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It hit Andrew then, how Thomas would sacrifice the world for him without even thinking. How terrible that was.
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.
Thomas heaved the hatchet into the air and brought it down as if he were chopping wood. Bones splintered, but he kept going. The Antler King had long ago stopped breathing.
He wished he could stuff the ashy remains in his mouth, inked monsters and matches and wicked flames and all. It would burn him to the core but not before he spent a bright, searing moment feeling full. Emptiness banished.
Kisses, but not. Apologies, but useless. The fever in his hands burned Andrew’s mouth.
But it was the witching hour that woke him. The sound of a howl pulled from a ravenous throat filled the night beyond their safe little room.
But this time it wasn’t pushing against skin and trying to escape. It was growing the other way. Going in deeper. It was inside him, he knew. The forest.
Once there was a boy who slept in an enchanted tower, his back flecked with whip marks from battles lost and monsters who’d won.
He wanted to press their bloody mouths together with a hunger he thought would kill him.
This is all they were, at the end of it all, boys with stomachs empty and concave, waiting to be filled by Wickwood and forests and rot.
He was failing classes; they both were. Sleepless nights full of monsters weren’t conducive to Wickwood’s rigorous academic schedule, apparently.
He needed Thomas, needed their lungs sewn inside each other so he could remember how to breathe.
Leaves skittered in their footsteps on a breeze they couldn’t feel, and something crawled through the underbrush with a form they couldn’t see.
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.
Trapped between monsters and the waking dark for so long, Andrew was focused on only one thing: Make the monsters stop. Not who had started it. Not why.
Andrew turned slowly, his grip firm on the hatchet. He refused to fall apart this time like a boy made of glass.
It was nothing like Thomas’s drawing. Everything in Andrew’s head started screaming.
Thomas stopped screaming, but his whimper alone could have murdered Andrew. He suddenly sounded so small, so full of pain. His mud-slick fingers grabbed at the tongue, but it was too slippery to hold.
sacrificeeeeee … every good story ends with a wishbone snapped … a bloodied kiss— the prince’s sacrifice. —cut out a heart— and bury it in the woods. but you already knew that, prince.
“I don’t know.” Liar. But he’d always been one.
he whispered, “Would you die for me?” Thomas sounded warm and cottony with sleep. “Of course I would.”
It was a relief to breathe in something that wasn’t the forest—suffocating, cloying, all-consuming.
They should’ve been in the dining hall for lunch, but this was Thomas’s compromise: They’d avoid everyone if Andrew would eat.
He couldn’t bite into food until Thomas had first. Even now, Andrew’s tongue searched for the grooves Thomas’s teeth had left behind.
“And Halloween is tomorrow. The monsters are bad enough now, but they’ll be worse then. I know it.”
“Why can’t you write a story that says ‘and no more monsters manifested out of my goddamn drawings and we all lived happily ever after’?”
Silence pulled over them, companionable if a little morose,
“Everything inside me is in ruins,” Thomas said. “For you.”
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.
“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. But he had to step back,
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.
A pathetic boy made of glass and delicate things, running to his sister for help; it was an embarrassing picture, but he didn’t care.
“you’re allowed to be around people who aren’t Thomas.” But he didn’t know how.
If a monster climbed out of the rosebushes right now with teeth as long as knives, Andrew would let it bite deep into his ribs and tear him in half like a rotted plum.
He had a beast caged behind his ribs and it took all his energy to keep it there.
He accepted one because he didn’t know how to say There’s a forest growing in my stomach, so I’m never hungry.
When she’s upset, she cares for people in, like, angry revenge at the world for being crap.”
“She doesn’t have to keep scraping me off the floor.” He sounded washed-out.
“When I get anxious, I hurt myself. Or other people.” He had no idea why he said it. He was never this honest.
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.
“It’s shitty that it has to be luck to be loved as you are,”
He loves me and I put a knife through his ribs.
“Lana hunts for lonely people. Hunts. But we’re also roommates, so that helped.”
Thomas would always reach a hand back for Andrew.
“I get that you forgave him.” Lana looked away. “But he was the reason you put your hand through that mirror.”
Andrew said nothing; it was easier that way. But a yawning emptiness opened in his mind, an endless black nothing where a memory should be. He had no idea what she was talking about.
