Page 94 of Chaos

“Sssh,” he whispers into my hair. “I double checked the lock. We’re safe.”

Safe—behind the lock. Safe—the soft snuffle of his snore telling me he’s already asleep.

No world but us. Nowhere else. No Thornewood outside my closet.

Just him.

Just me.

You can still choose who you want to be.

I close my eyes, the question sticking in the back of my throat as I curl my fingers around his stiff, scarred, knobby ones—but can I?

If I tell him now, would he be done with me forever?

22 |Possibilities? Problems? Potentials.

YORKE

FRANKIE’S WEARING LONG UNDERWEAR,the real deal, a onesie set like a grandpa in an old-time movie.

I don’t have a ton of good memories about my mom, but these pajamas bring me back.

Mom must have been clean for a stretch and gotten a job, because somehow she got her hands on a matching set for Carl and me. Long johns, she called them, and she smiled as she said it. One of the only times I remember her ever smiling just for us. No drugs or alcohol or man, no vicious cackle. Just a smile that felt like love. I can picture Carl, pudgy, smiling,wearing those long johns as he pushed around a toy rocket beside a tinsel tree in the reflected gleam of rainbow lights. They had little brown buttons that connected to an assflap so you could use the bathroom, grip treads on the feet, and a zipper that ran from crotch to neck.

And they looked just like the ones Frankie’s wearing now.

Hers aren’t red, nor do they have buttons, and more sadly, there’s no ass flap as I discovered last night after we set out the boy’s Santa gifts when I tried to tell her that I’m leaving after the factory raid first thing tomorrow morning.

I started to tell her, and then somehow she was climbing on top of me, right there in front of the tree, pulling at my pants, shoving me onto my back, legos biting into my freshly-healed shoulder, pulling my hand up to her neck.

And then she was on her back and we were both fighting with these thin, slippery long johns, peeling them down.

“I struggled with what to get you,” she says now, in the early morning on White Winter Day.

“So did I.”

She’s already holding it. It’s wrapped up in old newspaper, since there wasn’t any wrapping paper anywhere.

I had to ask Ty and Puck to keep an eye out on their scavenging missions—and they pulled through. A thick pair of size eight boots that lace up to her midcalf, thick leather that will protect her ankles, steel tips on the toes, deep treads so she won’t slip.

She slips a slim unwrapped canvas into my hand upside down and bites down on her lower lip. “Want to do it at the same time?”

I nod.

“Okay, go,” she says, and starts pulling at her newspaper while I flip mine over.

It’s a tiny canvas, three inches by five, of our little family. Auden and Shane, her and me, Beast with his tongue lolling out, the blue hills behind us green and lush, smiling in the warm glow of the summer sun.

“It’s perfect.”

And it is.

Like something straight out of the Flower-verse.

When I look up, she’s holding the new boots in her hands. “So are these.”

I’ll tell her now, ruin the day, swear I’ll come back once I figure out what Lavinia Hope wants.

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