Lydia has always been a cold sleeper. Jackson complained about it all the time – cold feet, cold hands, cold body. It's just a part of who she is, and everyone else could deal with it. Jackson obviously did, back when they'd still been sleeping together.
So when Lydia wakes up one night with fully-clothed arms wrapped around her and a face pressed against the back of her neck, someone whose skin is burning hot and who very much isn't Jackson, because when they slept together there weren't clothes, she only just keeps herself from totally freaking out.
She realizes who it is, after a moment, and she closes her eyes and tries not to burst into tears. He'd said he would leave her alone. She swallows, screws up her courage and tells off the big bad wolf. "You said you were going to leave me alone. What the hell are you doing here?" She wonders if she should scream and get this psycho arrested.
"It's too hot," he whispers, and his voice isn't his voice. In her dreams – in her psychoses – he had always been so confident, such a know-it-all, and Lydia could never deal with know-it-alls (they never knew more than her). Here, though, his voice is soft, and it's broken, and it sounds almost like the boy, the one with the blue eyes, what he'd been when he'd wanted to seduce her.
But this? This wasn't an act. His voice is too raw, and – she notices it, then, when his hand moves to spread across her thigh, that his fingers are trembling. And he is still burning flame-hot.
"I can hear them," he says, and his voice cracks, lost and lonely. "I can hear them screaming, and it's hot, too hot, no moisture in the air."
Lydia sucks in a breath and she squirms around. He lets her go, and she turns to face him. His eyes are fevered, wide and terrified behind a haze of memories. She half-wonders if he even realizes that he's here at all.
His hands press into her shoulders, burning away the chill of her skin, and then he moves and buries his face there and she lets out a little squeak.
He keeps murmuring, oblivious to her thoughts; that broken anguish still clear in his voice. "and I can smell them, hear them burning – it smells like food, just like—meat, my family burning—I can't stop hearing their screams, and then the sounds they make as they burn. Like fat in a pan. Bacon. Sizzling and popping all around me."
Lydia swallows hard. She feels sick, and she can see it in her head; not part of the connection they'd had, just her mind, imagining being trapped in a burning house with others dying all around. It makes tears well in her eyes, not for him – he was psychotic, completely insane – but for the boy, the boy that he'd been, and his family too.
"It's too hot," he whispers again.
She doesn't entirely know why – she's not a merciful girl – but maybe it's for the boy who he'd once been. She lifts a hand and puts it against his face, knowing that her fingers are icy cold. They always are. He lets out a soft gasp, his skin feverish underneath her hand, and he stills. Like he's afraid to move, because she might move too.
She doesn't know when she falls asleep, but she does; he's gone in the morning, like he'd never been there.
When she goes downstairs, she finds her mother, cooking. One of the few times she ever has time to anymore. The bacon sizzles and pops, and Lydia thinks of a boy, burning away in the basement of a house.