13. Chapter 13 #2
“Do you want me to fuck you?” I ask, my tone as cruel as he was when he left me alone in the bath, unrestrained.
Fucking humiliating is what it was, and he deserves retaliation.
“Or do you want it the other way around? Want to fuck me instead?” I bear down on his crotch, grinding my ass against it. “Would you like that?”
“I-I don’t know,” Noah says. “I think?…”
“What? What do you think?” I yell, barely recognizing myself. I feel crazed, barely aware of what I’m doing. Drunk on him and how wretched we are.
“I think?…?I just want you to hold me.” His voice is shaking, and his eyes glaze over with tears.
“Fuck,” I mumble. The out-of-control anger hisses out of me all at once, and a pang of guilt rips my chest open. “I’m sorry, Noah.” I let go of him, landing on the bed by his side.
Noah lies still as a corpse, staring up at the ceiling. I do the same, stewing in my guilt.
After a while, the side of his hand meets mine in the darkness. I stretch my fingers over his, whispering sorry , whispering I shouldn’t have. Noah turns his hand over, and I put my palm over his, our fingers entangling.
I hear his breath hitch. I can almost hear his heartbeat. Or maybe it’s mine.
I don’t know how long we’re silent after that. It feels like minutes; it feels like hours. It feels like I have to say something, and in the lack of anything else, I ask him a question that seems fitting, given the sort of people we are.
“What do you think happens after we die?”
Noah opens his mouth. It’s so quiet I can hear his dry lips parting. “Your body goes still, and your mind knows peace at last.”
“Sounds kind of nice. Want me to send you there?” I ask in jest.
“Maybe later. When you leave.” He says it so plainly. So matter-of-fact.
My chest tightens, and I can barely get another breath into my lungs to ask, “Wh-What are you saying, Noah? That you want me to kill you when?…? if … I leave?”
“If you won’t, I’ll do it myself.”
No.
No way.
I pinch my eyes together, clenching my jaw. “You’re a fucking asshole, you know that?”
“What?” Noah glances at me, blank-faced again. Seems like the only time he’s showing me proper emotion is when I’m touching him.
“You can’t just say stuff like that to me. God.” I bury my face in my sleeve and let out a heaving sob.
“Why are you crying, Goldilocks?” He grips my hand tighter, but I rip it away, glaring.
“You really don’t get it? You think you can make me stay here by guilt-tripping me like that? By threatening to kill yourself if I leave?”
“It’s not a threat,” Noah says plainly. “A threat would be something that would affect you, wouldn’t it? Something that would hurt you.”
“Don’t you think you dying would hurt me?”
“Why would it? You hate me; you said so yourself.”
“I don’t hate you.”
“You don’t?” Noah reaches to wipe a stray tear off my cheek, and I let him.
“Yeah, well, maybe I was a little pissed off back then. Besides, it’s not like I mean every single thing I say.”
“Okay,” Noah says. Then he goes silent, but it’s not like I’m going to let him get away with this so easily.
“You’re telling me you don’t think it’s a shitty thing to say? That you’ll kill yourself if I leave you?”
“I just say what I think. Sometimes it doesn’t come out right.”
“But it’s true?”
He nods. “It is.”
I sigh, running a hand through my hair. Fuck.
“It’s what I was planning, remember?” he adds. “The night I found you.”
“I know.” I guess that makes a lot of sense, given the way he’s been acting. Given the way he’s so desperate for me to like him, as if I’m some sort of lifeline. It’s a lot of pressure to put on a person. It’s not healthy, I’ll tell you that.
“You’ve thought about it too, haven’t you?” Noah asks.
I grimace. “You’re not making me feel any better, you know.”
He throws me a weird look. “Who said I was trying to make you feel better?” And he flashes a small smile, in the closest form of sarcasm he’s ever displayed.
“Well, if you want me to stop using, I need to feel better.”
He shrugs. “You’re not using now, are you? I’d say my method is fairly effective.”
“You should teach a class,” I mutter.
“I don’t think so.” And he gives me another smile, eyes glittering with something soft, something desperate. “I don’t care about anyone else but you.”
My breath catches in my throat. “Don’t say that.”
“Should I lie?”
“I don’t know.”
“Would you not rather I be truthful?”
“No. Yes. I don’t know. Just stop talking.” I roll over to my side and wrap an arm around him. “Just let me hold you.”
Noah sighs into my touch, and I bury my nose in his hair, lost in the wave of all the fucked-up emotions he evokes in me.
If he hadn’t found me on New Year’s Eve, would he be dead by now? If I’d escaped when he was upstairs getting me a new pair of pants, would he have picked up where he left off and gone through with it this time?
If you won’t, I’ll do it myself.
He can’t say shit like that to me; it’s not fair.
Doesn’t he get it? If I left him, knowing what I know now, and he killed himself as a result, it means I would be to blame?…
I’d be the reason?…?Fuck, it’s so messed up I can’t?…
I can’t think about that right now. All I can do is nudge closer to Noah, my arm slung tightly around his waist, trying to ignore the ache in my heart as well as the one between my legs.
I shouldn’t want him. I shouldn’t want to do anything to him except leave his sorry ass and not care one bit that he’d take his own life as a result.
But I do. I do care. I care more about this than I care about freedom, and I don’t care how messed up that is. At least, not for now. For now, I just want to sleep.
It takes a long time before either of us manages to find rest. Sometime during the night, I shift my hand—the one in chains—further up Noah’s body and wrap it lightly around his throat.
Like that, we both relax enough to fall asleep at last. If only for a little while, we can find rest and feel safe.