Chapter 31 Chanel
Chanel
“Help. Please—”
The heat presses against my back, sticks to my throat, my eyeballs, coating my skin in sweat and soot. It’s everywhere. The
taste of ash in my mouth. I cough—on the smoke, on my own terror, the voice in my head yelling at me to get out, get out, get out. But how?
I’m trapped.
The fire has spread all around the living room, flames engulfing the couches and the coffee table, blocking the way to the
windows, the last possible exit. I can’t step back without being burned, but I can’t get out with the front door still locked.
This shouldn’t be happening. It shouldn’t be like this, but then—the scene is so familiar. I’d seen my mother screaming for
help, or thought that’s what I saw. Her face. Or my own, I realize with a jolt, remembering every single time someone confused
the two of us. Blessed with her mother’s genes, god, the resemblance is striking, you look just like each other—
We look just like each other.
A hysterical laugh chokes out of me. The vision is the same, but it means something different now. I hadn’t recognized myself
in the lake. I’d never even considered that it could be me trapped inside the fire, because I didn’t think I’d ever put myself
in such a dangerous position in the first place. I didn’t think I would tell Ares where the house was, and now—
Where is he?
Did he start the fire after all, after everything I told him, after he promised me he wouldn’t? I had taken the risk—but had
I bet wrong? Gambled everything I had for nothing?
Useless, fragmented thoughts race through my head, trying to make sense of it. Piece on a chessboard, or the player standing
behind it. God rolling some dice. Fate. Destiny. Invisible hands of the universe. Immovable forces and timelines, splitting
apart, reconciling, splitting once more. Moon and sun, chasing each other across the sky. A butterfly flutters its wings,
and somewhere else a house erupts in flames. The beginning and middle and end, and the end is here.
I just never thought that it would be like this. That after all the blood spilled, the boys I’ve kissed, I would feel like
a little girl again. Helpless. Abandoned. Shaking and slamming against doors that won’t open, trapped inside my own house
while I watch it burn down.
As the smoke fills my throat and my vision darkens, I see flickers of my own life, its extraordinary beauty and its cruelty,
the highlights and the excruciating moments I’ve buried in the back of my mind.
Rationed bites of birthday cake, buttercream frosting scraped off with a fork.
The flash of camera lights outside a French restaurant in Shanghai.
Wiping off mascara specks from my eyelids with a cotton swab.
My parents smiling from across the dinner table as I unwrapped the new Tiffany necklace they bought me for Christmas, the blue satin ribbons unspooling in my fingers.
Crying on a bathroom floor, the cold of the tiles against my thighs.
Laughing together with Alice in our old dorm, cross-legged on the bed while the sunlight puddled through the windows.
Ares, trembling under my touch, his eyes dark and unfathomable; kissing him like every second mattered, and it did, like it was the apocalypse, and maybe it is.
And even though I’m gasping for air, the heat pressing in and the room swaying and every strained breath bringing in new,
bright gashes of pain, I still keep my hand on the doorknob, my knuckles white. I still want so badly to change the future
when it’s already here.
I dream of him before I die.
It’s an incredible dream, more vivid than anything I’ve ever experienced before. He’s running over to me like I always wanted,
the angles of his face burning bronze against the flames, and I think, half delirious, God, I’m really going to miss that face.
Even when he isn’t smiling, even when he’s looking the other way.
How his eyes always seem to change in the light, so I can never entirely pinpoint what shade they are, bitter black or coffee brown or brilliant molten gold; the smooth, firm line of his jaw; the shape of his mouth, which is exactly as soft as it looks.
I’m pretty sure I’d made a comment about that once, when I was kissing him.
“Nobody’s complimented my lips before,” he’d said, breaking away to laugh breathlessly into my shoulder, and the gesture somehow felt more intimate than when he had
his fingers in my mouth. I loved him like that, unspooled and vulnerable and happy, or the closest thing to it.
“Good,” I’d told him. “I don’t want other girls complimenting your lips.
I don’t want anyone else to know what you feel like.
” Or maybe I had only said it inside my head, afraid he’d hear the jealousy clawing up my throat.
The memories are getting jumbled now. Everything’s fuzzy, except the clarity of his arms around me. He’s holding me tight
to his chest like I’m his whole world, so careful not to drop me, and I remember the games I’d play as a kid, when the floor
was lava and you had to leap from sofa to sofa to avoid it. I was never good at getting from one end of the room to the other—I
kept slipping or missing my jumps. But maybe the trick is that you need someone to carry you. Someone who’ll wade through
the lava for you, like he is now.
“Chanel,” he whispers, his voice raw from the smoke. His shoulders are shaking, and it’s only when something cold splashes
onto my cheek from above that I realize he’s crying. “Chanel, please—”
It’s okay, I try to say, but the words won’t come out.
The fire dances in my peripheral vision, charring the wood and melting the walls of my childhood.
Something crashes from another room. The tinkling of porcelain.
It feels like the universe is shrinking and shrinking until there’s only the two of us left here, and maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing.
Maybe I could simply stay in this dream forever with him.
A window shatters to our right, and I glimpse the sky through the cracked glass, the crimson glow of the blood moon. It seems
to hang lower in the horizon than usual, so low that it feels like I could reach up and take it for myself, if only I could
move my hands. . . .
Then the darkness washes over me, and even the moon disappears.