. Eventually, after I’d heard the same song py on The Eagle for the fifth time, I shut off the radio and proceeded to sit in complete silence.

  At around 2200, I stopped at a gas station to refuel. Sitting in that dark and lonely parking lot, I hit a new low in life: covered in my own blood, eating a withered taquito and gulping down a nasty blend of Red Bull and fruit syrup like it was the only thing keeping me together.

  By now, I was no longer shaky with adrenaline; now I was the kind of tired where even a three day weekend wouldn’t have been enough time to sleep. I knew I should head home, but being around anyone right now - even Raja - felt taxing beyond belief. However, my other option was spending the night in my truck, and I really couldn’t afford to be woken up by police asking me why I was camped out in a car with blood on my clothes.

  Now that Raja had gotten the job at the gyro pce, I tried harder to be quiet coming home, just in case he was already asleep. Since he’d taken to sleeping in my bed, he wasn’t as sensitive to the sound of the front door anymore, but tonight it seemed more necessary than ever - at least until I’d put something else on.

  Throughout the apartment, the only sound was the A/C bsting so hard, it was like walking into a meat locker. I slipped my boots off carefully, stepping barefoot from the front door to the bathroom and flipping on the light when I got in. At the sight of my own face, I smirked in bleak amusement.

  “We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” I joked to myself, staring long into my tired eyes. I suppose I should’ve been grateful that my reflection didn’t ugh back.

  First order of business was a change of clothes. When I considered my bloodied shirt properly squashed under tissues, wrappers and toilet rolls, I tied it off with a tight knot, then tied it off again just for good measure. Right as I got ready to take it out, Raja poked his head around the doorway.

  “Oh! Uh, hey,” I jumped back, a little startled. “Sorry, did I wake you up?”

  “Nah, I just got up for some water.” He gave me a curious once-over. “What’re you doing back so te?”

  Swallowing down the lump in my throat, I gnced back to my reflection, bitter that such a question could never receive an honest answer. Burying everything deep down was starting to take its toll on me because I knew that it was going to cw its way to the surface eventually - it was only a matter of time. Was I strong enough to hold it back?

  In my silence, Raja entered the bathroom, his eyes half-lidded and sleepy. When I gazed into them, I felt unworthy of being looked at with such tenderness.

  “I had a long night,” I said finally.

  “Looks like it.” He stroked my cheek, knuckles against the barely-there stubble. “Should I even bother asking what happened?”

  No, I replied internally; I couldn’t stand to watch the warmth in his face give way to disgust if he knew the truth. Would he still touch me if he knew that only a few yers of flesh separated him from a teeming swarm within? Would he still kiss me, if he knew what I was becoming?

  “I— I had a fight with Cliff,” I stammered out, hoping it was enough. “It was ugly, and— I felt really shitty about it, so I didn’t want to come home and be shitty at you. So I stayed out ‘til I cooled off enough to come back. Just took a long time ‘cause… I’m a fucking basket case, I don’t know.”

  “Hm… well, he’s always been an asshole,” Raja said, shrugging. “One of those guys that likes getting under people’s skin.”

  A poor choice of words: immediately, my mind was pgued by images of the dead wasp coming alive again, resurrected by a communion between its body and mine. The sensation of it had been sharp and alien, like getting your blood drawn by a careless nurse. I shuddered at the thought of it.

  As if he had a sixth sense, Raja reached for my face again, his palm warm against my cheek as his dark eyes settled on me. “Come to bed,” he whispered, grazing his thumb against my cheek in circles. “You could really use some sleep.”

  I wasn’t in any position to argue with him, so I simply nodded in agreement. Taking my hand into his, Raja led me from the bathroom to my bedroom, where it was cold enough to make me shiver.

  Thankfully, Raja was kind enough to leave the door open, the light from the hallway splitting apart the darkness in one stark, off-white strip. When he’d left me alone to get water, my thoughts started racing anxiously, which made every second that he was gone borderline torture.

  Upon his return, Raja sat onto the bed and pnted a brief kiss on my cheek. Then, as he put his water on the nightstand and rearranged his pillow to lie down, I cleared my throat.

  “Uh, hey, so…” I propped myself up beside him on the bed. “Before you go back to sleep…”

  In the middle of rolling over, Raja paused. “Yeah?”

  Even in the darkness, I felt the spotlight of his eyes on me. Silently, I sat up and ran my hand from the length of his hip to his knee, stroking it as lightly as I could. It had a permanent color to it like a bruise that never healed, and for a long time, he recoiled whenever I got too close. Now he let me linger, like my touch was a risk worth taking.

  As I gazed down at him, Raja brushed his fingers nguidly all the way up my arm, unaware of the carnage that had taken pce hours before. He traced the petals of my tattooed roses, spiraling until he reached the center before reversing the spiral outward. He was clearly waiting for me to continue, but seemed ready to wait forever if he had to.

  Cliff had no idea what he was talking about. Every part of Raja that he hated - his tenderness, his pacifism, his heart - was what drew me to him, and his absence had left me looking for him in everyone I met. He didn’t know Raja like I did; didn’t appreciate the soft pulse in his veins, the look in his eyes that left me exposed with just a gnce. He was too blind to see what I saw.

  And now that Raja was here with me, staring at me like I had the power to bring the world to standstill, I wasn’t going to let anything get between us anymore. Not when I’d waited so long for this.

  So instead of speaking, I leaned down and pressed my lips firmly against Raja’s, kissing him again and again and again until every nagging question was smothered by the taste of him.

  ? ? ?

  On another one of my days off, I took advantage of the extra time to stay in bed as long as possible. Raja didn't dare try to stir me - he knew better than anyone that every second of sleep I could get was hard-won.

  In a brief moment of consciousness, my phone made its tell-tale bzzrt-bzzrt. Freeing myself from the tangle of bed sheets I was trapped in, I groped around my night stand in a dopey haze, increasingly frustrated when my phone was nowhere to be found.

  From the doorway, Raja ughed, entering the room with a cup of coffee in his hand. “Uh, what are you doing?”

  I blinked wearily, lifting my head off of my sweaty pillow. “Looking for my phone.”

  Raja set his coffee down on the end table and lifted my jeans up from his side of the bed, fishing my phone out of its back pocket. He tossed it over to me, but his aim was so bad that he hit me in the forehead.

  “Fuck!” I squawked. “Watch it, dumbass!”

  “Oh shit, sorry!” He winced in sympathy, covering his mouth. “You okay?”

  “No. I’ve got fatal brain damage now.” I rolled my head back into my pillow to read my phone. “Doc says I’ve got five minutes to live.”

  “Damn, really? Well, at least that means we can fuck one st time before you go.” With another sip of his coffee, Raja propped up his pillow beside mine and leaned back with me. “What’ll we do with the extra four minutes after you’re done?”

  Letting out a graceless snort, I turned my focus back to my phone. I saw a text from Cliff - one that I’d figure out a way to reply to ter - but what made me bolt upright was seeing a text from Mercy. I swiped it open so fast, my phone didn’t even register my finger at first.

  Manny, come to my house ter, it stated simply. We need to talk.

  If I’d gotten it from anyone else, I’d be nauseous with dread, but for us, this seemed like progress. The time stamp meant she’d just sent it, so ‘ter’ probably meant after she’d gotten off of work.

  At my reaction, Raja sat up, too. “What’s up? Is something going on?”

  “Mercy sent me a text,” I said, a little breathless. “This is the first time she’s talked to me in weeks. She wants to see me— tonight.”

  “Hm…” He fttened his mouth. “Yeah, she really didn’t take that whole boyfriend punching thing very well, did she?”

  “I told you already, the guy’s a fucking dick.” I turned away, rereading the text like I was savoring it. “He’s a piece of shit who had it coming. I still stand by it.”

  “Isn’t him being a piece of shit kind of her business? Like, why do you have to worry about it aside from putting up with the guy at parties?” Raja twisted himself around to grab his coffee. After he took a drink, he offered it to me.

  “No, thanks— look, I’m not saying it’s not her business,” I said. “But you know how bad her taste in guys is? It’s fucked beyond belief. She’s like a magnet for shitheads. They see that she’s lonely and can’t read red fgs to save her life, so they take advantage of that. You know the first guy she dated after Feliz scammed her out of three thousand bucks? Three thousand! Over the course of fuckin’, like, eight months!”

  “And she didn’t realize anything was up with him after the first thousand?” Raja stared in shock. “That’s… impressive. For both of them.”

  I frowned. “She’s a very trusting person, Raj. She’s kind, she’s sweet, she’s forgiving, and…”

  Before I said anything else, I stopped myself. The idea that of all the people that Mercy had known, I had crashed through the ceiling of her patience and that there may be no going back, was agonizing.

  But this text meant that there was possibly a chance I could make it up to her, and if it meant swallowing my pride, I'd do it. I missed her, and I missed Cleo, and - most selfishly of all - I didn’t think I was strong enough to go on without them.

  As he listened, Raja’s eyes had narrowed so slightly, I’d only noticed because I’d gnced over to him for a split second. He took a long, slow drink from his coffee until the cup was finally empty.

  “Do you really think you need to be the one to tell her when a guy’s an asshole, though?” He asked, setting the cup down. “She’ll figure it out eventually on her own, right?”

  “So if I get the impression a guy’s a scumbag, I should just wait until he scams her out of money, or— or starts pushing her around, or starts fucking her Goddamn sister before I say anything?” My frown deepened. “I’m just trying to look out for her.”

  There was something cold about the way Raja raised his eyebrow. “But did she ask you to?”

  I paused. In all these years, taking care of Mercy and Cleo just seemed like second nature. What I’d kept to myself was that even if Feliz hadn’t asked me to, I would’ve done so anyway, though I never knew how he would’ve taken it if it hadn’t been his idea. But what was the point of questioning it now?

  “She never had to,” I replied resolutely. “It’s just the right thing to do.”

  Strangely, Raja didn’t have anything to add. Rather than address anything I said, he got up from the bed and stretched in several different directions, his joints popping all along the way.

  “Well, I’m gonna go make breakfast,” he said quickly, changing the subject. “While I do that, you should hit the shower— you smell like a fucking gym.”

  I was surprised that Raja was actually willing to give me space on the matter, but I didn’t want to jinx it, so I let the conversation die off then and there. While I rooted around through my undry for some clean clothes to change into, Raja left to get breakfast started.

  The rest of the day went by uneventfully as we mostly rexed in front of the TV, Raja plucking aimlessly at his guitar between commercials. Since our conversation, he had been oddly quiet; I thought maybe I’d annoyed him by accident somehow, but when he sthered a bunch of arthritis cream on his knee, I figured that he was simply in pain. Though I offered to help, he declined each time.

  When there was less than an hour left before she would get off work, I stood from the couch after the conclusion of another bad made-for-TV movie.

  “Well, I’m gonna go ahead and take off,” I announced. “You need anything while I’m out?”

  Raja shook his head. “Mm, no, I don’t think so.”

  “Gotcha.” I smiled. “If your phone’s working again, just text me if you change your mind, okay?”

  He hummed, but it was so low and quick it barely registered. Before I went to look for my keys, I sat back down on the edge of the couch closer to him, and he shifted the position of his guitar to give me room.

  “Um…” I gnced away, bashful. “Can I get a kiss before I go?”

  Raja actually paused for a moment, like he had to think about it. Then, he nodded. “Sure.”

  My smile broadened. Immediately, I leaned in, but it didn’t really feel like a kiss: his mouth was cold and ft, as if he were going through the motions.

  When I pulled back, Raja’s eyes were half-lidded, but there wasn’t any dreamy sweetness to them. Instead, there was something pointed about the way he looked at me, but it was so subtle that on any other day I might’ve missed it.

  “Say hi to Mercy for me,” he said quietly.

  I couldn’t tell if he was serious or not.