Believe: (Intermix) (True Believers) by Erin McCarthy Page A

Robin.
    But I knew how to control my emotions. I always had.
    I went back upstairs, peeled off my shirt, and eased myself into bed beside Robin, still breathing hard. She was out cold, and I lay there and let my muscle fatigue become the focus of my thoughts. The way my shoulders burned, the strain in my calves. The pain crowded out the other thoughts, and I finally relaxed.
    Careful not to move too much, I turned my head and watched her sleep. I hadn’t had a lot of opportunity to sleep next to a girl. In high school my girlfriend had stayed over a few times when my mother wasn’t home, but her parents had busted her and that had been the end of that. Angel had stayed with me once, but she had gotten pissed at me for taking too much space and had kicked me in the shins hard before stomping off to sleep on the couch.
    But Robin seemed to like me in her space. She shifted toward me on the couch when we watched TV, she had turned toward me on the blanket in the park, and in bed she curled her legs up and tucked her hands under her chin, but always facing me.
    I studied her face in the dark, wanting to memorize it, to sketch it later.
    She was beautiful. She was naive.
    She felt like my reward for surviving jail.
    I stayed awake for an hour watching her, before drifting into oblivion.
    ***
    Another nightmare shattered my sleep. In this one I was watching my mother being raped by Iggy, half conscious from the beating he’d given her and from the drugs. Her body moved sluggish with each thrust, his grunts making my stomach roil, but there was a cell wall between me and her, so I couldn’t help her.
    Then it wasn’t my mom anymore.
    It was Robin, and her eyes were dead of any of the sweetness I’d seen, even void of the sadness she had shown me. They were just empty. Black holes. There was nothing there as that bastard abused her body in the most violating way possible.
    I pounded on the cell walls, yelling, shaking the bars until my throat was hoarse and my hands were bleeding. I wanted to explode outside of myself and kill him for hurting her.
    I had done this to her. I had killed her soul.
    Then suddenly I fell through as the glass wall dissolved into nothing and I was free, but Robin wasn’t there anymore . . .
    Waking up with a start as I fell, I half sat up. I must have made a sound because Robin jerked awake, too.
    “Shit,” I muttered, heart pounding, sweat all over the back of my neck, the image of her still floating in front of my eyes. “God.”
    “Are you okay?” Her hand stroked my arm, then my back, her touch warm and small and caring.
    And suddenly I didn’t give a fuck that I was bad for her. She was letting me be there, right? She was offering comfort and I was going to take it, because I couldn’t stand the way she had stared at me in my dream, like I wasn’t there. Like I didn’t exist.
    “Yeah,” I whispered, wiping my forehead as I eased myself back down onto the mattress. “I’m fine.”
    She touched my cheek and pushed my hair back. “Are you sure?”
    Nodding, I shifted closer to her so that our faces were aligned. She was so beautiful, so sweet, so trusting. I ached with want, the need to touch her greater than my self-control. I needed to see her smile, see her willingness to kiss me.
Me
. Her eyes, still heavy with sleep, darkened as I watched her, running my fingers down her cheek to her lips.
    She knew what I was about to do because her mouth drifted open, so that when I kissed her, she kissed me back. And of course, just to torture me, it felt as good as I had imagined. God. Those lips were plump and soft, and nothing had ever felt so simple and good and important. She gave a little sigh that had me pulling her leg up onto my hip so we could be closer, my other hand buried in her thick hair.
    Robin was safe, I wasn’t in a cell, and the kiss was perfect, our bodies pressed against each other, my tongue darting in between her lips. She opened for me without hesitation, and her