Chapter Twelve #2
They are vain, both of them. They like their bodies, they like the way they fit together, how immortal they feel when the other looks at them naked and sees something they want. He is a young god, hewn from perfection, and he is more beautiful than the sun. He could have had anyone.
She wonders sometimes, in a quiet yet brutal way, if there is a reason no one else wanted him.
Don’t be fucking insane.
They met on accident, and he fell in love with her, and that is all there is to it. She’s just unused to something good happening to her.
“I’m not sending him back to that school.” Her voice comes muffled from within the nest of duvet.
Bren rumples his knuckles through his still-damp hair as he leans against the doorframe of the en suite. Behind him, steam fogs the mirrors. “Kind of thought you’d say that. But that’s the only elementary school in Farrows, unless we go Catholic.”
“There’s this private preschool.” Elodie spins her phone screen and he comes over to take it from her and read.
He gives a confused scoff. “But he’s six. This is for three- and four-year-olds.”
“They don’t have to know that.” She says it carefully, not quite looking at him. Her bruised hand lays atop the blankets, the throb heady but regulated now, and he hasn’t commented on it or even mentioned hearing her scream.
His silence bleeds into the shadows pulling against the edges of the room, a coldness to it that feels so alien she doesn’t know how to fit around the shape of it.
“You heard his teacher.” Her voice stays low, calm. “He acts young. He’s such a little thing, Bren, no one even blinks twice if I say he’s four, and his behaviors fit that age.”
“How the hell is this addressing the problem?” Bren stares at her. “We need to handle whatever is going on with him, not … not cover it up. Also, wait. You tell people he’s four?”
She ignores the last part, throwing fury back at him with a snap. “Oh, like how you’re ‘handling’ the rot in our walls?”
He gives her a tight look, shakes his head abruptly, and walks around to his side of the bed. For once, the monstrous size of their four-poster doesn’t feel luxurious—it’s a desert neither of them makes an effort to cross. He keeps his back to her, messing around with his old vintage clock.
“Don’t be a hypocrite,” she says. “Not with me.”
“Maybe we should take him to a child psychologist.”
Elodie sits bolt upright, her cozy burrow of blankets and pillows tumbling apart. “The hell?”
Bren rubs a thumb in the corner of his eye. “We could get some answers.”
“They’ll take him.” The anger is back, molten on her trembling tongue. “They’ll take him away from me. How can you even suggest—”
He flops backward onto the bed, reaching a hand toward her.
She wrenches away. “Elodie, they won’t take him away.
Why do you even think that? Kids with, like …
special needs exist.” He fumbles for words he has never had to parse until now, because in the world of the Januarys, children are born beautiful and bold and faultless. “No one thinks you did this to him.”
Her bruised hand curls into a fist, pain reigniting. She feels like screaming.
“We need to get a handle on him before the baby comes,” Bren goes on. “What happens when the baby frustrates him and he lashes out at him?”
“Or when you demand he gives up his room—”
“Jesus, I’m not demanding! But he does need to transition to a big bed.”
“Or,” she says, breathless, furious, “we give him more time. Put him back in preschool. Tell people he’s four. He’ll be under less pressure and it will help him. He gets frightened. He’s so little, Bren.”
“Yeah, well, you don’t really help with that, either, do you? He needs to eat real food and not get away with all these tantrums. A psychologist could—”
“No.” She has turned primal, her teeth sharp. “No shitty doctor is going to root around in his head and pathologize him and tell me he is broken. He just needs more time. I’ll make him believe he’s four.”
She will tear out throats before someone touches Jude, talks to him, pries open his chest and plunges vicious fingers around in the softness of his guts to pull out every horrible thing he’s been through. No one can know.
He’s just a baby. He’s her baby.
Bren swivels to face her, and the cool annoyance on his face ignites her most vulnerable fears.
“You sound unhinged.”
“Oh, fuck you,” she snaps.
“Or maybe listen for a goddamn second instead of always attacking anyone who suggests—”
“Suggests I’m not doing my best for my kid?”
“I didn’t even say that!” His ears flush red, muscles in his jaw rippling in a way that screams danger.
She doesn’t care. Her voice is rising, anger a throttling force that upends her words and fills them with something white-hot. “You don’t trust me. You don’t think I’m capable or smart or—or remotely able to save myself.”
Something dark flashes in his eyes, a molten fury that would burn to the touch. “You couldn’t save yourself or Jude and you fucking know it. Don’t act like anything was under control, because it wasn’t.”
“I didn’t need you to rescue me.”
“You did.” It’s a snarl. “You needed me then and you need me now, so take a second to remember you have nothing without me.”
She could strike him. Her bruised hand rises, though there is no energy in it, and when he grabs her wrist, he is all steel and iron edges.
She wants to throw herself against him, to cut and be cut, to bleed out in pure vindictive pleasure.
Her fury is a bottomless well, and she wants to let loose, to rage in a way she has never allowed herself to in front of him.
Only, she isn’t meant to be angry. She is sweet Elodie January, delicate and quiet and reserved, no fractures showing on her porcelain veneer.
Bren tightens his grip on her. “No one is going to take him from you unless you keep acting deranged. Calm. The hell. Down. Don’t make me fix this in ways you won’t like.”
“Then let me put him in preschool!”
“Fine! Fuck. Fine. But I’ll enroll him. I’ll do the paperwork so you don’t screw it up. And in return you are going to let me handle him. You clearly can’t do it, so I will. And”—his voice turns rusted and rough—“you will trust me. Stop fighting me. Stop destroying my house.”
“Threaten me again,” she whispers, “and I will kill you.”
He yanks her closer and she cries out. His mouth is so close to hers. “Then stop being hysterical.”
The angle of her chin is regal, almost haughty, and she brings her free hand up to wrap about his throat. Her skin is so cold, his a furnace.
“What if I say no?”
“You won’t say no,” he says.
She shoves him back against the pillows and he goes down easily, his grip on her wrist loosening only so he can take hold of her hips as she straddles him.
When she kisses him, there is only fury as their teeth crack together, as he snarls something appreciative and hungry into her mouth, and then takes a fistful of her hair.
Too tight, too hard. Everything between them is cut glass and black frost, and she loves him, she hates him, as she yanks down his pajama pants and makes him groan.
His anger is already morphing into enamored want, and she knows he likes this.
When she is feral. Blood in his mouth. Bruises forming where she bit.
“Just know this,” she says. “I will always love him more than you.”
“Oh, I know.”
Bren is breathing fast as he pushes her off and then rolls so their positions are reversed. He on her this time, his weight suffocating, maddening, addicting.
“You always do this when we fight,” he murmurs into her neck. “You don’t have to. Arguments don’t have to end in sex.”
But she needs to know he still wants her.
“I’m not letting you go,” he says. “I couldn’t bear it. I need you.”
She needs to be wanted. She needs to be touched. She needs this.
He pulls off her shirt, then her sweatpants, his kisses growing more frantic. She wants to dig into his chest, carve out mounds of meat and oozing organs with her fingernails until there is space enough for her to worm inside him.
When there is nothing left of their fight—the consuming heat and ravenous hunger now whittled down to lust alone—she stops feeling like she’s falling.
She is calm again. She is in control.
“I love you so much I can’t bear it.” The anguished tremble in his voice thrills her. “Say you need me.”
She presses her face into the sweaty crook of his neck with a small, whimpered gasp. “I need you.”
“This house is for you.” He is everywhere; he is everything. “This house is you.”
She thinks, in a distant way, as she kisses him, that she doesn’t understand what he means.