Chapter 28
PLAY STUPID GAMES, WIN STUPID PRIZES
STATEN
KNOX
I’m outside.
After twenty-four hours, Knox is finally ready to talk, and I’m more than ready to listen.
When I make it outside, a steady downpour greets me, night closing its curtains on any ounce of moonlight or starlight. The sky is the darkest it’s ever been. If it wasn’t for the streetlights, I don’t think I’d be able to see Knox’s face at all.
My feet bend the rotting wood boards of the porch as I stand beneath the awning, safe from the pellets of rain that strike the earth with an ancient anger for all the temperamental dry spells of Minnesota’s weather.
However, Knox still stands far away enough that he’s sucked into a vortex of cold wetness, his hair plastered to his forehead and his clothes thoroughly soaked.
Something is wrong. His throat undulates like he’s trying to condense his thoughts into a bite-sized delivery. He’s not rushing to embrace me. He’s not grinning like a lovesick idiot. No, he’s a harbinger of something worse, and my heart is what he’s deemed for death.
There’s a sickly gyration in my stomach—one that turns bile on a low simmer at the back of my throat. “Knox? What’s going on?”
“I don’t think we should do this anymore.”
Eight words no girl ever wants to hear. My body forces a laugh as some kind of coping mechanism. He’s not making any sense right now. This is a nightmare; it has to be. Why would…why would he say that? What is he talking about?
His vagueness merits a twist of my face, and I foolishly try to bargain with fate and her willing disciples. As brave an act as it is brainless. “Do what?”
Knox gestures between us while rainwater slides down his hewn features, then the hills of his lips, dipping into the geographical indent where saliva and tears mix together to form a viscous concoction. “This. Us. We—we shouldn’t be together,” he yells into the void.
I don’t know what to say. A rebuttal migrates up my raw throat, but it never takes flight. My heart is the equivalent of a jackhammer—no longer the steady, soft cadence it usually is but my conscience’s sad attempt to send out an SOS signal.
He’s not thinking clearly. Yeah, that has to be the reason.
I don’t know how, but I allocate enough concentration to detangle my words.
If I let my emotions overpower this conversation, I don’t stand a chance at negotiating with him.
Just the mere thought of not seeing him every day—of not feeling his arms around me—lodges itself into my vulnerable, fleshy parts like a disembodied stinger.
“Where is this coming from?”
“It’s not coming from anywhere. I’ve been contemplating it for a while now.”
I know when Knox is hiding something, and right now, he’s lying through his teeth.
It’s getting harder and harder to hold back my true feelings.
I just want to fucking explode. I want him to feel my heart breaking.
I’ve been so perfect and pliant for everyone—my professors, my employers, my mother.
I’ve never been afforded the luxury to, pardon my French, lose my shit.
“Bullshit! We were good. We’ve been good. You started acting weird after that altercation with Leif.”
Hemmed in mistakes, Knox grinds his teeth together, his muscles coiling under the waterlogged cotton of his shirt. “This isn’t about Leif,” he growls, still choosing to brave the tempest instead of sharing the safety of the overhang.
This isn’t the Knox I know.
“This can’t be about us,” I cry, my voice tipping into disbelief.
He can barely look me in the eyes. “I’m sorry, Staten.”
Pain razes my chest, and my heart tries to wrench free from the corral of my ribs, desperate to crawl to him—to crawl to the only man who ever cared about me. “You’re not. You’re not, otherwise you wouldn’t be saying all these horrible things to me.”
“I never wanted to hurt you, okay? We just—we don’t mesh well. You deserve someone better.”
That single word, “deserve,” is the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
I leave the shelter of my porch to face him in the downpour—a battle of wills that tests who can outlast the other. It doesn’t take long for my clothes to get thoroughly drenched, but I couldn’t care less for the state of some cheap polyester.
Standing before him, I force him to witness each second of ruination architected by his own bloodstained hands. Falling prey to the storm front reminds me of my own mortality—the one I seemingly forgot about when I was with him.
“Don’t you dare finish that sentence. You don’t know what’s good for me,” I hiss, emotion welling up in my throat. “That’s a shit excuse someone uses when they don’t have a valid reason to end things.”
I’m running on fumes. I don’t even know how I’m still breathing right now. I bury the disheartened, docile side of me to make way for pureblooded anger—the kind whose only purpose is to return agony to sender.
When Knox’s conviction is a no-show, he promptly faces the consequences. His eyes are as dark as the trembling clouds above us, harboring no trace of kindness. Those unusually bright irises of his are dull, and the air stagnates with the words he can’t bring himself to say.
Everything is happening too fast for me to process. A part of me—a part I hope is wrong—surmises that my efforts to change his mind will be futile, like throwing water onto a grease fire.
“I’m trying to save you from all my shitty baggage, Ace. Don’t you see that? I’m fucked up, and I’m not going to drag you down with me,” he explains.
“So what? You’re using your own insecurities to try and push me away? This isn’t how we resolve problems, Knox. This isn’t healthy. I don’t care about your baggage. I never cared about it. I want to be with you. I want to help carry your burdens.”
I’ve lived a thousand lives looking for him—for a partner who loves without boundaries, for a partner who’s attentive and communicative, for a partner who chooses me above all else. I don’t want to exist without him.
His hoarse voice constricts around a tsunami of unshed tears, the whites of his eyes riddled with sanguine tributaries. “But you shouldn’t have to shoulder my problems for me. You shouldn’t need to take care of me.”
“I don’t view it as an obligation!”
I can’t gauge his reaction. Is any of this hurting him like it’s hurting me? He’s treating me as if I’m made of porcelain, and his hands are too big to hold me. Reckless. Prone to breaking things. But the truth is, I’ve only ever fit in his palms. He was made for me, and I was made for him.
“I guess we have differing opinions then,” he says tersely.
No dulcet words to reassure me. No noticeable guilt visible on his rain-slicked face. All I can do is stand by and watch helplessly while he punishes himself for an upbringing that he had no say in.
He doesn’t bother to wipe away the sticky massacre on his skin. “Staten, please. Please don’t make this harder than it already is.”
“You think I’m making things hard? Why won’t you just talk to me? Why are you lying to me?” I snarl, pressing my hand to my stomach, choking back the hot vomit that settles at the base of my throat. My vision shrinks to a pinpoint, like I’m looking through the green-tinted neck of a broken bottle.
“Me? Making things hard? I heard you and Leif talking the other day. I heard what he said to you about wanting to be your boyfriend.”
Oh, no. No, no, no.
“You heard that?”
Knox doubles down. He’s never been one to stray from a fight, and I guess now isn’t an exception. “You didn’t say no.”
“I didn’t say yes, either. I said I needed time to process things.”
“I’m tired of never being enough for people. And it makes sense, you know? I’m not a commitment guy. I don’t do relationships. I never have.”
I’ve heard that same tired script before. Never in a million years, though, would I expect it to come out of his mouth. Forehead kissing and hand-holding aren’t things fuck buddies do. They mean something.
“But you said—”
Knox shears away the last remains of his “gentleman act” and shows me the fangs that he’s apparently always had.
He’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing—a predator hiding amongst prey, wearing the skin of its brethren as a cautionary warning to those who try to cross him.
After all, teeth are only good for toying with the tenderized sides of necks.
“It was all an act.”
Five words is all it takes for my world to stop spinning—for the crumbling foundation beneath my feet to give way to a mudslide of unfulfilled promises. I don’t try to hang on amidst the destruction. I let it sweep over me like it always intended to do.
It was all an act.
How could it have all been an act? The things he said to me in confidence, the way he cradled me when I trusted him with my body, the not-so-inconspicuous glances he’d give me when he thought I wasn’t looking, the late-night dates he’d take me on to cheer me up after a rough day. I don’t believe him. I can’t.
I want to collapse to the ground. I want to bang my fists against sodden earth. I want to scream into the deluge until someone finally hears me. “No, no. What you felt for me—that was real.”
I didn’t know it was possible for the weather to grow any more malignant, but it does. Corporeal whispers hug the shadowed tree lines like the demonic chittering of unseen cryptids, and my hair slashes back and forth in the bone-chilling wind.
My indignation has flushed itself from my body as if it was poison—which, in some poetic way, I guess it was.
The tears surge forward, physically pushing me toward a finish line that I’m not ready to cross. “Please don’t do this. Please don’t leave me.”
Knox can’t offer me any relief besides another rehearsed response. “I’m so, so sorry.”
I try to extend my hand to him—hoping that he’ll take it, hoping that it’ll remind him of all the times he held it—but he steps backwards to evade it.
When my chest heaves, the air in my respiratory system snags on my ribs, as if the bone had broken and healed wrong. I can’t fucking do this.
“You’re breaking my heart,” I sob, hugging my arms around my midsection.
He stiffens. “I have to let you go. Things will be better this way.”
“Nothing will be better this way. And if you truly think that, then maybe I don’t know you as well as I thought I did. One bump in the road is all it takes for you to run for the hills.”
“Staten…”
My pulse trips against the thin skin of my wrist, and suddenly, I’m transported back to the day Knox Mulligan knocked me on my ass with his car.
Through a concussive lens, all I could see were the faint outlines of his features, but I felt his presence before anything—I felt the warmth that he radiated like the first sign of spring after a merciless winter.
As much as I hated him in that moment, a part of me knew he wasn’t going to let me die.
Ironic now, isn’t it? Me being at the mercy of my killer once again.
Sorrow bloats inside of me, and the lacquered film over my eyes is making it harder to see in the unrelenting shower.
The night knows no end. The rain won’t let me rest, nor will it soothe me to sleep with its melodic lullabies.
A piece of me will die with Knox tonight, and I don’t think I’ll ever revive it.
One last question—one last question because that’s all I have in me. It’s clear he’s not going to fight for us.
“Did you ever love me?” I ask, my voice small, aware of the space it takes up. There’s upset in my belly, and the question spoils like curdled milk against an irritated stomach lining.
Knox blinks at me before sadness perforates his cracked mask. “Of course I did. I loved you more than I’ve ever loved anyone in my entire life.”
“Then why didn’t you say it?”
“I didn’t know how.”
I take a step back, only to narrowly lose my footing on a misaligned board. It’s Knox’s turn to outstretch his hand, and my turn to refuse it.
“This isn’t how someone who ‘loves’ me would treat me.”
His lips pop open to say something, but even he knows that he’s used up all his defenses.
“I hope you never have to know what this pain feels like,” I scream at him with a bleeding throat, right before turning tail and closing our unfinished chapter.
If I look back, I don’t think I’ll be able to stay away.