WAKE (Wattpad edition)

36. The cave.

{Cary}

Cary's eyelids were heavy, slowly closing and then snapping open. His phone said they were 46 minutes away from anywhere and two hours from the address he had, but he couldn't exactly show up in the middle of the night. He found a wide gravel shoulder on the empty stretch of highway and pulled over.

The darkness dropped over them like a blanket when he turned off the car. He fumbled for his cigarettes and got out, feeling like his bones were creaking. The silence of the empty prairie swallowed the thud of his door and filled his ears like a deep toll of a bell. The snick of his lighter was absorbed in the sighing of wind in the grass and the creak of insects.

He lay down on the slope of the bank, hidden from the highway by the darkened car, and smoked with his face tipped to the sky. He'd never seen stars like this in the city—billows of light across the night sky. His breath caught, overwhelmed by awareness of the presence of something bigger than both him and Jon. He sucked in a huge chest full of night air and covered his eyes, slipping into the cave.

///

The stone entrance of the cave framed the constellations wheeling brilliant through the night sky, each star prick clearly visible with the fire pit cold and dead in the middle of the sandy floor. Cary didn't have the energy to gather wood and restart the fire—it had been all he could do to find his way here and prop himself against the curve of the cave wall.

His legs splayed in the dirt and his hands crumpled at his sides. Blood made cool ribbons over his arms and fell softly into the sand. All his cuts had come open one after another today, and his shirt front was turning black and sticking to his skin. He couldn't drag himself to the pool of tears; all he could do was lie here on the cave floor and watch the stars while his breath threaded through his open chest.

He heard a step in the sand and closed his eyes, his body trembling. He had thought he was alone now because he'd fucked this up so completely. But when he opened his eyes, Split-lip's face filled his vision, his hair and beard damp and tousled around his face like a mane. His scar stretched with his smile, his concerned gaze going over Cary's body.

Cary tipped his head back against the rock to lift his face to him, panting like a wounded animal.

"What happened to you?" Split-lip asked, soft and low.

A broken noise came out of Cary's throat, and he couldn't make it stop. He turned his hands up on the floor, blood pooling in his palms.

Split-lip knelt in front of him, cupping Cary's face. His eyes were warm and dark as the pool of tears under a night sky, and the sound choked off in Cary's chest. Split-lip sighed, his warm breath brushing Cary's forehead. He put his arms under Cary and drew him against his chest, as if he were no bigger than a child. Cary pressed his face into the soft fabric of his shirt and Split-lip held him, warming him with the warmth of his own body, while the stars swung past the cave entrance and blood soaked into the sand.

///

On the side of the highway, Cary pushed himself up and stubbed his cigarette butt into the scrubby weeds. He ran his hands over the unbroken skin of his arms before wrapping them over his front, trying to summon the energy to get back in the car. Sometimes visiting the cave showed him things he never could have found words for on his own. He wasn't frozen anymore. He wasn't hollow and bloodless. Somewhere along the way, he had become a person who was warm—who bled when he was hurt.

God, he hurt. Leaving Kadee, Pete and Mel, everything that had been his home...His head hung heavy, and he slid his fingers over the cuts, clean and bandaged under his sleeve. It wouldn't help to press them and make that hurt more intense—he didn't know how to make the pain inside him stop, but he'd figured that much out. For a second, he sank back into the cave, feeling Split-lip's arms around him and the slow sway of his body as he rocked him by the ashes of the unlit fire.

The backseat of the car wasn't nearly big enough for him to lie down in, but he curled his body to fit, listening to Jon's deep breathing, trying to find the forgetfulness of sleep for a few hours before sunrise.

Guard me Jesus, through the night.