The Wildness Within

Sugar and Spice 2

That night, Gwyn kept looking at Ash. It was furtive looks at first, and then it was longer looks, and then he was just staring and Ash eventually laughed and looked up from the chess board and shook his head.

'Not tonight, puppy,' Ash said. 'Let's give it a while to settle, okay? Augus isn't here, and normally I'm a bull in a fucking china shop, but I'm not going to do that with you. So let's just...come on, man. Is this why your game is off?'

Gwyn made a face at him and went back to concentrating on the game, but he didn't win, and he was frustrated that Ash wasn't giving him anything more.

'Aw,' Ash said, laughing as he put the pieces back into their official positions. 'Don't be mad at me. I'm trying to do what's best, yeah?'

Gwyn walked over to the couch and lay down on it and pointedly stretched his legs out and made sure there was no room for Ash to sit next to him.

It was petty, and belligerent, and it was strange, because these small actions brought with them the metallic taste of fear in the back of his throat.

Would Ash lose his temper all of a sudden and hit him?

Would Ash think that he'd gone too far, wanted too much, and tell him to go into a dark place and stay there until he was so hungry he'd set his front teeth to the wood and work his jaws until he could taste the treated lacquer on slivers of pulped cellulose?

So Gwyn stretched his legs out on the couch and glared at Ash and adrenaline turned his body to a livewire, so that he was ready to leap up and run to his room and close the door and hide if he needed to.

But Ash only laughed and walked into Augus' kitchen to wash up plates and bowls and cutlery and said:

'I was a way better sulker than you when I was growing up. I'll tell you about it later, and you can use all my secrets to success against Augus. He's a total softie once you know how to play him.'

Gwyn huffed and stared up at the ceiling and wondered when the jittery feeling in his body would disappear.

*

The next morning was rough. Nightmares that turned him silent and shaking and stiff with terror, so that when he woke, even Ash's harmless form in the bed terrified him. For the first time since Augus had left, Gwyn crept back to his own bedroom and quietly closed his own door and then slid down in the space between the bed and the wall and curled up and hummed to himself, over and over again. The noise vibrated through his lips and his jaw and his ears, and if he kept to the same pitch, it seemed to tune out all the bad stuff.

He couldn't tell what the 'bad stuff' even was. It wasn't attached to images or words or anything more than phantom sensations that chased through him. He didn't even think he was in pain. All he knew was that something abrasive was rubbing at him from the inside, sandpaper beneath his skin, pumice scratching at his throat and in his head. The hum made the scratching go away, and so he made the noise, and knew he'd done this before, but not for a long time.

He didn't know how long had passed before the door opened. Gwyn flinched and stopped making the noise and wished he didn't have to stop. But the consequences for making the noise around someone else might be worse than the consequences of stopping and dealing with the internal scratching.

His arms were around his head and he leaned into the cold wall and he waited.

'Okay puppy,' Ash said quietly from the doorway. 'Just give me a few seconds.'

Ash came back a few minutes later, and carefully placed a mug on the small set of drawers all the way on the other side of the bed.

'I've made you some sweet tea. Drink it whenever you like. I'm gonna be out there reading some of those chess books. You just...do whatever you need to.'