Don't Let the Forest In

by C.G. Drews

This was what Andrew did—told stories. Ones with dark, bitter corners and magic curled into thorns. Ones about monsters with elegant, razor-like teeth. He wrote fairy tales, but cruel.

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.

Thomas had broken his phone a week into summer vacation. Andrew pulled up their last exchange and chewed his lip. phones pretty muvh smaashes exicse typos ill see you when schools back

i giggled lol

Thomas was nothing if not a chronic mess of untucked corners and spills and mussed hair and artwork staining his cuffs.

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.

Andrew should be forgotten. That was what happened to the quiet ones, the wallflowers. When people like him made a friend like Thomas, there should be nowhere to stand in the wake of glory and chaos that Thomas left behind. But Thomas always looked over his shoulder before turning a corner, always reached back to tug Andrew after him.

You know what we need? You, me, stargazing, and vodka. I’m deeply interested in what you’d say with no filter.”

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.

Thomas said. “But I only draw monsters, so you probably couldn’t handle that.” He looked at Andrew as he said it, his mouth a serious line with a challenge tucked into one corner. “I can handle you,” Andrew said.

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. The teacher stormed toward them. Thomas casually tossed his stick into the trees and didn’t look concerned. “He won’t touch you again,” he said. Andrew could hardly breathe. “You’ll be in trouble.” The light in Thomas’s eyes was bold and ferocious. “But he won’t touch you again.”

but so what if Andrew had Thomas to himself for once? It was an excuse to lie beside each other, skin brushing skin, knee pressed against leg. Only the stars could judge.

An extraordinary amount of intimacy lay in exchanging art. Not for critique and not for class. Just to look. To feel. To understand each other.

“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.”

Everything inside him had turned brittle. He couldn’t fit into a love story the way he was meant to, the way the stories were always told. No one would see a point in kissing him and leaving it at that, but he didn’t think he wanted anything more.

“Are you scared of me?” Thomas’s voice was small. “No,” Andrew said. “We’ll stop this. Everything that starts has a way to end.”

They paid and stuffed everything in the bottom of Andrew’s backpack, receiving no dubious looks from the man in a red flannel with a huge beard. As if teenage boys buying weapons wasn’t something to question.

If the trees belonged to Thomas, midnight was in love with Andrew. It made him braver somehow, invisible, hiding his delicate edges and leaving behind a lean and hungry shadow. In the dark, no one could see his hollow and empty places. Instead he looked like he could have teeth.

His chest was a broken cage for his emotions, and they spilled out of him like paint.

“What were you all talking about?” Thomas said, too casual. Have you ever thought about kissing me?

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.

clemens is gonna die isn’t he. any character that starts to believe the mcs crazy unwieldy situation dies soon after

Thomas was breathing hard, his bloody shirt stuck sloppily to his chest, but he felt solid and firm. He’d break down over this later, Andrew knew—but right now he was the glorious fairy-tale prince come to save them all, while Andrew was nothing more than a thing made of skeleton leaves needing to be cupped between safe hands before he blew away.

Thomas fell asleep with one hand dangling over his bed, whimpering as his eyes moved restlessly behind closed lids to the beat of his nightmares. Andrew couldn’t take it. He lay on his back on the cold floorboards under Thomas’s limp hand. Carefully, not daring to breathe, Andrew brushed his mouth over Thomas’s raw red palms. Kisses, but not. Apologies, but useless.

Maybe he could put on a brave face when he fought monsters, but afterward he was always this: a panicked ruin, barely keeping himself together. He needed someone to hold him up, and hadn’t Andrew been doing just that? He was the only person in the world who understood. They had to stay together. They should never be apart.

“If I lose control, you’d stop me, right? If I’m the true monster, you’d fight me.” “You’re not the monster.” But all Andrew could think was if he could crack open Thomas’s ribs right then and fit his whole self inside him, he would. “But if I am”—Thomas’s teeth clenched—“you have to swear you’d stop me.” “I can’t,” Andrew whispered.

because he couldn’t kiss him he had to punch him instead

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.

“Everything inside me is in ruins,” Thomas said. “For you.”

“You know that time when we were twelve and hiking in the forest for class?” Thomas’s voice was uneven, and it took Andrew a second to realize it was with anger. “We decided to race, Dove and me. And the whole time, I was thinking, I want Andrew to look at me. I want Andrew to see me. I’ve loved you since then. So you know what? Fuck you. I think you do love me back, you’re just—you’re too much a coward to admit it.”

Dove told me she used to think Thomas fought with people he liked because that’s how he knew to get attention. But not with you. She told me, ‘Andrew is his safe space. He is forever gentle for Andrew.’”

“I think,” Andrew whispered, “it sucks to be ace.” “I think,” Lana said, “the world sucks for making you feel that way.”

“Have you ever wanted to be something else so … so someone would still want you?” Chloe considered this, and he liked how she didn’t rush her answers. “Sometimes? Like I’m anxious and queer and Vietnamese, and I just think … wow, no one could be bothered with me if I’m too much. But it isn’t true. You just have to find the people who love you for you. I’m lucky to have those.” “It’s shitty that it has to be luck to be loved as you are,” Andrew said. Chloe looked serious. “Agreed.”

the tension here is immaculate. I have never read a characters thought process that’s desperate to cut themselves open. it makes you so nervous

How the school would explain this away, he had no idea, but they couldn’t pin it on Thomas—even though, for once, this was actually his fault.

He was so tired of suffering because he moved through the world differently from everyone else. This wasn’t only about goddamn monsters. It was about how he never seemed able to cope, how the world didn’t fit against his skin, how he felt too much and hurt too often and couldn’t pack his emotions into neat, palatable boxes. He needed help. He needed someone to hold on to. He needed to be believed. It didn’t matter if what hurt him was an invisible weight inside his head or something that left real bruises against his skin: His pain was real.

Then he whispered, “I am real. You are real.” “Make me believe you,” Andrew said. And Thomas kissed him, hard and fierce and merciless. All teeth and tongue as he took everything from Andrew and devoured him whole. Andrew’s teeth sank into Thomas’s lip until the old scab burst open again, and then it was impossible to do anything but breathe as one. They were a catastrophe, exploding. Thomas pulled back and grabbed Andrew’s face, rough and hard. He pressed their foreheads together. “Do you feel this? I am here and I am here and I am here.” He couldn’t make this up, could he? The extraordinary wonder of pain and blood and Thomas.

“Get off before I headbutt you and there ends your perfect nose.” “You think my nose is perfect?” “Well, it’s straight,” Andrew said. Thomas’s mouth quirked a little. “At least one part of me is.”

They took her away. They didn’t even ask him if they could.