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It hadn’t hurt, the day he had cut out his own heart.
It was easier to tell a story than say how he felt,
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.
But Dove was a statue of glittering ice, beautiful and dangerous and impossible to reshape, while Andrew was more like a collection of skeleton leaves, fragile and crumbling. Dove was the one everyone saw, and Andrew was the one they forgot.
1% in i’m already amazed at the lyrical prose
Dozens of heads turned. Only one mattered.
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.
There was something intoxicating about meaning that much to one person. Addictive.
Andrew forgot how to breathe. The moment didn’t seem real: kneeling bunched up next to a keyhole, listening to his best friend, his heart, be dissected.
People didn’t just kiss and continue on with their lives. They undid buttons and touched mouths to hot skin and lost themselves within each other.
Thomas’s work, unmistakably. A stark winter forest, every tree burned white with frost. A boy with horns and roses grown from his eyes held a knife, and he was midway through carving the heart out of another boy with moth wings who knelt in the leaves, his face tilted upward in supplication. Vines blossomed around them, tangled and unruly.
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.
Their story had begun in the forest, a collision both violent and beautiful.
Dove could be tossed into anything and she’d bounce. Andrew was a glass figurine. Drop him and he shattered.
Andrew fell in love with the woods. It was quiet there, and the trees seemed like they could keep secrets.
Andrew wanted that—to be so full of fierce life it spilled over his edges.
“I can handle you,”
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.
His best talent had always been letting people down. Even in sleep, apparently.
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.”
“You’ll cut me open and find a garden of rot where my heart should be.”
“When I cut you open,”
“all I’ll find is that we match.”
It was strange, Andrew thought, how when something moved in the dark, everyone’s first instinct was to go inside and hide under the covers. As if monsters couldn’t open doors and crawl into bed with you.
There was something so raw about being known this intimately, being understood down to his darkest parts. Andrew’s heart felt swollen to twice its normal size.
Everyone saw Andrew as shattered and fragile, and maybe he was to them. But when Thomas looked at Andrew’s sharp edges, he thought them dangerous and beautiful—not weak.
“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 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, because he couldn’t be what Thomas wanted, and for that he was going to lose him completely.
Andrew loved this boy so deep and whole and obsessively that he couldn’t breathe, and the weight of it terrified him.
“I want … I need you.” Thomas’s voice came so thin it was nearly lost under a wave of laughter from the other end of the table. “We can just be what we were. I swear I won’t ask for anything else. It’s just—I make monsters. I am a monster. I lost my mind for a second and freaked out that you could never love someone this wicked.”
They stayed there, tangled in each other, heartbeats racing. Nothing mattered but this.
Thorns grew in both their mouths. All they could do was bleed.
hauntingly beautiful
But I love you … like you’re my whole world.”
“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.”
They were beautiful together; they were magic and monstrous, and they had created a whole vengeful world between them.
