In My Dreams I Hold a Knife

by Ashley Winstead

His eyes, so serious. “I’m memorizing your face in this light.”

A woman who wanted was an ugly thing. I knew it made me childish and vulnerable. My whole life had taught me that lesson. But still. For one moment, laid out on the grass, all my ruined, pointless, pent-up wanting was too great to contain— I threw open the doors to my heart. The pain flooded in. I’d wanted so many things and lost them all. This was the cost. I lay on the grass and sobbed. The stars looked on, cold and unblinking.

“I won’t sugarcoat it. Your father tried to kill himself last night. He took the coward’s way out.”

“I thought she was you!” Mint screamed, pointing at me, eyes blazing. “I thought I was hurting you!”

Up, up, up. He was going to climb the walls of the elevator if it went any slower; he was going to claw his skin off.

She’d died. While he was in the bathroom scrubbing off her blood, Heather had died alone.

He bent and scooped something from the floor, gripping it like a dagger in his right hand. It was a massive, jagged piece of glass. A line of blood snaked down his wrist from where he held it, the same crimson as the Duquette polo he wore.

“Let’s go.” “Where?” “I don’t know. I just want to be free with you in this city. I used to dream about it.”