Chapter 43 #2
“I wish she had told me sooner.” He frowned, a crease forming between his eyebrows. “You should never have had to stay with those people.”
I shouldn't have, that was true. And yet it had been the only solution that had made sense at the time.
“None of them were abusive. It was just...”
I paused, torn between how much I could tell Davian without making him uncomfortable. Strangely, I felt... uninhibited around him.
“...a strange feeling. The girls at school always said sex would hurt the first time. But it always hurt. Not physically.”
I swallowed, forced myself to continue.
“Even this summer, when I wasn’t forced to do it, when I was free to choose who I slept with, that feeling didn’t go away.”
Until I met Davian…
“What feeling?”
Davian sounded tense.
“Being a disposable body. Something you use once and then throw away.”
A sad laugh escaped me.
“I had planned to fill the void inside me, but I only made it bigger.”
“You were sixteen. You should have gone to social services.”
A glance to the side told me that his jaw was grinding against his cheek.
“They would have torn me away from Mama.
I might never have seen her alive again.
Mama didn't mean any harm. She didn't even realize she was locking me out because she never left the house.
And whenever I knocked, she was so drunk that she ran to hide in the bathroom, crying. She didn't recognize me.”
The memory of her disturbed eyes through the dirty windowpane still hurt.
“The last eight months with her were different. She said terrible things to me whenever she wasn't herself, asked me to jump with her. That woman...” I allowed her one last tear. “...was no longer Mama.”
The pain in my chest became more unbearable with every further image of her. With every further month that she had been wasted away.
“I found her ten months ago...”
take a moment to breathe.
normal the kid
My voice broke and I lost the battle against my tears, lost all control and turned away from Davian.
I would tell him someday. But not today.
Davian stepped around me, stopped close in front of me, and before I knew it, his rough, warm hands were on my cheeks, cupping my wet face.
My stomach rebelled. My moths. His moths... In any case, they only existed for him. My last candle light.
His ink eyes glistened, distracting me from the pain in my chest, even if it didn't completely fade away.
“I'm sorry you had to go through all this.”
A tear escaped from his eye.
Overwhelmed, I watched it roll around the tiny pearl-like dots beneath his eye and make its way across his skin, getting smaller and smaller until it reached his lip.
“Alone.”
His voice turned into a whisper as he looked back and forth between my eyes and shook his head.
“Please know that as long as you're here, you don't have to go through anything alone.”
He couldn't say that to me, couldn't hold me like that. Friends didn't do things like that. Not in that combination. Not with that intensity...
“No matter what you say, Davian, I feel like a burden.”
My voice sounded pathetic.
“No.” He shook his head vehemently, despair in his eyes. “No, Quill. What can I do to make you believe me?”
“It’s not you. It’s me.”
Before my gaze had a chance to slip to his lips, I pulled my head back, because the tingling in my stomach was silently begging for things it shouldn't desire.
He let go of me immediately.
What Would I Do?
Strawberry Guy
I started walking, wanted to leave this place, wanted to forget again what life I had left behind before I had come to Maplecrest.
Tony was my family. And I didn't appreciate it. Who knew what could happen until someone took him away from me.
That was life. It took away what you were most attached to, in the moments you appreciated it the least.
Davian caught up with me and we walked silently through the cemetery.
“She always encouraged me to become a writer.”
He shouldn't think badly of her. She hadn't been a bad person. Just a miserable mother.
“I think I got it from her. Before she started drinking, she used to tell me the craziest fairy tales.
She answered all my questions about the world with bizarre, made-up stories.
People die because the thirteenth fairy cursed them all at birth.
Babies are brought by the Sandman, moulded from dream sand, because he needed someone to believe in his dreams. That's why we dream at night. And children grow up as soon as they stop believing in Santa Claus. Another curse from the thirteenth fairy.”
The corners of my mouth turned up and Davian smirked too.
“Some butterflies have blue wings because ink flows through them, and after death we go to Wonderland.”
His smile disappeared, and he stared at the path before turning his head, his piercing eyes seeking mine.
“Do you believe we go to Wonderland when we die?”
I wanted to believe it so badly that it destroyed me.
“I’m only sure of one thing.”
Smiling, I turned to him and began walking backwards.
Hands in his pockets, he raised his eyebrows, a corner of his mouth lifting.
“And that would be?”
“The Sandman wanted you to become an author so badly that he put a drop of ink in each of your eyes.”
Davian glinted at me and I couldn't help but grin. And for a moment, I forgot my name and my parents. And all that remained was the person I was with Davian.
Blue is a sad color for those
who live in a color film.
But for those who are trapped in a
black-and-white film, it is a color.
– Leaking Batteries Diary