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Seven years ago, Laurence Lennox-Hall tried to kill him in the garden, down amongst the roses. But somehow, Evander is still obsessed with him.
He wishes his brain moved in one direction, not a dozen all at the same time, and that he didn’t pull apart in a panic if even one thing goes wrong.
Dawes says, with cool precision, “There’s something wrong with you.” “Want a gold sticker for figuring that out?” Laurie’s amusement is pure vinegar.
“I am not a feral cat,” Evander says stiffly. Laurie raises an eyebrow. “Have you thought about scratching my eyes out at any point in the last twenty-four hours?” “Try the last five minutes,” Evander mutters.
“What?” Laurie says. “Put him back in his cell?” Dawes rubs at his temples. “Laurence. I swear, I’m—” “Not in front of the baby,” Laurie says. Evander straightens in his chair, lightning flaring hot in his chest. “I’m not a baby.” “I was talking about me,” Laurie says calmly, “but okay.”
There is no point talking to him. Evander has to remember that this boy is the devil with gilt horns under his golden curls and being alone with him is like putting coals on his tongue and wondering why they burn.
He really needs to pull apart the wicker cage of his ribs and see if he can find the reason he’s so obsessed with that boy hidden amidst the rot. He craves him. He thinks about him all the time. Even when Laurie is at school, Evander still lies in bed and imagines how he must look in classes, tapping a pencil against his lips or reaching to pull books off tall shelves. Laurie is smoldering sin when he tilts his head back in a way that begs to be kissed.
Finally, Laurie’s smile drops. “Because whenever I fucked up, Grandfather would beat the living shit out of me as a kid. So.”
“No matter what happens,” Laurie whispers, blood freckling his round cheeks, “remember your name is Evander and you love me best.”
Sometimes he just wants to crawl out of his own skin and peg it on a washing line to air out for a bit while he takes a long nap somewhere cool and dark. But those are not the sorts of things he can explain out loud. No one cares how he feels anyway.
what a mood
“Evander, wait.” There’s no explaining it, the pleasure of hearing his name in Laurie’s mouth.
He is gasoline poured into Evander’s open mouth of flame, and the worst part is how he likes the taste.
He is just a boy who speaks too bluntly when what he wants most is to figure out which pretty, magical words will finally make him understood.
If he could dig fingernails into the sides of Laurie’s face and peel back the mask, he would. He would core him like a pear and throw away the soft, rotted skin until he saw him as he really is: horrible and beautiful and real.
They would have been fervent terrors back then, riotous with life and each other; now they only haunt the places where together they once were lovely.
In fact, he seems to go out of his way to be unpleasant, but a small part of Evander can’t ignore the part where Laurie’s truest crime seems to be telling the truth, brutal and honest and scathing, instead of simpering around and folding himself into shapes his rich relatives want to see. It must hurt him, though, the constant hate and rejection from his own family.
He is Icarus with wings of swan feathers, who chose to fly into the sun because it looked like a pretty boy.
When Laurie is far enough ahead, Evander fits his mouth over the place Laurie’s was and he bites down like a secondhand kiss. Juice splits free of the sun-hot skin and runs in a bloody line down his chin. He eats the whole thing. He craves more. Though he isn’t sure it’s the fruit his mouth waters for.
Words don’t make sense in the space between them, when Laurie’s heat is a molten promise against Evander’s bones. They are wrong like this—they should be flint against sharpened teeth if they touch. But instead, Laurie curves himself like a supplicant who would hollow out his own body if only it could be used to fit a lovely god inside.
“Who tells you to be quiet all the time?” Laurie’s words are a low, thickened spill of warm honey. “Pain is meant to take up space or else we wouldn’t know how to scream. Fuck making your agony silent to avoid disturbing others. Maybe they should be disturbed.”
Maybe this is what it is to face your own death: to worry if you will be lonely, right there at the end.
“I think you forgot,” he whispers, too emptied to care that he’s talking to a plant, “you’re meant to be trying to kill me.”
Unfortunately, he turned into such a sour young man, so antisocial and sarcastic, but he used to be so lovely and bright. Oh! And he had the cutest imaginary friend. He combined his own names to give it a name. Isn’t that sweet?”
Laurence Evan Alexander Lennox-Hall. He’d rattled it off when asked, though he’d been reluctant.
He has always known that to scream is to believe there is someone out there who cares. People only scream with rabid hope caged in their lungs like a thousand thrashing wings because they still think someone is going to save them. Evander has no one. He is alone and he always has been and he might as well stay silent.
“I thought,” Evander says dully, “it was because you wanted Hazelthorn.” “I still do. And that’s why I’m not leaving.” He hesitates and then his voice comes rough and fierce. “I’m not leaving Hazelthorn because I’m not leaving you.”
Since when did Evander get choices? Since when did anyone ask? He is forever bullied into whatever option is most convenient for everyone else.
“If I help you to the bathroom, I’d need to touch you. Is that okay?” The fact that he asks brings such brilliant and violent relief that Evander can’t hold back the choked sob.
What Evander wants right now is to die and be reincarnated as a slug that everybody leaves the hell alone, but failing that, he wants to be able to think through this fog.
again, what a mood
Laurie’s head tilts toward him, a frown leaving a divot between his brows. “You should’ve called for me. If you put my name in your mouth, I will always listen.”
“I like you like this.” Hushed amusement edges Laurie’s voice. “Like what?” Evander’s heartbeat picks up and his mouth feels oddly crowded with hummingbird wings. He doesn’t know how to say, I like it when you’re actually being you, so he just says, “Muddy.” “Okay, Evander.” He’s trying not to laugh.
He wants their twined fingers to grow together like soft green vines across a rose trellis. If he is to be held, to be touched, he wants it to be like this and only by this boy.
He is not a bird meant for flight; he is broken wings and forgotten petals left to dry between pages of an old book and he doesn’t know how to believe he could be anything else.
The fissuring rage in his head grows louder and louder, while thorns fill his mouth and black petals blossom behind his eyes, and he cannot think think think beyond this— He crushes his mouth to Laurie’s.
Evander is breathless as he follows, but doesn’t know what scares him more: Wondering if the garden has sunk hooks so deep inside him that it’s made him monstrous. Or if it didn’t force him at all.
Evander has to rearrange his shoulders as he squeezes inside. Splinters snag against his skin and his body feels suddenly too unwieldy and stretched. This makes no sense. Laurie didn’t struggle and Evander is far smaller than him.
Because sometimes the snarl, the insult, the teeth marks cut into the nearest person are so often a reflection of the bruises you already wear.
“You can’t read, can you?” Evander says quietly. Because he is thinking of academic probation. He is thinking of Laurie prowling through Evander’s bedroom but never glancing at any of his papers and clues. He is thinking of Laurie looking at the murder wall saying, One of these for me? when the card with his name was right in front of him.
“Gave up what?” Evander tilts his head forward so his forehead brushes Laurie’s temple. “Trying to stay away from you. I’d split my bones, I’d open my throat, I’d do anything to be near you and have even one second with my mouth against yours.”
And maybe this is the best way to destroy the boy he’s hated for so long—to kiss him helpless, senseless, to make him desperate for more from the person he made the mistake of failing to kill.
He decides the worst and most satisfying thing he could do to Laurie right now is this: kneel down, lift his shirt just enough to trail six burning kisses from his hip across the sensitive skin below his navel, and stop just before his jeans halt any descent. Then Evander pulls away and crouches down to gather up the papers. The choked sound Laurie makes as he covers his face with the crook of his arm is very, very pleasing.
“There is nothing else to me but the hollow spaces I’ve carved out for you. I knew I’d cut myself to pieces on you if we ever had the chance to touch, but I wanted to.” His voice unravels, massacred on yearning. “Let me ruin myself on you.”
“I never tried to sacrifice you, because I was sacrificing me.” Each word shatters as it hits the ground. “I asked the garden for you. Then I dug you up.”
He has always been drawn to Laurie, addicted to him, and it is only now that he understands why. He belongs to this boy in the way a flower belongs to its god.
This is why they hid all the mirrors in Hazelthorn. He doesn’t look right. He is the uncanny copy of a human, the best the garden could do. A boy made of otherness and green wood sticks and wicked hunger.
Pain has become a thing he wears, a thing he is.
“I think I did it,” he says as the room folds into hysterical chaos. “I think I killed Byron Lennox-Hall.” He pauses, poisonous petals unfolding in his throat, before he whispers, “And the rest of you too.”
