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His hate for Laurie is unmanageable, wild and bitter as wormwood on his tongue, and he should have lost all interest in him by now. He shouldn’t watch for him through his window. Or crave snippets of his voice. Or think about his cornflower-blue eyes and the beautiful shape of his wretched mouth.
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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
Sidney liked this
“No matter what happens,” Laurie whispers, blood freckling his round cheeks, “remember your name is Evander and you love me best.”
the ropey line that runs from hip to hip. A severing. As if someone tried to chop him in half. Not Laurie.
Wickwood is a shit school anyway and it’s in the middle of godforsaken nowhere. Weird, creepy stuff kept happening and every time I asked Grandfather if I could transfer, he said no because he hates me.”
The urge to bolt sends electric shocks up Evander’s spine, and he is only held in place by the promise of Laurie’s confusing offer of protection—he crosses his arms and stiffens his stance, surreptitiously turning so his body is a wall between Evander and the world.
He has no idea how to feel about Laurie protecting him.
It must hurt him, though, the constant hate and rejection from his own family.
But maybe the thing he truly wants to understand is how he, too, can hate this boy and yet long to use his own bones to build a shelter around Laurie’s raw, bleeding heart. It is unfathomable to feel that way. Yet he can’t make himself stop.
Electricity skitters over his too-raw skin and he doesn’t know how to shape the words I’m not okay. Though he thinks, maybe, that Laurie knows and that’s why he bent himself to play guard dog, as if Evander is a thing he owns.
“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.”
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“I never said you were.” Laurie’s mouth is a flat line. “Are they meltdowns? Because I’m pretty sure anyone can have a meltdown when they’re being pushed off the goddamn edge. But is that what Carrington or Grandfather told you they were? ‘Episodes’? It’s fucking derogatory,” he adds, with surprising venom.
Because nobody tells wealthy, vicious people no.
It’s easy, somehow, to think of himself with loathing and contempt, but then to realize how wrong it sounds when someone else does it to themselves.
“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.”
Lauren Ventry liked this
And he pretends that it is Laurie who whispers, “It’s okay.”
It makes sense, in a wild, hot rush—the garden isn’t eating him, it’s mending him. Those vines have stitched his side, moss has soaked up his blood, tiny violet roots have sprouted from his busted lip to suture ragged flesh.
“God was stronger than me when he made Adam and didn’t fall in love with him.”
No one should look at a monster like that. With such unashamed adoration.
