2. Emmett #3
3 promises that will make sure he and I will have a forever together!
Stunned, I read that last line again, but my thoughts are all a blur.
And then, there’s the last entry.
June 19
I want Emmett to pull me close and dance with me.
I hope one day he shows me his art that he keeps secret.
I want him to teach me something special, just between us.
I want him to hold my hand… always.
I want to be his first kiss and forever kiss.
I want him to hold me when it’s raining and read books with me by the fireplace.
I want him to give me flowers randomly, every day.
I want to go on walks with him and watch him cook for me while shirtless.
I want to experience the most magical things with him.
Because only he truly knows how to love me.
I really, really like him.
I’m going to tell him.
God, I pray that he loves me too…
A vigorously violent pain zaps across my chest and around my back, gripping tightly against the marrow of my bones.
I grip the diary, keeling over as pain unlike anything I’ve ever felt in my life engulfs me in its flames.
For the first few lines, she’s detailing what she wants… but for the last one, she’s praying.
Praying for me to love her back.
In a daze, I grip the table, struggling to breathe.
“You read it all, right?” Spider’s voice sounds like it’s coming from the other side of a mountain. Slow, ancient, and cold. “Did you see it? Did you see the very concerning shift from major depression to sudden cheery optimism, hope, expectation, trust, and the complete devotion she has for you?”
An unbearable heaviness crushes down on top of me.
I stare down at the raw words cemented in ink and baptized by tears, and they sink into my bones.
“My sister clearly knows that your family cannot be trusted, and we should stay the fuck away, but she remains resolute in her trust in you!” Spider explodes.
“Even when she couldn’t contact you or know anything about you and the other kids here, she still attached her optimism for life itself on you! ”
The words are like a jaw-breaking punch.
“In the beginning, she wrote about her loneliness, which is my fault, but did you see how that quickly turned to that line where she confesses that she wants to die? Did you fucking see it?”
“Yes,” I croak after a few seconds of stilted silence.
“Ivy has struggled with seeing the value of her life for years. From knowing that she was abandoned as a baby, to witnessing Gramps dying the night he went to save her, to us leaving because your family attempted to kill her yet again… she thought her life is worthless and unwanted. But do you know what’s even more fucked up?
” Spider’s voice is now low, broken. “I went to visit her a year ago to see how she was doing at the boarding school, and I happened to see that entry in her diary. I asked her if she really wanted to die. Guess what she said.”
I can only look at him, my throat too clogged up to speak.
“She said, and I quote, ‘His heart is still beating, isn’t it? So I won’t dare throw away my life. I’ll wait to go back to him. I’ll wait for him.’”
My entire body trembles so hard that I reach for the chair in front of me to stabilize myself.
“She’s a girl that struggles with chronic depression.
She’s even struggling right now! Still fighting her sadness and loneliness, but she doesn’t dare throw away her life because of you!
” Spider snaps. “Now, normally I would be on my knees with gratitude, thanking you for giving my sister some sort of will to live but, Em, tell me, is this a blessing or just a one-way ticket to the most brutal circle of hell?”
I flinch, knowing exactly what Spider means.
Angel clearly pinned her entire life and future on me… linking us together.
But… I don’t have a future.
I’m literally a dead man walking.
Any heartbeat could be my last… and judging by the indescribable agony in my chest right now, I might croak this very second.
“Please… stop,” I mutter slowly.
“Forgive me, Em, but I won’t stop. Not anymore, because I need you here,” Spider presses, his voice low in a heartfelt plea. “I need you to do what needs to be done.”
“But… it’s her ,” I whisper dispiritedly, struggling to keep breathing. “From the beginning, it’s always been her.”
Spider sighs heavily.
“I know how you feel. I saw it when you two were growing up. Hell, I don’t even know the half of it, but you know your situation far better than anyone else.”
My situation…
That includes my murderous family that has put Angel and her family in danger for years.
The old grudges that will hurt Angel.
Not to mention the other matter I found out recently about Angel’s biological mother…
But above that, the thing in my chest is torn apart at vital points.
It leaks blood every five business weeks.
The valves don’t work like other people’s.
The arteries are too thin and unstable to have another transplant done just yet.
As of eight months ago, I have a few years if I’m lucky.
Yes, I know my situation better than anyone…
“Emmett, I know you’re hating my guts right now, but you’re also an unparalleled war strategist. You can see far ahead but, most of all, I know there’s nothing you wouldn’t do for that girl.”
I look at him, but my soul, body and mind completely in shambles.
“What do you want me to do?” I ask quietly.
Spider stares at me for a long while before he speaks again.
“One day, my sister will grow the guts to come to you and confess her feelings,” he starts slowly. “Deny her.”
“What?”
“Break her heart.”
What the ? —
“Fuck you!” I blow up, unable to stop myself anymore.
“Listen man, it’s the onl?—”
“Like hell! I’d sooner stand in front of a firing squad, dance in a minefield, and drown in a pool of acid before I ever break her heart!”
Because doing so is the same as shattering mine.
“Do you love my sister?” Spider suddenly demands, shocking me into silence.
Spider steps closer, his voice dropping low but serious.
“You just said from the beginning it’s always been her.
If you mean that then you’ll go and stand in front of a firing squad and be riddled with bullets until you’re unrecognizable!
You’ll dance around a fucking minefield like a damn ballerina!
And if that’s not enough, you’ll go drown in fucking acid to protect her, because that’s exactly what you’ve been doing all along! ”
My entire body and soul grow numb, frozen in time.
How can he possibly know what I’ve been through just to get Angel back?
That I’d do anything and everything for her still…
“I know you’re in love with Ivy,” he states forcefully, like a hammer pounding down on a nail. “You’ve always been in love with her. Right from the start.”
I don’t respond. What can I say anyway?
That she’s all I think about in the busiest, most intense, life-threatening seconds of my life?
Do I confess that she’s all I see when I’m aimlessly lagging from moment to moment, questioning my existence when it’s already so useless and cursed?
Should I mention that she exists in the in-between, in the mundane and the precious, in the most sensitive and the minor?
I don’t know when it happened or how, but that girl… she’s all I want.
When I couldn’t move, too sick to go to school, she’d skip her own classes without her grandmother’s knowledge, just to come over and lie down next to me on my deathbed.
She’d ramble on and on about all the pesky thoughts that bothered her, like how she finds school difficult.
How she’s worried about her brother.
How she wants to be friends with Astraea and all the little crazy, yet curious questions she’d have about random stuff.
That girl saw me through my worst days.
My cold days.
My solitary days.
My most brutal, agonizing days.
The nothing-but-numbness days.
She was there for them all.
Her physical presence was crucially important, but even when she wasn’t there physically, she was still with me in strange ways I both hated and obsessed over all at the same time.
“Break her heart.”
How can I do that when her heart is more valuable than mine and everyone else’s combined?
Her soul is so fucking pure that she sees the beauty of life clearly.
Spider said she linked her life to me, but the simple truth is, I fastened my entire existence to her!
She was the first person to ever tell me to my fucking face that life is worth it.
I almost died three times while she was away, but I hung on for her.
To see her again.
To hold her hand silently when she’s asleep.
To hear her melodic voice, see the incomparable twinkle in her eye when she gets excited, and capture the heart-stopping smiles she reserved just for me.
I held on for her…
I don’t say any of this to Spider. It’s no use trying to explain my already defeated argument.
I can’t haggle with a protective brother that rightfully blames me for the danger upon his sister.
Not when I don’t ever budge when it comes to Angel’s safety either, nor do I negotiate, even with myself.
“I understand.”
Spider looks at me with slight shock in his eyes, but it quickly turns into resolve.
“You do?” he asks silently.
“I know what to do.”
Spider stares at me. I don’t know what he sees on my face, but he comes round the side and pats my shoulder.
“I know I have no right to demand this of you. If I were anyone else, hell, if I were King or Montreal who said all this to your face like this, no matter how skilled I am, I know you’d have me die a thousand deaths a million times over,” he says quietly.
“I know you are sparing me solely for the sake of my sister.”
I don’t say anything.
Is there anything I can say when it has all come to this?
“For what it’s worth, I was rooting for you, but…” Spider trails off.
“But you never trusted me, nor do you dare to trust someone like me.”
“You’re not an ordinary man, Emmett,” he says softly. “Nor are the Eastons just a regular wealthy family. And your health…”
Silence falls in the kitchen, but I can’t crash out now. I have the rest of my painful heartbeats for that.
I turn to look at Spider fully. “Thank you for clearing those Russians. I had all traces of you wiped cleaned. Nothing will come back to you.”
Spider looks at me with a bit of pity that vanishes quickly.
He nods, and says, “With your particular way of doing things, I’ve figured that if anyone finds a trace or knows what you’re up to, it’s solely because you intentionally want that person to know. Likely for a spectacular trap.”
I neither confirm nor deny that.
I just silently stand there, feeling the waves of agony surging in me from what I’ll have to do from now on.
Spider abruptly looks at me with a strange light in his dark eyes. “You knew, didn’t you?”
“What?”
“These four years you were asking me to see Ivy.”
I hold his stare, but I don’t say anything.
Spider chuckles humorlessly. “I thought and even believed that you couldn’t find her,” he says a bit awkwardly. “But now… well, it seems you’ve always known exactly where both of us were all along, huh?”
I don’t bother responding to that.
I found Angel twenty hours after she and her brother ran away from Westbrook Blues.
I’ve always known where she was. I just didn’t have the power to keep her… and now, I can’t even have her.
Feeling like the world is closing in on me, I repress everything I’m feeling, burying it deep inside
“I’ll take that pest in your garage,” I say instead, then turn to leave.
“Emmett,” Spider calls after me. I stop, but I don’t dare to face him. My pain should at least be private. “I am sorry. For this unfair heartbreak.”
I suck in a sharp breath, but it does nothing to alleviate the torture in my chest, or the tension in my veins, let alone the agony of loss for the only thing I’ve ever let myself desire.
Everything bubbles up into a million incomparable emotions, blasting at me from Spider’s words, but I know he won’t suddenly change his mind.
If I can’t guarantee Angel’s safety, why risk it?
“What must be done, will always be taken care of,” I mutter, repeating a line from a book I once read.
“Uh, that’s a bit bleak and cold from someone so young,” Spider mumbles, maybe out of a bit of guilt but I don’t mention to him the three other statements of wisdom I read in that same book.
What has to come, will never be late.
What one must face, cannot be avoided.
But it’s the last one that has been engraved in my bones that rings in my head now.
What is, can never be changed.
I was never meant to have anything beautiful in this life…
I can’t have her.