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Like a paper cut—a tiny sting that meant nothing more than I’m alive I’m alive I’m alive.
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.”
“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.”
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.
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’d take you.” Andrew swung his flashlight around the trees. “I’d pack you into my carry-on.” “Like, okay, I’m short, but not that short.” Andrew snorted.
“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.”
All I care about right now is you. He was liked by the boy who liked no one at all, and he wanted it to stay that way so much it hurt.
“I don’t have my phone to look up the nearest art store,” Andrew said. “We’ll do it the good ol’ fashioned way.” Thomas power-walked across the street and Andrew had to run to keep up. “Ask directions?” he said. “What? No. Walk around until we find one.” They wasted fifteen minutes before Thomas gave in and asked for directions.
He was mad and brutal beauty in that moment. Andrew forgot how to breathe.
Thomas’s eyes looked liquid green, violent and wild and bright. “Are you hurt? I’ll kill anything that touches you. I swear.” “We have to … have to…” Every word came out strangled. “We have to make them stop.” Thomas looked away, his throat working. “I’ll kill them all. I don’t know what else to do. I-I-I don’t know, Andrew. I don’t know what to do.”
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 knew how to ruin Thomas the same way Thomas knew how to ruin him. They could be so beautiful to each other. They could be so cruel.
The forest watched him, silent, and the monsters stayed back in respect, though the hunger in their eyes was still terrible. To cut out his heart was actually such a small thing.
