Chapter 26 #2
She shuffled across the heated tiles into my bedroom, then crawled on the bed, letting her towel fall off, her wet skin dampening the comforter, her soaked hair dripping everywhere.
There was a pile of pajamas I’d laid out for her on the bed and she grabbed them, tugging my t-shirt over her head and pulling up her cotton shorts.
She looked over her shoulder, eyes sweeping up my body, landing on my face.
“Do you want me to brush your hair?” I asked.
For a second, she did nothing. Then she nodded.
I sat behind her on the bed and squeezed the excess water out of her hair into the towel, then started carefully brushing it. We didn’t converse while I worked through her tangles, but I winced every time the brush snagged.
After her hair was smooth, she faced me and let me rub lotion on her cheeks, her forehead, her chin, her nose. She stared at me the whole time, not blinking.
Dakota rolled her lips together, then spoke one word. “Aquaphor.”
“I have it,” I said while I grabbed the tube off the comforter and held it up. She watched me put some on my finger then smooth it over her lips.
I love you so much I feel like I can’t breathe.
Dakota laid down and snuggled herself under the covers, rolling to face the window instead of me. For a minute, I just watched the back of her head, her ear, the barest bit of cheekbone that I could see from this angle.
Then I changed into my own pajamas and joined her.
I wasn’t going to fall asleep, not for a long time. It was still early. And if I lost consciousness, all her heartbreak would come flooding back into her brain, too big for her to handle alone. I had to stay awake until it faded away.
Nobody understood how Sigeian power felt, except Sigeians. It wasn’t as simple as manipulating how other people felt.
I had to burn through the weight of the emotion I stole before relenting my control, or else it’d wreck the other person.
That was why I could threaten Mason. If I took all his instability and did nothing to dampen it before shoving it all back into his brain, it would be fucking unbearable for him to receive everything at once. Guaranteed fracturing.
I supposed if I took something positive—like happiness—away, it would feel like some weird euphoria for me to give back, but I’d never done that. Nor considered it.
Someday, I’d explain all of it to Dakota.
Explain how saving Mason from a fracture was fast but exhausting, while saving her from heartbreak was slow but bearable. Explain how emotional weight worked. Explain how it felt to eventually relent control.
But not today.
“Are you disappointed?” Dakota asked, almost too quiet for me to hear. I shifted how I was laying, tilting her face towards mine.
“Why would I be disappointed?”
“That I’m probably not who you thought I was.
” Dakota ducked her head, pressing her forehead to my sternum, body curled up against mine.
Her voice was still strangely detached. “Like if you thought I was interesting when you first saw me, or something, and now you know I’m not.
And I’m probably more sad and messy than you thought, too. And annoying to be around.”
“That’s not true,” I murmured. “Not in the slightest.”
“Okay.”
“Is that what you think I think of you? That you’re annoying?”
“Probably.”
“You’re not annoying, Masters. You might be sad and you might be messy but I wasn’t blind to either of those things when I chose you. Messiness doesn’t make you untouchable. Remember?”
And I might be sad, too.
She was quiet.
After a few minutes, I realized she’d fallen asleep.
━━━━━
The morning was cold, rain already pelting the windows when I cracked my eyes open. Dakota was still sleeping next to me, which was good. She usually didn’t get enough sleep.
My mind had been running half the night, thoughts branching off each other into intricate webs while I watched Dakota dreaming. Deer and forests.
Listening to Dakota talk about her own death last night was surreal for many reasons, one of those being the simple truth of it. She was a human and she was going to die; that was something she’d always known in the back of her head. An inevitability. There would be an end to her life eventually.
I thought of her words, You don’t get it because you’re not going to die.
But she didn’t know how sometimes I wished for that, too. Wished for the ability to die.
There was no easy way out for me. There was no number of pills I could swallow to make everything stop.
I couldn’t put a barrel in my mouth and pull the trigger without a chance to take it back once my finger curled.
I couldn’t jump off a building and be crushed into the pavement, my life stolen in that instant.
I would live through all of that, only in excruciating pain for the amount of time it took my body to heal the wounds.
The only way for me to die was by asphyxiation.
And that would take at least twenty one minutes and fifty nine seconds.
It was the longest I’d ever held my breath underwater, back when I still lived in Heaven.
I didn’t like thinking about the memory now, because it represented the start of the very thing that broke me in the end. It represented the start of two souls binding together. Mine and Mason’s.
The first moment where I could see we would become one single thing. No longer two souls, but one. One knotted rope.
And I couldn’t even describe how excruciating it was to eventually rip that rope apart, how it felt like I’d lost every important part of myself when I left him, how I’d truly believed I’d never be whole again. I still believed that, and he didn’t have a clue.
When things first started with Mason, all we were doing was hooking up. It was supposed to be meaningless. I knew I was giving him a different experience since he’d never been with a man prior, and I’d been accepting of the fact that this was all I’d ever be. A new experience.
But he was Thrausian. I knew that from the start.
It was part of the reason I was drawn to him, among many others.
It intrigued me. I wanted to…help him.
Help wasn’t really the right word, though.
I wanted to show him that his aspect wouldn’t be a hindrance with me. I wanted to show him there were angels who’d rather appreciate everything about who he was rather than hate him for it. I wanted to support him without changing him.
Unfortunately, not all my initial desires translated correctly into my actions.
I’d seen him hold his breath underwater a few times, but I knew he couldn’t feel his limit.
He wouldn’t know how long he could stay submerged without dying, so I’d done it myself.
I submerged myself in a pool of black water and counted the numbers until I felt like my lungs were about to explode, then I wrote it on a scrap of paper and gave it to him.
21:59
That was when things changed.
It was the perhaps the single most important moment of my life, even if I hadn’t known it at the time.
Dakota stirred, drawing my attention back to the present.
I was grateful for it.
She rolled over and peered up at me, looking like herself again in the soft morning light. There was no longer vacancy in her stare or transparency in her irises. The amount of heartbreak in her brain was manageable for now. I wanted to ask what Mason had done to her last night, but I didn’t.
“I’m hungry,” she said.
I laughed. “Okay. We can get breakfast.”
“I want drive-thru breakfast. A breakfast sandwich.”
“I’m not sure how to feel about the bossiness, but I can arrange for a breakfast sandwich excursion.” I ran my fingers through the loose hairs around her face, curling the strands behind her ear.
“I’m sorry.” She blushed and hid her face. “I’m, like, ravenous. For some reason.” Her voice was slightly muffled in the pillow.
“I don’t think you had dinner.”
Dakota was quiet while she contemplated this. I’d picked her up right around dinnertime, and I never fed her. Then she went to bed early.
“Oh. Yeah, I didn’t.” She frowned slightly, probably remembering the events of the previous night.
“Alright. Let’s get dressed, then. Yeah?”
“Yeah,” she mumbled.
We both got ready, then went out to my truck in the garage.
Dakota cranked the knob for the heat as I pulled out of the driveway, tucking her legs up on the seat. She was wearing some soft sweatpants and a big sweatshirt with the hood pulled up over her head. She looked cute.
I let her mess with the radio while we drove to get the food, then parked in a gravel pull off overlooking the ocean. Rain pattered on the roof of the truck, streaming down the windows.
“This is my favorite beach,” she said, unwrapping her sandwich.
“I know. I’ve been here with you.”
“Oh. Right.” Dakota took a bite of her breakfast, staring out the rainy windshield while she chewed. The clouds over the ocean were dark, and I could see whispers of lightning in the distance. “I wish I could see Heaven.”
“Why’s that?” I unwrapped my own sandwich, watching her side profile.
“I’ve just been thinking about it recently. I wish I knew more. I’d probably be happy there, you think? Like if I could be an angel living there.”
“I don’t know,” I answered, my gaze falling to my hand crinkling the wax paper.
“Why do you say that?”
I swallowed.
“Bad things happen in Heaven, too.” My fingers trembled as I tightened my grip on my sandwich, forcing myself to eat more of it.
“Oh,” she breathed, quiet for a minute while she considered this. “What does that mean? A bad thing happened to you?”
I almost choked on the bite I was chewing.
I can’t tell you. I’ll never tell you. It doesn’t matter how much I love you because these are words I’m never going to utter aloud for the rest of my life.
“No. I didn’t say that,” I said, clearing my throat.
“Okay.” She looked away, biting the corner of her lip while her fingers played with the edge of her sandwich wrapper.
“I just wanted you to know that it’s not some perfect, idyllic place. Not all of it.”
“Can you tell me more?”