21. Preston #3
Take me with you, I whisper in my head. I want to go with you.
I float higher toward the stars, watching the scene from above as the small body—the useless shell I left behind—barely gives a shudder. The terror coils hot in the cavity where my center should be, but it’s distant, muffled by the black.
It’s fine. It’s not happening to you, the stars whisper, their voices similar to mine, colder, inhuman. You’re just watching. You’re safe.
I close my eyes in the dark, my real eyes, the ones that exist outside the body on the bed, and wait for the apathy to swallow the last of the fear.
For a moment, I’m a ghost tethered to a corpse, waiting for the string to finally snap.
But it doesn’t.
And the boy who looks like me is thrashing. He’s fighting, trying to breathe.
“Shut up,” I murmur. “Shut the fuck up. Stop fighting. It’ll only hurt more if you fight.”
His big green eyes, the ones I didn’t kill yet, are staring up at me, welling with a pool of tears.
“Help me,” he says, the words carried on a low, haunted rasp. “Tell Mom and Dad to help me.”
“No one will ever help you. Just stay still and put up with it.”
“Mom will help me.”
“Mom left you because you wouldn’t shut the fuck up and take it. She killed herself because of you!”
“Noooo.”
“Yes. It’s all your fault, you useless idiot.”
“W-what about Dad?”
“He doesn’t even like you. No one does, you fuckup. No one.”
A tear slides down his cheek, but he stops thrashing, stops moving as the figure shrouded in black moves on top of him.
“What about you?” the boy whispers, the black smoke nearly swallowing him whole. “Can’t you save us?”
A loud creak crashes in the silence, and I jolt up and grab the black figure by the throat.
“Die!” I scream. “Fucking die!”
It’s writhing beneath me, but today, I’ll get rid of it once and for all. There will never be darkness again, no nightmares, no constant fucking static—
“P-Preston, it’s me…” A hand taps on my arm, and I flinch when the familiar voice registers.
My limbs go slack as the world clears up around me.
Instead of my room in Mom’s house, I find myself in a small room with gray bedsheets. Instead of lying down, I’m straddling Marcus, both my hands wrapped around his throat.
His face is red, the veins bulging from his neck from the force of my choking.
I let him go, my hands trembling, and jerk away so fast, I fall backward. Marcus catches my arm and pulls me forward before I hit my head on the floor.
“Let me go!” I slap his hand away, my skin crawling.
Not because of his touch, but mine.
My hands are covered with black smudges from that dark figure in the nightmare.
Marcus doesn’t see them, but I do. They’re sticky and smell of suffocating cigarettes and mint.
And I don’t want to touch Marcus with this filth.
I slide into the corner until my back slams against the wall, then pull my knees to my chest.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Breathe, I tell myself. Just fucking breathe.
Stop being such a fucking mess.
Marcus remains at the edge of the bed, watching me closely. “Do you need anything?”
“Why the fuck am I here?” I stare at him as if I’m in a parallel universe.
When did I come to meet Marcus? I was in Mom’s house.
My jittery brain is assaulted by all sorts of images, and none of them explain this.
I almost killed him.
“You fell asleep a couple of hours ago,” Marcus says in a calm, steady voice. “I came to pick up some clothes, and I saw that you were clearly having a nightmare, so I tried to wake you up.”
My lips part as memories flood back in.
I fell asleep in Marcus’s room.
Me, who never sleeps in unfamiliar places, not even in Kane’s house, fell asleep here? I didn’t even check the locks obsessively like I usually do.
How…?
This doesn’t make any sense.
“Don’t do that again,” I whisper, releasing my knees and forcing myself to sit straighter.
“Do what?”
“Wake me up. I might actually kill you next time.” I jut my chin toward the red fingerprints on his neck and grimace.
He tilts his head to the side, and I notice his thumb stops tapping against his middle finger. “You think that scares me?”
“It will when you’re dead.”
“You can’t kill me, Preston.”
“I could’ve just now.”
“No. I would’ve fought you off. The only reason I didn’t was because I thought it would be a better idea to resort to a gentler approach.”
I narrow my eyes. “Why?”
“I suppose you don’t like being restricted or touched, because you started being violent when I tried to grab your hands. So I figured countering your violence with violence would only backfire.”
My lips part. How did he even…deduce that so fast?
“But I was choking you,” I whisper.
His lips curl into a playful grin. “Wasn’t the first time. I’m used to you being a menace.”
I stare, dumbfounded, my gulp audible in the silence.
And it hits me. I categorically can’t understand this man.
At all.
If I were him, I would’ve gotten rid of me ages ago. And yet even as he sees me at my lowest, at my most shameful moment, he’s not running away.
If anything, he seems…fascinated. Enamored.
And that look scares the shit out of me.
Because I think I could get used to it.