Don't Let the Forest In

by C.G. Drews

Being left aching and hollow was a familiar feeling. A comfortable pain.

They’re just meant to hurt. Like a paper cut—a tiny sting that meant nothing more than I’m alive I’m alive I’m alive.

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.

“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.” Andrew let the silence sharpen between them, waited until Thomas’s breath caught in quiet anguish from being made to wait. “When I cut you open,” Andrew finally said, “all I’ll find is that we match.”

It was strange, Andrew thought, how when something moved in the dark, everyone’s first instinct was to go inside and hide under the covers. As if monsters couldn’t open doors and crawl into bed with you.

To write something nice, he’d need something nice to say. But his ribs were a cage for monsters and they cut their teeth on his bones.

He had no wings. He’d fall and die and he’d do so in silence.

“Anyone could be a monster. In the right circumstances. Motivated by the right thing. To protect someone else or to … to protect yourself. Is it that wrong to fight for yourself if no one else will?”

“It is better to study law, play tennis, then kiss many beautiful women.”

For a vicious moment, Andrew thought about slipping his fingers into Thomas’s cut. Taking hold of his rib and breaking it. Pulling the soft crumbling bone from his chest and sewing it into his own. They’d be forever together, rib against rib, fused in gore and bone and adoration.

“I 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.”

The world had no business being this bitterly crisp at 6:00 a.m.

“You can talk, Andrew. I won’t bite your head off,” Lana, known-head-biter, said.

“You could cut me open and devour everything that I am,” Thomas said, ragged and thin. “I would let you. I’d ask you to. But I have no idea what it means to you. What … what I mean to you.”

He thought maybe you could love someone so much you ruined them, and then you ruined yourself.

“If you cut open my chest”—Andrew’s voice was wrecked—“you’ll find a garden of rot where my heart should be.” Thomas tilted his head up, and the way he looked at Andrew was so tender and fierce, so full of fearless worship. “I don’t care how dark the world is for you. I’ll hold out my hand until you find it, and I won’t let go.”