Victoria's eyes traced along the curve of Nathan's cheek, over dark, sunken in eyes and down the ridge of his nose. He was asleep, naked and breathing slowly underneath the blankets. She took a drag from her cigarette and then exhaled the smoke, letting it drift away in tendrils, like most of their nights and most of her feelings. She shifted, feeling the wet sticky residue of their romp cooling between her legs. For a moment, she considered getting up to clean herself. But Nathan was so calm in his slumber and those nights were so rare. She didn't have the heart to wake him with her movements.
Victoria wasn't in love with Nathan.
She'd thought it over on many nights like these, where heat and desperation melted down and ground into skin and tongues and touch. She thought maybe she was in lust with him, but that wasn't really right either. A lot of it wasn't sexual or romantic at all. There was just something there, vague and ambiguous and overwhelming. Sometimes she felt so scared of everything around her that she wanted to cut him open and wear him like a suit of armor. She was certain he felt the same.
Maybe it was dependency. Something pure and a little twisted all at once. But they were twisted people, so Victoria couldn't find herself minding. They were vulnerable people, even under all the masks and lies and pretending they were perfect and loved and okay. They shielded each other from pain. From the loneliness that they felt, even in rooms full of people. Pills and grass and alcohol, running through them, trying to fill that gaping ache at their center.
Victoria's was from the need to be acknowledged. To be the best, the prettiest, the smartest, the coolest, the most. To be everything. Her ambition choked her, swallowing her whole and no matter how hard she tried, she couldn't help feeling like she was below everyone else. She burned apart her insides with a slow, smoldering fire, filling her with envy and jealousy and insecurity. She wanted to be noticed, but it only came through hard work and perseverance. And even then, her number of close friends was small. People just didn't really like her for anything but her money and status. It ached.
Nathan's was more profound. Maybe something he was born with, maybe the result of neglect and abuse. Nathan longed. Longed for love and affection and acceptance and someone to tell him what to do. He'd looked up to his father, once. Then, he looked to Kristine to protect him, but she left too. After that, Nathan wasn't the same. Chasing shadows for something or someone to believe in. Wanting someone to love him. He'd always been unstable. People whispered in the halls, laughing until he lashed out and smashed their faces in. He knew what people thought of him. That he was crazy and fucked up and good for nothing. He fought them and fought it, but deep inside he felt it was true. Nathan didn't like to talk about it. Never said it outright. But Victoria knew him like she knew herself.
She knew a lot, and little. Too much, but not enough.
Nathan was like cigarette smoke. Victoria blew a out a wisp of it, imagining it was Nathan. She reached for it and closed her hand around it, but she could never catch it. It too had been inside her, filling her lungs and relieving her stress and anxiety with it's presence. Giving her something to hold onto when she needed an anchor. She knew it well.
She knew Nathan, too.
Maybe not his mind. That was a vault of screams and whispers that even she couldn't begin to parse. But his body. She knew that.
Her eyes glanced over him again, looking at his hair, messy and playing across the pillow. Loose, making him look so much younger and so much more vulnerable. She could feel it, without touching. Know it's softness in her hand and the way he would glance at her, with cautious but affectionate eyes.
She knew the cold of his skin, how he could never hold in warmth because of his weight and his meds. The way he shoved his hands into his pockets and wore layers and layers just to feel normal. The way he rubbed his hands together sometimes, and stared off with a distant look.
She knew his hands the best.
Victoria wasn't one for vulnerability. She had flings and crushes, but she never took them seriously. At least, not often. She had too much to do. A future to plan. She was goal oriented and internal. She built walls around her, miles high, and didn't like letting people in. But, while they were steel for others, Nathan could crumble them like foil, bursting through and ripping out her core.
Physical contact with intimacy was terrifying, but Nathan was who she held hands with. She knew them. The weight of them and the places they calloused. She knew what they felt like, thumb running across his large knuckles, swollen and scared. She knew about his red, frayed cuticles and the jagged edges of his nails. She knew what they felt like, shaking.
On bad nights, when Nathan looked like a child shaking apart in an invisible wind, red eyed and clench jawed and frantic. When there was that agony and brokenness inside him that she couldn't push away and there were no words to be said. She held his hand. Tight. A tether to reality, reminding him that he was real. That they were real and that they could be okay.
She told him, with her hand, that the cold halls of Prescott Manor, filled with screaming and anger and loneliness, were not his home. Told him that the white, sterile walls of The Chase Space and of her own home, with soulless painting and a generally unlived in feeling were not her home. That they were in it together. They had a home in each other. Even if it was just the two of them, that was okay.
He didn't always calm down, though.
Sometimes he flinched, staring wide and terrified in her direction, but not at her. Through her. Seeing someone just beyond reality. Sometimes he whimpered, like a beaten animal, and choked on the sounds of his own agony, begging for forgiveness.
Sometimes, he was angry. Throwing things, breaking the things he loved and some things that he didn't. Sometimes she would sit there and watch him, shaking hands and unhinged fury, pulling at his hair, clawing at his arms, looking like he might vibrate through the floor. Sometimes, when he thought she wasn't looking, she would see him put of his cigarettes under his sleeves.
She's seen the scars. Seen the taut, shiny white sheen of skin that's been destroyed. There are countless lines and red, angry circles up both of his forearms. They're also on the insides of his thighs. He doesn't talk about it, and she never asks. They pretend there's not a problem, that they're not scared, because it's easier than screaming at walls when no one will hear them.
Sometimes she wishes she would ask anyway.
The worst times are when Nathan goes quiet. It's eerie, like there's wind all around him and he's at the center of the hurricane, calm, but dead. He stares during those times, at his hands, the floor, the ceiling, and at walls. Sometimes he stares at her, but she can't look his way. It scares her. It scares her when he goes dead.
Nathan is intense. He is fire and ice and raw extremes. But when Nathan goes blank, he is nothing and Victoria would rather see him scream or have him wrap his hands around her neck than ever see him like that.
Sometimes his voice is quiet, and not all there. Small, and childish. Begging for approval. Asking for things, but immediately crying and berating himself. He doesn't show that side to her often. He doesn't like showing those sides at all. He'd rather put his head in a fog, curled up around her and listening to soft, soothing sounds, packing a bowl and running away from himself.
She doesn't blame him. She doesn't want to live with herself most times either and she could only imagine what a day in his head must look like.
But at that moment, he's calm. In her sheets and clutching her pillow, looking more at peace than he ever does awake. She puts her cigarette out and drops it in the ash tray, wrapping an arm around his waist, curling against him, holding him close. She breathes him in, wanting to hold him there. He's been drifting so far from her. He's been running away from her outstretched hand and it scares her. She doesn't know what to do to help him. She's not in love with him, but she loves him on some level. In some way that's even more intimate than romance. She loves him like he's part of her but not in any way she can explain.
She wants that to be enough. To pull him from the dark and the hell that he's trapped himself in. She wants to be able to shield him from himself and anyone around him. Protect him from people like his father, or Caulfield, or anyone who calls him a psycho. She wants it so badly. She wonders if she can't do it because she's not a man. Because she can't fill in the Sean Prescott shaped hole inside of him.
He whimpers and the nightmares start up again and she can only hold him and whisper and hope to tether him there.
She wants her love to be enough, but she's empty inside too.
She knows it's not enough. It's not enough for her, either.