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It hadn’t hurt, the day he had cut out his own heart.
Andrew had always been an empty boy.
It didn’t matter if Thomas read the truth in the story or not, how he alone owned Andrew’s heart. The thrill of the confession had been terrible and beautiful—and retractable. Just in case.
He wrote fairy tales, but cruel. Thomas loved them.
Dove was the one everyone saw, and Andrew was the one they forgot.
Once upon a time, Andrew had cut out his heart and given it to this boy, and he was very sure Thomas had no idea that Andrew would do anything for him. Protect him. Lie for him. Kill for him.
There was something intoxicating about meaning that much to one person. Addictive.
Except one look at Thomas and anyone could see his mouth was crammed full of thorns and lies.
Sometimes he’d lie awake at night and unpack all his feelings about this boy-shaped hurricane named Thomas Rye.
He drew like this because Andrew wrote like this. They fed off each other relentlessly, their fever dreams bleeding through their eyes long after they woke.
Andrew hated the way his brain did this. Destroyed beautiful things. It was like he couldn’t just hold a flower; he had to crush the petals in his fist until his hand was stained with murdered color.
Their story had begun in the forest, a collision both violent and beautiful.
Andrew was a glass figurine. Drop him and he shattered.
A horribly delicious feeling flooded Andrew’s chest. He could taste pain in the air and for once it wasn’t his, and he loved that.
“I think someday you’ll hate me.” Thomas’s voice stretched with a loneliness Andrew had never heard before. “You’ll cut me open and find a garden of rot where my heart should be.”
To write something nice, he’d need something nice to say. But his ribs were a cage for monsters
What were twins, if not one to shout and one to whisper?
Andrew should have said nothing. He needed Thomas, but he’d always known Thomas didn’t need him in the same way.
Something was eating Thomas alive if it distracted him from his art.
pleasure Horror. lovely Horror. open your pretty mouth for meeee
He was l s i n g o his goddamn mind.
The silence breathed out.
like how you are. There’s an entire world of ink and magic stuffed inside your head, and I think it’s beautiful. I just wish everything didn’t hurt you so much.”
“You don’t know anything about me,” he said, low and venomous. “And you know less about Andrew if you think he’s some delicate wallflower that you need to ball up in cotton wool. He could cut me to bloody pieces if he wanted. I couldn’t stop him even if I tried. So can you stop pretending he needs saving from me? Back up and leave us alone.”
He was liked by the boy who liked no one at all, and he wanted it to stay that way so much it hurt.
It was a nightmare and it was alive and there was nowhere to
It was inside him, he knew. The forest.
He needed Thomas, needed their lungs sewn inside each other so he could remember how to breathe. He needed to take words from Thomas’s mouth and put them in his own so he had something to say.
This school grows foul, poisonous spores and calls them roses.”
“Everything inside me is in ruins,” Thomas said. “For you.”
He hadn’t just pushed Thomas away, he’d made sure to cut his throat on the way out.
The boy who loved no one loved him.
Bryce Kane stared down at Andrew while a forest grew from his hollowed-out eyes.
He was a wretched thing, a rotten thing, a skeleton with his insides already devoured by the forest. It was too late to save him.
The way Andrew loved Thomas was terrible and eternal, but he couldn’t remember if he’d ever said that out loud.
