One Week Later
I wake up before my alarm.
This, in itself, is new.
Not the waking up part—I've been waking before my alarm for years, jolted out of sleep by nightmares or panic or that familiar crushing weight that makes breathing feel like work.
No, what's new is the reason I'm awake.
Light.
Actual, genuine morning light filtering through my curtains, painting gold stripes across my bedroom floor.
I blink at it for a moment, disoriented.
No nightmare. No racing heart. No immediate inventory of everything wrong with me and the world and my continued existence in it.
Just... morning.
I lie there for a while, waiting for the other shoe to drop. For the darkness to come rushing back in the way it always does.
It doesn't.
Not completely, anyway.
There's still a low hum of anxiety underneath everything—there probably always will be—but it's quieter today. More manageable. Like background noise instead of the only thing in the room.
Better, I think, testing the word carefully.
Not good. Not fixed. Not okay in any complete or permanent sense.
But better.
I sit up slowly, checking my arms out of habit. The bandages Dylan replaced two days ago are still clean and secure. The scratches underneath are healing—slowly, imperfectly, but healing.
Like everything else, I suppose.
---
The apartment is quiet when I emerge from my room, but it's a different kind of quiet than the week Keith was gone.
That quiet had been suffocating. Heavy with absence and anger and the particular loneliness of feeling like you've been left behind again.
This quiet is comfortable.
Keith is asleep—I can hear it in the complete stillness from his room, the absence of the restless movement that usually signals he's awake and thinking too hard about something.
Dylan, however, is already in the kitchen.
Of course he is.
He looks up when I appear in the doorway, taking in my expression with that careful, assessing gaze I've grown used to.
"Good morning?" he asks, and the slight upward inflection makes it a genuine question rather than an assumption.
"Good morning," I confirm.
Something in his shoulders relaxes as he gives me one of his rare smiles. "Tea?"
"Please."
We move around each other in the kitchen with the ease that's been building slowly over the past week. Dylan fills the kettle. I retrieve the mugs. He measures out the tea leaves with slightly less precision than I would but enough that I don't feel the need to correct him.
Progress.
"How did you sleep?" he asks.
"Better." I pause. "Actually better. Not just saying it."
Dylan glances at me over his shoulder. The small smile that crosses his face is genuine and warm and nothing like the carefully controlled expressions he used to give me.
"Good," he says simply.
I wrap my hands around my mug when he hands it to me, letting the warmth seep into my palms.
Better.
The word keeps coming back to me, turning itself over in my mind.
A week ago, I wouldn't have believed it was possible.
---
A week ago, I was sitting on my bed with Keith on one side of me and Dylan on the other, trying to find words for things I'd never said out loud to anyone.
It had started simply enough—or as simply as anything that significant can start.
Keith had knocked on my door after breakfast, Dylan just behind him.
"Can we talk?" Keith had asked. "All three of us?"
I'd almost said no.
Almost retreated back into the careful blankness that had been my armor for so long.
But I'd thought about the promise we'd made. All three of us, standing in the living room with the morning light growing around us.
No more hiding.
So I'd opened the door wider and stepped aside.
They'd settled on my bed—Keith on my left, Dylan on my right, leaving space between us that felt deliberate. Not crowding me. Not demanding proximity.
Just... present.
"You don't have to tell us anything if you don't want to," Keith had said carefully. "We're not here to push. We're just here."
"But if you want to talk," Dylan had added, "we want to listen."
I'd stared at my hands for a long time.
No more hiding, Cecil.
"My mother died giving birth to me," I'd said finally.
Neither of them moved. Neither of them spoke.
So I kept going.
It came out in pieces at first—fragments and half-sentences, the words I'd never given to anyone because there had never been anyone to give them to. My father's drinking. The debt. The collectors. The rooftop.
The fall.
At some point during the telling, Keith's hand had found mine. Not gripping. Just resting there, warm and present, giving me something to anchor to.
And Dylan—Dylan who always needed to ask questions, who processed the world through information and answers—said nothing. Just listened with his entire body, completely still, his attention absolute.
It was the stillness that broke something open in me.
Because no one had ever been that still for me before. No one had ever made themselves so completely, deliberately available just to receive what I was saying without immediately trying to fix or question or minimize it.
"I blamed myself," I'd said, my voice barely above a whisper by then. "I still do, sometimes. Even knowing it wasn't—even when I can see logically that it wasn't my fault, there's still this part of me that—"
"That knows it was," Keith had finished softly.
I'd looked at him, surprised that he knew what I was about to say.
"That's how it feels," he'd clarified gently. "Not that it's true. But that it feels true. There's a difference."
Something had cracked in my chest at that.
Because yes. That was exactly it. That was exactly the thing I'd never been able to articulate—the gap between knowing something intellectually and feeling it in your bones as absolute truth.
"Yeah," I'd managed. "Exactly that."
We'd talked for hours.
Not all of it heavy—some of it was almost ordinary. Keith asking careful questions when I seemed willing to answer them. Dylan occasionally offering observations that were so precisely, uncomfortably accurate that I'd laughed despite myself.
At some point, the daylight had faded.
At some point, I'd stopped noticing how tense my shoulders were.
At some point, without quite realizing how we'd gotten there, I was lying down—still between them, Keith on my left with his back against the headboard, Dylan on my right, close but not touching, the three of us existing in the quiet dark of my room.
"You can sleep," Dylan had said at some point. "We're not going anywhere."
"You don't have to stay," I'd said automatically.
"We know," Keith had replied. "But we want to."
I'd lain there in the dark, waiting for the familiar anxiety to spike. For the moment when the quiet became too loud and the darkness too pressing and sleep became impossible the way it always did.
But it didn't come.
Instead, there was just the sound of Keith's steady breathing on my left and the warmth of Dylan's presence on my right and the strange, unprecedented feeling of being—
Safe.
Actually, genuinely safe.
I'd fallen asleep before I even realized I was tired.
And for the first time in longer than I could remember, I hadn't dreamed at all.
---
"You're thinking loud again," Dylan says from across the kitchen table.
I look up to find him watching me over the rim of his mug, one eyebrow slightly raised.
"Sorry."
"Don't apologize. Just tell me what you're thinking about."
I consider deflecting. Consider the old habits—the smile, the *nothing, I'm fine*, the careful redirection.
Then I don't.
"That night," I say. "A week ago. When we talked."
Dylan's expression softens. "What about it?"
"I slept." I turn my mug slowly in my hands. "Properly. For the first time in—I don't even know how long. I can't remember the last time I slept without nightmares before that night."
Dylan is quiet for a moment, his eyes steady on mine.
"You felt safe," he says finally.
"Yeah." The word comes out smaller than I intended. "I did."
He nods slowly, like this confirms something he already suspected.
"Good," he says. "That's—" He stops, jaw working slightly like he's editing himself. "You deserve to feel safe, Cecil."
I open my mouth to deflect—to say something self-deprecating or dismissive that would let me sidestep the sincerity of it.
Then I close it again.
"I'm working on believing that," I say instead.
Dylan's small smile returns. "That's enough."
Footsteps in the hallway, and then Keith appears in the kitchen doorway, his hair spectacularly disheveled, wearing a hoodie that's inside out and doesn't appear to know it yet.
He takes in the two of us at the table, squinting against the morning light.
"Why are you both awake," he says. It comes out as a statement rather than a question, mostly because he's clearly not fully conscious yet.
"It's nine AM, Keith," Dylan says.
"That's not an answer."
"Tea?" I offer.
Keith's eyes find mine, and whatever he sees in my expression—some remnant of the conversation Dylan and I just had, some trace of the better that's been quietly building—makes him go still for just a moment.
Then he smiles. Warm and genuine and relieved in a way he doesn't try to hide anymore.
"Yeah," he says, pushing off the doorframe. "Tea sounds perfect."
He settles into the chair across from me, and Dylan gets up to make another cup without being asked, and the morning light continues its slow progress across the kitchen floor.
I watch them for a moment—Dylan measuring tea leaves with careful precision, Keith still blinking sleep from his eyes—and something warm settles in my chest.
"I'll make breakfast," I say.
Both of them look at me.
"You don't have to—" Keith starts.
"I want to." I stand, carrying my mug to the counter. "Besides, you both took care of me all last week. My turn."
Dylan's expression does something complicated—pleased and soft and maybe a little emotional—before he nods. "Okay."
I move to the fridge, mentally cataloging what we have. Eggs. Bacon. Bread for toast. Simple, but it'll do.
Keith watches me pull ingredients out with an expression that grows increasingly sullen.
"This is so unfair," he mutters.
Dylan glances at him. "What is?"
"You both can cook." Keith gestures between us dramatically. "Both of you. Dylan makes these elaborate meals like it's nothing, and now Cecil's over there looking all competent and—and I can barely make toast without burning it."
I pause mid-reach for the eggs, surprised into a laugh.
It bubbles up unexpectedly—not the controlled, careful laugh I've perfected over the years, but something genuine and bright and completely unguarded.
Keith stares at me like I've grown a second head.
Dylan just grins and reaches over to ruffle Keith's already chaotic hair, making it even worse.
"You have other skills," Dylan says.
"Name one."
"You're very good at being dramatic."
"That's not a skill, that's a personality flaw."
I'm still laughing, turning back to the stove to hide my smile. "I could teach you," I offer. "Cooking isn't that hard once you know the basics."
"Really?" Keith sounds genuinely hopeful.
"Really."
"See?" Dylan says, still grinning. "Problem solved."
Keith mutters something that sounds like "both of you are insufferable" but there's no heat in it.
The morning light continues to stretch across the kitchen floor, warm and golden, and I focus on cracking eggs into a bowl, whisking them with practiced efficiency.
Better.
This—right here, right now—this is what better feels like.
Then the doorbell rings.
All three of us freeze.
"Are we expecting someone?" Dylan asks.
Keith shakes his head, already standing. "No. I'll get it."
He disappears down the hallway, and I exchange a glance with Dylan.
He looks as confused as I feel.
We hear the door open. Keith's voice, muffled and surprised: "Naomi?"
My hands still over the bowl.
Naomi.
We haven't seen her since—since before Keith left. Since the night of Truth or Dare and everything that came after.
Footsteps approach the kitchen, and then Keith reappears with Naomi behind him.
She's smiling—that bright, energetic smile I remember from our first meeting.
"Hi," she says softly.
But something's off.
The smile is in place. Her posture is relaxed. Her voice is warm.
But her eyes—
Her eyes are too careful. Too controlled.
Like she's working very hard to appear exactly this casual, exactly this cheerful.
Dylan notices it too. I can see it in the way his shoulders tense almost imperceptibly, the way his gaze sharpens on her face.
"Naomi," I say, forcing my voice to sound normal even though alarm bells are starting to ring in the back of my mind. "It's good to see you. What brings you by?"
She steps further into the kitchen, that smile never wavering.
"Just wanted to check in on you guys," she says lightly. "It's been a while."
The words are harmless.
Everything about her demeanor is harmless.
But I can't shake the feeling that something is very, very wrong.