Hidden

This time, I slip into the pool first.

Lance is changing, and this is a strange act of courage I thought I did not have in me. It surprises me, this sudden impulse to go in without him there. It is dangerous. It is more than a little stupid.

I want it.

I need it.

I carefully stand up from my place in my wheelchair, safely distant from the pool, the wheels locked into place. I remember Marcus's fingers on the arm of the chair as he crouched, locked the wheels to stillness. The feel of his lips on my forehead, careless of the notion, but familiar and soft. I take a step towards the water.

My blood pounds through my veins, the sound of my heart so loud that it overwhelms almost everything. It creates an odd sort of focus to what I am doing, lends it an importance, a drum roll for the occasion. I take another step.

My leg throbs with the pain of my weight, and I rest it a little, holding the centre of my body over my other leg; though apparently healed, I am not meant to walk on it. But I am walking. And this forbidden moment sends a thrill through me, along with another ache that resonates inside of me like nothing else can. Pain has always had its own song, and I have always known it. I know it so well that the dips and whorls and lulls do not surprise me any longer; the smooth cadences followed by screaming crashes of notes no longer retain the ability to shock me. I ride the swell of the sound, and I rest in the wake of the waves. I take another step.

I can feel the rough texture of the concrete beneath my skin, slick with drying water from feet that walked upon it not long ago, and with not nearly as much care as I employ: it is darkening outside, now, as Lance has use of the pool after hours, and everyone else has gone. Our usual daytime lessons were inconvenient, and mum and dad realised, after I talked some sense into them, that this was easier as well as less expensive than renting out the whole pool for a few days a week. Marcus dropped me off with a promise to return at eight, in an hour and a half, to pick me up and walk me home. I remember the reluctance with which he left, but also the slight, almost imperceptibly excited quirk to his lips. It made me nervous, that look; nervous and somehow betrayed, as if his excitement in itself was disloyal to me.

I am at the edge of the pool. I turn, hold on to the sides of the ladder and step down. Careful. Slow. My arms tremble with my weight, the burden of this body I am trapped in. Sometimes, I hate it. I hate it a lot. I hate it most in the world. And that disturbs and bewilders me, that the thing I hate most in the world is myself. But it also makes sense. I am my own prison.

I go down another step. Another rung. Hand over hand; foot after foot. My limbs enter the water, and I shiver a little at the coldness. My heart is beating fast fast fast too fast, but it feels good, not dangerous. Not frightening. Not bad.

I step off the last rung. Gather my courage and release the ladder. I float for a moment before my feet touch down on the ground. I feel strange. Free. Strong, for a change. I am still scared of drowning. But as long as my feet are on the ground, and the ladder is in reach, I am fine; I am perfect; I am ok.

I reach out and brush it with my fingertips: the metal is cool against my skin, chilled and reassuring. I smile and take my fingers back. And then I hear a sound, soft but loud in the silence, and turn. And my feet leave the ground. And I am falling thrashing I cannot stand I cannot find my feet in the water I am nothing I am sinking. I catch a glimpse of skin; the flash of a body arcing through the air. And then I am beneath the water and I hit the bottom and I cannot get my feet beneath me. I hold my breath, because that is all I know how to do, and my eyes are closed but my mind is open and it is imagining death it is imagining me dying at the bottom of this shallow, false lake.

And then arms are around me, pulling me up, and I am light light light as air. When I break the surface, the water parts over me like a thin veil, though moments ago it was a heavy prison; confining bars. I breathe in the air with a newfound appreciation; my hands are spread flat. And then I realise that they are against skin: I can feel a heartbeat against my palms, the rapid rise and fall of breaths beneath my fingertips. When I open my eyes, my lashes are sodden. My hair covers my face so that I can hardly see; escaped strands from my braid.

I am shifted slightly, so that an arm is beneath the bend of my knees and another is supporting my back, holding me in the water. Lance is sunken slightly, so that his knees are bent with his feet on the ground, and he holds me close against his chest, his brow creased with worry and also anger. "What the hell were you doing?" he asks, his voice heated. He holds me tighter than anyone ever has; he is not afraid to break me. This boy, this strange boy, knows my limits. He knows how to hold me without breaking me. I take in a strangled breath of the chlorinated air; blink the sting from my eyes. "Were you trying to kill yourself or something? Because I didn't think you were like that. I didn't think you were a coward."

It is new and strange to have someone angry with me. I don't quite know how to respond to the heated tone of his voice; the burn in his eyes. And then the word 'coward' catches up with me. "I wasn't trying to kill myself," I say, making my voice even.

He looks at me closely, centimetres away, hair plastered to his face so that I have to look closely to catch the glint of amber from between the sodden strands of dark hair, my own, wet and silver, also obstructing my view.

I watch him, unresponsive and thoughtful, his gaze incredibly sharp. And then, something makes his expression soften. He sighs, loosens his grip on me slightly. I feel the warm pulse of life coursing through him; the calming of his breaths; the hard muscles of his chest beneath my hands.

"I wasn't trying to kill myself," I repeat, softly.

He smiles reluctantly and removes his arm from beneath my knees as he lowers my feet to the ground; I move my hands to his shoulders as he sinks a little further into the water, so that we're almost the same height. He brings his hands up and pushes the hair from my face. "Whatever you were doing," he says seriously, his thumbs tracing the line of my cheekbones as he pushes clinging strands from my skin, "please don't do it again, unless I'm here."

I nod, a little embarrassed now, and his hands fall back into the water. I let go of one of his shoulders and brush his hair from his face, wanting to see it properly, to see if the traces of anger are completely gone from his hidden eyes. I smile slightly, and his shoulder stiffens beneath my hand. And then the smile slips from my face, replaced by fascination: there is a strange, dark mark near his left eye, starting from the outer corner and webbing beneath it. It almost looks as if he has been punched, but has been spared the swelling, having only a bruise to show.

"What's this?" I ask, my fingers dancing lightly across the skin.

He turns his face away, but I turn it back, as weak as I am. "Birthmark," he mumbles.

I trace the skin around his eye with a finger, and they both flutter shut, lashes brushing my fingertips. "You shouldn't cover it with your hair," I say, decidedly. Some people might think it ugly. I don't. Any imperfection, any flaw, only makes him more human. He is human and he is not perfect, but I don't care. This is a strange thing to discover, but the truth of it resonates inside of me. He is my friend, and he is imperfect. And I like him more for it. "No more hiding. I don't like hiding."

He opens his eyes, and the colour of them, amber and bright, startles me. He puts his hand over mine, long fingers warm and slim and slightly wrinkled from the water, eclipsing my hand like clouds over the sun. "I'd better get it cut, then," he says, his voice low and rough and strange, different from any other version of Lance I have ever seen.

It sends a strange shock through me, and I pull my hand back, wanting to take the other from his shoulder but scared of drowning without the anchor of his skin beneath my hand. This feeling is strange: it is like I have been burned, but it is a pain I like, a pain that lingers. The aftershock of lightning that will not go away.

I clear my throat, my free hand fanning uselessly through the water. "I found something more epic than the zoo," I say, somewhat randomly.

He tilts his head quizzically to the side, and his hair falls back over his eye. It makes me sad, thinking of how often he's done that. "What could that possibly be?" he asks pleasantly, all traces of the other Lance gone.

"Get your hair cut," I say brightly. It is like we are both trying to erase that moment; we are both scared of what it was, of what it meant. We are confused and this is how we deal with it.

He laughs, stands and scoops me into his arms. I rest against his chest, small and warm and wet and burning with that strange heat that simmers beneath my skin. "That sounds good. Tomorrow?"

I am tired; the shock of that almost-drowning moment has burnt all of the energy from my body. I reach up, though it pains me, and push the hair from his face again. "Tomorrow," I agree. He looks at me strangely. It is strange because I like to think that I have come to know him well, over our time together, and I know almost all of his facial expressions and looks, but this one I do not recognise. When I drop my eyes and my hands, they itch to look at him, to touch him. I force them still, and school my thoughts to rhymes.

"I think, today, you should learn to float," he says. I am grateful he didn't ask if I wanted to kick at the water in the same useless way I have been doing for the past week. I am too tired for that. Floating seems effortless. Floating seems peaceful.

"I think that would be wise," I tell him. He smiles slightly, a flicker of his lips, and carries me away from the wall, towards the centre of the pool, though he stays in the shallow end.

"All you have to do is lie down, and not move," he tells me. "And if you panic, put your feet on the ground. You can do that here." There is a slight teasing, amused note in his voice.

"Hey!" I chide, my voice quiet, more than a little weary.

"Too soon?" he asks quizzically.

"Far too soon," I agree drily. He laughs soundlessly, his chest rising and falling disjointedly with the laughter. And then he teaches me to float.

Floating is more difficult than I thought it would be. I have to lie a certain way in the water: flat on my back, straight as a metal rod; stomach up, head tilted back, limbs spread like a star on the surface of the water. Lance keeps his hands beneath me: one on my back, one cradling my head. I feel the places he touches me with a strange acuity, and try to remember if I have ever felt this sensation before, before concluding that I have not.

Slowly, he pulls his hands away, and I force myself to stay still. If I move, I will sink. That thought makes it easier to be still. From the corner of my eye, I watch as Lance lies on his back beside me, floating on the surface of the water as if it is the most natural thing in the world. He starts to drift away, and then his fingers lightly grip my outstretched wrist. I force myself to stay still still still, so I do not sink. I feel unbalanced, but he slip his fingers through mine, tying us together, and I steady on the surface.

"You're doing it," Lance says, his voice soft. It is oddly muffled by the water in my ears.

I do not know how to respond and, anyway, I feel as if the words will unbalance me. So I am quiet as we are aloft in the water; a breeze; a gentle wind, bobbing and moving with the invisible current but staying together.

"I know I've said it a million times, but thank you, for what you've been doing with Tiana," he murmurs. The words filter through the water, spreading til they reach my ears.

"I'm not really doing anything," I remind him gently, closing my eyes. I see again the little girl; her colourful bandanas; her unicorn toy and the fairy puzzles and the photo of the two of us and Lance that she keeps by her bedside. I see the photo, remember it being taken. Tiana on the couch of the visiting lounge, beside me, and Lance on his sister's other side. His eyes on her, his arm a warm weight on my shoulders. I remember the soft, adoring smile on his face. It brings a sad smile to my own lips.

"You're doing everything," he says quietly. I open my mouth to respond. And then a sound knifes through me.

Lance jolts, unbalancing me, but he catches me and holds me steady as I stand. He towers over me, water dripping from his hair to patter against my upturned face, his hands loose on my waist, his eyes frighteningly vacant.

"Lance?" I ask, wary. "What is that?" It's just a phone, I think. A mobile phone. So why is he so scared?

And then I remember a conversation we had a while ago, started by Lance slipping a phone from his pocket and another coming clattering out. He has two, I remind myself. One for personal use, and the other for the hospital.

For Tiana.

"Lance," I snap, and he shudders, looks down at me. "Answer it."

He brings me to the ladder and then pulls himself out of the pool, and I haul myself up as far as I can and there is so far to go but only two more steps but I cannot do it. I hold on tight and resign myself to wait, fear roiling in my belly as he rummages in his backpack. Water sloughs from his muscular body and soaks into his bag. Finally, he finds the phone. The ring is hollow and generic; loud and falsely cheerful, like every hospital I have ever been to. He silences it and presses it to his ear, turning slightly away from me. I watch his profile; see him swallow; hear the quiet sound of his voice that refuses to resolve into words in my ears. And then he hangs up, and stares down at the phone in his hand.

My arms are aching. Much longer, and I will fall. "Lance," I call softly. Hating to be needy. Hating to be weak. Hating to need him when all he needs is to leave.

He drops the phone in his bag and walks over, crouches and pulls me up. My sides hurt where he holds me a little less carefully than he usually does, and it aches but nothing is broken. I wince, but push the pain down. "What is it?" I ask.

"Tiana," he says, simply, and the love and anguish in the word say more than anything else could.

"You need to go to her," I say. He looks at me without seeing me. I reach up, and my arms throb, and I push his hair from his eyes and grip the sides of his face with both of my hands, forcing him to look at me. "You need to go," I say, more firmly.

His eyes fill with urgency. "I need to go," he repeats, and I nod. And then he turns and grabs his bag, and starts for the door, and I stand in the centre of the walkway, shocked and dripping. But then he stops and turns, and he frowns. "When is Marc coming?" he asks.

I look at the clock above the pool. "Half an hour," I say.

He shakes his head, pulls a towel from his bag, and walks over to me. He slings his bag on his back and puts the towel around my shoulders before swinging me mechanically into his arms. "You're coming with me," he says.

"Ok," I murmur. And that is how I learn that Lance has a car.

Lance's car is clearly second-hand –it is well-loved, though, and it is already his. His scent pervades the air inside of it; I smell chlorine and sweat and the deodorant that he uses, and an underlying scent that is distinctly masculine. He swung his bag easily into the back after placing me in my seat, and I huddle, wearing only my bathers and wrapped in his towel, shivering, my seatbelt around my folded-up knees. He moves smoothly through the gears with a sense of urgency that I have never before seen in a person: it is as if he is a light and before he was off, but now he is on, and he is brighter than anything I have seen before. It makes me sad that emergency, his sister's life, is what makes him this way.

When we got into the car, he tossed me his phone and told me to call my parents; instead, I texted them. Told them that Lance was bringing me home, because we were going to be a little late, and that they shouldn't worry. Then I texted Marc the same thing. Unlike my parents, he didn't reply with a lengthy, concerned message. He simply said, 'Ok.' Honestly, I don't know what I've done wrong, but either he is angry or preoccupied with something. I know it is selfish of me, but it hurts that, for once, I am not the first thing that he is thinking of. And that makes me feel like a whining brat, so I push the thought away and hold Lance's phone, unsure what I should do with it.

He drives with a tense-jawed concentration that takes all of the softness from his face. He is sharp as a razor, as the cutting edge of a knife. His eyes are narrowed and golden in the dimmed late-night light, reminding me of something feral and dangerous, ages old. His nose juts from his face, elegant and proud, making him look like some blue-blooded creature of old. He is wild and frightening; gaunt with the shadows thrown beneath his eyes, the bright light that flashes past us from fleeting streetlights. He is dangerous and lovely. He is a study in profile.

My eyes travel down; I watch his throat as he swallows, stares resolutely ahead. His arms, lean and rigid, tensed and lightly bent as he drives, his fingers long and slim and oddly lovely on the steering wheel, familiarly curved around the round leather of the gearstick. His collarbones and his flat stomach and the suggestion of bone at his hip, just above the damp fabric of board shorts. The slight wave to his damp hair, and the darkness of his birthmark below his left eye, curving around it slightly at the outer edge. It looks, bewilderingly, like a spiralling black tattoo as the light spins and flashes on his skin. My eyes track down, again, to the base of his jaw; to the pulse that ticks in his throat.

I look away. My body is shivering but my face is hot.

We reach the hospital, and Lance climbs out, stretching his long legs before he rummages in the back of the car. He comes around and opens my door, and hands a large, hooded jumper to me. I slip it on without a word, pull it down; over my bathers, it is warm and soft with wear, and reaches down to my knees. His phone rests in my hand, encased in the overly large sleeve that hangs down. Wordlessly, he leans into the car and scoops me into his arms. "Lance," I say softly. "You're not wearing anything but shorts."

"Does it matter?" he asks quietly, pained.

"Tatiana might be a little bewildered, when she sees you, as to why you're mostly naked," I tell him gently. I don't know if he'll actually see her, but I make out like he will, because there isn't much I won't do at the moment to lessen the pain he is in. He lowers me to my feet and leans into the back of the car, slips on a pair of jeans in the dark car park, and then tugs a t-shirt over his head. He locks the car and then picks me back up, and walks swiftly inside.

The hospital is full of people, rushing to and fro. There are a few families outside the rooms of patients, but mostly there are staff on the night shift. A nurse takes in the picture of Lance carrying me in, and rushes over to us. "What happened to her?" he asks.

"I'm fine," I tell him. And then it doesn't matter because we are gone. Lance takes the stairs, because they're quicker than the elevator. He seems tireless and restless and strong and empty. He puts me down in a chair and then he leaves me, striding powerfully down the corridor. I watch him speak to a nurse, urgent and curt. And then he walks into a room, leaving me to fend for myself.

I suddenly realise how cold and weak I am; how my hair drips water down my back. I pull it over my shoulder and plait it as well as I can; the water wrinkles my fingers, my fingertips looking like pale raisins. I tug down Lance's jumper and curl my legs up beneath it; there is ample room, enough for five of me. If it is this large on me, I cannot imagine it fitting him. Then again, I am unusually tiny, and his shoulders are broad, his body long and lean. His arms are definitely not as short as mine. I curl my fingers in the sleeves, and then remember that Lance's phone is in my hand. The urge to look at photos or play a game, to simply unlock it, is overwhelming. I fiddle it between my fingers for a while before unlocking it to satisfy only a little of my curiosity: behind a simple, no-nonsense digital clock, there is a picture of Tatiana. She has tubes in her nose and leading from her arms; her skin is paler than mine, all her veins visible, her newly-shaven head bare. Yet there is a wide, joy-filled smile on her face, and in her hands is a unicorn toy, worn and well-loved, like Lance's car. It is both sad and unbelievably beautiful at the same time.

I lock the phone and slip it back into my sleeve, and resign myself to wait. Mum calls, once, and I explain the situation: she asks if I want to be picked up, and I say no, Lance needs me. She is either disapproving or worried, but she agrees to let me stay. The staff move around me, a flurry of movement. After a while, I nod off, close my eyes and rest my head against the back of the chair. And then I am jolted awake by a hand on my shoulder.

When I open my eyes, Lance stands over me. He looks at me, thin-lipped, his eyes dimmed. That burning energy he had before is gone, but now he is tense, so tense that he is stretched thin, like taffy, about to snap. "She wants to see you," he says, and his voice is carefully neutral.

When he offers me his hand, I take it, and let him pull me into his arms. I am grateful, because I could not walk if my life depended on it. I am the wounded gazelle in my dream, but I have run out of energy; I have run out of life. I am ready to sleep.

He carries me into his sister's room, and I sit on the chair by the bed. I let her pet my hair and she tells me how pretty I am, and I return the compliment. She giggles, delighted. For someone who is so small and frail and sick-looking, she has an awful lot of energy, more than I could ever hope to have.

Soon, the nurse tells us to leave. Lance kisses his sister on the cheek and tucks her in, and I say goodbye; she wraps her small arms around me, sitting up in bed, careful not to hurt me. And then he picks me up and carries me to the car, sets me in the seat and closes the door behind me. I pull down Lance's jumper, to my knees, and take his phone from my sleeve, depositing it in the glove box before closing the compartment with a click.

He climbs into the car and shuts the door, his keys hanging uselessly from a finger. He drops them onto the dashboard and stares at the steering wheel emptily. "Lance-" I start.

"She had a collapsed lung," he says, cutting me off. His voice is inflectionless. "They almost couldn't save her, but some genius knew how to fix her. It was luck, they said." He blinks, narrows his eyes. "It was luck," he repeats.

And then he starts to cry. I don't notice, at first, because the tears roll soundlessly down his face. But then his shoulders start to shake, and I don't know how I can stop it, the misery and relief and flood of emotion that was all but gone but is now back, stronger than before, and he is alive again but it is horrible, and it makes me ache in a way I cannot explain.

Soundlessly, slowly, painstakingly careful, I crawl across the partition between our seats and onto his lap. I rest my hand against his cheek, my own pain forgotten, and touch my fingers to the dark patch of skin beneath his eye, catching his tears on my fingertips. For a moment, he is still. And then his eyes close and he wraps me in his arms with that perfect control he has; not too tight, but not too loose. He bows his head, buries his face in my shoulder, in the soft fabric of his worn jumper. I feel his lips against my neck when the fabric shifts. His shoulders shaking beneath my palm. My other hand winds through his hair and then slips down to his neck, and my palm presses against his skin, hot with the point of contact. And I wait as he cries, feeling his body shake, not quite sure any more if I am holding him or he is holding me. Because I think of that little girl in her hospital bed, all the light of the world in her eyes, filled with promise, and I think of her dying and it makes me want to sleep and never wake up, because surely the world could not be so cruel as to allow me life when it denies it to her? Surely the world cannot think us so inconsequential? For her, I would give my life a thousand times. And I hardly know her.

I think all of this, and I want to cry. But I don't let myself, because now I realise that, yes, I am holding him, and he needs me to be strong when he is drowning in this moment. Only I can save him, here. It is just the two of us.

When he stops crying, he stays still for a moment, just breathing. I can feel the air rushing from between his slightly parted lips: in, out, in, out. "I'm sorry," he says, and he sounds halfway normal, though his voice is broken and raw.

"There's nothing to apologise for," I tell him. My fingers curl around his neck, my palm flat between his shoulder blades. His arms are wrapped around my waist, his cheek against my neck. He lets me go, and I take back my hands; crawl back into my chair and do up my seatbelt, curling my legs beneath the jumper.

Silently, he starts the car and drives me home. Mum opens the door for me and, when Lance carries me in, she asks in a hushed tone, "Is your sister alright, dear?"

Lance smiles tightly, a relieved, uncomfortable sort of smile. "She's ok," he says. When he puts me down, mum wraps her arms around him, and he is startled for a moment before he relaxes into the hug and returns her embrace.

"You're not going home tonight," she says. "You'll sleep here." She says it like there are no other options; like it is a fact.

She lets Lance go, and he takes a step away, a protest readily prepared on his lips. She just shakes her head. "Do you want me to call your parents?" There is nothing he can do, really. I know that tone of voice. It gives no release from its bonds. It is final.

Lance seems to realise this. His shoulders slump in defeat, and he shakes his head. Mum smiles. "Sleep, sweetheart. You can shower in the morning."

She kisses his forehead, which seems to surprise him, and then she comes to me. Asks if I'm alright. All the perfunctory questions. I nod and respond to each of them in turn, and when she is satisfied, she kisses my brow. "Door open, Syl," she says. And then she leaves me to think over the strangeness of her words.

Lance stands unsurely by the foot of the bed, a shadow in the dark. "What's wrong?" I whisper.

He grips the back of his neck, and then his hand drops to his side. "Why is your mum fine with a guy sleeping in your bed?" he asks. His voice is still raw, but he is trying.

I resist the urge to laugh, but pat the bed beside me. I smell like chlorine, and so does he, when he sits beside where I lie. My hair is stiff with it, and I feel slightly uncomfortable with it on my skin, but Lance's jumper is warm and soft, and I can wait to shower til morning. "Because someone sleeps with me every night: either mum, dad, or Marc. Sometimes Olivia."

He freezes, his shoulders a rounded, hard shape in the dark. "Does Marc sleep with you often?" he asks.

I wonder at the strangeness of the question. "Yes." I pause for a moment, thinking. And then I whisper, "I think they're scared that I won't wake up in the morning."

His shoulders relax slightly, though the tension does not leave them completely. "How does that help?"

"I guess it doesn't, really," I respond. "Now lie down."

He is quiet. Then he tugs at the bottom of his shirt. "Do you mind if..."

I shake my head, glad of the dark, because my cheeks have flushed, hot with blood. "Go ahead," I say. I catch the flash of skin in the shadows, his muscled back and arms. And then I make myself roll onto my side, slow and careful, the movement as laborious as my life. The bed shifts as he lies down. I hear the rustle of sheets, and then feel a jean-clad leg touch the bare skin of my lower thigh. Heat at my back, and an arm over me. Hot breath against my neck, and fingers in my hair. He is not gentle –he is controlled. Not scared to touch me. He knows exactly what he is doing, what will hurt me and what will not. And I do not know how he knows, but I don't exactly mind his proximity, either.

He spreads his fingers against my stomach, and I imagine I can feel his hand as if it were against my skin, a brand through the soft material of his jumper. His fingers are gentle in my hair, tangled in the strands, just resting there as if it is the most natural thing in the world. "Thanks, Sylva," he says, his voice hushed and low.

"For what?" I ask.

"For being strong when I wasn't," he says, after a slight pause.

I laugh a soft, breathy laugh. "I'm not strong. I'm weak and breakable."

I can feel his lips moving against the back of my neck when he speaks, his breath warm and strange against my skin. "You're the strongest person I know," he says.

And I fall asleep with that thought in my mind.

When I dream, I am strong.