Chapter 28
I
“I have to ask you something,” Asher murmured, still brushing away the tears that wouldn’t stop streaming down Levi’s face.
Levi’s breath came in shallow gasps around the pain.
His eyes were wet and his mouth was open and the angry desperation that fueled every rush towards death still lived in him.
“Go fuck yourself,” he spat. “I don’t want to hear anything you have to say.
If you’re not going to help me leave, then you never really loved me. You just liked hurting me.”
Asher’s hand stopped on his face. “That’s not —” His voice cracked. “Levi, that’s not — how can you —”
He reached for the tape again.
“You’re going to stop saying things like that,” he said quietly, his hands working. “You don’t get to say things like that to me. You don’t mean them. I know you love me. You said it. I heard you.”
The tape was coming across Levi’s mouth now, the silver pressing down over his lips, sealing.
“There is nowhere else,” Asher said, almost to himself. “There is this room and there is me and there is you and that is the whole world now. We are going to stay in it until you understand.”
The tape went around Levi’s head — under his jaw, over his mouth, around again.
“I am going to be so good to you. I am going to show you. I am going to make you understand —” Asher tossed the tape off the side of the bed, his hands shaking, and he looked at them for a moment, then back at Levi. He grabbed Levi’s face. “WHY DID YOU MAKE ME LOVE YOU?”
How am I supposed to respond? How do I get out of this?
“Why did you make me love you if you were always planning to leave? I was FINE, Levi — I was fine — and then you came in and you made me feel this thing…and you knew you were going to leave and you did it ANYWAY and now I have to live with it and I can’t — it’s too big — it’s going to kill me —” Asher pressed his forehead to Levi’s, breathing hard.
“Stay so that I can live with it. Please.”
The pain in his wrist had become a steady pulse that he could feel in his teeth, and Levi stared up at the ceiling of the room he had told someone, for the first time in his life, that he loved them.
He’s going to keep me here forever. He means it. He will sit on this bed and tell me he loves me while wrapping my broken wrist in duct tape and call it care. He’ll never, ever let me leave.
I want more than this room.
He couldn’t use his hands or feet. He couldn’t talk his way into making Asher let him go.
But my teeth are still mine.
He closed his teeth around his tongue.
The first attempt failed — his tongue retreated, pulling itself back as his teeth clacked together in the empty air of his mouth.
No.
He pushed his tongue forward, forcing it into position against every instinct pulling it back, and bit.
The pain was unlike any pain he had ever felt. It came from the inside of his own mouth and went directly into his skull. His whole face spasmed and Levi bit down harder, using his jaw to override instinct.
He gagged. Blood filled his mouth, flooding the spaces between his teeth, welling in the hollows under his tongue, pooling against the roof of his mouth with nowhere to go.
Asher was still talking, still stroking his hair, almost compulsively, his eyes squeezed shut like he was trying to soothe himself.
His teeth found the place where the tongue wanted to give. He bit through.
The front half came free, loose in his mouth, and the stub sent nerve pain directly into the bones of his face.
Breathe in.
His body said no. His diaphragm locked. His throat closed. His chest refused to expand. Every part of him designed to keep liquid out of his lungs was screaming at him to stop.
brEATHE. IN.
The first pull was a gurgle — a wet, rattling suck as the blood crossed the back of his throat — and his body jerked so hard his back came off the mattress. His chest tried to cough and the cough was blocked by the tape, which turned the cough inward and forced the blood deeper.
Keep going.
Each convulsion pulled more blood into his airway — his body fighting him and every fight helping him, his diaphragm’s attempts to expel forcing the blood further down. He tried to cough again and felt the blood go up his nose.
“Levi, what is —” Asher pulled back, holding Levi’s face again as he stared at Levi’s nose.
Realization dawned on his face like the fog when it filled a room, the moment frozen, then all at once.
He yanked at the tape, pulling, tearing, trying to get it off, but the layers were too many and his hands were shaking too badly.
I love you.
Levi’s chest kept spasming, kept trying to reject the blood, and he breathed in deeper.
Asher kept yelling his name over and over, and the tape was finally coming away, taking pieces of Levi’s hair with it that strangely hurt more than his missing tongue.
The world faded away as it always did, tunneling smaller and smaller, just sensations.
Fingers in his mouth, blood in his throat, all of him in pain…
I love you, Asher.
I’m not sorry.