The duvet felt itchy. I thought so anyway. Not annoyingly itchy mind you, just a bit scratchy. And only just scratchy enough for me to remember it was there and pull it tighter, not even enough to irritate me really. Which was nice.
I smiled a little and shuffled in the bed. Nice…
I turned my head to the side, breathing deeply as I snuggled down. I hadn’t been this comfortable in ages – in what felt like forever, if I was truthful.
I couldn’t hear anything. And I still had my eyes closed. I was almost still asleep. There wasn’t a draught swirling through the room like there normally was, though I could only guess why. It was relaxing, having everything still. It was as though there was nothing going on anywhere. As though, outside my little bubble of comfort, there was nothing wrong.
The air around me didn’t taste cool, it was warm – but comfortable warm. As I woke up a little more, I realised I was pretty tangled in the duvet. It was comfortable, and warm, and wonderful, but pretty tangled. At least I hadn’t jumped awake this morning.
My hand felt cold. Somehow it had ended up next to my cheek and though it wasn’t quite touching, I could still feel the air beside it cooling. I considered doing something about it, but I was far too comfortable in every other way for it to really bother me.
The light through my eyelids was faint. Early morning would be my guess, not that I was willing to risk my warmth to check.
It was a shame there was something nudging so strongly at the back of my mind. I wasn’t quite sure what it was, but it didn’t want to go away. I imagined building up a brick wall in my mind, blocking it out, hiding it from view. Apparently, I didn’t cement the wall well enough, because it managed to push through one of the lower bricks pretty quickly and start nudging again.
The nudge was irritating. It was gentle, I supposed, but it was persistent. And not in a good way. It refused to leave me alone. I even got to the point of fidgeting on the bed and almost disrupting what serenity I had before I realised it was a lost cause. Sighing slightly, I fell still.
I could my expression was tense, even if there was no-one to see it. And because of that, I knew I was thinking, even if I didn’t want to be. I definitely didn’t want to be.
Calix should know me well enough to know I wouldn’t change my mind. Sure, he’d shown me a few things I hadn’t known about before, but just because he could move me didn’t mean he could make me want what he did. And judging from how annoyed he’d been when he’d done it and the look on his face afterwards, it took a lot out of him, which meant he couldn’t do it for long, and certainly couldn’t do it often.
And, well, didn’t that sort of make the whole thing useless? Sure, it was good for a threat, good for show, but aside from that…
I bit down lightly on the inside of my cheek, memories surging to the surface. Conner always telling me to be careful. Conner warning me Calix could hurt me. Conner yelling at me. Conner telling me off. Telling me how powerful Calix should be.
They weren’t happy memories. But they did make me realise something.
Every time he warned me about it, every time he got that look in his eyes – the worried, protective one I’d never used to be able to recognise – he would always tell me I should behave because I didn’t know. He always said there was more to things than I realised, always reminded me Calix was more than I knew, always acted as if there was something I should be scared of. I’d never understood him before, but what if there really was more than I knew?
I’d always known that Conner kept stuff from me. Half I the time I just didn’t want to know, and sometimes it was just stuff that didn’t matter. We’d only ever had a couple of occasions when I’d wanted to know something that he really couldn’t tell me, but even then we didn’t really fight. One of us won the argument and then we moved on. Sometimes it was him. Sometimes it was me. Either way, it never mattered. It just got to the point eventually where I simply didn’t notice when he wasn’t saying things. If it was important, I did, of course, but there were so many things he couldn’t tell me. After Calix’s accusation of Conner being merely a “source” to me, I’d begun to think about it more. It hadn’t taken long for me to notice that there really was a lot he didn’t say.
