I don’t fully understand what happened last night. I don’t even really remember it. The best I can do is write it out to try to piece this back together.
I crept down the stairs after Raph’s last text, doing my best to avoid Logan. The last thing I needed was him asking me where I was going, or realizing he was alone in the house. And I made it out the front door and then down to Raph’s apartment, where the door was unlocked as usual. The whole place was dark, of course, except for some thin moonlight coming in from those small windows. I picked my way through the shadows toward Raph’s bedroom, at the back of the apartment. I’d never been in there before. It was darker even than the other rooms, and I could barely make out the outline of Raph’s dark curls against the white of his pillow.
“Raph,” I whispered hoarsely. No answer. “Raph,” I said again, in something closer to a normal voice.
“What?” he said. “Oh, right, Paige.” He sat up in bed. “I’m sorry, I drifted off again.” He rubbed a hand over his face and scraped it through his hair. “Is this real? I was dreaming, and then—”
“It’s not a dream.” If only!
Raph, just like on the night I met him, was shirtless. He was under covers, but I figured that if experience was any indication, he was probably wearing nothing but underwear. I felt suddenly self-conscious about being in my goofy pajamas, but . . . God, the brain is a weird organ. I can’t believe I was even thinking about stuff like that, given what had just happened. But at least it was distracting me a little from the horror.
“What’s going on?” Raph said, jolting me out of my nervous silence. I gave him a recap, with as much detail as I could bear. For a minute or so, he didn’t say anything.
“Raph,” I said.
“What do you want me to do?”
“I don’t know. Nothing, I know there’s nothing . . . I just . . . I can’t go back up there. I can’t be alone. Can I . . . stay here with you?”
Raph closed his eyes. “I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”
“I know,” I said. “It’s dangerous, you’re dangerous. So you keep telling me. But at least down here my face isn’t covered in spiders.”
Raph opened his eyes again, and I saw resignation and sympathy in them. “Okay,” he said. “You can crash on the couch until morning.”
I thanked him and groped my way through the dark back to his couch. I tried to sleep for a couple minutes, but I was way too jumpy, so eventually I took out my phone, just to distract myself. Even so, though, I kept feeling—or *thinking* I felt—tiny legs tickling my skin. I shook my limbs and smacked at the strange sensations until my skin was red and raw, but I never saw anything.
Eventually I couldn’t bear it anymore and I snuck back toward Raph’s room. He was asleep again, stretched out in a moonbeam, his face peaceful, his pale skin almost glowing. Instantly I felt calmer. No matter how many warnings people gave me, including Raph himself, I just couldn’t see him as dangerous. In the madness I now faced every day, he felt like an island of sanity.
There wasn’t anyplace else in the room to sit, so I eased myself gently onto the edge of the bed, not wanting to disturb him. Idly I wondered about his history, the stuff he didn’t want to tell us. About what had gone wrong that had resulted in him getting kicked off campus. A failed romance, presumably. Gazing down on his elegant sleeping form, it was hard to picture anyone rejecting him. What kind of person could resist this gorgeous creature, as broken and tortured as he might be?
Eventually I started to get stiff in my position, so I carefully shifted and scootched in a bit to sit next to him in the bed, my back leaning against the headboard.
I was convinced there was no way I would be able to sleep that night, but the next thing I remember, my eyelids shot open as if I’d just received a shot of adrenaline.
I didn’t remember where I was, or maybe even who I was. Everything felt strange and wrong, and my whole body was trembling, my muscles spasming. I sat straight up in the bed, and after a moment felt my senses returning to me. I’m in Raph’s bedroom. There is a weird, thick feeling in my throat, as if I swallowed a penny or something. My pajamas are all twisted up, and also sticking to me because I’m coated in a slick film of sweat. The bedclothes are tangled around me as if someone has been thrashing wildly in the bed, and they are also damp, presumably with sweat. I am alone in the bed, my breathing shallow and labored, my pulse erratic.
I took a few deep, slow breaths, like my mom taught me for dealing with exam stress and stuff—in through my nose, one two three, out through my mouth, one two three—and gradually started to feel like myself again. It was at this point that I realized I could hear voices. A voice. Raph’s voice. Coming from the kitchen.
I got out of bed and moved quietly toward his voice. From the doorway I could see him facing away from me, leaning over the kitchen sink. He had slipped on a pair of jeans and he was talking on his phone, but there was something weird about his voice, like it was slightly muffled.
“I’m sorry,” he was saying. “I know. I know, but this is different.” His voice was trembling and his words seemed to come with difficulty. “You have to come, please . . . It isn’t about that! I swear.” Raph paused to listen, and hung his head at whatever he was hearing. “I know. And I promise I wouldn’t call if it weren’t—” [pause] “I understand all that, and look, in six months I haven’t talked to you once, I haven’t contacted you, I haven’t—I’ve abided by the—but this is different, it’s not just about me.” [pause] “Monty, listen to what I’m saying! I don’t care. You started this, you can’t just walk away when you feel like it.” [pause] “I told you.” [pause] “You promise?” [pause] “Yeah, okay, I know, just . . . come quickly.”
Raph hung up the phone and turned around. He startled a little when he saw me. My mouth was already moving to ask, “Who’s Monty?” but the words were replaced by a different question when I saw his face. I realized now why his voice sounded weird: he had a dish towel pressed up against his mouth. “What happened?” I said. “Are you okay?”
Raph dropped his hand with the dish towel to his side, revealing a large, messy gash in his lip, which looked like it had only recently stopped gushing and started to seal itself. As he stood up straighter in the sunlight, I saw something else: there were tiny reddish bruises, maybe the size of a nickel, all over his chest, his throat, and a few on his wrists. I gasped and rushed to his side. I was just trying to help. I wanted to examine his injuries, clean them, and see if they needed a doctor’s attention. But Raph moved away from me. In fact, he was . . . cowering, shrinking away from me, backing himself up against the refrigerator, his eyes big with fear.
Growing desperate, I kept asking what happened, if he was okay, should I call a doctor, but he wouldn’t answer. Then something caught my eye from the counter: a smear of bright color reflected at me in the chrome side of the toaster. It was me. My face and chest, red with blood.
I touched my face, not believing what I saw, but my fingers came away sticky with the stuff. “Raph . . . ,” I said uncertainly. “What happened to us?”
Raph squeezed his eyes shut. “Leave me alone,” he whispered. “Please, get away from me.”
I ran all the way to our upstairs bathroom and set about cleaning the blood from my skin. The strange thing is, though I checked my whole face and neck and the inside of my mouth, I couldn’t find a cut.
I don’t think it was my blood.