Alone with You in the Ether

by Olivie Blake

Her discomfort was, for him, an insurmountable distraction.

There was wonder here, even if Regan no longer saw it. Even if she no longer felt it, he would feel it for both of them. He would translate it for her later. He would learn to draw it for her, he thought, or to write it, or graph it. She seemed to appreciate things she could see. He thought of her gaze traveling over the scars on his shoulders, taking him in. Yes, he would draw it for her, and then she would see it. She would watch it take shape and he would know he’d said it in a way she could understand, and then she would know that even this, with its ordinary features, was wonder and glory, too.

He didn’t blame her for not seeing it. He blamed everyone else for letting her forget.

“You sure you’re fine?” “Yes, why wouldn’t I be?” “You sound,” he began, and then stopped. “Good,” he decided. The word he’d meant was bright, perhaps even blinding, but it didn’t make sense, and she laughed again.

She couldn’t prevent the urge to know his thoughts. She wanted to lace them between her fingers, to root them in her hands, to twine them around her limbs until he’d secured her within the invisible web of his carefully ordered madness.

“I’m not taking my pills,” she said. “I’m not sleeping.” She exhaled raggedly, “I’m … I have problems. Like, diagnosed ones. Ones I should be treating somehow.”

“I don’t want to,” she confessed. “I can’t go back, not anymore.” You don’t just unburn, she thought desperately, and in answer, Aldo smoothed a cool hand over hers, tracing the shapes of her fingers.

“You can’t fix me,” she whispered to him, her mouth tracing his neck. Do you understand, do you know what you hold in your hands, do you know how readily it breaks?

“I don’t see anything to fix,” he said.

This time, she finishes with a gasp. It grits through her teeth and she leans back to tell him, raggedly, I knew you would feel like this. I knew I would feel you everywhere, in my whole body, I knew it. She’s rocking against him slowly and whispering I knew it, I knew it, I knew it, in his ear until she sighs again, his hands tight on her hips.

It isn’t nothing—she sleeps with her hand wrapped around his cock just to comfort her subconscious with the shape of it—but this, I love your brain, is more.

She doesn’t really know who she is but she wants to know, she wants to find out, and she can’t do it with pills.

And then here she is, this mystery, this puzzle, does she even know how much he loves her unpredictability, her twists and turns? She thinks her brain is some sort of problem? Fine, good, he loves problems.