31. Chapter 31
Noah
I wake up hurting.
It seems like the burning sensation in my abdomen won’t let me sleep for longer than a couple of hours.
I try not to show my pain, but ever since a few days ago, when I regained consciousness, Asher seems to sense when I’m in distress.
He wakes up with a start from where he sits half-slumped in the chair beside my bed.
“Want me to call a nurse?”
“No,” I mumble. “It’s just pain.”
Asher rubs his face, yawning. “It’s not ‘just’ pain. You’re hurting, and you don’t have to.”
“It’s okay.” I try to give him a smile, but it comes out strained. “You can go home if you like.”
He frowns. “And why would I do that?”
“To sleep.”
“Well, I’m not going anywhere without you.”
“Oh.” Suddenly, the pain doesn’t seem that bad anymore. “Okay.”
“I still think you should take some more painkillers.”
I don’t reply, staring into the opposite wall.
Asher takes my hand in his, and his voice is soft when he asks, “Why do you do this? Do you think you deserve it or something?”
My mouth opens and closes. Opens again. Fuck, I’m thirsty. I’ve neglected that too. “I’m sorry.”
“What for?”
“You know what for.”
Asher sighs. “I thought we’d been through this.” He squeezes my hand. His palm is soft and warm, soothing some of my ache.
I clench my jaw, finding it hard to look at him, the guilt weighing heavy on my shoulders. “I can’t say it enough. It won’t ever be enough.”
“How about me, huh? How about how I hurt you?” He nods toward my abdomen, lower than the stab wound, and the memory of him straddling me and cutting me open hits me full force. I shiver at the memory. “I knocked you out too. I could’ve caused some serious damage with that one.”
“Whatever your actions, I deserved them.”
Asher rolls his eyes. “You’re starting to piss me off.”
My breathing comes in quick bursts, followed by an underlying whimper, and that pain?…?Fuck, that pain?…
“That’s it.” Asher reaches for the red button by my bedside, and before I can stop him, he presses down hard.
Moments later, a nurse comes inside. “Everything okay?”
“No,” Asher says. “He’s in pain.”
The nurse administers another dose of intravenous painkillers. All the while, I can feel Asher watching the procedure with a certain?…? intensity to his expression.
“When can he go home?” he asks the nurse.
“He’s recovering quickly, so in a few days, at the most.” The nurse finishes with the IV and straightens up. “Anything else?”
I shake my head, and the nurse leaves. Already, the painkillers are starting to work. My eyelids droop, but I try to keep focusing on Asher.
“Are you thinking about it?” I ask.
“About what?”
Not answering, I squeeze his hand, and his gaze falls.
“Yeah?…?Yeah, I’m thinking about it. I almost did it, you know. At the party, before you came.” He winces, as if he’s awaiting my judgment, but I just nod and squeeze his hand in return.
“But you didn’t?”
“No.”
“What can I do if I see you struggling?”
“I don’t know.”
“Does it get easier?”
He shrugs. “Some days, I just notice it less.” He pulls up a leg and leans his chin on his knee, gazing sullenly into the dark.
“Do you need anything?” I ask.
He looks back at me, smiling wryly. “I’m not the one who got stabbed.”
“I just?…”
“I need you .”
I smile back, and eventually, the tension eases from his shoulders.
He drops his leg and edges closer to me.
I tend to get warm in the night, so I’ve had the covers removed, and Asher looks at my naked torso, at the bandage around my abdomen.
He runs his fingers along it—no pressure, just a featherlight touch—until he arrives at the cut below.
The scab is itchy, but the wound is healing, and soon it will form a scar. A precious one.
Asher swallows thickly, running a finger along the scab. “You know?…?I’ve been thinking, and?…?I think I was mean to you?…?and hurt you because?…?Because you hurt me.”
“I know. I’m sorry.” I can never say it enough, or with enough conviction.
“Me too.” He lifts a hand to stroke the hair out of my face. “I don’t want to anymore. Hurt you,” he clarifies. “Not for the wrong reasons, at least. I want us to be happy. Do you think that’s possible?”
I shift my gaze, and many thoughts run through my head as I try to come up with a reply.
Can we be happy? It’s such a simple question, and the answer should be simple too, but in truth, it couldn’t be more complicated.
We’ve both been miserable for most of our lives, the way I’ve understood it.
Many are the methods we’ve employed to make ourselves feel better, but none have been quite as effective as just being in each other’s company.
At least for me, it’s like that. I don’t need much—I don’t want therapy, I don’t want a family, I don’t want anything except to just be with him.
But at the same time, is that really what’s best for him?
And I should want what’s best for him, right?
If you love someone, you should want what’s best for them, and I do.
God, I do.
So the answer boils down to a few simple words, carrying the weight of the world behind them.
“I don’t know.” I entwine our fingers, meeting his gaze. “But we can try.”
His face lights up with a smile, and what a smile . A smile the gods would weep in joy to witness.
“Yeah. We can try.”
I let go of his hand to run a finger down the cut. “But I like this kind of stuff sometimes. I like you to hurt me.”
He shrugs. “We can continue on like we have?…?Kind of. I think we need to be more careful though. I need to be more careful. I won’t do it because I want to hurt you or?…
exact some kind of fucked-up revenge on you for what you did to me.
I want to do it because you want me to, and because it feels good for us both. Is that something you want?”
“Yeah. I want that.” I take his hand and squeeze it with all the strength I can muster.
“You have to know, Ash, this isn’t something I’m used to.
I might fuck up. You might want to?…?leave again, and if you do, you can.
I never want you to feel like you’re trapped with me, like you were.
” The guilt runs heavy alongside my words. I don’t think I’ll ever get rid of it.
“Well, to be fair, it’s hard not to feel like that,” Asher says. “Even when you weren’t keeping me captive anymore, I couldn’t imagine my future without you. I couldn’t picture it. Everything was just black.”
“It was for me too. It’s still like that. Is that bad, do you think?”
He shrugs again. “Maybe it is. But maybe it’s all we can do for the moment.”
I nod, absent-mindedly running my fingertips along the back of his hand. I can’t get enough of just feeling his skin touching mine, feeling that he’s real. Alive. That I’m alive, and I’m here with him.
“Did you mean what you said the other day?” I ask.
“Hm?”
“Before I fell asleep, you said you’re mine. Are you?”
His cheeks bloom pink. “I am.”
“I’m yours too. For as long as you’ll have me.”
“That’ll be a long time, then, ’cause I never plan on letting you go.” He squeezes my hand, hard enough for me to feel his pulse. “Are you okay with that? Are you okay with living, with clinging to life with me for a little while longer?”
“Not just a little while longer. More. I want more than that.”
He smiles and looks down into his lap. “Me too.”
“Ash.”
He looks up. “Yeah?”
“I mean it. I don’t want to anymore.”
“What?”
“Die.”
“Oh.”
I frighten myself with my own confession.
It feels so absolute—so certain when the word passes my tongue, but?…
I can never truly know. I’ve been in the darkness for so long that I can’t know if this passing into light is only fleeting, or if it’s truly the way my life will be from now on.
It feels like it right now, though, and in a way, that’s all that matters.
“I want to do other things,” I say.
“Like what?”
“I’d like to?…?to travel.”
“Travel?” Asher scrunches his nose. “But you hate going outside.”
“I don’t. I just don’t like people.”
“Well, it’s pretty hard avoiding people if you’re going to travel.”
I can’t come up with a reply to that, my mind hazy from the painkillers.
“Me neither,” Asher says after a while. “I don’t like other people. I like you though.” His voice softens. “You see me, right? The way no one else does.”
“I see you. Do you see me?”
“Yeah,” he whispers. “I see you, Noah.”
We gaze into each other’s eyes, and I feel weirdly shy all of a sudden, heat rising to my face.
“So,” Asher says, “they said you can leave soon. What do you want to eat when we get home?”
Somehow, we’ve reached an unspoken agreement that he’s going to follow me home.
That my house is his home now as well as mine, and that we’re going to live there together.
It’s what I’ve always wanted. What I never dared hope he’d want too.
I’ve never really known happiness, but I think I can glimpse a sliver of it when gazing into his eyes.
Watching them glitter, watching him smile back at me?… Yeah. There it is.
It’s been a long journey—a painful one—with many lonesome nights in the dark, but I think I’ve found it at last.
The light.