Don't Let the Forest In

by C.G. Drews

his heart a bruised and wretched thing beneath. No one would want a heart like his. But he’d still cut it out and given it away.

There was something intoxicating about meaning that much to one person. Addictive. But Andrew would never admit it out loud.

He couldn’t risk allowing his mouth to say the things he only dared scream in his head.

Sometimes he’d lie awake at night and unpack all his feelings about this boy-shaped hurricane named Thomas Rye.

“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.”

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.

But it felt like something was watching them leave, hungry eyes marking their footfalls and tracing the shapes of their shoulder blades.

Roots would grow over his face and dirt would fill his mouth and he’d be lost forever.

He clutched Thomas like he was the only thing real in a world of nightmares.

A kiss, but not. Comfort, but useless. The promise, I’m here, without words.

Thomas flashed a wicked smile like a feral changeling, a creature you’d bargain your heart to and not even mind.

If the trees belonged to Thomas, midnight was in love with Andrew.

He hadn’t meant to make the girls come out to him just now, but it felt like they’d held out a tentative gift. Opened a door in case he wanted to slip inside, too.

Maybe they’d done this by taking solace in each other. Their soft touches, their bodies magnetized closer and closer—it must enrage the monsters, who wanted nothing more than their bare throats and pale wrists offered up as sacrifice.

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.

Andrew would write them as a story someday. He’d make the blackest parts beautiful and he’d write the kisses bloody and the vengeance sweet.

He could tear out a dozen stories and shove them in Thomas’s face. Each said, in bloody and beautiful ways, I love you I love you I love you.

The remains of a battlefield lay in his wake, broken swords and hollyhock crowns left to decay among piles of bones. But the sword plunged through his stomach was his fault. All Thomas had done was ask to love a boy lost in fairy tales, and the boy had ordered him punished.

Here was a boy who made monsters, or perhaps was a monster himself. All because he couldn’t face the fact, the guilt, the sorrow, the rage, of his sister being dead.

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

They’d devoured each other in this forest, these boys so ravenous and defiant and tearful, they’d not known how to stop. The way Andrew loved Thomas was terrible and eternal, but he couldn’t remember if he’d ever said that out loud.

They were beautiful together; they were magic and monstrous, and they had created a whole vengeful world between them.