CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
JAMES WAS INTOXICATED WITH SENSATION. Infatuation. His mind was tangled in Elliott when Kitty spoke to him, her words piercing through his thoughts like a javelin.
“You’re wearing someone else’s cologne.” Before James could mention it was perfectly normal to borrow a cologne, Kitty went on.
“You’re wearing his ties with the teeth marks in them.
You’ve never worn his ties before. You’re with him.
You’re sipping his college mug instead of yours, even though you don’t drink high-sugar energy drinks.
You’re trying to hide the fact that you’re with him. All of his exes did the same thing.”
“His exes?” James tripped over the soil. James led her through the beautiful prairies of campus. That afternoon, he wanted to surprise her with Elliott.
For their final year of high school, the prospective students that applied to the Crucian League as psychology students were secluded together for the year to examine every aspect of human psychology with each other.
Where they somehow became even more pretentious as they psychoanalyzed everyone, further armed with scholastic knowledge.
Before Kitty left for the year, James thought to reunite them at least once.
Now he couldn’t speak under her direct gaze. His tongue tangled.
“Are you dating my brother?” Kitty asked at last, excitement consuming her eyes. Elliott found happiness?
James cleared his throat. “That’s not the surprise.”
Elliott was smitten, and it was written all over his face in cursive. A calligraphy of love. James always believed himself to be surreptitious, adept at secrecy.
He hadn’t anticipated Kitty deciphering him.
Kitty was rarely wrong. She was right about the drinks. He hated the erratic, hyperactive energy drinks, it felt like lightning buzzed beneath his skin, but he loved the taste of it on Elliott’s mouth every morning.
He sipped it sometimes only to have a taste of him throughout the day.
Elliott had that effect on everyone who loved him. They all wanted to be in his world.
He could make you love anything.
James couldn’t bring himself to look at her. “What would you think about it, if he and I were together?”
Kitty was the closest James had to a younger sister.
It would feel as though his family rejected him, if Kitty didn’t think James was right for him.
She could be excited for them, but she might think Elliott was better with Halle.
Halle was loving, healing, and warm. James was tethered to the darkest moments of Elliott’s life, the strain of two murders. Kitty was honest that way.
“You’ve never forgiven yourself for the past, and I think it’s time that you let yourself live. Elliott’s never been able to overcome the pain of his past either. If anyone could understand each other, it’s mated souls like yours.”
Mated souls. James’s tense shoulders relaxed.
He thanked her with a kiss on her temple.
James didn’t believe in woven threads, however, for the first time in his life, he believed anything Kitty believed.
Every dawn, James existed without an urge to swallow Scotch to blunt the day before it even started.
His limerence with Elliott was beyond obsession.
His extreme happiness with him beyond a wild delirium. Life was fantasy.
“You’ll take care of him while I’m gone?” She asked softly, though she didn’t need to even ask that of him. Elliott’s heart was his own heart. “Will you look out for him?”
“I’ll take care of him with everything in me, Kitty,” James promised. “He’s safe.”
Kitty didn’t hear the last syllables of his words, she fell into tears, seeing Elliott for the first time since December. Since huntsmen coerced buck antlers onto his head, twined his wrists with rope, and forced him out to slaughter. The crowds of thousands that kept them apart.
He stood alone between the elms and sugar maples.
She ran for him.
Elliott held her so tightly not even the huntsmen could wrench them apart at that moment. “I missed you more than anything,” his voice thickened, fighting back the throes of relief, sorrow, guilt, pain, love. He was close to tears in front of her. “I missed you more than I missed myself.”
His words didn’t make sense to anyone but Kitty. Elliott hadn’t been the same from the minute his name was echoed over the masses, his life nearly cut short, his world abruptly ruptured. In her arms, he was Elliott again.
It’d taken him half a year, but he was almost Elliott again. He couldn’t have been whole without the chance to hold her in his arms again. To embrace his little sister and keep them warm from the winter of the earth around them.
“Were you okay out there?” Kitty asked between sobs, trying to dry her face in futile, her eyes were bathed with tears. “Did you sleep alright? All I thought about was you.”
Elliott nodded. “I managed to sleep. A friend of James kept me safe.”
James was on the outside of their embrace, his hands in his pockets, his eyes on the compassion between a family he would never have. He would never experience again.
All he had were memories of his mother’s arms, the charm of her voice, the soft wink of her eye as she kissed his forehead. Eu te amo tanto. Eu te amo tanto que as palavras n?o podem expressar meus sentimentos. Meu anjo.
Even when he was mischievous, he was her angel.
It struck him then that he wasn’t her angel. He wasn’t headed to where she was in the afterlife, they would never be reunited. The earth would be the only time he would ever have with Elliott and Kitty. Exactly like his mother, he could only experience them once.
He could only pray to gaze up at them.
Unaware of the dark, bittersweet thoughts of James’s mind, Elliott opened his arm towards him at the same time Kitty opened her arms to James, as though it were natural for them to think of him. To want him there with them.
Before he knew it, he was interwoven in their heartfelt embrace.
“I love you past the stars, James.” Elliott’s words brushed against his ear. Elliott didn’t need to hear the words back, but everything ached within James to return something, anything, to him. To give all of himself unto Elliott.
“In the end, all I want is to gaze up at you,” James whispered to him. “I want to gaze up at you for eternity.”