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Only Andrew saw Thomas kiss the tree. It wasn’t a performance. This boy did what he wanted on impulse and regretted nothing.
Andrew wanted that—to be so full of fierce life it spilled over his edges.
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.
Andrew was the worst about it, the one who clammed up or outright lied so people would stop trying to pry apart his bones and see why he was riddled with peculiar agonies.
“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.”
“When I cut you open,” Andrew finally said, “all I’ll find is that we match.”
A small, reserved part of him knew he must be asexual, and that being gay enough wasn’t a thing. But he looked at other boys and felt nothing, so maybe the only reason he didn’t want Thomas to kiss Dove was so their trio wouldn’t change—not because he wanted to kiss Thomas. Or maybe he … did?
“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?”
“I would do something terrible if I had to protect someone,” Andrew said, desperately wishing he could shut up. “I’d do anything for Dove. Or … or you.”
He was losing Thomas, watching him slip between his fingers and sink into the earth. Roots would grow over his face and dirt would fill his mouth and he’d be lost forever.
He couldn’t fit into a love story the way he was meant to, the way the stories were always told.
They gently lowered the fairy prince’s body into a glass coffin, leaving bloody fingerprints smudged on the case. His chest had been caved in from battles fought and lost, and they’d filled the space between his ribs with flowers. Even now the flowers grew, blossoming as they drank the last of his blood.
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.
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.
Everyone wanted something. Everyone yearned or searched or hungered—even monsters.
“I told a story.” Andrew gripped Thomas like he’d never let go. “I killed them with ink.”
“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.”
“Everything inside me is in ruins,” Thomas said. “For you.”
He knew there was nothing wrong with intimate, platonic affection—but for him, under all his rotted and tremulous layers, there was nothing platonic about what he felt for Thomas. Andrew loved this boy so deep and whole and obsessively that he couldn’t breathe, and the weight of it terrified him.
“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.”
All Thomas had done was ask to love a boy lost in fairy tales, and the boy had ordered him punished.
“I think,” Andrew whispered, “it sucks to be ace.” “I think,” Lana said, “the world sucks for making you feel that way.”
He accepted one because he didn’t know how to say There’s a forest growing in my stomach, so I’m never hungry.
Andrew felt it as he sat in class, as if he could press fingertips against the air and the gossamer threads separating this world from the next would part. A small push, and anyone could fall through.
A poet with his chest held together by rose vines climbed a tower to kiss his true love, but as their lips touched, a monster with a charming smile snaked into the room. It tore into them and stole a piece of their lungs, a liver, a cracked rib to gnaw on. The end only came when the poet sent his rose vines down the monster’s throat to strangle him. But when the poet tried to kiss his true love once more, he couldn’t. Thorns grew in both their mouths. All they could do was bleed.
Violent. Macabre. Wicked. Twisted.
This book in 4 words
Fevered and sweaty, wild-eyed and insane.
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.
He used to be an empty boy, impossible to fill. Now he was so full of monsters.
“If you cut open my chest”—Andrew’s voice was wrecked—“you’ll find a garden of rot where my heart should be.”
“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.”
I am crying and so are you
