Chapter Twenty-Five #2
“You promised not to lie anymore,” Evander says fiercely. “And there has to be a reason you struggle to tell me even the smallest truth. You’re scared, Laurie. You’re goddamn scared.”
A long, taut minute passes before Laurie sighs.
“I was nine the first time I tried to tell. I think it—” He stops and says nothing for so long Evander thinks he won’t, but then a tremor runs up his spine and he forces himself on.
“I think I started all of this? I told my teacher and then she told my mom I was making up ‘fantastical but very concerning stories’ and suggested getting me some counseling.” His laugh is so bitter he chokes.
“Then my parents started fighting, all the time. About me. About the garden. My dad finally drove us to Hazelthorn and told Grandfather what I’d done and—Well, he was furious.
He’s terrified of people finding out, beyond terrified.
He and my dad ‘dealt’ with my mom, since she was protesting the legacy too much, and then Grandfather told him to go home and leave me at Hazelthorn.
I was losing my mind with terror over what he was going to do to me, but Dad didn’t care. He just left me.”
“And your dad … drove into a tree on purpose?” Evander says, so softly.
“Yup.” Laurie lets out a long, shuddering breath.
“He was always really anxious and erratic … It eats away at all of them, you know? The guilt. They pretend it doesn’t, but it does.
He couldn’t take what he’d done to my mother and I guess I wasn’t enough to live for.
” There is nothing in his voice as he goes on.
“Anyway, Grandfather used to tie me to a chair and put dirt in my mouth. I thought I would choke and pass out so many times. He did it every day for weeks, for hours, to remind me to ‘stay quiet’ about the gardens. I just had to sit there, choking on mud and panicking in silence, until he felt like untying me. When he stuck me in the next boarding school, I didn’t speak at all for months. ”
The room suddenly feels far too small and intimate, both of them stripped down to naked bones. Evander thinks, if he pulled off Laurie’s shirt right now, there would be no skin holding him together, just raw meat and flayed nerves left to bear the abuse of the world.
He pushes slowly to his feet and moves to stand behind Laurie. There is an infinitesimal flinch from Laurie, but then he leans backward so his spine presses to Evander’s chest.
Evander puts his chin on Laurie’s shoulder and watches him fumble with the papers before he gives up and just stands there, breathing too fast, too damp.
“The second time I tried to tell, he punished me by doing this.” Laurie holds up his brace and then lets it drop limply to his side.
“I’d already flunked out of my last school, so he enrolled me in Wickwood and I haven’t breathed a word about my family or the garden to anyone since.
I know I’m a coward, I know. He was always going to feed me to the garden someday, he just put it off because he loved my father.
But I’m this family’s bad apple, the academically defective and offensively queer Lennox-Hall who runs their mouth. ”
“Pretend,” Evander whispers, “you’re somewhat functional.”
Because sometimes the snarl, the insult, the teeth marks cut into the nearest person are so often a reflection of the bruises you already wear.
Laurie gives a tiny snort, but Evander can feel him trembling.
He slowly, slowly, wraps his arms around Laurie’s waist, unsure what he’s doing, if this is allowed or if he’s making it worse.
Touch like this is easier for him when he’s the one deciding on the pressure, but he doesn’t know what Laurie needs. He wonders if anyone ever asks.
“You can’t read, can you?” Evander says quietly.
Because he is thinking of academic probation.
He is thinking of Laurie prowling through Evander’s bedroom but never glancing at any of his papers and clues.
He is thinking of Laurie looking at the murder wall saying, One of these for me? when the card with his name was right in front of him.
He is thinking of Laurie bringing him here when he could’ve come alone, of digging through these papers without pause, without purpose. He’s searching for answers he can’t grasp and the despair has cracked something inside him.
Laurie puts a thumb to the corner of his eye.
“I have really intense dyslexia. I’m not”—he sounds hoarse—“allowed tutoring or help at school, because I’m ‘just being lazy.’ So.
Whatever. It’s just, the more I stress, the more the letters don’t make sense, and it never gets easier, just harder, and I literally can’t make my brain recognize the simplest goddamn—Look, it doesn’t matter.
” He can barely get the words out through the shame he’s so used to choking down.
“What do the walls say? I always wanted to know. Handwriting is kind of the worst for me.”
“Um, chaotic ravings.” Evander very carefully splays a hand over Laurie’s ribs and feels the rapid rise and fall of his featherlight lungs. “But why would Byron be so cruel to you and nice to me?”
“Evander, he wasn’t fucking nice to you.
” There’s sudden venom in his voice. “He tortured you. He locked you up and drugged you and punished you for not being … being ‘normal.’ I used to wake up at night and hear you crying and crying, like a haunting that never ended. You think he’s nice because he gave you presents and said you were ‘good’ after you did what he wanted.
You think he’s nice because you don’t know anything but pain. ”
It’s like being struck and Evander can’t swallow the tar slicked all through his mouth.
“You were never sick, you get that, right?” Laurie says.
“He made you sick. Like, if he was giving you real meds, they would have helped you. But he was forcing you to take laced sedatives so you’d always be unconscious or vomiting and too weak to…
” He trails off, a shudder spiraling down his body.
“Too weak to question him. Or get angry.”
A hollow ache smudges the word angry, the weight of it pushing Evander through the floor. He isn’t an angry person, except—maybe he doesn’t actually know what kind of person he is.
“You don’t know anything but pain too.” He gives a harsh yank and spins Laurie around so they are chest to chest, both of them breathing too fast at the intimacy of this touch.
“I just want to know what the point was to any of this. Why keep me? Did he steal me? Where is my real family? I feel like—I’m not even a real person.
” He hates the way his voice stretches at the end, the vulnerability in it.
The only thing in Laurie’s eyes is this agony, this brokenness that feels wrong to see. Take down the armor, the walls, the glib snark and the curated boredom, and he doesn’t have anything to hold himself together—except, perhaps, for Evander, with fingers stretched over his ribs.
“I’m sorry,” is all Laurie says. “You’re real. You’re so real that I gave up.” His voice is unsteady, his hand gripping the desk behind him.
“Gave up what?” Evander tilts his head forward so his forehead brushes Laurie’s temple.
“Trying to stay away from you. I’d split my bones, I’d open my throat, I’d do anything to be near you and have even one second with my mouth against yours.”
A short, sharp pain splices Evander’s chest and he doesn’t know how to unpack this delirious need to fit himself so hard against Laurie that their limbs twine like soft green branches, to grow into him with reverent fervor, their mossy green hearts a matched set.
He wants to forget how it ever felt to be alone.
He’s meant to hate this boy, yet he’s forgotten how.
He tastes guilt as he puts a thumb gently against Laurie’s swollen lower lip. The teeth marks have left a deep, purpling groove.
“It’s okay, I wanted it.” Laurie mouth is glossy with drying blood.
Evander hates the rasp in his own voice. “No, you didn’t. You just don’t know what it would be like if it was soft.”
“Show me.” His words are a breath of spun spider silk and fairy dust.
Evander puts his mouth on Laurie’s neck.
It is careful the way he kisses, the way he leaves heat shaped like fireflies up to Laurie’s ear and then under his jaw.
A feral urge to scrape his teeth against Laurie’s cheekbone cages Evander in a riot of hunger before he shoves it aside and forces himself to breathe.
To hold back whatever—that is. He kisses the corner of Laurie’s mocking mouth so very, very tenderly.
When he pulls at the hem of that filthy T-shirt and drags his thumbs along the soft skin just above Laurie’s belt loops, his reward is a caught breath, an almost whimper.
His skin is hot, soft, divine.
Evander is dimly aware of the furnace burning through the back of his head as he kisses Laurie’s swollen lower lip and waits for the flinch, the fear, the pain. But there’s nothing. Only Laurie leaning into him.
His forgiveness is maddening.
Evander’s hands brush against the field guide still tucked into the back of Laurie’s jeans and he pulls it out without looking and tosses it on the carpet behind them.
“I think I grew,” he mumbles. “I’m as tall as you?”
Laurie gives a breathy, unsteady laugh. “Yeah, um … you grew like a weed.”
It hardly matters, though it explains the too-short cuffs and the odd way he has to rearrange his shoulders to fit places. He’s seventeen, a growth spurt is probably normal. What he cares about is this, and only this.
Laurie.
He is wrecked with this terrible, gnawing need to splay Laurie out on the floorboards like a butterfly with broken wings and put pins through him to make him stay still as he takes him apart.
Carefully, reverently. To think like this, to be consumed by this want, is ridiculous right now, when they are both hiding and hunted—but maybe they deserve this distraction.
He has been locked in a room for seven years.
He has been starved for this.