Chapter 69
CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE
MICAH
Dakota hadn’t come back when Mason came back. When she’d left me here alone earlier, I had a feeling it would end up like this, with her finding an excuse to stay away while sending Mason to me by himself. She knew things now. About us. About me.
I stared down at the back of my hands as I sat in the leather armchair, hearing Mason enter through my front door. My fingers trembled slightly, the fading black veins twitching below my skin.
The burn that’d swallowed me after I flicked the lighter against my own palm was little more than a memory now, the only trace of that pain imprinted in these dim shadows running along my skin.
Mason had already been in the sky at that point, Dakota held tight to the front of him as she gasped for breath she could never find, her white wings limp and bloody hanging off her back.
When I thought about it, I was almost uncomfortable with the morbidity of carrying around a lighter in my pocket for the weeks after learning about Dakota’s true nature. Angelakia. It wasn’t something I looked forward to admitting to.
Of course, I’d mostly expected we would have to find a third-party angel to gift her transformation—or to force to do it—but the idea that it could’ve been myself had always lingered around the edges of my skull.
And so, I carried a lighter with me. I was too much of a planner to ignore what would happen after I potentially gave Dakota my life—Mason would have to burn my body.
I’d been hoping I might be able to find the strength to do it myself, to spare him the trauma, but it probably hadn’t mattered in the end.
He sat down on the couch, and I didn’t look at him directly, but I could see his feet at the edge of my vision.
I considered feeling for his emotions, but my strength wasn’t what it’d been before. The process of my entire body healing after death was tiring enough.
“If you don’t want to talk, we don’t have to. I’m not going to make a big deal of it,” Mason started. I kept my stare glued to my hands. “And I’ll leave if you want me to. Leave and never come back. But I really want to apologize to you.”
My pulse quickened, beating up in my tight throat, and I clenched my fingers into fists, then flexed them back out.
“I honestly don’t want an apology,” I said, keeping my voice as low and controlled as I could.
“Do you just want me to go?”
The anguish in his tone had me glancing up, my eyes finding his darker ones, heat crawling along my ribs.
The expression on his face now was almost identical to the one when I’d left him, but with less surprise and more pain.
Like he’d been expecting this, trying to brace for it, and failing.
I thought about that expression a lot. It haunted me. He hadn’t deserved the way I left him.
“No.” I cleared my throat. His face didn’t relax at all. “You don’t need to apologize,” I clarified.
“But how could I—”
“Because I let you believe I was fine.”
Silence filled the air, and I wasn’t ready to have this conversation—would never be ready—but I’d already died once.
I wouldn’t kill myself again with more lies.
I’d had about twenty three years to come to terms with my own decisions, two long decades of living with the knowledge that what caused our end was my dishonesty.
As much as Mason’s instability tore me apart, my own inability to be truthful with him about it was the final nail in our coffin.
I’d put myself in the position to be hurt.
I’d let him think everything was better than it was.
I could only hide from that for so long.
“I should’ve known,” Mason finally said. “I knew you, Micah. I should’ve realized you’d—”
“I don’t want you to do this,” I cut him off, shaking my head. “Just let it be. I didn’t want to let you down, didn’t want to be seen as weak, and so I never told you how much I was struggling. It’s not your job to read my mind.”
The words burned on the way out, and Mason didn’t look any happier to be hearing them than I was speaking them.
I wasn’t sure there was a point, anyway.
What purpose did my explanations serve now?
Mason deserved to know years ago why I left him without a glance back.
I couldn’t do it then, and I could hardly do it now.
And now that I’d told him about our last night together, using the most euphemistic words possible, he’d latched onto that act as the thing on which to shackle his shame.
He saw my past and what’d almost happened between us through the same lens, but the core feeling from those events was different to me. It had to be different.
It wasn’t about what could’ve happened.
It was about what I’d realized about myself.
In that moment, I saw how far we’d truly gone, how lost I’d become to him, how lost he’d become to me, and neither of us were honest enough to handle something like that. He’d trusted me blindly, and I was no longer capable of deserving it.
“Did you burn yourself?” he questioned, pulling my gaze away from my hands again.
“I didn’t want you to have to do it.”
I watched his throat move when he swallowed, his eyes darting away for an instant.
“I wish you hadn’t made that choice for me. I would’ve…” His head fell forward, hands lifting to press against his face as he sucked in a deep inhale between his palms. “I would’ve liked to see your face one more time, before it was engulfed in flame.”
There was a pause.
“Well, I don’t know what you want me to say to that,” I said dryly. Instantly, I could see the irritation in his body language.
“You don’t have to fucking say anything, Micah!” He raised his voice. “I was just telling you. I had—”
“No. I didn’t do that shit hoping to come back and have this conversation with you about it!
” I stood up from the chair, my heart slamming on my ribcage.
Mason stood too, but neither of us took any steps closer.
We faced each other, breathing harder, the frayed, knotted, tangled, breaking threads of our souls stretched messily between us.
“You did it because you wanted to die.”
I pressed my lips together. “Yeah, probably. Is that what you want to hear? That I still value your life above my own? That it wasn’t even a question for me?”
“Those are two different answers,” Mason said, taking one slow step towards me. I held my ground. “Either you wanted to die, or you wanted to save me and Dakota.”
“It can’t be both?”
“I need to know,” he pleaded hoarsely. “Did I do that to you? Make you hate your life that much?”
No.
It was the absence of you.
“We’re not doing this,” I rushed, finally breaking our eye contact to walk away from him, knowing he would follow me and dreading the sound of his footsteps.
“All you need to know is that it happened. I wouldn’t have done it had her life not been ripped away from her like that, but I didn’t hesitate either. Does that satisfy you?”
“She wouldn’t want you to feel that way. She loves you.”
I spun around. “And I can’t handle it! I can’t handle anything! I cut you off after fifty two years without a conversation. Imagine what I could do to her.”
“The reason you didn’t have a conversation with me was because I—” His voice got tight, his sentence choked off in the middle.
“Not you. Me.”
“I should’ve known, Kill! I should’ve asked! You didn’t owe me control or words or convincing. I knew you.”
I stepped back until my hip hit the edge of the counter, but Mason didn’t stop his advance until he was barely a foot from me. His eyes were dark with desperation.
“Stop simplifying this into a conversation about consent, when it’s fucking not.
I’m fucking fine. The only thing that night did was make me realize I couldn’t survive us if I couldn’t be honest with you—if nothing changed.
And I knew nothing would change because of who I am!
Admitting how powerless I’d become would’ve felt worse than anything you could’ve done to me. ”
Mason was an unmovable stone.
I was an impenetrable wall.
Neither of us would be willing to relinquish blame to the other. As easily as we’d argued with words of external hatred, we’d shifted to arguing with words displaying our internal hatred. We used to fight for dominance, for control, for the right to blame the other for our brutal end.
Now, we fought to place that same weight on our own shoulders.
I had no idea where we were supposed to go from this point.
He was wrong.
I just stared at him.
Mason took another step forward, as close as he could be without touching me. I held myself motionless.
“You never told me,” he started, his voice low. “But you shouldn’t have had to. Anything you think you did wrong doesn’t cancel out anything I did wrong.”
Fear gripped my chest, panic weaving its way through my ribs the longer this conversation went on.
We’d had it before. Mason understood what almost happened, understood how I’d lost control, understood how badly he’d drained me, but somehow accepting the fact that had almost been another memory like the one that’d altered my life in the first place was horrifying.
This was a consequence of my dishonesty. Nothing else.
I wasn’t the type of person who had something like that happen to them. Who was assaulted. Much less two times. This was me losing control and not telling Mason. This was not Mason doing anything to me.
What almost happened with Mason stood nowhere near the bad thing that happened in Heaven. They were categorically separate. I was weak and I made a decision not to say anything.
“No,” I said through gritted teeth. “It wasn’t because of you. I should’ve—”
“Stop.” Mason’s voice was firm.
“I’m not going to stop. I lost control. I wasn’t prepared enough. This has nothing to do with you. You made no decision here.”
“Micah—”
“Shut the fuck up.” I shoved him off of me, my hands shaking and my jaw tight. “I failed. You remind me of my own failure. That’s the only reason I don’t want to look at you.” My chest rose and fell rapidly. I felt sick. There wasn’t enough neon in the air and there never would be. “I can’t—”