Page 38 of Midnight Wishes

‘You should though.’ Alex perked up. ‘Maybe not your ass, exactly, but a dragon tail wrapping around your thigh? I could trace it with my tongue on my way to—’

‘Forget I asked.’ Those smiles and laughs had disarmed her. Made her forget who she was dealing with. It was her fault for being stupid enough to ask him something real.

Then he surprised her again.

‘You know how Erik is…sensitive?’ Alex asked after a moment.

Sarah frowned at the subject change.

She did know. Abby had valiantly kept his diagnosis to herself, only telling Sarah that his sensory issues might result in new light bulbs and fewer nights out. Then Erik had sat down for dinner on his first night at their place and given Sarah a detailedrundown of his history and the ways it might impact her life. He wasn’t shy about it.

‘My granddad,’ Alex said. ‘He was like that too. Never diagnosed, of course, but looking back, it’s easy to see the similarities. He found our big family events overwhelming, and since I was normally by myself too, I’d go sit with him. One night, he started telling me all the myths and folktales he heard growing up in Norway.’ He paused. Stared at his drink. Took one sip, then another, while Sarah’s heart dipped in anticipation. ‘He— He died while I was off at uni. It was sudden. I’d just got my first tattoo—you know the dates on my ribs?—and I’d been itching to get another, but I hadn’t known what I wanted. He had one of these too’—Alex rubbed absently at the troll’s cross on his arm—‘and it felt like a good way to remember him. And after, I just…kept getting them.’

For the first time since she’d met him, his voice was hollow and devoid of humour.

‘Shit, Alex, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have— Sorry.’

‘It’s okay.’ He shrugged. ‘He died almost ten years ago. I still miss him at every family event where I’m sitting by myself on the sidelines, but it’s not like I’m actively grieving. It’s actually kind of nice being able to talk about him.’

‘You can’t talk to Erik? If they were so similar… They weren’t close?’

Alex waited a moment before speaking again. ‘They weren’tnotclose. He was still his granddad. But Erik didn’t exactly need company when we were kids.’

‘I kind of assumed you were part of that company.’

He and Erik seemed so close, with their Saturday runs and private dinners. Abby and Alex clearly adored each other, even if they pretended it was grudgingly so. Of course Abby and Erik were, well,Abby and Erik, but in her mind, Alex had been along for the ride growing up.

Alex’s voice turned bitter. ‘You’ve lived with them. Do you feel like you’re part of a fun little trio? Or do you feel slightly invisible? Like you’re intruding on something, even though technically you were invited.’

Sarah pinched her lips together at his suggestion, one that did hit a little close to home. Erik was a pretty easy guest, and she didn’t mind having him around. He was quiet and put the toilet seat down and washed the dishes. Of the two of them, Abby was objectively more difficult to share a space with, no matter how much Sarah loved her. After so long, Sarah was just used to the chaos, although it had calmed since Erik moved in. He also made her best friend ridiculously happy, like she was a giddy teenager in love for the first time. Which made sense, all things considered.

But arriving home to find them cuddling on the couch, hearing them whisper in the kitchen, seeing them go to bed together almost every night… For months after her breakup, she’d thought she had no interest in a relationship. But it was impossible to be near them and not want what they had.

‘Yeah. That’s what I thought. It’s always been that way. Christmases, birthdays, weekends. They stuck together, and I was just…there.’ Resignation curled close to his words.

‘You sound jealous.’

Alex scoffed. ‘Aren’t you?’

There was no pretending she wasn’t, not when he turned to pierce her with his eyes, stripping her beyond the body he was intimately familiar with to see straight into her soul.

But his reaction surprised her. By all accounts, including his own, Alex didn’t do relationships, and he hadn’t shown any indication that he might want to.

‘It can’t have been easy. Growing up with that.’ Sarah related more than she cared to. And it was in that spirit, reciprocating his rare moment of vulnerability, that she offered an olive branch. ‘I was a lonely child too.’

She was close to her parents. They’d spent plenty of time with her in her youth, neatly slotting a child into their lives rather than revolving their life around the child. So while her peers were munching fish fingers and attendingPeppa Pig Live, Sarah became accustomed to Vietnamese food, jazz concerts, and art galleries on a Saturday afternoon. She’d loved it. Had loved that her parents seemed to genuinely enjoy her company. Had loved that, when she’d come out at sixteen, her parents had been entirely unfazed. She loved that now, she could talk to her mum about anything—even when she’d rather her mothernotreturn the favour with explicit details about her own life. But it had been hard as a kid.

‘My parents are amazing, and as an adult, I’m really grateful they shaped me into someone with cool interests and great music taste. But sometimes I just needed a friend to— Fuck, I don’t know. Play dolls with? I don’t even know what normal kids do; that’s how far removed I was.’

Closeness aside, her parents hadn’t been a replacement for the childlike company she’d sometimes needed. And growing upso removed from her peers, with largely adult interests from too young an age, had put a gulf between her and her classmates. One that hadn’t really disappeared until uni, when she met other people who were slightly too weird to have fit in anywhere.

‘So you understand why it’s important to me that Abby doesn’t find out about this. She and Zoe… They were my lifelines through uni. It was the first time I’d felt like Ibelongedanywhere, you know? And I— I can’t imagine screwing that up,’ Sarah said.

Some might have questioned why she was doing this at all then. She’d agonised over it herself, when she lay in bed at night, Alex’s phantom touch lingering as she heard her best friend moving around the flat. But as long as they kept this quiet, it remained a victimless crime. And she could live with that selfishness.

But Alex seemed to understand, as he gently slid a lock of her hair through his fingers. Tucked it behind her ear. Let his hand linger on her jaw. ‘Our secret’s safe with me.’

And she trusted him. Like she must have all along, on some level, to be doing this in the first place.

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