Bryant's being nice, and I don't have any idea what to do with that. First, he didn't hit me back when I took a swing at him. Then he hit Jasper on my behalf. Now he's willingly sharing his tent with me—his tiny, one-man tent neither one of us is ready to climb into with the other.

We've been sitting in silence together for quite a while. Other than his short trip into the tent with his massive bag filled with God knows what, we've been sitting together in silence for almost a solid five hours. I prefer him to Ellie and Jasper being all over each other at the moment. I look for it to change any moment when Bryant decides to go back to being a dick, but for right now, this silence is more comfortable than that would be.

There's a massive elephant in the room in the shape of my father's business dealings. I have questions I know he won't answer, so I'm not bothering to ask, but they're still lurking under the surface of our silence. Him not knowing about Jasper and Ellie was a relief I didn't know I needed until he gave it to me. I'd convinced myself I didn't care, but the truth is, it mattered a hell of a lot more to me than I care to admit that he'd keep that from me.

It's late now. It's one o'clock, which is late for me, but it's fairly early for Bryant. I want to go to sleep, but I also don't want to make the wrong move here and end up sleeping outside of his tent as opposed to inside. I wait for him to make a move. We've already been sitting in silence for several hours, and he doesn't seem to be about to break that silence any time soon.

"Ready for bed?" he asks me, his tone is hesitant.

He doesn't like the idea of sharing a tent with me. It's weird, and we both know it, but we're both going to have to get over it.

"Sure," I agree.

He takes an audible breath, and he stands up. He walks over to the tent, and he unzips it. Then he climbs inside. My gaze falls to his ass as he enters in front of me. I wait outside for a few minutes. I look at the grass beside the tent, contemplating biting the bullet for both of us and sleeping on the ground. Truth be told, the thought of it is miserable.

"You coming?" he asks me.

"Urh—yeah," I say before I bend over to crawl inside.

The tent is as tiny as it looks from the outside. When I get inside I turn to close the zipper on the tent, and I have to touch Bryant to do it.

"Sorry," I mumble, trying to avoid touching him any more than I have to.

He chuckles.

"It's gonna happen. Don't worry about it," he says, sounding far less casual in tone than in words.

I nod, and then I crawl back down next to him. We're too close for comfort. When I lay back onto the plethora of blankets he brought, I can feel his body heat against my legs. I can also feel his breath on my face. I turn my body so we're not directly facing one another, and I look up at the top of the tent, laying flat on my back. He's less than an inch away, and we have as much distance between us right now as the tent allows for. I, once again, think of the ground outside, and even though this arrangement is far from ideal, I can't deny the ground is far more comfortable than I would have thought possible. I seriously start to wonder how many blankets are on this ground because I genuinely can barely feel the ground beneath us? The thought of how many blankets it would take to achieve that makes me laugh, and Bryant obviously takes notice of my laughter.

"What's funny," he asks, with humor in his tone.

"How many blankets did you bring?" I ask him, noting the one he has draped over him.

"Six total," he says.

Then he laughs too. His laugh is deep and throaty, and it in combination with our proximity makes my stomach twist in a comfortable way.

"My general rule is at least six when I go camping. I forgot to take into account you and your dad's rich rich status. Most of my blankets growing up weren't down. I'll admit, this is the best result I've achieved with this number of blankets, but also, I guarantee I still wake up with a backache," he tells me.

"Well I'm glad someone's prepared," I tell him honestly.

If he weren't allowing me to sleep with him, I'd have to find somewhere else to sleep because he was right earlier. I can't leave. I've been in similar situations where my father's business is concerned several times over the years. It's not shocking anymore, but it is annoying.

"If I were truly prepared, the tent would be bigger," he tells me.

"Are you sure it's okay?" I ask despite hoping like hell he doesn't say no.

"Don't worry about it. All I'm saying is the situation isn't ideal. We're making lemonade. I get it," he says, being surprisingly nice again.

I'm exhausted. I don't stay up this late, ever. What's worse is we're camping. I'm going to wake up when the sun comes up, so best case scenario, I get about six hours of sleep tonight. I don't respond to him. Instead, I close my eyes, and I start to go to sleep.

Sleep should be easier, given how exhausted I am, but I'm abundantly aware of how close Bryant is to me. Every time I move, I touch him, and then I have to jerk away from him. The last thing I want to do is to make him mad by continuously getting into his space, but it's hard to avoid in here. It happens about five times before I hear his gentle, sleepy laughter.

"It's gonna happen, Kyle. Don't worry about it," he mumbles.

I'm thankful he's being cool about it, but at the same time, I am worried about it. The guy's demeanor on a good day screams don't come within a foot of me or I'll deck you. Even if he's being nice now, my body and brain are conditioned to avoid touching him.

It takes me longer than it normally would to fall asleep, but there are a lot of things that aren't normal about tonight. For example, once I fall asleep, I'm usually out for the night. I almost never wake up halfway through the night. Strangely, only a couple of hours after I fall asleep, I wake back up with a pounding heart. I don't know what woke me. I start to think it was some combination of sleeping somewhere unfamiliar and a bad dream I can't remember when I hear Bryant groan beside me.

Before I can comprehend what's happening, he's throwing his arm over his eyes in a sudden movement.

"Please," he whimpers, and my heart drops when I hear the sheer desperation in his voice.

Then he's thrashing back and forth, and he's not avoiding hitting me at all. Before I can respond or try to sit up, I get an elbow to the face.

"Shit," I mumble.

"Sorry," he whispers, still thrashing, still lost in whatever nightmare has ahold of his consciousness.

Having nothing to lose at this point and hating the sound of his pain in his voice, I shake him awake. His eyes burst open a second later, and when they land on me, holding a hand over my wounded eye, they widen in horror.

"Fuck. Are you alright?" he asks me.

"What was that?" I ask him.

"Let me see your eye," he mumbles, sounding wrecked and sleepy.

He peels my arm away from my eye with a touch so gentle if you would have asked me yesterday if he were capable, I would've told you no. He runs featherlight fingers directly under where my cheekbone is throbbing. It hurts, so I wince and pull away from his touch.

"Fuck," he whispers, biting his lip.

He's an inch from my face, and he's vulnerable in a way I've never seen him. My brain is struggling to reconcile this gentle guy with the guy who's been making my life hard for the past several years of my life. He runs his tongue along the bottom of his lip, and stares into my eyes with haunted eyes.

"Your eyes already turning black," he says, sounding heartbreakingly upset about it.

"S'okay," I mumble, even though the pain is undeniable.

I can't really blame him for it. He was lost in a nightmare. The person to blame was in the nightmare. A thought occurs to me, and I can't dismiss it.

"What was that?" I ask him.

He doesn't deny the nightmare, but he doesn't explain it either. He shrugs.

"I have them sometimes," he says as if the nightmare is inconsequential.

"I'll see if there's still ice in the cooler," he says.

"Are they about my dad?" I ask before he can get into a position where he can get out of the tent.

His response to my question almost convinces me the answer is yes. His eyes widen in horror, before they narrow slightly at me. His shoulders are tense, but his demeanor is open.

"Do you have nightmares about your dad?" he asks me, sounding like he doesn't like the idea as much as I'd think he would.

"Sometimes," I shrug, answering honestly.

I replay the night my mom left a lot when I'm asleep. If I want his answer, I'm not going to lie about my nightmares. My answer has the opposite effect than I intend. Instead of seeming sympathetic, he seems angry.

"Your dad doesn't deserve to breathe," he says with conviction.

Shit. Before I can even wrap my brain around his anger, he's unzipping the tent.

"They aren't about your dad," Bryant says as he exits the tent.

He comes back a short while later with his shirt off. At first, I'm thrown by his shirtless torso, but then he hands me his shirt with ice in it, and I realize he's using it as a makeshift icepack for my eye.

"Sorry about your eye," he says, sounding truly horrified by it.

"It's okay," I tell him, but then I press the issue because earlier when I told him about my dad, he didn't volunteer any information about anything like what his nightmare could have been about.

"Who are they about?" I ask him.

He flinches, and he looks away.

"Nightmares don't have to be about anyone," he says, in a detached, yet vulnerable tone.

"They don't have to be," I agree, "yours are though, right?" I ask.

"I just gave you a black eye, Kyle. I don't want to be a dick to you right now, but I can't answer that question," he tells me.

"Why?" I ask him.

"It's not something I like to talk about," he tells me.

I start to argue with him, but he cuts me off.

"It's not something I'm going to talk about," he revises in a stern voice.

It makes me angry, but I know it's not fair. I told him about my dad's abuse, but in truth, I didn't do that to confide in him. I did it because I was pissed off and fed up with his assumptions about me. Either way, it's not a tit for tat type of thing. He has the right to keeping whatever is in his nightmares to himself if he wants to. I just suddenly feel an overwhelming amount of emotion over how bad my relationship with Bryant is.

"Is it what my dad has on you?" I ask him instead of pressing too much further into who was in his nightmares, "I mean, does it have something to do with the nightmares?"

He takes a visible breath, and he looks at me in the eye.

"If I answer that, will you drop the rest?" he asks me.

I agree immediately because I want to know more about him, and this is looking like the only thing I'm going to get.

"Yes, it has something to do with it," he says, then he looks away.

Shit. So, my belief my dad has something on him wasn't unfounded. Leave it to my dad to hold something over a teenager's head in order to force them to run his drugs for him. I open my mouth to ask another question, but Bryant's warning look is all I need to leave it rest.

"Okay, I said I'd let it rest, and I will, but Bryant?" I ask him.

He takes a deep breath through his nose. It's clear to me he's trying to keep his temper in check where I'm concerned at the moment. He's not used to being nice to me, but there's undeniable guilt on his face. He gave me a black eye, and between tonight and the incident with my asthma, I can deduce he doesn't actually like causing me pain.

"What?" he asks, sounding as impatient as he appears.

"If there ever were a time when you wanted to talk about it, if you ever did decide you wanted to try to fight back, I just—" I struggle with my words, but eventually, I figure out what I'm trying to say, "I want you to know I hold no loyalty to him."