Mikey and the Chickadee Ch. 10

"I can't even imagine them. Can you give me something? What's something you like to remember?"

I watched him reflect. Then his face changed all at once, flooding with warmth, as if some prevailing shot of consolation had finally arrived through a vacuum tube extending back into his past. "There was this trip we took to the interior," he said. "I think I was already eighteen. It was just me and them-we hadn't done anything like that in a long time. I sat in the middle seat just behind them in the van. My mom was handing me some kind of snack-I don't remember what it was-and we were playing this endless license plate game. I remember feeling like I was just a kid. Normally, by that age, I hated feeling that way. I hated anything that made me feel like a child. But in that moment...I don't know. It was just different in that moment. I felt really safe with them. I felt like it would be okay if it stayed like that forever. I wish-" He stopped himself. Gone from his expression was any perceivable degree of solace. He sighed and his words crept out precariously onto some imagined threshold, "I just wish I had known it was the last time I would get to feel that way."

Mikey stopped talking altogether now. He reached under the edge of his pillow with both hands and lifted it, curving it up against his face. In this way he couched his countenance from me, as he held very still. He was silent. For a period of several seconds, I don't believe he breathed at all. Then he drew in a mammoth breath, so enduring as to be inhuman, like a ship keeling to one side. He held it for an instant and then released, shuddering slightly, the air slipping unevenly forth.

I waited for what felt like a long time before saying, "Mikey, what can I do?" I wanted desperately to put my arms around him now.

His voice cracked slightly, muted and deep through the pillow. "You've already done so much for me."

I did not ask his permission as I moved closer to him. I sent my left arm up over his side, just below his shoulder, and pulled him tightly against me. His pillow-barrier remained and separated his face from my chest. He wordlessly lifted his head and dragged the pillow out from under him entirely, casting it down near his feet. He burrowed into my chest and stayed put, breathing softly in and out. I felt him relax incrementally with each whisper of hot air against my skin. A period of time passed, after which I felt all but certain he was asleep. I tucked my mouth and nose slightly into his hair and smelled him. My comfort asked for no change in position. Accepting now that he had been put completely at ease, I, too, relaxed.

In the morning I woke up, once again before Mikey, as well as before the alarm we'd set. I lay on my stomach, halfway on top of him, arm slung around him, the side of my head pressed cleanly into the center of his chest. My other arm was stuffed underneath me and alongside his; we held hands here, I realized, against the cotton of my underwear-a meaningless barrier between us and my bulging flesh.

Caught off guard by this surprise advancement, I jumped enough to wake him. I went to lift myself off of him.

"Stop," he grumbled. "Where are you going?"

My own voice far from prepared for the day, I rested again on him and mumbled, "This seemed a little intimate."

He said nothing for a moment and then laughed. His chest rumbled beneath my ear. "Don't worry," he said. "We're doing a terrible job at being fuck-buddies, that's all."

There was nothing else to say, so I just laughed along with him.