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A+2DEXTERASA+5

A fluttering hum beat against his cheek like a worried moth. Dex turned towards the house, bones groaning.

Norah’s stone-still figure stood past the lifted window, listless, struck, heart racing.

He extinguished his cigar into his palm and shoved to his feet.

“Cara mi?” he asked gently, bowing low beneath the sill.

She yelped and spun. The teetering glassware in her arms scraped and clinked and began to plummet, but Dex snatched them from the air with outreached hands. He set them on the rug below, striving to keep his friend calm and unbothered.

He straightened and drank in the room that held her captive, finding himself wincing with its intensity. Nor and the space here tremored with aches.

Her eyes returned glassily to the door adjoining her room to another, as though dead bodies rotted within.

“You want to go that way?” He tossed his chin towards it.

“I don’t know that I can...”

He eyed the door’s lock and nodded, extending an outstretched palm to her.

“You’ve got a key, too,” she noted.

“But yours is much heavier.”

She sighed and pulled the tiny thing from her chest as though it bore the weight of a ship’s anchor. With averted eyes, she dropped it into his palm.

He disengaged the locking mechanism with a shudder of steel.

Nor’s heartbeat quickened behind him as though he’d pulled the hammer of a pistol.

He reached for the knob, but as his flesh grazed its dusty brass, he snatched himself back with a hiss. A poker-hot sting had bitten his palm.

“Faex,” he cursed, stepping back from the threshold in confusion.

It wasn’t the pain, but what came with the pain that struck him so. Accompanying imagery, visions, flashed behind his eyelids. He was reminded briefly of the memories Cecil had shown him.

“What happened?” Nor’s heart lifted with a familiar hope his tongue knew well. It was a yearning for proof that you weren’t crazy. That someone else felt what you felt. “It hurt you?”

“It was more of a…a memory of a hurt…” he began. “I think I picked up on something you left behind here, love.”

Norah took a step back, brows stitched with fear.

Dex again gripped the handle and closed his eyes. This time, he expected the pain. Respected it, because it was hers.

Beneath the darkness of his lids, he was instantly met by brilliant evergreen irises, wide and fixed with horror. A small cry of pain sang out like a mourning songbird.

“You were so small Nor...” he muttered, swimming through the old memory as though it were morning fog. “The house. It smells like...cigarettes.”

“How do you know that?” she snapped, defense mechanisms unsheathing like swords from their hilts.

The struck chord in her voice returned him to the present and reminded him to be gentle.

He didn’t tell her that he could hear screams. That he could feel the heavy tragedy. That trauma could imbed itself even in wood grain. It was no wonder she feared it so. Its weariness sapped him so severely, that he thought he may need to sit and rest. He turned from her to blink away his brief tears. Someone or parts of someone had indeed died here.

“Anyone would’ve come from that with some scars, love. Seen and unseen…” His eyes fell magnetically to her sweating palm where her white scar sang to him. “But you don’t let yourself feel them, do you?”

Norah shoved both hands into her sweatpants pockets and stared at him, refusing such a confession.

He returned to the door again and grazed its handle. In respecting its memories with a quiet reverence, they were respectful in return and didn’t burn him. He then reached out for her hand.

Her heartbeat was nearly louder than her voice. “I can’t, Dex.”

He remained still and patient and said nothing.

She wrinkled her face in pain and stepped nearer of her own volition, eyeing the knob with disgust. Her hand hovered above it, thumb lacing her fingertips as though the phantasm of a quarter rolled across her knuckles. But despite the self-soothing tic, she promptly retracted, shaking her head in defeat, eyelids batting like a flickering star.

“It’s alright to feel the hurt love,” he said as quietly as he could manage.

“Nothing can be done about it now. Why would I ever want to?”

He could hear the consequential buckles and straps of her armor cinch closer to her chest but knew she wasn’t angry with him. She was angry with herself.

“Some things aren’t meant to be fixed, Nor. You’re just supposed to feel them,” he said, rewording something he’d heard her voice to clients prior.

Her jaw tightened. A lump rolled in her throat. She closed her eyes.

“It’s not that simple.”

Her inner song hardened and crackled like distant lightning, like the jarring scratch of a record player. The hairs on his beard buzzed with its protective electricity. Though his face remained stoic, he inwardly admired her spirit. Her bite.

“It is that simple. But it’s not that easy, amica mea,” he corrected.

“A-Amica?”

He raised a brow, realizing he’d been slipping into Latin again. “Amica mea, means my friend.” He rubbed his neck, heat warming his cheeks.

She smiled briefly with the distraction.

“It doesn’t have to be today,” he said, nodding to the door.

She blinked away hot tears. “Not today...”

He pulled her close into an embrace until the panicked moth in her chest sputtered from her lips. Still clutching to his small friend, he cast the door open wide and peered in. Dusty, unused furniture and a barren king bed loomed in the dark like sarcophagi. He stepped in.

He spun to watch her step in after him, watching her courage break through the dead, old space, her bravery glimmering like Aurora Borealis.

They cleaned dishes and watered her plants. He petted the waxy leaves and whispered inspirations of growth to each beneath his breath. He wrestled with Vincent and fed the small beast his human tuna fish whilst Norah tidied the home with a hum in her throat and only a mild, residual anxiety in her heartbeat.

Along his commute back to the rooftop, he noticed her key and its still chain remained relinquished in the ajar door’s knob.