My jaw clenches and my heartbeats accelerate, my hands turning clammy as I swipe them along the front of my blue jeans. I’m not sure what to do, so I merely acknowledge her with a quick nod and swallow down all the things I cannot say.
But I don’t miss the flash of hurt and dismissal in her eyes before she spins around and busies herself in the kitchen.
I flinch when Mandy’s fingers begin tugging the sleeve of my winter coat, yanking me out of my messy thoughts. “Take your coat off. Stay a while,” she beams at me, then follows her parents into the family room, chattering on about her shift at the hair salon like it’s another ordinary day in Normalville.
I stay rooted to the snowman welcome mat, staring at Cora’s back as she leans over the kitchen counter, facing away from me. Her head is bowed, her shoulders taut. She is gripping the edge of the countertop as her hair falls over the sides of her face in waves.
I want to run to her. I want to take her in my arms and whisper into her ear that everything is going to be okay. We survived. It’s over.
But I don’t.
I can lie to Mandy and her parents and my friends and my boss and my therapist… but I can’t lie to her.
We all sit around the formal dining table, and for a moment, everything feels like it used to. It’s easy to pretend between four walls adorned with pretty paint colors, lace drapes, recess lighting, and holiday decorations scattered throughout. It’s easy to pretend in the company of the family I’ve come to care about over the past fifteen years while they discuss politics and trending Netflix shows as if nothing is amiss.
But the façade cracks when my eyes float over to Cora, sitting across from me, smashing her meatloaf into something unidentifiable with the tines of her fork as the candlelight illuminates the dark circles under her eyes. I push my own mushy meatloaf into my mashed potatoes, realizing I’m doing the exact same thing. I reach under the table to give Blizzard my dinner roll so it appears that I’m actually eating the meal that probably tastes delicious.
“… about the pregnancy.”
Mandy’s voice pushes through my fog, and I lift my head, turning towards her. Pregnancy? A silence washes over the dinner table, and I feel incredibly out of the loop. “What?” I glance from face to face, but everyone is looking down at their plates like they’re in the midst of a riveting crossword puzzle. My eyes shift back to Cora, but she’s not looking at her plate. Her eyes are wide and accusatory as she stares down a sheepish-looking Mandy.
Mandy presses her lips between her teeth, flipping her hair over one shoulder. “Sorry. I-I didn’t mean to blurt that out. We were talking about our cousin’s new baby, and it just triggered… you know. I suck at thinking before I speak.”
I blink. Cora’s fork clinks against the dinner plate as she folds her hands in her lap, but she refuses to meet my eyes. I don’t think she’s looked at me once since our stare-down from earlier. I run my tongue along the roof of my mouth, putting two and two together with a hard knot twisting in my gut. “Are you pregnant, Cora?”
Her head finally jerks towards me, alarmed by the sound of my voice addressing her for the first time in weeks. I watch her haunted eyes swirl with grief and confusion and sadness and everything in between. But the eye contact doesn’t last, and she ducks her head with fluttering lashes. “I was,” she says softly, so soft I almost don’t hear her. Then she pins her eyes back on Mandy. “I didn’t want to talk about this. I didn’t want to talk about any of this.”
Cora pushes back from the table and stands up, scratching at her wrist and making a quick escape from the dining room to the staircase.
I follow, not caring if it looks strange or inappropriate—my instincts tell me to follow her.
I can feel their eyes boring into my back, trying to understand why I’m chasing Mandy’s sister up the stairs, but they have to know.
They have to know we’re different now.
The image of Cora and me standing together, our hands interlocked, dappled in blood stains and dirt with an identical far-off look in our eyes, has made the rounds on the internet. In fact, it went viral as soon as the photo was released by the media. It has over two-million shares and hundreds of thousands of comments ranging from, “Sending prayers to those poor souls” to “This looks like the movie poster for the next Quentin Tarantino film” to “Following for future wedding announcement”. Mandy delicately questioned me about the photo, hoping for insight into our shared nightmare. Hoping for answers I wasn’t able to give her. She doesn’t know all the details of what transpired in that basement—only what she’s seen in news articles and TV broadcasts.
All I told Mandy was that we formed a friendship out of survival and fear and boredom and loneliness. It was necessary. It was inevitable. It was all we had.
She’ll never know the things I was forced to do, the lines that were crossed, or the guilt I’ll carry with me until the day I die.
And she’ll certainly never know how those lines blurred inexplicably on that final day.
I take the stairs up two at a time, passing through the loft and poking my head into each room. I find her sitting on the edge of the guest bed of her old bedroom, pinching the bed covers between white-knuckled fingers. Her breathing is labored and her hair is blocking her face.
“Cora.”
She looks up, surprised that I followed her. I watch the complex emotions flicker in her eyes as she tries to read me—tries to make sense of why I’m standing in front of her, looking just as lost and vulnerable as she is.
Cora rises to her feet, smoothing down the fabric of her slightly too-big dress, then tucking her hair behind her ears. My eyes dance across her face, drinking in her pink cheeks and those soft, full lips that I should not be so familiar with.
Then we each take a step forward. Then another. Then one more.
And before we’ve thought anything through or had time to ponder our next move, our arms are wrapped around each other, her hot breath against my neck, her hair that smells like daffodils tickling my nose. I pull her close, breathing in every ounce of her, savoring her warmth.
She feels like home.
“Dean,” she whispers, her voice breaking on my name like it split her in half.
I squeeze her tighter, my hand cradling the back of her head, my fingers tangling in her hair. I breathe in and out, slow and deep, trying not to go back to that basement where she was all I had to hold onto. “I’m sorry I haven’t called you,” I apologize, and I truly am sorry. “I didn’t know what to say.”
I’ve spent an embarrassing amount of time over the last two weeks just staring at my phone, telling myself to dial her number or send her a quick text. Just to check in. Just to make sure she’s okay. Instead, I’ve been a coward, getting my inside information from Mandy and avoiding Cora just like I’m avoiding everything else in my life.
Cora’s hands land on the back of my neck as she pulls back, our eyes bound, our connection still palpable. The look on her face is too familiar, too reminiscent of that last day—the moment everything shifted. The moment our relationship or friendship or whatever the fuck we were was stripped down to bare bones and raw truths and more questions than we’ll ever have answers to.