Take Me

“I know, baby.” He put his arm around her, holding her hard against his side, holding her together.

“Are you sure it’s real?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said.

She could feel a tremble move through his body, echo in hers. He’d seen it, too. It hadn’t been a sick hallucination or a party trick. It was real.

Her friend was dead. Before her life could ever begin, she was dead.

Travis leaned back against the wall, closing his eyes. She looked at him, so strong, so solid. Shaken like she was. The look on his face made it even more real. “Promise me something, Travis,” she said, shaking from the inside out.

“Anything.”

Right now, Travis was the anchor. Right now, Travis was the only thing that made sense. She felt like if she lost sight of him, she would drift out to sea completely.

He was her friend, warm, alive and present, and right now she needed him to be with her. She would give anything, her soul if she had to. She just couldn’t bear to lose him, too. Not tonight.

“Promise you’ll stay with me,” she said.

“How long?” he asked.

“As long as it takes.”

“For?”

“For...for me to stop shaking.”

He released his hold on her, but he stayed close, his presence a comfort.

He rested his head against the high-gloss elevator wall and closed his eyes, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down as he swallowed hard. He opened his eyes and looked at her, and all of his sparkle was gone.

She wondered if she would ever see it again.

“I’ll stay with you,” he said, putting her hand in his and squeezing it tight.

For some reason, the agreement felt like a blood oath. Like a pact. And she wondered just what it was she’d agreed to.

She wasn’t sure. She wasn’t sure of anything.

Except that Sarah was dead. Horribly. Tragically.

And that right now, as much as she needed Travis, he needed her, too.

She watched the numbers of the elevator, watched as they got closer to the ground floor. She didn’t know what would happen between them, because nothing seemed right tonight. Nothing was predictable.

She’d never been afraid to be alone with Travis before, but for some reason, right now she was.

But not as afraid as she was of being alone without him.

Chapter Two

“The Black Book,” Travis said when they got back into the town car that had delivered them to the party earlier that night.

“What’s that?” she asked, squeezing her hands into fists and trying not to fall apart.

They were both on the verge of it, and if either of them gave in...well, they would both shatter completely.

“A hotel. It belongs to a friend of my father’s.”

“You don’t want to...go back to the dorms?” She’d been planning on staying with Sarah tonight, but obviously...obviously she wasn’t now.

“You want to go back to the dorms right now?” he asked.

She imagined the little space she’d shared with Sarah for the past three years. Sarah had been gone from it for nearly a year, but now it would feel so final. There was no chance she would ever walk through the door again.

“No,” she said, her voice choked.

“I don’t, either. I don’t think I can stomach the drive time and...I just want to be...somewhere else. Somewhere new.”

She nodded slowly. “Are you okay?”

“Fuck.” He dragged his hands over his face and leaned forward. “No, I’m not okay.”

She didn’t know what to do. Didn’t know what to say. Didn’t know how to react at all, since her instinct now was to do what he was doing. Folding in on herself. Holding her stomach, trying to keep the pain from tearing her into tiny, irreparable pieces.

But if she did, she didn’t know what it might do to him. So she just sat there, staring straight ahead, unmoving, while tiny claws stabbed into her heart.

Travis had never seen life’s ugly side. And she’d been spared a lot of it. But growing up she’d seen in her neighborhood violence, poverty and the kind of depressed desperation that went along with it all.

She’d learned as a child to shut things off when the outside world went insane. And she realized now that Travis never had. Travis’s life had always been beautiful mansions and social niceties. Weekends spent on the Cape and afternoons on the green.

He’d seen nothing more than the careful facade laid over the reality of life. Had barely seen down into the machine, to see where the cogs, like her family, like so many others, made things work, seamlessly and beautifully for families like his.

And he’d never seen those more unfortunate people get ground up in the inner workings of the beast before, either.

He was kind, his family was kind, and they assumed everyone else was, too. His life was charmed and he assumed that all of life was.

Travis was brilliant, but this wasn’t the sort of thing brilliance could prepare you for.

Not that she was prepared. Not in the least.

She’d grown up in a rough neighborhood, with no father and a mother who was wounded and jaded by life. Her mother had taught her early to never depend on other people...to depend on herself.

She lived by that. She’d moved through life mercilessly ensuring that she guarded her own interests and her mother’s. She’d made sure she’d carved a clear path out for herself, so that at the end of everything people would look and see that while she’d had a hand up, she’d done the work herself.

Travis was her friend, but she’d never been in a position where she was forced to depend on him before. But tonight she needed him. Tonight, she needed him to be the one who was strong, because she was already broken.

“We’ll stay together,” she said finally. “All night.”