Every Breath After: Part 1 (Lost Boys, #3)

by Jessie Walker

Jeremy dips his chin, gaze boring into me. And in my head, he’s six. Then he’s ten. Fourteen. Fifteen Sixteen… Seventeeneighteennineteentwentytwentyonetwentytwo—

All these versions of Jeremy flashing through my mind—amber eyes searing through me from across a room. Golden blond hair haloing his head, spun silver-white as he got older and cut it, dyed it. Shy smiles and ducked gazes and hunched shoulders that turned into rogue grins and rolled eyes and stubborn juts of his chin.

But in our universe, the one we carved out just for us, just for this moment… Time no longer exists. No one else exists. I don’t even think I exist anymore.

“Suddenly, I had a…a small corner of that world,” —he waves a hand, as if indicating outside this room— “their world, but one that was made just for me, and me alone.” His gaze refocuses on mine, and he taps the headphones around his neck. “You gave me that.”

He could never love me in the way I crave so desperately…not in this timeline. Not in this universe. Our stars are only ever meant to exist from opposite sides of the sun burning brightly forever between us.

Invisible. You’re invisible. Nothing can touch you. Nothing else exists. You are the music.

He’s beautiful, even when he’s at his ugliest—a husk of the person I once knew. Barely even recognizable these days, and yet my soul still aches for him, always. More now than it ever has. And I’ve never hated myself more.

If there’s a way out of this hell, would we even take it at this point?

There’s still hope. Bitterness gnaws at me at the thought. Who knew hope could be so fucking cruel?

“I think…I think it helps,” I whisper. “Making sense of the ugly by finding the beauty in it. I mean, what else do we do with it, you know? How do we make room for it otherwise?”

Perhaps that is why I continue to burn and burn for him. Because in these brief moments of reprieve, like now, where just for a second, the noose loosens, the flames retreat just enough for the smoke to clear, and gravity no longer feels like a curse but a relief… I can remember what it’s like to breathe freely again.

I’m not Jeremy the Coward anymore. I’m Jeremy the Wicked. And if hope shall be my downfall… Then fall I will.

Our pasts won’t break us. No, they’ll fuse us together.

Perhaps the universe did me a favor not aligning our stars. To be loved by Mason Wyatt would surely be a death sentence. The weight of it would crush me. Would that really be so bad? And therein lies the problem.

I thought… Hope. It’s a vicious fucking thing. Like love—like death—all it does is take and take and take. We’re put on this earth for no other purpose than to be ravaged.

“Perhaps the answers you seek aren’t in the stars…but in the space between them.”

It’s just Jeremy and me, and a lifetime of fear and regret and pushed back feelings colliding in a white-hot supernova that obliterates every other thought, every other sensation, but this. Thisthisthis. Ususus.

The sky is black, and so, so vast, and yet for once, I can see it all—see what’s been hiding behind the stars I resented for years. Stars I let myself be blinded by.

He is the void. Him. Jeremy. He’s what’s been missing all along… What I’ve been chasing. Right in front of my fucking face.

You’ll never be invisible to me.