Chapter Twenty-One – Ezra #2
A silly question to ask her. If anything, I should be the one sharing my wisdom with her, not the other way around.
I’m older than her by quite a few years.
She’s, what? In her lower twenties, mid-twenties at most?
I’m thirty. I’m old enough to be responsible for my own emotions, old enough to have them under control and not lock myself away in my bedroom like I’m in some sappy teenage movie having an existential crisis.
“The only thing you can do,” she answers me. “Get through it day by day. Surround yourself with other people you love. Her memory, her love; those things will never disappear, and that’s okay. She’s a part of who you are, and pretending you’re fine and her memory doesn’t exist won’t get you far.”
She sounds so confident, like she always does. How I wish I had her confidence, just a fraction of it.
“Is that what you do, with your sister?”
A gentle smile tugs at the corners of Abby’s lips.
“Hell no. I mean, theoretically, yes, I’d love to practice what I preach, but it’s a lot harder to put in practice, I know.
I might sound like I have it all figured out, but I don’t.
Almost every time I go to sleep, I have the same recurring nightmare, but it’s like a flashback of the day that I found her.
I’m not past it. I think being alone for so long, doing what I was doing, didn’t necessarily help me much. ”
She says, “Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad I got the practice in, and I’m glad I somehow stumbled on you guys, but… I do wonder if things might’ve been better for me if I wasn’t alone.” Ten long, tense seconds pass. “Being alone really does make things worse.”
Her nose wrinkles. “I have actually felt better ever since I talked to you and Royal about it, and I feel even better knowing we’re going to close that chapter of my life.
I don’t know what’s going to happen after we get Connor, but I think…
I think I’m starting to look forward to the future.
Might not know what it’ll entail, but I’m still excited for it. ”
Her silver gaze flicks up to me when she adds, “I’m excited to keep getting to know you guys. We haven’t known each other for that long, but it feels like you’re family—which is exactly why I don’t want to be the cause of your anxiety. I want to help make you feel better, not worse.”
“And what if I can’t feel better? What if I’m just broken forever?”
I swear, the way she gazes up at me makes me feel some type of way. It’s like I can feel the missing pieces of me slowly drawing back together, little by little. I wouldn’t say I feel whole, but being this close to her, being so vulnerable with her, makes the holes inside more tolerable.
“You’re not broken,” Abby says. “None of us are. We have more baggage than your average person, but look at us. Look at you. Look at everything you guys are doing. A broken person wouldn’t be able to do all that. I think you’re so much stronger than you realize.”
Something in my chest tightens. My heart? And not in a heart attack kind of way. No, it tightens in a way it hasn’t tightened in a long, long time, reminiscent to how I felt the night of our last kill, when I stood near her and watched as she partook in the dismembering.
It tightens in longing. In want. In desire. In everything it shouldn’t, but unlike that night, when it was too much for me and I had to put some distance between us, I stay right where I am, locked in on her.
After a minute, I whisper, “You do make me feel better, you know. You don’t make me feel worse. I just… I’m not used to feeling better, and I feel guilty for wanting to, like I’m betraying her memory.”
“Do you really think she wouldn’t want you to be happy again?”
Well, if we’re going down that road, I don’t think she’d want me to resort to killing, but I suppose happiness is way different than that.
Would she want me to be happy? It’s not something we ever talked about.
You don’t discuss those things when you’re so young and you think you have the rest of your life to figure everything out.
But, yeah, she probably would want me to be happy again.
“It’s okay to be happy every now and then,” Abby tells me. “You shouldn’t feel guilty about it. Just promise me, if I ever make you feel uncomfortable, or if I ever say something that upsets you, or I do anything that upsets you—”
She stops rambling when I lift a hand and gently run my fingers down the side of her face.
I don’t know what makes me do it, or why it ends up being such a drawn-out action on my part.
It’s like she’s a light in the middle of the darkness and I am nothing but a moth, helplessly drawn to its luminosity.
“Nothing you could do or say would ever upset me,” I say, slow in dropping my hand from her face.
Her skin is softer than I imagined. That information isn’t something the old me would’ve wanted to know, but I’d be lying if I say this talk didn’t help me.
It did. It helped, and it made things so much clearer.
She doesn’t pull away after that. She stays right where she is, giving me the softest smile known to mankind. A smile like that should be illegal with the way it makes me feel. “Good,” she whispers. “I guess I’ll let you be.”
“You don’t have to.” The words are out of me before I can stop them. “I mean, I’m not doing anything. You don’t have to go.”
She still wears that smile, though it grows somewhat when she asks me, “If I stay, what would we do? I don’t see any TVs in here, and unless you have some board games hidden in that closet…”
A weird sound escapes me. I think it’s a chuckle? A soft one, to be sure, one that only lasts two seconds at the most, but definitely a chuckle. “You a board game fanatic?”
“Oh, I play a mean game of Monopoly. UNO is another favorite, but it’s been years since I’ve played anything. Obviously, you can’t play any of those games by yourself, so the past few years, my life has been pretty board game-less.”
“I’m surprised someone like you even knows what Monopoly is. I didn’t know the wealthy played board games.”
Her gentle smile breaks into a full-blown grin as she stares up at me. “Ezra,” she practically purrs out my name. “Are you teasing me? I don’t know how to respond. I don’t think you’ve ever teased me before.” In a more hushed whisper, she adds, “I kind of like it.”
Another chuckle leaves me, but this one is a bit louder, more firm. More of an actual laugh. “You would like it, wouldn’t you?”
“And what’s that supposed to mean?”
“Just that it’s not surprising.” It’s crazy how quickly things changed, just like that.
Regardless of how heavy that talk was, how serious the topic was, I do feel better.
I feel… lighter. I wouldn’t necessarily say I feel freer, but these shoulders of mine definitely don’t weigh as much as they did twenty minutes ago.
Seriously, it’s crazy how easy Abby makes things. I think it’s why I was having such a hard time with it, with her, before. I’m not used to it.
Abby flashes me her pearly whites. “Have I ever told you I dig a man with tattoos?”
“Oh, yeah?” I glance down at the sleeves on my arms. “Got any yourself?”