Chapter Thirty-One
My breathing is rapid and choppy, and I think the weight sitting on my ribs might just crush me.
“Please, Chase…” I start to beg but stop when I hear the sound of steel crashing.
I look toward the edge of the barred gate expecting it to move, but it doesn’t, it remains in place.
That is when I hear him, rocks scraping beneath shuffling feet.
Chase is moving toward me, Harlen at his side, and he looks the same, even though he won’t let me see his eyes.
I take one calculated step back, allow my hands to slip from the bars, finally, I thought, fucking finally.
A moment later, I hated myself for thinking it was going to be that easy.
Chase doesn’t open the gate, and his face doesn’t leave the ground at his feet.
I wanted to cry, and then I wanted to scream.
“What do you want, Laiken?” he asks, his voice void of emotion, the tenor of all that was Chase Keller gone.
I scoff, and fold my arms across my chest when my body starts to shake. A detriment to my anger. Had he not been paying attention at all?
“Are you seri…” I accidentally swallow my words.
“Serious,” he finishes for me, and I want to throw hands. “Yeah, yeah, I fucking am.”
I drop my chin to my chest and bite into my bottom lip when it wobbles. “You never came back, Chase,” I whisper so quietly I barely hear myself.
But the exhale that leaves him tells me he did, and I’m about to speak again when he rasps on a warning, “Leave, Laik.”
How dare he.
I prowl toward the bars, snatching them in the palm of my hands.
“No,” I state so slowly and so boldly that I almost see a shiver live wire through his body.
Tears prick like needles at the back of my eyes, but I don’t let myself cry.
“Not until you tell me why the fuck you are avoiding me.”
I’m trying to find his face, but it’s still hanging low, buried in his chest. I can see his mouth, only the corner, he’s sucking on his front teeth, shaking his head.
“Chase, please—” I start to speak, but he barrels over the top of me.
“Do you trust me?” he asks coolly.
And it’s at that moment, in the depths of his question, that I realize I can’t tame my tears any longer. They fill my eyes and fall in a stream down my cheeks.
I wanted to lie, then, I wanted to die.
“Till death,” I whisper and when silence presses, I try to stare into the deep-brown eyes of a broken boy battling a storm he’d long forgotten we’d shared. But he doesn’t offer them to me the way he used to.
“Then hear me when I tell you this is for the best,” he rasps.
I’m crying so hard now that I feel every rib splinter in my chest.
I felt cast aside.
Kicked away.
“What the fuck does that even mean?” I beg.
Chase stays silent, so I seek some kind of clarity in Harlen, hoping he will help me understand. But he doesn’t even try, he keeps his head turned away.
I force my gaze back to Chase, swallowing my next cry, wiping my cheeks with both hands, taking a breath, stepping away.
I let my eyes take in the length of the boy that I believed used to be able to see me, even when I could barely see myself, and I scoff. Because now, I am pissed.
“You selfish son of a…”
I don’t finish when Chase’s hands slam against the steel, wrapping around the poles, his forehead drilling into the panel. He still hasn’t given me his eyes, but beneath his breath he tells me, “I killed her you know, my mother, then I killed my father, I’m…not…a good person.”
I wasn’t sure I was still breathing.
I press my quivering fingers to my mouth, silent tears roll down my face and my knees begin to shake.
I didn’t know what to say, didn’t think words could find a place. So, I step forward instead, reaching for him, and he lets me run my thumb across his bloodied knuckles, but he’s quick to pull them away.
Chase swallows, then rasps so quietly I barely hear him, “It’s only a matter of time before I kill you too, Laiken. Save yourself while you can.”
I wasn’t willing to accept that.
“You don’t get to make that decision, Chase. You don’t get to push me away.”
He is back at the bars and the anger contorting his once playful face makes him unrecognizable, ugly.
The Chase standing in front of me today isn’t the Chase I knew four weeks ago.
His eyes remain pressed to the ground when he spits, “I don’t want to see you. I don’t want to be around you. I can’t fucking stand looking at you.”
I flinch.
My stomach lurches, like I’m falling from a height.
Every word is a stab to my heart.
I swallow the bile creeping up the back of my throat. I let the silence press into us. He is trying to hurt me. He is pushing me away—and I hate that it’s working.
He begins to move back toward the building, and I shout, “At least look at me when you squeeze the trigger, Chase.”
And he doesn’t, he keeps walking.
I press my hand to my stomach, feeling it shift. I wouldn’t beg, not again.
Chase Keller had become someone I no longer knew.
My headphones are still in my ears, and I don’t realize music is playing until “True Friends” by Bring Me The Horizon sizzles through the wire.
I step back on trembling legs, my whole body a gaping wound.
Harlen calls out to me and I don’t turn around. I stagger away, and when I reach the end of the street, one hand wrapped around my ribs, I fall to my knees. My stomach feels as if it’s filled with thumbtacks and I work them up my throat, forcing out dark bile.
I sit back on my heels, running my wrist across my mouth. My knees are in the dirt, my heart a metronome at the base of my throat. I pull air into my lungs, and when I have enough, I clamber back to my feet, burying what cries I have left deep in my chest.
I continue to stumble, never turning back.
One night.
One decision.
It changed everything.
It altered and cleaved our lives.
We would never be the same again.