Free Little Battles by N.K. Smith

Elliott about the fork and the day Helen decided she’d had enough of taking care of me, which was not to be confused with the day that Helen decided she didn’t like me or whatever. I couldn’t remember a time when she wasn’t just outright mean.
    I’d seen those melodramas on TV where the big bad mother/father/husband/whatever beat his or her loved one up and then the next day was all like, “Hey, I’m sorry, here’s a gold necklace to make up for it.” Helen wasn’t like that. She never apologized. She never gave me anything.
    Except scars and bruises.
    I wished I was high. Why the hell couldn’t Elliott be a burner? I could be high right now.
    I wanted to be high.
    “S-S-SSSophie?”
    I blinked as he said my name and I felt myself come back to the here and now just long enough to remember again that I was in Elliott’s room and that just last week, I’d danced with him, and it was the best I’d ever felt for just a split second. His hands were perfect for that short time. The smell of him was just so…damn! I didn’t know what it was, but I liked it!
    It was too much. He was way too much.
    He didn’t even know it.
    It was like he was burning me, but from inside myself. That didn’t even make sense.
    I had broken that contact as quickly as I could, but I ached for him when I was across the room and no longer in his arms.
    How could he fucking want me?
    How could he do what he did to me? I wasn’t capable of these feelings.
    How could he make me want him when I didn’t want any fucking one?
    Why the hell wasn’t I high? I still had one pill left, but I was going to save it for tomorrow morning. I wasn’t sure about being on morphine with Tom around.
    “S-Sophie?”
    I took a deep breath and looked up at him.
    “What’s up, Elliott?” I whispered, taking in his furrowed brow and nervous posture as he sat on his bed, and I gave him a small smile.
    Although he didn’t respond, his expression told me that he was worried about me.
    His eyes burned into me; they breathed into me.
    It made me hurt.
    “A-a-ar-are you o-okay?”
    I breathed out a near silent, “Yeah.”
    Shhhh!
    I breathed in and forced myself to look away from him. “I’m fine.”
    Quiet, Sophie. Don’t wake your mother.
    I let a long moment go by before saying, “You don’t look like you own that bed, you know?”
    When I could finally allow myself to look over at him, I saw him scooting back, looking more comfortable like I’d taught him to do, and I smiled. That was better.
    “What do you want to do tomorrow?”
    “If it sssssnows, w-w-w-we c-can—”
    “We can play in it,” I finished for him, not because I was impatient, but because the idea was sort of exciting. “Then I’ll make you chili.”
    I liked making food for him. It was like the one thing I could do to give him the comfort he silently gave me. The thought of playing in the snow with Elliott made me think of being innocent with him; of being childlike and just losing ourselves in each other.
    Now that there was such a creature as Elliott in my life, I hoped for snow. I wanted that childlike innocence back.

Saturday morning came too soon. Tom was already up when my tired eyes finally cracked open. I could hear the TV downstairs, and smelled the coffee growing stale and burning to the bottom of the pot. Apparently it was a day off for him. I guess he didn’t have to go to the firehouse or his paramedic gig. Grumbling because yet again I didn’t get much sleep, I rolled out of bed, my bare feet hitting the cold wooden floorboards.
    I shivered and went to retrieve my socks. It was probably eighty degrees right now in Tampa, but as I glanced out of my window, I found that the weatherman had been accurate. An early snow had settled upon Damascus, making everything outside blindingly white and everything inside much colder than I’d experienced in a long time. Tom mentioned the other night that snow would be a welcomed change from all of the ice this part of