53. No More Secrets
NO MORE SECRETS
LEV
“ W hat are you doing here?” Lev hissed, and pulled Silas into his room, then ducked his head out to check the hallway was empty.
Silas staggered inside as if Lev had manhandled him, which he most certainly had not.
Lev had long-since learned to handle Silas with care.
Anorexia had ravaged his body on and off through his teens, and while Silas had hovered at a healthy weight for the last two years, it would take a lot longer than that for his bones to be as sturdy as Lev’s.
“You can’t do this. You love me. We’re family,” Silas wailed, tears spilling without shame down delicate cheekbones smattered with purple petechiae like they’d been flicked from a paintbrush.
Silas had always bruised easily. If he cried or screamed hard enough, burst blood vessel freckles peppered his skin. Pleasing him without bruising him had always been a delicate line to navigate.
Pain and sex were the only things that took the edge off of Silas’s suffering, and Lev had never denied him, even if he hadn’t wanted to.
“I do love you, Si.” Lev pulled him into a hug, partly to muffle the infernal racket he was making. “We’ll always be family. I just can’t love you the way you want me to.”
Twisting the knife in Silas’s back deeper with the same truth he’d already told him earlier was excruciating, but if he surrendered to Silas now, he’d restart the same broken clock, and he couldn’t do that again. He’d already sacrificed far too many years of his life to Silas.
Silas pushed out of Lev’s arms. He stopped crying mid-sob, stymying his tears faster than turning a faucet off. His face transformed from agony to a hateful scowl that lifted the hair on the back of Lev’s neck. When would Lev stop falling for his theatrics?
“Sorry. Forgive me for not understanding, but are you telling me you only love me as a brother?” Silas pushed his lips into a masquerade of a pout. “The goodbye sex we had before you dumped me certainly wasn’t a brotherly game of croquet.”
“It wasn’t goodbye sex,” Lev said through clenched teeth, balling his hands into fists. “You needed me and I took care of you, and then I broke.”
Every time Silas had asked Lev to hurt him, he’d stacked another boulder on Lev’s chest, and they’d been doing it for so long that Silas had buried him, and Lev hadn’t noticed until he could scarcely breathe against the weight of it.
Lev hadn’t realized that last time was the last time until he’d tried to breathe and couldn’t.
If Lev stayed with Silas, he would suffocate.
“You literally shagged me, then dumped me. It’s like you did it on purpose just to take advantage of me and then hurt me,” Silas said.
“No. What you’re not going to do is cast me as the villain taking advantage of you. Trust me, if I’d had any choice, I wouldn’t have fucked you at all. ”
Silas’s jaw dropped with the most scandalized gasp. “What a terribly cruel thing to say.”
“I’m not finished!”
“Lower your voice,” Silas said, as if he hadn’t brought an argument to Lev’s room on purpose to hold him hostage under the threat of waking Father.
Lev screamed inside his head.
“If I’d ever planned to shag you and dump you , I would have checked the tide charts first, because nothing is worse than being trapped by high tide at Lichenmoor with you.”
Silas’s mouth closed, then opened, and closed again.
Lev shouldn’t have said that last part even if it was true. “I’m sorry. Why don’t we pause this for now and get some rest before we say things we regret? We can talk more after we’ve both slept.”
“How?”
Lev stroked Silas’s hair behind his ear. “What do you mean?”
“How can I sleep when I’m the worst thing that’s ever happened to you? What about losing your mum? What about Wendell? Is staying with me really that terrible?”
Lev clicked his tongue “Silas, no. Not at all. I was angry and meant it in a dramatic cliche sort of way. Understood?”
Silas nodded.
“Good.” Lev hugged Silas, this time not to silence him, but to comfort them both. Lev tucked Silas’s head under his chin and hugged him tighter.
Silas melted against him and inhaled a shuddering breath as if his tears had been real all along and he’d finally settled himself in the safety of Lev’s arms. Silas had loved Lev for more than a decade, for more than half of his life, for nearly all of his memories.
While the same could be said for Lev, there was one astronomically important difference—Lev had a life outside of Silas, and Silas did not. When the tide receded, Lev would leave, and Silas would be alone.
Lev and Silas would both start a new chapter tomorrow. It was terrifying, and perhaps the tiniest bit exhilarating, which made him feel like the world’s biggest prick, because Silas was staring down a future of blank pages without Lev to fill them with.
But maybe Silas could learn to be happy on his own, and then after that, maybe he could find someone else. Lev had to tell himself that, he had to believe it was true, because if he let his mind wander to how Silas would suffer, he’d never be able to leave.
“How can I sleep without you?” Silas asked, tugging Lev back to the present.
“You don’t have to.”
Silas tipped his head back and looked at Lev with powder blue eyes so devastatingly vulnerable. “How would we sleep? Like lovers or brothers?”
“We’ll sleep like we always have, because whatever label we fall under, we’ll always be Lev and Silas, and I’ll always love you.”
Silas’s muscles tensed. His eyes shuttered. “What does that mean?”
“It means I love you and I want to hold you while you sleep, but I still can’t love you like that anymore.”
Some of Lev’s scratches hadn’t stopped bleeding, so he gradually released Silas and stepped out of fingernail range just in case. There was nothing he could say because he’d already said it, and then he’d said too much.
“Perhaps we should tell Father… Maybe without the pressure to keep us a secret, you’ll feel better?” Silas said quite sensibly, as if he actually thought it would help.
Lev wanted to believe him, but he knew Silas as well as he didn’t know him at all—it was the same manipulation tactic he’d paraded around since they’d started dating.
“Maybe we should tell him.” At this point, he’d rather disappoint Father than fight with Silas again. “You can’t blackmail me into staying with you, Si. That’s not love.”
“It could be if you tried.”
Lev shook his head. “I wasn’t talking about myself. If you really loved me, you wouldn’t do this. You’d let me go.”
“It was supposed to be only me and you.”
“It never was, though, Si. I was so young. I wasn’t equipped.
What happened to you was terrible, but I didn’t steal Wendell from you, or send you to that school, nor did I bully you.
I shouldn’t have carried all of your darkness for you as if I was the one who’d hurt you.
Maybe if I’d told someone, they could have helped you. ”
“You act as if I haven’t been carrying you too.”
“If you have, then I’m sorry. We should have been kids. We should have run amok in the fields, and played in the ruins, and swam for hours in the summer, instead of sharing secrets in the shadows.”
“I could leave with you. Maybe we can start fresh somewhere else.”
How many times had Silas promised that only to change his mind at the last minute with a slash of his wrists or an overdose to delay Lev’s departure?
“You won’t. Even if you did, it’s too late for that.”
“Perhaps I’ll tell father the truth myself, then. No more secrets.”
What was Silas playing at? A thousand horrifying suggestions cartwheeled through his head.
“You must remember the first summer we were together, Levvy? You touched me and I said it felt funny, but you were older and I looked up to you, so when you said it should feel good, I pretended that it did, but it never felt good. It only ever hurt.”
The suggestion of a false accusation like that was a fatal fucking blow to their relationship, but he could be upset about that later, after he found out if someone had hurt Silas.
“Did someone do that to you?”
Silas shrugged one shoulder. “If they had, would you stay?”
“Have they?”
Silas snorted with derision. “No, but words can do so much damage, especially when given a pen.” Then the little narcissistic twat lifted his nose and sighed like ruining Lev’s life was all such a bore.
“You’re disgusting.”
“Yes, Brother . You’ve already made your opinion about my appeal quite clear.”
Silas barely spared him a glance, looking around Lev’s room like he was a guest who wanted to leave but couldn’t find his hat.
“Father won’t believe you.”
“What about the defensive wounds I left on your wrist? You were so kind to fuck me. I’m sure I’m just swimming with evidence.”
Claustrophobia curled around Lev. Had Silas anticipated Lev’s departure before Lev himself had? Was all of this a plot to steer Lev back to Lichenmoor?
“I don’t recognize you anymore,” Lev whispered.
“I think you’ve never seen me more clearly. Ever since you met me, you only saw what you wanted to see, and you only loved who you wanted me to be.”
“No, Si. That’s not true.” Fuck. Lev sniffed back tears and pressed his hands to his eyes.
What was real and what wasn’t? Was this Silas the same Silas who’d sung lullabies when Lev had missed his mum? Had he ever been the precocious boy who had talked his way into Lev’s home and his heart?
Or had Lev wasted the last twelve years of his life, the twilight of his childhood, the dawn of his adulthood, loving someone who was incapable of loving anyone but himself? Lying to himself was easier.
“You’re just trying to hurt me,” Lev said.
“Of course, I’m trying to hurt you,” Silas shouted, giving no fucks for Father at all. “You want to leave me here to rot.”
Lev forced his fear into patience like he’d been taught to do with horses. “Silas, we can always try again, but we can’t do that if you tell Father those lies.”
“I don’t think I want to try again. I think I want to destroy your life the way you’ve destroyed mine.”
“But I didn’t?—”
“And then, I’d like to try with someone new. I can be the sad half orphan instead of you. I can be the golden child, the one who persevered in spite of your abuse.”
Silas crossed to the door.Lev couldn’t think beyond stopping him as he erased the distance between them and grabbed him by the shoulders—and even then, he’d been gentle, even when Silas was trying to put him in prison.
“Silas, wait. We can fix this. I still love you.”
“Let go of me.” When Lev didn’t, fear snuck into Silas’s voice. “Strength is nothing without wit. Besides, you’d never hurt me.” A wicked gleam twinkled in Silas’s eyes as he opened his mouth wide and bellowed, “Father?—”
Lev slammed his hand over Silas’s mouth.
For a fleeting, fractured millisecond, Silas’s powder blue eyes shot wide with fear. Then his head flung backward, bounced off the wall at his back, and came to rest, hanging limply over his chest.
It had all happened so fast.