A/N: Sorry about the lateness. I had it finished last night, but this site wouldn't let me log on for some reason... The next chapter will probably be up sometime this weekend.

Three weeks. It's been three weeks since that dream, and I still haven't mustered up the courage to tell her about it yet. All I said was that it had been a nightmare. A really terrible nightmare, but I left it at that. She sensed it went deeper, but also didn't push me. Another great thing about her. She lets me deal with things when I'm ready, not the moment they happen.

But sometimes I don't think I'll ever be ready. I feel like I've regressed in these last three weeks, that being with Ashley has reminded me of the pain I knew back in those days, the band-aids she's putting on being ripped off by ghosts of the past.

I wake up today, once again surrounded by Ashley. Though we've been doing this for weeks now, it's a comforting feeling to have. Today, we're going out. Not on a date or anything, because I still don't feel like I'm ready for that yet. Not in public. I don't know why, but I've allowed myself to get over the fear of acting at least a little couple-like in public, though I can't bring myself to let her take me on a date. Today we're going to Harbor Hills' only place of interest: an old house that everyone thinks is haunted. It's an old mansion, one of the most well preserved in Ohio. The descendants of the original owners have turned it into a museum, detailing its fascinating and somewhat colorful history. Ashley's been wanting to see it for awhile, and we finally have a nice day to do it.

After a quick breakfast with Clay, Chelsea, and Chris, we move out into Ashley's car, laughing about something or other. I can't really remember what Clay had said that had caused this, but the laughter induces something inside of me that I haven't really been familiar with since the dream. Happiness.

We hop in her car. "So this haunted house thing, it's a little outside of town, right?" Ashley asks, biting her lip in concentration as she pulls out of the driveway.

"Yep."

"I'm gonna need some directions," she tells me matter-of-factly.

I chuckle. "Why don't you just let me drive?"

She gasps in shock. "And relinquish control of my baby? Fat chance." She leans over and smiles at me, this huge smile that I've only seen on her a couple of times before. I've been seeing it a lot lately.

Ashley is very good at following directions; she never got lost once on the entire trip, despite my vague descriptions.

"Alrighty, then," she jokes as we get out. "Where's this house?"

I shrug. "It's kind of a hidden wonder. You have to go all the way back through this path- it's about half a mile through the forest, but the forest itself is absolutely breath-taking."

"If this was a cheesy romantic movie, I'd tell you that nothing could ever be as breath-taking as you." I'm about to give her a kiss, and then she adds, "But since it's, not you'll have to settle for some hand holding."

"I'm debating whether or not to slap you right now," I tell her. "But since you're holding my hand, I'll let it slide."

"You're so easy," she laughs. And then she stops. I almost feel like her heart stops with her laughter, taking its last breath as the happiness leaves her face.

I turn in the direction she's looking, down the path. It's a boy and a girl, holding hands. They're around our age. The boy has tousled and messy blonde hair, the girl's is bouncy, red, and curly. Ashley has never met him before, but I can tell she recognizes him instantly. He has the same cheekbones as me, but I don't think that's what clicks in her head. It's that picture on the desk in the dorm of us when we were kids. My brother hasn't aged a day since that photo was taken.

It's awkward moment for the four of us. Ashley's face shows the look she gets when she's calculating things. She's probably figured out by now that the girl is Elle. My Elle. The Elle.

"Look who it is," Glen says, breaking the silence. "My little dyke of a sister."

I lean back closer to Ashley, my eyes stinging with tears. Today was supposed to be a fun day; a good day. Not that day. The day I've known would come, but tried to run from.

Ashley sizes Glen up with glaring eyes. "Look who it is," she mimics. "My girlfriend's ass of a brother."

Glen smirks at her evilly. "Well, well. Someone hasn't learned her lesson yet. Guess this time you didn't try to oh, I don't know, rape her?"

That hurts more than I could have ever imagined. To hear my own brother accuse me of raping someone who I had loved, who had loved me back, takes me to a new low. And at this point, I say the hell with being strong. Ashley can be my shoulder to lean on, because now, I need that shoulder. I need that shoulder to cry into.

As I put my head there, I can feel her entire shoulder tense up, her body responding to my brother's comments. "She did not rape Elle," Ashley says in a cold, calm voice. "Whatever she's been telling you is a lie, because Spencer and Elle, they were in love. They were, I know. Because Spencer's told me and when she talks about you, Elle, there's nothing in her eyes but hurt and pain. The kind of hurt and pain that can only be caused by those you loved, who loved you back." I'm truly touched by what she says; how she defends me, no questions asked, just the straight up facts.

And Glen falters, I can tell, because he doesn't say anything for a couple of seconds. "Your girlfriend over there never loved my wife." I notice how he calls me Ashley's girlfriend, not his sister. It's like he doesn't want to have any affiliation with me.

"Why don't you let your wife speak for herself?" Ashley snaps at him.

"Why don't you let your girlfriend speak for herself?" Glen counters. I can almost feel the heat between them, the tension becoming palpable.

"Spencer?" she whispers in my ear, her breath warming my cheek. She's giving me an option to stand up or back down, and I honestly can't tell you what makes me answer "yes."

"What, Glen?" I say. I don't look all that intimidating, with my ruffled hair and tear-stained face, Ashley's arm slung protectively around my waist. But I think the fact that I even have the courage to say anything shocks us all. Glen makes no movement to do anything; for once he has no snippy retort. Elle stares at the ground, her face unreadable. And Ashley... Ashley sneaks a glance at me, a smile full of nothing but love and pride. I almost melt under that smile. But I don't. "What else can you possibly say to me?"

Glen still formulates no response; it's Elle's turn to say something. It's Elle's turn to break not only my heart, but my body. "I never loved you. You were always just that little whore who wanted me."

They say that things fall apart and they leave it at that. But they're wrong. Things fall apart, all right, but when they fall apart, they fall apart little by little until there's that one thing that cracks it all so it crumbles. The last nail in the coffin. And that was what Elle just delivered.

This appears to be even a low point for Glen and Ashley. They're both rendered speechless and I can't even process this beyond the fact that for the first time in my life, I'm seriously contemplating running away. Not suicide, but just running. Leaving it all. Even Clay and Chelsea and Chris. Even Ashley. Because I can't deal with going back to anything at all. But I can't run, because Ashley's holding my hand. She's keeping me grounded. But she's barely keeping herself grounded.

"I have nothing else to say to you," Ashley tells them. She then laughs in that sarcastic way she has. "Oh, wait. I do. I have a question for you, actually. How is it that you can hate Spencer? Just because she loves another girl?" She smirks smugly at them.

They're both uncomfortable for a moment, and she squeezes my hand tightly. For that brief second, it feels like we've won. We've got them stopped, confused. And I let myself think that for a second.

"How is it I can do that?" Glen says with an almost insane laugh. "Because she's my damn sister, that's why. And it's sick, disgusting. Why do you think women need a man to make a baby? Because that's the natural order of things. Because women depend on men; they need men, and men..." He snorts in an awful way. "We all know why men need women."

"You self-satisfied bastard!" Ashley exclaims. She takes steps forward; intercepts him. "You think of saying something like that again, I'll-"

"You'll what?" Glen taunts, his face aglow with sarcasm, anger, hunger. "What?"

Ashley is visibly shaking now. "You don't even want to find out." From the words, from that emotion, both Elle and I understand that we don't want to find out. I'm so busy darting my eyes between the tenseness on Elle's face and the pure loathing on Ashley's that I miss Glen. I miss him lunging.

I miss him smacking Ashley full in the face.

None of us react for a moment, the stunned crack slitting the silence like a knife. Ashley recovers first, going at Glen, but I stop her. I don't know why I stop her, but it feels like the right thing to do. I hold her arms back, and in a few seconds she calms down, her breathing steadies.

Glen laughs at her. "Need your little girlfriend to protect you?" He chuckles again.

Elle pats his arm in this devilish way. "Hey, I'm sorry about that. He usually doesn't hit girls."

"But wait." He turns to Elle, an amused, sarcastic look on his face. "Lesbians aren't really girls, are they?"

Ashley can't find anything to say to him. So she just takes my hand, stalks off angrily, and flips him the bird. We head back to the car, our walk choppy. Hers angry, mine scared.

We sit in the car silently for a moment. The only sound is the outside world. And me crying. My face in my hands, I can't even look at her. The world that I've worked so long and hard to avoid has finally caught up with me. My dad used to tell me that life was like walls.

"Walls?" I giggled in my six-year-old voice. "How can life be like walls?"

"Like this," he said, a smirk on his face. He took some of our LEGO bricks out and began building something. "What's a famous wall, Spencer?"

I shrugged and thought hard about what we'd learned in school. "Oh!" I exclaimed. "The Great Wall of China!"

He chuckled. "Okay, sure. The Great Wall of China. It was built by a Chinese emperor, but I can't remember which one for the life of me. Do you know why they built it?"

I shook my head gleefully. "Tell me, tell me!"

"Alright," he laughed. "They built to keep out the bad guys from the north. And it worked, too. For hundreds of years, it kept the bad guys out. But one day, they broke it down."

"What does this have to do with life?" I asked, confused.

"Because you can build up as many walls as you want, Spencer," he told me seriously. "But one day, someone's going to climb over them. You can't hide forever." He put the last brick on his very tiny LEGO wall.

At the time, I didn't really understand what he meant. But now I do. Now his meaning comes into stark focus, like someone had just adjusted the lens of a blurry camera. I sit there, my head buried in my hands, my tears sliding over my arms, my pants, Ashley's car seat. No words can describe how deeply I feel. Nothing can convey how much I want to crawl under ground and hide. No words can say how much I need Ashley right now. No words can explain why I can't let myself touch her.

She puts her hand on my shoulder, lightly, as if she's testing the waters. And I withdraw. I pull my head up and buckle myself in. Ashley knows what this means; she puts her baby into gear and starts to drive.

We go all the way home in silence, and I rush all the way up to our room in silence. I throw myself on the bed and cry myself into a state of exhaustion. And once I'm done crying, everything is silent.

I don't participate much in conversation at dinner that night. Clay and Chelsea act like all is normal, but I can tell that Ashley's told them. If not all the details, they at least know we met them today. Ashley tries to act normal, but she's failing miserable. I'm not even trying.

Little Chris babbles on about dinosaurs and seems oblivious to the obvious tension of his family.
"They're really cool!" he exclaims, reminding me of my own childhood enthusiasm towards fantasy stories. "The big ones- the T-Rex ones, yeah! They got these tiny little arms and HUGE heads! They're enormous!"

Ashley smiles at him as she plays with her pasta. "That's really cool, kiddo. Did you learn anything about the big fish?"

Chris scrunches up his nose. "Big fish?"

"Mhmm," Ashley tells him seriously. "There were these ginormous fish in the water the same time the dinosaurs were on land."

Chris shakes his head. "But I don't like fish."

She smiles at him again. "Trust me; you'll like these fish. They were like swimming dinosaurs. Only cooler."

"Nothing's cooler than dinosaurs!"

"Wanna bet?"

Chris ponders this for a second. "Do I have to give you money?"

Ashley chuckles at him. "Nah, squirt. Just the satisfaction of knowing that I was right."

He cocks his head to one side and looks at her for a second. "Okay! Deal." He then turns to his father. My brother. "Daddy, can we get some fish books from the library?"

"Sure thing, buddy," he says.

"I could take him," Ashley volunteers.

I feel as though I am watching this conversation as it takes place on a television; I'm not there, but I can see all the things going on. I feel detached from the world, wanting more than anything to be held by Ashley and curl up alone on my bed at the same time. A certain numbness washes over me; a certain state of discontent that can so easily be fixed by avoiding the state all together. Avoiding the state of being alive.

Luke's advice from a few weeks ago passes through my head in a fleeting flash. I hear his words spoken, but they mean nothing to me. If I'm "dead," how can I be hurt more? Shouldn't I be somewhere in between depression and bliss? A kind of limbo, almost content boredom? That state of comforting lack of feeling could easily last me the rest of my life. It easily could do that.

"Auntie Spencer, you're not supposed to play with your food." I don't even know why that statement affects me so profoundly. Maybe because I was so buried in myself that I didn't even notice what I was doing with my food. But that's enough; to hear a young boy's voice so confused and concerned over something so innocent.

"I just... I have to go." I rush out of the room, back into mine and Ashley's shared space. As I leave, I hear Chris saying, "Mommy, what's wrong with Auntie Spencer?" And if I still believed I had a heart, that would have broken it.

Around 10:00, Ashley comes in quietly. The doors creaks and light spills over. "Spencer?"

I pretend to be asleep, to not hear her.

A pause.

"Alright. Well, if you need me, I'll be on the couch in the living room." She leaves. The door closes gently. The light goes out.

Days pass. Days of me pulling away, leaving Ashley to play with Chris. I sit and I watch them. But once again, I'm not really there. I'm somewhere else, where reality means nothing and everything is a mass of swirling, meaningless colors. It's where I am, and while it would be happier if I let myself live, it's just easier to be here. Because no one can hurt me here.

And then one day, it all goes to hell.

It's night and Ashley comes into our room. As usual, I don't acknowledge her. But from the corner of my eye and my previous knowledge of her, I can tell she biting her lip and fiddling with her thumbs.

"Spencer." She comes over to me and runs her fingers through my hair. But I turn away. "See, this is what I wanted to talk about. You're pulling away, Spence."

I shake my head. "No. I'm still... yours."

She smiles sadly, tears welling up in her eyes. "Maybe in your head. But not in mine. You're turning into Elle. Right before she outed you. I don't want that to happen to us."

I laugh at her from my incredulity. "You can't seriously be comparing me to Elle. You know what she's done to me!" I'm close to tears myself now. "You've seen what she's done to me. How can you even think that?"

She takes a deep shaky breath. "Yeah, Spencer, I know what she's done. But I also know what you're going through is similar to what she went through after that speech."

I gape at her. I never told her that story. "How'd you know?" I croak, a crack in my voice.

"Clay told me while you were caged in here one of these past few days." She shrugs like it's no big deal. But it's a very big deal to me, because I what to tell her things when I'm ready, not when Clay's ready. "I've been your safety net; your place to run to when it all falls apart. I haven't pushed you, because I thought you would tell me when you were ready. And that's a good plan." Pause. "For a while."

I look at her and for the first time in days I feel something. And it's not good. "What?" I choke out.

She stands up and starts pacing. "When I was totally wrecked in freshmen year, with the sex and the booze, you were my safety net. I would come home, wasted, and you would hold my hair behind my head while I threw up and then sing me to sleep. It was just something simple, having you do that for me even though you hated that lifestyle. Seeing your concerned face waiting there for me with your arms wide open. I needed you. Every night, before I would down my first one, I'd know that you were home waiting. I could drink more easily knowing that. And then one day, you weren't. You weren't there." I remember that night; the night that he took me out for the weekend. One of my pretend boyfriends took me for a spontaneous weekend trip that I really didn't want to go on, but ended up doing so because I felt so sorry for him with his puppy dog face, and I couldn't say no. "I came home, and it was pure torture. I had to do it all by myself, and it was then I hit rock bottom.

"You never realize how deep you're in until you've hit the bottom. Since you can't look down any longer, you have to look up and you can finally see just how far you've fallen. I saw that that night, when you weren't there. And I honestly don't think I could have realized that, recognized it for what it was, if you were there. I needed that alone time. But after I'd figured out the who's, what's, when's, why's, and how's, then I needed you. I needed you to get me out of that rut. And we fixed it. We fixed it together. That's the kind of thing that has to happen now. That's what you need right now. Without your safety net. You need to hit rock bottom." Her resolve crumbles and she talks out through choking sobs, "And I can't be here while you do it."

"No!"

"Yeah." She takes her already packed suitcase and heads out the door. "I'm hanging at Luke and Mitch's for a couple of days. I'll be there when you're ready. When you know what you want."

And she heads out the door, her footsteps padding away.

And I'm alone.