Chapter 31
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
SHILOH
There’s everything and there’s nothing. Weeks pass, and I go to classes. I go to my job. There’s a bright spot where I get news that Iggy woke up and he’s going to be able to leave the hospital soon with his aunt.
He’s going to be okay, just like Donovan said.
The news says nothing about his dad being found, and when I walk by the water where we dumped the body a week after Donovan walked away and took my heart with him, I hear people talking about the strong current from a recent storm.
There’s already someone new in the building we cleaned up, destroying any evidence we might have missed.
Even the aches in my body start to dull… but there’s one that doesn’t stop.
My heart.
It’s not hollow after all. It’s there, and it’s beating, and every beat feels like it’s trying to tear me apart from the inside out, because it only came back to life for a man who told me he couldn’t be with me anymore.
I can’t do this.
It echoes in my head and leaves me smearing canvases with black paint. When I try to see an image, all I can see is his eyes.
I’ve painted Donovan’s eyes looking at me like I’ve broken him a dozen times. I painted his hand, reaching for me right before it fell.
I’ve painted his lips turned down in a frown, and the little spatters of blood that got onto his shirt, freckles that he was never meant to have. Every painting has a crimson wash of my blood—his memory and my body… the only way we can touch now.
Donovan covers my apartment, and I can’t sell a single one of the paintings because it’s all I have left.
I drop the brush and look at my arm… tiny cuts litter my skin, places I’ve run my knife, like bleeding onto the brush could somehow bleed out the emotions that are drowning me with the flow.
It doesn’t help.
Nothing helps.
When I look at my phone again, the notification screen is only full of messages from my website about when I’m going to put up more art…
It’s too much.
This is all too much.
I can’t do this anymore.
I grab a knife and head out into the icy snow left over from the storm, knowing that there’s only one thing left for me.
I need to see him.
I’m afraid to knock on his apartment door. I walked the entire way here in nothing but a thin shirt, because I haven’t been able to wash the blood from his hoodie. It still smells like him beneath the scent of copper, and I can’t lose it.
My hair is soaked, clinging to my cheek in chilled tendrils that barely penetrate my senses.
I’m afraid.
I’m more afraid than I’ve been in my entire life, because I know that if he tells me to leave again… that’s it.
It’s really over.
And I’m not sure what I’ll do if he says that.
My fingers grip the knife I’m holding, though they’re shaking so hard I nearly drop it when I finally raise my fist and knock.
Once.
Twice.
And for a minute, there’s nothing… I don’t know if he’s at practice. Fuck, for all I know he moved to make sure he never had to see me again.
When the door opens, I sway on the spot. My vision blinks in and out, gray speckled with black and white…
But in the center of it all is crimson.
Donovan.
My heart.
“What are you doing here, Shiloh?” His voice is full of pain, like seeing me hurts.
It would almost be enough to completely break me if it weren’t for the fact that I see the way he sweeps his eyes over my wet hair, and concern draws his brows together.
I’m too caught up on how gorgeous he is—on his freckles and full lips—to care.
None of my paintings did him justice. Donovan is more than art.
He’s everything.
“Donovan, please…” I know if he closes the door on me now, whatever part of me came back to life, whatever part of me felt like I could be a person instead of just a monster, is going to die with the sound.
“Shiloh…” His expression is soft and shuttered as he reaches out and then instantly drops his hand back to his side as he glances down and sees the knife I’m clutching. The hesitation is breaking me apart, the way he’s looking at me like I’m breaking him too… and then he steps aside. “Come in.”
I half stumble through the door, my teeth chattering and my fingers numb, and the sound of it shutting with me inside is the first thing that breaks through the frozen feeling in my chest since the night Donovan walked away.
“I…” I stand there almost helplessly, my arms crossed over my waist like I can hold myself together for whatever is about to happen. I don’t even realize I’m tapping the knife nervously against my arm until Donovan steps forward, reaching toward me again before drawing up short.
“You’re going to cut yourself.”
I stare blankly at him. “I already have.”
His eyes widen then, his gaze sweeping along the length of my body.
It’s the concern there that gives me the strength to do what I do next.
I set the knife down long enough to yank my shirt over my head, dropping it to the floor with a wet plop.
I turn my arms out so he can see the ragged cuts I’ve drawn blood from over the last few weeks.
“Shiloh…”
“I needed to paint.” I’m surprised my voice sounds so small… so in pain. “It was the only way I could see you.” My head shakes back and forth as I keep my arms out between us so he can see it all. “Everything is so… colorless now, Donovan. I can’t see anything but blacks and grays.”
The pain on his face is almost too much. Am I hurting him more by being here? Am I making it worse? I couldn’t wait for him to call me anymore… and I…
“I don’t understand, Shiloh,” he says, reaching out to take my carved-up arms into his warm hands. “Help me understand… this. All of this.”
All of this…
All of me.
“You want to know me, right? I want to give you all of me, Donovan. I’ve never wanted that before.
I’ve never wanted someone the way I want you.
I…” My brows come together as I look at the cuts on my arm, some scabbed over, a few looking fresh.
“I had to paint you, and I didn’t want to hurt anyone else after the way you looked at me… I…”
“You hurt,” he says, soft and gentle like he’s soothing a wild animal. “I can tell, but you also hurt other people, and I… I don’t know how someone so beautiful could do something so… just… horrible, Loh. I’ve tried to make it make sense, but I can’t.”
“My dad tried to kill me when I was small,” I say blankly, drawing him up short. There’s something on his face, some sign in his expression that tells me maybe he suspected something like this. I grab his hand and take in a shaking breath as I draw it to my waist.
It nearly kills me when his fingers run over my scars—not because I’m afraid, or because I’m remembering… but because his hand is so warm. Just that touch is enough to make my pulse race, my heart remember to beat again.
“You don’t have to…”
“He came up behind my mother and me when we were painting, and he put a gun to the back of her head and pulled the trigger. He didn’t have a reason…
he just got it in his head to do it one day.
He probably would have killed me too if the damn thing hadn’t jammed…
” Donovan winces like he’s being dragged back in time, like he’s there to see it as I monotone the story.
“So he took our painting knife and stabbed me. Over and over. I can remember lying there on the floor with my insides spilling out and watching my mother’s blood and brains slowly slide down the wall.
It made a pretty picture, like a butterfly.
I…” I swallow hard. “Looking at it, imagining it was paint… that’s the only thing that kept me awake until the police arrived. ”
“That’s terrible. I’m so sorry.”
My eyes flick to the space between us, to his hand on my waist and his fingers trembling where they’re pressed to my skin.
Everyone wants to know the truth, but when the truth is so ugly…
what else can they really say but sorry?
“I think he’s still alive in a cell somewhere…
” I snort, the thought still prickly in my mind.
“Anyway, after that… I don’t know… I just saw beauty in blood.
It’s what I am. What I was, I guess.” I look at him pleadingly, like he can untangle the mess in my head.
As if he’d still want to. “It’s all I thought I could be before I met you. ”
“You say that like this was the only logical outcome for your life.”
“It’s not an excuse, Donovan. But it’s why I am the way I am.
It’s all I know… it’s why I…” I shudder, picking up the knife and holding it between us.
The blade catches in the low light, and I can see the reflection of his Godzilla posters on the wall warped in the metal as I twist it back and forth.
“It’s why I wanted to help the kids at the center, so maybe there won’t be another me in the world.
Fuck, Iggy could have been another me.” I scoff, blinking away tears that slide hot down my cheeks.
“One’s enough, right? I know I’m a monster… but I… you made me feel like…”
“Like?” he asks, as I let my sentence trail off.
“Like I could be more.” The confession cracks me open from the inside out, splits my ribs and leaves me raw and exposed. “Can I… can I be more? Fuck, can I be enough?”
“Enough?” he echoes, and I shove the knife forward without thinking.
Donovan startles until he realizes I’m handing it to him, using my free hand to wrap his fingers around it.
This is all I can do. I’m open—I’m raw. My beating heart is there, and if he can’t accept it, I need him to carve it out.
He has to end this one way or another, because I can’t walk out of this room knowing that I have to go back to being who I was before I met him.
“Take it, Donovan. Please.” I feel the words catch in my chest, trembling, aching, and I press the knife harder into his hand.
It’s easy to draw his wrist up to hold the blade to my throat.
“Make me into something different. Make me into something better. Carve me open if you need to prove to yourself that I have a heart…” I can’t make out his expression through the blur of my tears, but it doesn’t matter.
“Please… please, just make me into something that can be yours, because I can’t do this without you.
” The confession catches on a sob that aches through my rib cage and makes me sway, nearly falling against the sharp edge at my throat.
“Shiloh…” Donovan’s hand around my waist is the only thing that keeps me upright… but it still isn’t an answer.
I need an answer.
“I love you, Donovan… I…” I never thought I’d say those words to anyone, but they spill freely from my lips as I lean into the blade.
“You can cut my heart out right now if it means you’ll believe me when I say it.
If it means you’ll keep it. I just know I can’t keep breathing without you now that I know what it feels like to know you.
I’ll do anything… I’ll be anything… Please, let me stay. ”
My head drops to his shoulder and he pulls the knife down so I don’t slit my own throat on it.
I can feel him shaking, his ragged breath.
I can see his pulse jumping through my hazy vision as I glance to the side…
and I’m lost in the feel of his warm fingers as they smooth up my bare skin and catch in my hair, tilting my head back.
He looks at me, and he’s all wide eyes and pupils. That ocean that threatened to flay me open before is finally here to drag me under. It’s okay, though. I’m ready to drown.
I’m ready when he brings the knife up and presses it to the smooth skin just below my throat. I think if Donovan kills me, it would be okay. I’d be okay, because his hands would be warm while he did it.
It takes a second for me to realize he’s pressing into the same place where I first marked him—that spot on his shoulder where my teeth sank into his skin. He’s delicate, though. Deliberate, small lines deep enough to leave a scar against my collarbone.
It’s crude when I look down, but it’s there.
A little heart.
“You’re mine, Shiloh. For keeps, if you’ll have me.”