Chapter 20 #2
Skully’s voice comes next, stripped of its armor. “You’re scaring me, Baby. Just—just spit it out. No punchline.”
And Marrow—his hand lands lightly on my wrist, flour-smudging across my trembling hand. “My love,” he murmurs, velvet and grave-deep, “do not carry this alone.”
That’s when the dam bursts.
“It’s the clock!” I scream, too loud, too raw. My palms slam the counter, rattling cookie cutters. “Tick-tock, tick-tock—don’t you hear it? Today. Tomorrow. Then Halloween. And then-” My breath hitches. The sugar-sweet air tastes like rot. “And then you’re gone.”
Their faces crack open in horror, but I can’t stop now, the words are spilling like frosting from a split piping bag.
“I see it every time I blink. The flicker. Bone where you should be skin. Ribs shining through. Hollow jaws. Like the world’s reminding me what you really are.
Not men. Not mine. Just borrowed until the veil slams shut.
And I can’t—I can’t keep pretending sprinkles will hold you here when all I hear is the clock. ”
I choke on the laugh that bubbles up, high and jagged.
“I thought if I baked enough cookies, if I screamed loud enough, if I made it all chaos and candy and costumes, maybe time would forget us. Maybe the window wouldn’t close.
But it’s closing, I can feel it chewing at the edges of everything.
You’re going to leave me. And I don’t know how to stop it. ”
The silence swells so big it has corners. It has edges I can cut my tongue on. The mixer ticks as it cools. The oven hums like it’s trying to pretend it isn’t a mouth. Somewhere in the wall the house makes a settling sound like bones sighing.
Tick.
Tock.
No one moves. It’s like they all decided at once to try not being monsters and instead be furniture. I want them to break it. I want someone to drop a tray, to cuss, to laugh, to shove me against the fridge and grind the panic out of me until all that’s left is sweat and sugar.
Nothing.
The horror lands.
It doesn’t smash me; it settles, like a cloak still warm from a dead girl’s shoulders. It drapes over my spine and tucks itself under my ribs and whispers: yes. That. You said it. There’s no taking it back.
Tick-tock.
Bonehead moves first. Not the smash-forward lunge I expect, but something gentler, like he’s remembering how to be big without being a wrecking ball.
He steps into my space and I feel the temperature shift, heat rolling off him in waves.
He’s careful. Measured. He bends until we’re eye to eye and his hand comes up slow enough that I could dodge if I wanted.
I don’t.
His palm covers my entire head—of course it does; he’s absurd—and then I’m folded into him, swallowed in muscle and flour and his day-old soap. He gathers me like spilled sugar. He doesn’t squeeze hard. He just holds me in a cage that is also a shelter as he lowers us to the floor.
“Mine,” he mutters, so low I feel it more than hear it. “Mine. Stay. We stay.”
Something digs under my ribs and pops something loose.
I don’t make some pretty, cinematic sound when I cry; I make a sharp, wet noise, like a laugh snapped in half.
My face goes hot and stupid, and my nose starts doing the thing it does that would make any self-respecting heroine faint.
I shove my forehead into his chest so he won’t have to see it.
Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.
“You broke the clock,” I say into him, which is not what I mean to say, but it’s what comes out. “You broke the clock. We broke it. You punched it to death. It shattered like a mouthful of teeth.” My fingers knot in the strings of his apron. “Why do I still hear it? Why won’t it shut up?”
His hand cups the back of my skull, shielding it, like he could block the noise with his skin. “Stupid clock,” he rumbles, and there’s a tremor in it, a shaken thing. “I’ll break more clocks.” He means it like a vow, like a to-do list. “All the clocks.”
Skully slides in on my other side, the way a knife slides into a sheath it knows by heart, somehow arranged so his shoulder presses me from the left and his hand finds mine without hunting.
He laces our fingers and I realize his skin is colder than Bonehead’s.
The contrast is a mercy. It gives my body two temperatures to choose from and I can split the panic between them.
His thumb lands on my wrist. He’s not slick about taking my pulse—he stares at his own thumb like it’s a stethoscope and his brows pull together like he doesn’t trust my heart not to lie.
He keeps holding it there like he’s manually-restarting me.
I squeeze his hand until the bones complain and he lets me.
He lets me grind pain into him because he knows it’s a translation. He knows this is how I say don’t go.
Marrow is not a statue. I see it now. I always tell myself he’s stillness, but stillness is a trick.
What he is, right now, is motion he strangled because he was afraid to spook me.
His hands shake, fine and furious, and there is zero poetry in his eyes.
No velvet. No sonnet. Just a man who wants to kneel and bite the world for touching me.
He does kneel. Slow. Not dramatic. He kneels like a medic would. His knees whisper against flour dust. His fingers rise, hesitate, and then he places both palms lightly on my waist as if I’m a lit candle he’s moving across a room.
No speeches. No metaphors. “I love you,” he says. It’s embarrassingly plain. Too naked. I think it flays him to say it without dressing it. “I love you,” he repeats, because saying it once feels like an accident. “We’re here. We’re with you.”
Something in my chest cracks, and the tick-tock spills through the fissure, louder for a moment, then diffuses like steam.
Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.
Tears don’t feel like water. They feel like something is finally melting. They run hot over my fingers where they cling to Bonehead’s apron strings, and the salt on my lip tastes like I licked the ocean and dared it to drown me.
“Fuck the clock,” I whisper, a broken sob breaking free from my chest. “Don’t leave me.”
Bonehead’s arms tighten—just enough pressure to say alive, alive, alive. “Not leaving,” he growls, low and desperate. “No.”
“You don’t get a vote, baby. You’re-” I can’t say gone. The word is a trapdoor. I choose a worse one. “-borrowed.”
He snarls at the word like it insulted his mother.
I feel him breathe through it, recalibrate.
His next inhale is measured. He buries his nose in my hair like he could huff me into his lungs and keep me there where clocks can’t find me.
“We stay,” he says again, smaller, which makes it somehow larger.
“We stay until we don’t. And if we don’t, we’ll meet again someday,” Skully intones, finishing what Bonehead struggled to say.
I cry harder.
It’s embarrassing. Snot and hiccups and makeup make new countries down my cheeks. I press my face into Bonehead’s chest and smear a comet of eyeliner across the ghost on his apron, so now the cartoon looks like it’s been crying, too. We match. Perfect.
Skully’s grip tightens so sharply I think he’s trying to strangle the tick out of my pulse.
Marrow's hands continue wandering my skin, as if searching for an answer. But there is none.
Tick. Tock.
“Why won’t it go away?” I ask no one. Everyone. “We broke it. We broke the one on the wall. We threw it away. We smashed the kitchen timer. There isn’t a clock left in this house I haven’t threatened with a hammer. Why is it still in my head? Why is it still-” I mime the pendulum with my finger.
“Because it’s not a clock,” Skully says, his voice is husky and chopped. “It’s a calendar that learned to talk. It’s a rule. It’s a—you know—veil. Like a curtain call.” He swallows. “I hate that analogy.”
“Me eat it,” Bonehead mutters, and I love him so much for being exactly him. So much it hurts.
Marrow finally moves higher, bracing his hands at my ribs and pressing in, not hard—just enough for me to feel where I end.
His eyes are steady. There’s no graveyard in them.
No lilies. “We will steal every second like thieves. We will make each minute too loud to be counted. And if the counting cannot be drowned—we will meet it with our hands held.”
“No poetry,” I croak, because if he starts, I will drown in pretty words and never claw my way back out.
He nods, a bow so subtle it could be a swallow. “No poetry,” he agrees. “Only this.”
He leans in and kisses the corner of my mouth. It’s not sex. It’s not saintly either. It’s just his mouth saying I’m real, you’re real, this touch is real, you can bite it and it will bleed.
“I’m sorry,” I say, because confessing feels like I failed a test. “I should’ve told you yesterday. Or last week. Or when I first saw…” I glance and it happens—just for a blink, Skully’s eyes hollow, Bonehead’s cheekbone ghost-lights, Marrow’s hands are bones on my ribs. “You.”
Bonehead’s head jerks like he felt the flicker.
Skully notices where I’m looking. He lifts his chin, baring his throat like a dare. “We know who we are, Baby. Meat suits never fooled us. Don’t let it scare you out of the room.”
“I’m not scared of bones,” I lie.
He huffs. “You’re not scared of anything except normalcy and running out of eyeliner.”
“Add losing you to the list,” I say, and it’s almost a joke. Almost.
He squeezes my fingers around the pulse point, hard enough to bruise a promise into the skin. “Okay,” he says, like he’s changing a set list. “Breathe, baby.”
I try. In. Out. In again. The tick-tock doesn’t stop, but it recedes, like it backed up a step to watch. I hate that it’s polite enough to give me a second. I want it to be rude so I can punch it.
I drag in air that tastes like vanilla and metal and boys. My chest stops trying to eat itself.
“I’m breathing,” I say. I sound like I’ve been drunk for a week and just remembered my name.
Bonehead makes a soft pleased noise that belongs in a different book. He rocks me a little, like I’m a thing he’s trying to lull back to sleep. “More breathing,” he instructs. “All day. No stopping. Doctor’s orders.” He kisses the top of my head, clumsy and worshipful.
Skully smirks, still broken, but the effort is there. “You’re ruining my whole worldview here. I thought the only time you cry is when I have you bent in half.”He squeezes my wrist, thumb riding the pulse like he’s afraid it’ll vanish, then bends to kiss the skin.
Marrow takes my chin between his thumb and pointer, his other hand brushing tears from my cheeks.
“We will not make you empty promises,” he says quietly.
“We will make fun. We will frost cakes. We will string lights and set fire and laugh and kiss and hold you until the clock is a thing that we can forget for a little while.” He breathes once.
“And if it comes anyway, we will walk into it with the same hearts we love you with.”
A laugh bleeds out of me, a soft, ugly thing. “That’s poetry,” I accuse.
“It is love,” he corrects. “And I am bad at making it small.”
Tick. Tock.
“Again,” I say, because the words were medicine. “Say you love me again.”
All three of them, at once:
“Love you,” Bonehead growls, forehead on mine.
“Love you, idiot,” Skully says, the insult so tender it shivers.
“I love you,” Marrow says, plain like bread.
Something unknots in my spine. It’s not fixed. Nothing about this is fixed. But they’re holding different parts of me and my pieces are, for the moment, organized.
I sniff so hard I see stars. “Okay,” I say, ruining the solemnity by wiping my nose on the back of my hand and then on Bonehead’s apron ghost. “Okay.”
Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.
“Fuck the clock,” I whisper again, calmer now, meaner. “I hope it chokes.”
Skully grins. “On what, exactly?”
“On me,” I say without missing a beat, and that—finally—makes all three of them laugh. Real laughter. The kind that maps a way back to a body.
Something unclenches.
“Okay,” I say, and I peel myself out of Bonehead’s chest, my hair sticking to his skin. He lets me go like a man handing over a weapon he’ll get back soon. Skully releases my wrist but not before he presses a last kiss to my pulse. Marrow shifts back just enough for me to see his face again.
“Okay.” I wipe my cheeks. I probably have raccoon eyes. Whatever. “We’re going to make so much noise the veil files a noise complaint.”
“That’s my girl,” Skully mutters, relief sharpening him back into himself.
Bonehead puffs up like I fed him compliments. “Smash party.”
Marrow, stripped of poetry but unable to resist a benediction, nods once. “Smash party.”
I look around our ruined kitchen: the HELL’S KITCHEN in dripping red icing, the screaming candy-eyed oven, the cathedral cookies, the obscene cupcakes, the mixer spattered like a murder weapon. It’s ugly and glorious and so us my heart bears it like armor.
I pick up a cupcake Skully labeled COWARD and take a savage bite. “First item,” I say around crumbs and sugar and salt. “We eat. We breathe. We party. We refuse to go out sadly.”
Tick-tock.
Bonehead kisses my temple—quick, reverent—and lunges for the mixer with the feral joy of a man about to arm-wrestle a demon.
Skully wipes my face with the corner of a towel, very gentle and very rude at the same time, and goes back to icing slurs on confections with the precision of a forger.
Marrow presses his fingertips to my waist one last time, like a note pinned there—love—and then turns to the tray, steadying the cookies I want to throw at the wall until I want to kiss him for making them beautiful again.
I stand in the wreckage, chest aching, eyes burning, throat raw—and I feel held. I feel ridiculous. I feel a little dangerous again.
The clock keeps whispering from its invisible mouth. But I have three louder ones now. And a kitchen knife. And an oven full of cakes that will rot, or be eaten, or be smashed, or be fed to evil titan gods. I don’t know. I don’t care.
“Fuck the clock,” I say, just to make it flinch.
“Fuck the clock,” my boys echo, all in different keys.