Chapter 27
Elowen
He doesn’t come inside, even after midnight.
One more hour passes.
Another does.
I keep staring at the ceiling, lost in the worst place in the world: my head.
When he still hasn’t come inside by three in the morning, I leave the room. Maybe he’s finally decided to set me free.
Who am I kidding? I know he’s outside, smoking. He’s been there for the past three hours.
The house reeks of smoke and alcohol. I enter the living room, where the smell is suffocatingly thick.
He isn’t on the couches. I walk around the longest sofa, and there he is, sitting on the floor, empty plastic alcohol bottles and burnt cigarette butts scattered all around him.
“Have you planned to kill yourself tonight?” I don’t know why I’m so angry at him. I shouldn’t care whether he lives or dies. If anything, his death would be good news for me.
He drags his eyes up to me. His eyes look like those of a dead man—soulless. Two pits of nothing. Now I realize that in the past few days, when his face was expressionless, his eyes weren’t. They belonged to a living man, a hopeful one. Now they’re entirely hopeless.
“Shouldn’t you be happy about that?” he mutters, sounding perfectly sober.
I take another look at the bottles around him. Three whiskey bottles lie empty on the floor, and one stands untouched. How is he still sober?
“I want to kill you myself. I don’t need these things’ help.”
He laughs. The sound is as dark and void as the moonless night. He doesn’t say anything. He looks away from me and takes a long drag from his cigarette, then releases the smoke slowly.
“Your lungs will be charcoal black by morning,” I snap at him, then snatch the cigarette from his hand and throw it to the floor. “And the same will happen to me from passive smoking.”
His empty gaze returns to me, and before I can react, he takes my hand and pulls me down onto him. I fall against his hard thighs. He wraps a hand around my waist and pulls me closer onto his lap. I don’t want to, but I can’t ignore how his hardness grows beneath me.
I try to push myself away from him, but he holds me tight, not letting me move an inch. His breath carries the smell of alcohol and tobacco. He’s taken down so much of that poison that I feel like I’m going tipsy just breathing him in.
“Let me go, Hunter. Don’t forget what I said about you touching me,” I hiss.
He releases my wrist and lifts his hand to my face, brushing my cheek with his knuckles.
“I can never forget a single thing you’ve said to me, baby,” he murmurs.
“You’re the best part of my memories.” His palm rests against my jaw, his thumb tracing my lower lip.
“Even when you say you hate me… even when you say you’ll kill me…
you’re still the best thing in my life. The only thing that makes me feel alive. ”
I grab his hand and pull it away from my face.
“Will you cry if I die, baby?”
I try to get up from his lap and fail.
“What do you think?” I reply, icily.
He smiles, and it’s the ugliest curve of his lips I’ve ever seen. I hate it, and the way it clenches my heart.
“My brain says you won’t, but…” He takes my hand and places it on his chest. “It says you will. Maybe you’ll search for me everywhere, like you used to search for him, once you lose me.”
I pull my hand from his grip, away from his chest.
“Your brain is right,” I mutter, looking away.
We stay silent after that. He keeps staring at me while I keep looking away.
“How am I less than him? What does he have that I don’t?” His voice sounds gutted. The question comes out hollow, scraped clean of everything but exhaustion.
I finally look at him, and regret it instantly. I’m human, and humans feel bad when they see another human in such a shattered state, like there’s nothing left in him to hold him together.
“You’re not less, Hunter. You’re just not him. If you had loved someone the way I love Salvario, you would understand. Some things are irreplaceable.”
He lets out that haunted laugh again, pressing his head back against the couch. Then the laughter dies, just as unnaturally as it started. He keeps staring up.
“I don’t understand your love. The only person I’ve ever loved is someone who will never love me back. The love I know is pain. Endless pain.”
A tear slides from the corner of his red-rimmed eye, down his cheek to his throat. My eyes burn. I blink quickly.
He holds my gaze. “Still, I can’t stop loving her. Can you understand my love?”
I force myself to speak past the knot in my throat. “We both don’t understand each other’s love.”
“Is there nothing I can do to make you love me the way you love him?” he breathes, the words so fragile they almost vanish into the silence.
“It doesn’t work like that, Hunter.” Now I feel bad for him, so bad that I want to get drunk with him and cry with him.
His eyes redden further. “Tell me how it works. I’ll do anything you say.” His voice breaks, and tears fall freely down his cheeks.
I hug him, rubbing his back, and he starts sobbing, holding me tight against his chest. “Please, Elowen. I will do anything. Please love me.”
I keep rubbing his back, crying silently with him. I can deal with every other version of him, but not this one. I don’t think anyone has a heart strong enough not to break for him.
He sobs for a long time, only stopping when he falls asleep. I know he’s asleep because his weight becomes crushingly heavy on me.
I try to move away, but he doesn’t release me. Somehow, I manage to ease him onto his back on the carpet, with me still in his arms, lying on top of him.
This is how he used to sleep in Naples, with me on top of him.
It was a habit he picked up gradually. When I asked him whether he felt uncomfortable under my weight, he said he felt at peace.
No one could take me away from him if I slept like that, because he would feel the loss of my weight, it would break his sleep, and he wouldn’t let me go.
I used to laugh at that. Now, I don’t find it amusing anymore.