Chapter 77
CHAPTER SEVENTY-SEVEN
DAKOTA
Micah knocked on the bathroom door. Again.
I remained curled up in a ball on my side on the floor, soaking up the warmth of his heated tiles and making zero move to go unlock the door. My eyes were puffy from crying, and I was staring at the cracked screen of my phone lying on the tile a few feet away from me.
As much as I wanted my new life to be void of panic attacks and shame spirals, it was not. My bad days still existed.
I simply had a better bathroom floor to cry on now. Warm, with a nice bathmat.
I tried not to, but I still felt so fucking stupid all the time.
Even more now that I’d had the thought of unblocking my brother’s number this morning.
I didn’t want to do that. He didn’t deserve for me to do that.
But I still thought about it, still wondered if he’d ever tried messaging me, wondered what he would say if he did.
I’d also blocked him and his new wife on all social media platforms, so I didn’t have a clue what was going on in his life.
I hated that he still took up so much space in my brain, hated that I even cared about this.
It’d been a year now, since the last time I saw him at Thanksgiving.
Did he even notice I’d blocked him?
Would he even care?
Another knock.
No pounding or metal jamming into the lock or angry words.
Just a steady knocking, followed by a pause, then more knocking.
“Masters.” Micah’s voice was muffled. “Please unlock the door.”
“I don’t want to,” I mumbled, quiet enough that he probably couldn’t hear it. Another tear slipped down my cheek. The way I hated myself on these days suffocated me. It was as if every memory I’d ever made was crawling out of the crevices of my brain, just to wreck me all over again.
A strange wispy sound had me sitting up and staring at the door.
There was a piece of paper sliding underneath the crack, pushing onto the tile.
I quietly crawled over to it, my eyes skimming over Micah’s handwriting.
We still haven’t gone to your rock.
My lips rolled together, sadness and love crushing against each other in my chest. My rock.
My ocean rock. I’d told Micah once that if I ever grew wings, I’d want to go sit on that biggest rock for a few hours, then get the hell out of here.
He’d offered to take me there when I was sad a long time ago, when he was the only one of us with wings, but we never went.
I reached up and unlocked the door, but didn’t turn the handle to open it, both of my hands returning to grip the paper.
Micah slowly opened the door, staring down at me with torment in his eyes.
“Do you want to go?” he asked.
I didn’t contemplate my answer. I just nodded.
“Good. Come here.” Micah knelt and took me into his arms, pressing a kiss to my forehead. “I love you.” He kissed my cheek. “I love you.” My other cheek. “I love you.” A small kiss on my nose. “I love you.” His lips brushed my own, his arms wrapping tight around me. “You’re going to be okay.”
“No, I’m not. I’m always going to be like this.”
“That’s not true. You are my miracle girl.”
Whenever he called me that, I couldn’t stop the smile that tried forcing its way across my face. Every single time, it happened. It was unfair.
I buried my face against his chest.
“Repeat what I said,” Micah instructed.
“I don’t know what you said,” I mumbled into his t-shirt.
“I said that you are not always going to be like this. You’re going to be okay. And you are my miracle girl, and I love you so much I can’t even tell you in words.”
I tried to steady myself with an inhale, pressing my palms flat to Micah’s back to feel the solidness of his body, his strength. The same smile from before tugged at the corners of my mouth, subtly brightening the darkness in my brain.
“I’m your miracle girl,” I finally relented.
“And you’re going to be okay.”
“And I will try to be okay someday.”
“You’re twisting my words.” He rubbed up and down my back. “But I’ll accept it for now. Let’s go get in the car.”
I followed him downstairs and out of the house, peeking over at his phone screen to see him texting Mason—Ash.
It made my heart squeeze and flutter. Mason was currently doing some demon activities—or something like that—but it seemed he would be done soon.
It was unfortunate that my transformation from Angelakia to angel had basically caused the death of any other Thrausian living in this area, so Mason was much busier.
Micah and I climbed into his truck, and he jammed the key in the ignition, the engine rumbling as he backed out of the garage.
“Norman.” He pointed to the glovebox.
I pulled the latch to open it and got out the cassette for Norman Fucking Rockwell by Lana Del Rey, then carefully stuck it into the slot to play it.
Micah adjusted the volume knob as the song started.
But it wasn’t the first song on the album that began to hum out of the speakers. It was the third song.
Venice Bitch.
One of my top favorite songs ever.
I stared over at him, my eyes already welling with more tears. “Micah.”
“Masters?”
“You did this. Before you knocked on the bathroom door, you got in the car and listened to the first two songs then stopped the tape, so it would be here.”
“Yes. Of course I did.” He gave an easy smile, glancing at me, pine trees blurring past the windows. “I know you. I love you.”
I didn’t even know what to say to that.
This still didn’t feel entirely real to me. How had I gone from a life of quietly-ignored birthdays to a life where the person I loved knew exactly what song would make me happy after crying? Where he would go out of his way to get it ready for me to listen to?
It was a level of thoughtfulness I’d never even considered possible.
“Come here,” Micah murmured, extending his arm. “Lay down.”
I laid with my head on his lap, my legs bent up on the bench seat, my eyes closed and the sound of guitar and synth drifting endlessly around me. Shimmering and distorted, melancholic below its sweetness. Grateful tears slid quietly from below my eyelashes, brushed away by Micah’s thumb.
“I’m sorry for always crying so much,” I whispered.
“It doesn’t bother me. You’re very pretty when you do.” By the way his voice sounded, I could tell he was looking down at me. My cheeks flushed pink.
It didn’t take very long to get to my favorite beach, and Micah let me change into his shirt so I wouldn’t have to rip my own.
He efficiently tore a large slit up the center of the back, ignoring the guilt spilling from my lips.
I’d inadvertently destroyed so many of his clothes. He didn’t seem to care, though.
We went down the rocks together, winter wind ruffling my shirt, tangling in the lengths of my hair. This had been my beach with Anthony first, but it didn’t belong to him now. I’d rewritten all those memories, digging the tip of my knife in over the old words, carving new ones, deeper and deeper.
I used to wonder if sharks remembered things the way I did, used to write down poems about carving through my brain with their teeth, but I didn’t now.
They left their blackened teeth on the gritty beach, maybe like memories or maybe like nothing at all.
It didn’t matter. I left my black feathers here the same way.
Sometimes overcome with bad memories, sometimes overcome with nothing at all, living only in the present moment.
I am not the sum of my memories, not the consequence of everything that’s ever happened to me. I am loved. Steady and unflinching.
Micah had been practicing invisibility with me, so I cloaked myself, then allowed my wings to expand and catch the wind. It was much easier than before.
Micah did the same.
I couldn’t sense his Sigeian presence the same way he could sense mine, but I knew he was with me as I soared over choppy waves, over bursts of saltwater spray, until I reached the large dark rock emerging from the water, the one I’d spent years staring at while I prayed for a different life.
With my wings gone, I allowed the invisibility to slip away, my boots solid on the damp rock. I had a different life now.
Micah stepped up behind me, his arms looping around my waist and his chin resting on the top of my head.
“My Heaven on Earth,” he murmured, pressing a kiss to my hair as we stared out at the expanse of ocean around us.
“This rock?”
“No. You.” He squeezed me tighter.
Me.
I turned around so I could hug him and press my face to his bare chest, feeling him breathe, hearing his heart beat, thinking about how I might’ve never felt this again if things had been different. He might’ve been lost to an unreachable void forever, his forest perpetually out of my grasp.
But he’d tied me to himself two decades ago, and that thread was stronger than death.
It tied me to Mason, too. It bound all of us together.
And it was such a simple, thoughtless thing.
Holding me for a minute at the post office, just to help my struggling mother, because he was a good person deep down—even if he didn’t think so.
That was all it took, the stars above aligning perfectly for that one brief moment, setting all three of us on our separate paths, the trails destined to converge in the distant future.
Micah took my chin, tilted my head back, pressed his lips to mine.
I’d been wrong. There did exist another person who understood how it felt to drown with Mason Ashborn, and he was kissing me now.
“I love you,” he mumbled against my lips.
“I love you more,” I whispered back.
“Impossible.”
His frosted words were still in my brain, the ones breathed out into a vast forest. Words he meant entirely. I love you more than my own life.
I wasn’t sure I deserved that. It was hard to think about another person loving me so much, but Micah reassured me every time I worried. He made sure I knew I was worth everything to him. Worth spending time on, worth caring for, worth saving. And I showed him he was worth waiting for.
“Do you want to sit?” he asked.