Take Me Home | ✔

Chapter Fourteen

 

[ fourteen ] - nearly criminals 

              ↠  monday - four days before graduation   

      I woke up with half the blanket gone. 

      My eyes fluttered in the dark and I searched for the light switch, fog clouding my still sleeping senses, when someone twitched beside me. I slowly craned my neck and saw a silhouette of a muscled person snoring a considerable distance away. 

     Elliot’s head was turned away and he was tucked on the far side of the bed, a large, considerable gap of space in between us. He took up most of the blankets, taking it all on his side. Juts of hair stuck out and some just stood straight up, his back slowly rising and falling.

    “What the hell?” I muttered to myself as my eyes adjusted to the dark, despite the stray bits of morning sun trying to escape the hotel blinds.

    Seconds later, he wriggled around me, shifting his body. His head turned and soon he was staring up at me with darkening eyes that I swore were once green. Now, they were just a muddled mess of grey and blue and he was unaware of where he was. 

            We locked glances for a few seconds in silence before I spoke.

            “Um,” I awkwardly said, "Good morning."

           Elliot jumped, a little startled at how close we were, and scooted respectfully to the left. "Uh... hey, good morning."

        “I don’t think I ever gave you permission to sleep on my bed," I said slowly, teasing. 

   He chuckled, albeit a little nervously. "I know. I'm sorry, my back hurting and the floor was too hard." 

           “What did you expect, it’s the floor,” I teased.

        But in all honesty, I didn’t have the heart to shove him off of the bed. Like last night’s phone call as well as the others, there was obviously a ton he wasn’t telling me. As much as I wanted to know about the mysterious injured person he was so concerned about, I promised myself last night that I would stay out of his way. Not cause any more trouble. Not being a burden.

        He shuffled around beside me, switching from lying on his stomach to his back.

      "I'm sorry, I should've asked you, but I didn't want to wake you. You looked like you were sleeping pretty well," he admitted.

     "It's fine," I quickly said. Considering all of the sacrifices he's made to get me home, sharing the bed was the least I could do.

  “When did you decide to share the bed?” I asked, feeling a little self-conscious. He had seen me asleep, when I was the most vulnerable, and probably while I was drooling off into subconscious. 

  “Hmm, about the middle of the night. I heard a shitload of snoring and thought someone else was in the room, until I realized it was you. Then my back started to ache, and the master’s bed looked so big, and you were only using like a centimeter of it, plus you were snoring like a baby, so that meant it was comfortable. You were drooling, actually,” he pointed out, to this I responded with smug eye roll which he obviously didn’t see.

    "Oh," was all I could manage to think of. 

  We both stared up at the ceiling for a couple more minutes spent in sweet silence, and as slow as the sun peeked from the curtains, he fell back to sleep. For a while, I lay just watching him there shamelessly. It obvious something was bothering him the way a frown was etched onto his lips, the way his face was flooded with worries rather than calmness.