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Then the Antler King looked up and its eyes locked on Andrew. there you are prince
The Antler King reached down and down and down to caress Andrew’s tearstained face.
He was mad and brutal beauty in that moment. Andrew forgot how to breathe.
He stared at the mirror with bloodshot eyes. The Antler King stared back. Blood dripped down the crown as its skin flaked into burnished autumn leaves.
“That’s always how I’ve drawn us. Me, the prince with the sword, you the valiant storyteller.”
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.
“Hit me.” Thomas’s eyes blazed. “Or I swear I will fucking leave you in case that’s the only way to save you. I will leave you and never, never come back. I’ll—” Andrew hit him.
He wanted to kiss Thomas. He wanted to press their bloody mouths together with a hunger he thought would kill him.
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.
This school grows foul, poisonous spores and calls them roses.”
The prince and his poet climbed over fallen logs, soft with moss and fungi, and the shadows made it look as if they wore crowns of holly berries and thorns. 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 wished he could fit his face into the crook of Thomas’s throat and hold on until his anxiety thinned and they both felt warm again.
“I told a story.” Andrew gripped Thomas like he’d never let go. “I killed them with ink.”
Andrew pressed his face into Thomas’s curls and thought of princes with their hearts cut out.
Instead, he whispered, “Would you die for me?” Thomas sounded warm and cottony with sleep. “Of course I would.”
“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.”
“Well, obviously? Andrew, you’re beautiful. Of course I … I told you. I am in ruins for you. I’d give you anything.”
He wanted to say, You are my everything, too. He wanted to say, I don’t exist without you. He wanted to say, Kiss me.
Andrew loved this boy so deep and whole and obsessively that he couldn’t breathe, and the weight of it terrified him.
“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.”
The boy who loved no one loved him.
“It’s shitty that it has to be luck to be loved as you are,” Andrew said.
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.
“I want … I need you.”
Then he crushed Andrew to his chest. “I want you always.”
All that mattered was the way Thomas had held him last night, reverent and desperate and terrified all at once, and how he’d pressed his mouth to Andrew’s head. It felt right. It felt perfect.
The forest had been growing inside him for a long time, he’d just refused to think about it.
He was a boy close to the end of infinity and he would run off the edge of the world if that was what it took.
“Did I make this all up? The m-monsters, the-the stories, the—” “I’m real, Andrew. Do you see the blood on my shirt? How can—” “Kiss me, then.” It burst out of him, frantic and feral. “Kiss me.”
“Make me believe you,” Andrew said. And Thomas kissed him, hard and fierce and merciless.
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.
It felt thrilling but strange to write. He’d never looked at a boy and wanted him. Except one.
I love you … like you’re my whole world.”
It shouldn’t be a surprise that the forest had outgrown the confines of his thin, frail body and longed to stretch. He used to be an empty boy, impossible to fill. Now he was so full of monsters.
“She wanted everything to stay the same,” Andrew said. “And it couldn’t. It didn’t. We let our love for each other cut us to the bloody core.”
He could unmake Andrew if he wanted; he could destroy him with the tender shape of his mouth.
This was how they were, bones broken and mended crookedly, each entwined with the other. 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.”
“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.”
Their rib bones would twine together in a lattice to protect them from the worst of the world and they would always be together; they should never be apart.
The way Andrew loved Thomas was terrible and eternal, but he couldn’t remember if he’d ever said that out loud.
“Remember you love me.” His words felt so small and sleepy against the forest’s dawn. “All my stories are about you. They will always be about you.”
They were beautiful together; they were magic and monstrous, and they had created a whole vengeful world between them.
