Chapter 15
Silas
I’m a goddamn fool.
The thought has worn itself smooth by the time it finishes another lap around my skull. It is no longer outrage. No longer even surprise. Just fact. The kind of fact that settles in your bones and makes every movement after it feel a little more deserved.
The bathroom is empty, which should help.
It doesn’t.
Fluorescent light washes everything out overhead, leaving nowhere for a person to hide from himself.
I pace anyway, back and forth across too-clean tile, from the sinks to the paper towel dispenser and back again, my schedule crumpled in one hand until I finally throw it onto the counter hard enough that it skids and curls at the corner.
I don’t care about the schedule.
I care about my hand.
That is the problem.
Gripping the sink, I stare at my hand like it’s a borrowed weapon.
Same hand that kept me kneeling between her legs while I kissed every scar on her stomach, that braced on her thigh when she dragged my head closer and sank her fingers into my hair.
The memory of her hand clenching, tugging me hard enough to hurt, sent something feral tearing through my chest. I can still feel that grip, the way she twisted curls between her knuckles like she needed proof I was real.
I never even got under her leggings, yet the ghost of her heat still throbs against my palm.
I feel the slick seam of the fabric giving under my thumb, the hitch in her breath when I pushed, the involuntary jerk of her hips when that thin barrier became useless.
Her gasp, sharp and shocked, lives under my skin, echoing the way she whimpered when my mouth made a home on her scars.
Rinsing my fingers, they still pulse with the taste of her, the imagined drag of her arousal soaking through cloth. Kneeling for her, tasting skin I wasn’t supposed to touch, hearing the wrecked sounds she made while her hand fisted my hair, those moments rewired me.
My jaw tightens so hard it hurts.
Control yourself.
The command comes in my father’s voice. My head drops over the sink. Cold porcelain. White knuckles. Breathing that refuses to even out.
Everything you touch rots.
The memory keeps replaying without permission.
Not just what I did. Worse than that. What she did back.
The half-second where she didn’t pull away.
The sound she made that still has my pulse kicking harder than it should in a university bathroom in broad daylight.
The way my body answered instantly...stupidly.
That is what makes me feel sick.
Not wanting her. I’ve already lost that fight.
It’s the fact that my body still wants anything at all.
It’s the fact that hers answered me.
Dragging both hands over my face, I force myself to look up. The mirror gives me back a face I’d like to break. Hat low. Mouth hard. Eyes too dark. A body pretending it belongs in a hoodie and jeans on a college campus when all it really knows how to do is hurt people.
Because that’s the other part.
Every time I see the scar on her left cheek, everything in me splits open.
She doesn’t remember me. Not the real version.
Maybe she remembers in fragments. Maybe her body does, in the way bodies flinch, brace, and go still before the mind catches up.
But she doesn’t look at me and see that room at Brightside.
She doesn’t see broken glass on the floor or a dead moth in pieces or a boy being dragged out while she bled into her own hand.
I do.
I know exactly where that scar came from.
This morning, after all of that, after the pool, the overdose, my room and my mouth on her skin, I still put my hand on her in the car like I had any right.
The thought turns mean fast.
Maybe this is all I am.
Maybe the old men in offices, the Warden, and every idiot who ever looked at my file and saw violence before they saw a kid got it right. Maybe a person can be made wrong enough that even tenderness comes out with teeth.
I laugh once under my breath. It sounds ugly.
Because the worst part is that I didn’t lose control in the car by accident.
Not fully.
Some part of me wanted to know.
Wanted to see if she would still feel me after everything.
Wanted to know if what happened in my room had only been liquor, grief, and exhaustion, or if her body would answer me sober enough to hate me for it.
Wanted proof that I wasn’t the only one carrying last night around like a live wire under the skin.
When she moved against my hand, even for that ruined half-second, I became exactly the kind of man I despise.
My grip tightens on the sink again.
I should leave her alone.
That conclusion is obvious.
It changes nothing.
Because my mind knows what the decent answer is, but my body keeps betraying me in humiliating little ways.
The way it reacts when she looks at me too long.
The way it goes taut when she says my name with anger in it.
The way it nearly came apart from nothing but the memory of her gasping in the car.
Every part of me that should have learned restraint learned hunger instead, and now I’m stuck walking around inside a body that keeps dragging me toward the one person I should protect myself from.
Or protect from myself.
I think about what I said to her.
Last night was a mistake.
The alcohol made me do things.
Coward’s language. I know it. Knew it the second it left my mouth. But what was I supposed to say? That I wanted her before she ever knew who I was? That I watched her heal from a distance and still let myself want what I had no right to touch?
No.
So I lied around the truth instead.
And then I made it worse.
My head drops again, and for one awful second all I can hear is her voice in the car. The way she said Lacey’s name. The way she asked why I let her touch me. The way her anger cracked just enough around the edges for me to hear the hurt under it.
Why let me touch you?
Because you’re the first person who ever did it without trying to take.
Because some part of me has been answering to you ever since you held a moth between us like it was proof something gentle could survive being near me.
I didn’t say any of that.
Instead, I threw Kadin at her. Used him like a knife. Told her the truth in the filthiest way possible because if I was going to bleed, I wanted her to do it too.
I straighten slowly, staring at myself again.
This is what I keep doing. Every time something in me gets too close to being human, I reach for cruelty because cruelty feels more survivable than honesty.
The worst part is that she still looked at Medusa and understood enough to ask the right questions.
Lacey.
Christ.
Pressing my palms flat to the counter, I shut my eyes.
No, I didn’t want Lacey. Didn’t want her hands. Didn’t want anybody’s hands. I only wanted the room to think I did. Wanted Octavia to watch me disappear into some cheap, meaningless version of the boy she should expect me to be.
And then I saw her in the pool with Kadin.
Saw her wrapped around him, mouth on his, body open in a way that made something white-hot and irrational rip through me so fast I stepped into the water fully dressed without thinking.
The memory of that is still enough to make my blood spike.
Her wet shirt clinging to her. Her hair in her face.
The way she looked at me when I put my hands on her and told her she didn’t belong to him.
Christ.
I did say that.
Out loud.
Like I had any claim to make.
My body and mind have been at war since the second I saw her again, and neither side is winning.
My head keeps listing reasons to keep my distance.
Her scar. Her house. Her history. Mine. The fact that anything between us was doomed before it ever had a chance to become real.
The fact that I helped write one of the worst things on her face and then had the nerve to kiss the lower scars like I was healing something.
My body doesn’t care.
My body only remembers the taste of her skin, the way she trembled, the bruises I left at her hips and how close I came to forgetting every decent instinct I’ve ever tried to build.
I open my eyes again.
The mirror doesn’t look kinder.
Just more accurate.
I’m not afraid of the class. I’m not even afraid of campus.
I’m afraid of another enclosed space. Another charged silence. Another moment where she turns to me angry and flushed and I find myself reaching before thought can catch up. I’m afraid of what happens if she keeps answering me. I’m afraid of what happens if she doesn’t.
Picking up the schedule because I need something to hold, the paper crackles under my fingers.
An hour ago, I was still close enough to feel her breathing.
Now I’m standing in a university bathroom trying to convince myself that wanting her is not already a form of violence.
The problem is, I don’t believe myself anymore.
The voices outside the bathroom drift closer in uneven bursts of laughter, sneakers squeaking on polished floor, backpacks thudding lightly against lockers as people pass.
The whole building has settled into the rhythm of first period already, and I know without checking the time that Creative Arts has started without me.
The fact should matter. It doesn’t. Right now, the class is just another place where she exists, another room I’m supposed to walk into and sit in like I didn’t put my hand on her in the car and then spend twenty minutes in here trying to convince myself I’m not exactly the thing people have always said I am.
I move toward the door because hiding in a bathroom is pathetic even by my standards.
Just as my hand reaches the handle, the door swings inward and almost clips my shoulder. A group of guys is clustered outside, one of them peeling away from the rest with a grin still stuck on his face from whatever conversation he’s leaving behind.
“I gotta take a leak,” he says over his shoulder, waving the others on.
They laugh and keep moving.