Chapter 60
CHAPTER SIXTY
MASON
Two Months After
I pushed open Micah’s front door, instantly noticing there was another presence in the dark house.
I walked silently up to his bedroom.
Dakota was lying in his bed, curled up in a little ball on her side, her wings wrapped around her small body. She was crying, her shoulders shaking with weak sobs, her voice so soft and broken. It wasn’t the first time she’d slept like this in his bed. She’d been doing it often the past month.
Her wings were him, the weight of those bones and muscles and feathers the only way either of us would ever be able to hold him again. And now the wings held her, wrapping around her body the same way he did when she slept, comforting her and keeping her safe in a way I couldn’t.
Especially not now as both drowned in our grief, neither able to save the other.
Sometimes we screamed at each other until our voices were hoarse.
Sometimes we didn’t speak for days.
I couldn’t decide which hurt more.
I walked around the side of the bed and knelt next to her face, holding her cheek in my palm, staring at her teary eyes. Her eyelashes were all wet and clumped together, her cheeks flushed, her lips shiny.
She didn’t say anything.
“I love you,” I whispered.
Her expression broke, face scrunching up like everything hurt her, and she reached her arms towards me. I leaned in, tucking her damp face in the crook of my neck.
“I’m sorry,” I breathed.
She shook her head, sniffling, clinging to me tighter.
After a few minutes, I crawled onto the bed behind her, stroking my fingertips lightly over her wings. She seemed to relax when I did it, so I continued, gently tracing her feathers until her breathing evened out and she was asleep again, surrounded by the fading scent of pine trees and rain.
━━━━━
Dakota was mostly quiet as I drove both of us to my apartment, slumped over onto the center console, her backpack on the floor at her feet. It was raining, and the temperature was low enough for the roads to be slightly icy, so all the cars were driving slower than normal.
I pulled into the parking lot and shut off my car, but I didn’t get out right away. Dakota didn’t move either.
We sat together while raindrops pattered on the windshield and the top of the car, dripping down the windows, obscuring the outside world. How am I supposed to keep doing this forever without him? How is she?
More often than I’d ever tell her, I thought about what I’d read in her journal on that terrible morning when she woke up with blood staining her shorts.
Ivy. It made me so deeply sad in a way I couldn’t articulate with words.
Maybe I hadn’t wanted the baby at first, and even less so because it belonged to Micah, but when I saw that, I felt sick to my stomach.
Some part of her had wanted it.
And she didn’t want to tell me.
I hated how that felt. I wondered if she ever thought about it, if she wished she hadn’t miscarried now. She could’ve still had Micah’s child. But maybe she wouldn’t have wanted to do it without him. I’d never really know the answer to that. I wasn’t going to ask her.
Dakota eventually sat up and gathered her belongings, then pushed out of the car without waiting for me.
I hopped out and jogged around to catch up with her as she reached the door to my apartment complex, then opened it for her.
We went up the elevator together, then down the hall to my apartment.
The door frame remained busted, but it wasn’t really visible from the exterior.
I pushed the door open, and Dakota went directly to my bedroom without a word.
We’d tried to have sex since his death, but it wasn’t good. Neither of us really wanted to do it. It was more of a compulsion than anything, some fleeting attempt at normalcy or connection between us.
Dakota cried a little bit, but mostly just stared at the ceiling.
Once, I tried to flip her over onto her stomach and fuck her harder, but I almost broke down right there, so I had to disappear into the bathroom and lock the door until I could pull myself together.
That was the last time we ever tried doing anything intimate.
I had no idea how I could fix it.
We weren’t surviving together.
We were drowning right beside each other.
Dakota dropped her backpack on my bed, then came out of the bedroom towards the kitchen, where I stood in the hallway, broken glass crunching under her boots.
Most of it had been kicked to the sides of my apartment now, but it was still there, along with every other broken thing I’d destroyed on the day he died.
“Are we ever going to clean this?” she asked, motioning to the floor.
“Why?”
“Because we live here.”
“Barely.”
Her green eyes narrowed, but she didn’t say anything else before walking into the wrecked kitchen. I followed her, leaning against the non-broken part of the countertop as she got a plastic cup for water. She filled the cup, then drank all of it.
And then the apartment was silent.
She remained facing away from me for a few minutes, not doing anything except staring down at her hand holding the empty cup.
“I don’t think we’re getting better,” Dakota said quietly, more to herself than me. After a minute, she turned. “Do you?”
I couldn’t respond.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to put words to the disaster we were becoming.
She took a shaky inhale, glancing around at the ruin of my apartment.
“Do you still want me here?”
I can’t want you here.
You need to leave before I bring both of us all the way to the bottom.
“It doesn’t matter,” I mumbled.
“Don’t do this.” Her eyes were pleading. “Talk to me. Tell me what you’re thinking.”
“What makes you think I would want to do that?”
She tossed her arms up. “Are we seriously going to do this again?” Her voice got louder, angrier.
“Do what?”
“This bullshit! This!” She gestured between us. “I don’t want to fix you. But I have to help you.”
“You really don’t.”
“I really do.”
“You know, if you hadn’t been screaming at us, this wouldn’t have happened in the first place.” I said, before I could think better of it. The moment the words left my mouth, I wished I could take them back.
But it was too late.
Dakota’s face was completely pale, her wide eyes glossy with tears, her body language stiff and defensive.
“Are you saying this is my fault?” she managed to question, her hands trembling.
“No—”
“Well, I agree with you!” She increased the volume of her voice again, tears coming faster, her finger pointed at my chest as her emotions flipped. “I fucking agree with you Mason. It is my fault, and I wish I’d died that night instead of him! I’m glad you’re finally being honest!”
“I’m not being honest!” I shouted, making her angrier. My chest was tight, all my muscles aching from tension and anxiety and instability. “I didn’t mean to fucking say that, Dakota!”
“Yes you did! Don’t lie to me! You think it’s all my fault, and you hate me because I killed him!” Her screams broke into sobs again and it felt like the walls were closing in on me.
I was hurting her. I was fucking ruining her. Micah had left her with me, and I was nothing except a violent nightmare.
Poison in the water.
“Tell me. Do you wish it had been me?” Dakota continued. “Do you wish I died instead of him?”
No. I wish I died instead of either of you.
And part of me really fucking hates Micah for making the choice he made.
“Never,” I said, but it was clear she didn’t believe me. “I would never wish that, not in a million years.”
“But you just can’t ignore the fact that I was fighting with him—I was fighting with both of you, and then I stormed off and got myself fucking killed, can you?” Her voice trembled with each word, but she didn’t slow down. “I don’t blame you, Mason.”
“Well, I do! I do blame myself! I should’ve known he was going to do that!
I should’ve stopped him!” I threw my hands up in the air, my throat constricting.
“I knew you could become an angel if another angel sacrificed their life for you, but I somehow never considered it might happen in that way. I should’ve—”
“Why wouldn’t you tell me that?” She cut me off, eyes narrowing.
“Micah thought it was a bad idea.” A bitter taste coated my tongue, and I hated myself even more. I didn’t need to bring him into this. He wasn’t here to defend himself, and I’d wholeheartedly agreed with him at the time.
He’s not here to defend himself.
He’s not here at all.
“You don’t have to listen to everything he says.
I deserved to know.” Hurt shone in Dakota’s teary eyes, and she had her arms crossed over her chest like she needed to physically protect her heart from me.
“But you’re always going to lie to me, aren’t you?
It doesn’t even matter what the topic is.
All I will ever get from you are lies, Mason. ”
“That’s not true.”
“It is true.” She’d moved farther away from me at some point during our conversation.
“I told you he left me. That was the truth.”
“Only because I figured it out myself.” Her cheeks still glistened with tears, and panic still encroached on my every thought.
Only two months without Micah, and Dakota and I had become almost entirely dysfunctional.
More than that, it was entirely my fault that we were breaking apart. This was in my nature.
“Do you want me to tell you something you haven’t figured out yourself?” I questioned, my heart beating in my throat and my palms sweating. Fear and self-hatred constricted my ribs, until I could barely get a breath in—not that I needed a breath. I wished I could never breathe again.
“Sure. But I don’t see how it matters.” Dakota moved back further away from me. I tried reminding myself that this was good, that she needed to leave me. It was the only way to survive me.
But deep down, I still didn’t want her to.
“It matters because you…You need to understand you can’t stay with me.”
“I can do whatever—”
“No.” I interrupted her sharply. “You can’t. I—” My voice cut out, my hand ghosting over my tight throat as I stared at the ceiling.
“I almost…” The words died on my tongue.
How was I supposed to phrase this?
I wished she would be horrified by the admission once I told her, but she knew me too well for that.
She’d already been let down so many times by me, already seen all the terrible sides.
This wouldn’t be a surprise, as much as I wished it was.
But I needed her to know just how disgusting I could be, how bad things were going to get.
“I almost sexually assaulted him. And I don’t really know if he’s lying about the almost part. But what’s worse is I didn’t even know I was doing it. I was completely gone.”
Dakota was silent.
“If I could do that to him, imagine what I could do to you,” I continued.
“I don’t have to imagine it.”
The knot in my throat grew until I couldn’t breathe at all.
“I think it’s best if you leave,” I said, trying desperately to clear my throat, making some attempt to appear stable.
“Why? I already know what you’re capable of.”
“You don’t understand,” I pleaded. I wasn’t the first person to do that to him. I knew how badly he was hurt by his past, and I somehow still lost control to the point where I traumatized him again in the exact same way. I couldn’t tell her that, though. “You just—”
“I understand perfectly. You’re a terrible person. I don’t care. So am I.”
Her words dug into me.
I felt really stupid then, because while I knew it was the truth, maybe some part of me didn’t actually want to be such a terrible person.
Maybe some part of me wanted to have been born differently, to have been perceived differently for my whole life, to have been capable of making morally correct choices and controlling myself.
But I was a terrible person. And I always would be.
I had done so many terrible, terrible things.
My stomach twisted.
The version of myself I’d been on my last night with Micah was the truest one of them all. That was who I became when I was lost to instinct.
“You should care, Dakota. Don’t be fucking stupid. You’re not bad like I am.”
“I’m not leaving, so quit telling me to. I don’t listen to you anymore.”
I sensed her in my skull, digging all my messy emotions up.
Violence surged in my thoughts with the sensation, and Dakota’s entire body tensed, preparing for whatever physical or emotional harm I would inflict on her.
She didn’t try and stop it, no. She braced.
The only emotions she ever took from my brain were the ones that would harm me. Not her. Never her.
I didn’t have Micah to fight with anymore, and all the Thrausians that’d been living in this area of Washington were either dead or fast on their way to that brutal end.
Dakota’s transformation into a real angel had thrown off the fragile balance all of us had been living in for the past two decades.
There didn’t seem to be any other Angelakia here—at least not any other Sigeian ones.
I lunged forward and my fist broke through the drywall next to Dakota’s head.
She flinched but didn’t move.
“I’m going to hurt you. You need to leave,” I said through my teeth, despite knowing I’d already hurt her worse than she could recover from. In every way possible, I’d infected her with darkness and violence.
She had a deadly fantasy when she met me.
I took that fantasy and turned it into a nightmare.
“I can’t leave, Mason. I need you.” She shook her head, teary-eyed. “Leave with me, then. We can get out of here for a little bit.”
I’m so sorry.
I’m so sorry for who I am.