I decide my plan is to stay awake and to wait for Knox to fall asleep so I can watch him. It sounds crazy, feels that way, too, but I want to do it. I want to watch his chest slowly rise and fall, a small angel-like smile on his lips, and to imagine being able to kiss them whenever I wanted. To imagine they were for me alone. Strange to think that that is exactly what I want and that that is exactly what I could have had just a little while ago, but stopped.
I’m angry.
I’m pissed off, and I mean really pissed off.
With myself. As if glued to the couch I glower over at Knox. There’s no mirror around or I’d glower at myself. I ball my hands into fists and drive my nails into my palms until it hurts.
Apologize. Talk with him. You didn’t mean it. Tell him.
It doesn’t work. I can’t get my mouth open although I cannot lie: Ireallywant Knox. There are a variety of reasons why.
He listens to Disney songs in his car.
He puts Simon and Garfunkel on the jukebox as if he simplyknewme.
He says my ears are ethereal when he means aesthetic.
He finds me beautifulin every conceivableway.
I have shattered into a thousand pieces, some far too small, far too broken and fractured to be glued back together to make a whole. But Knox can do it. Put me back together. Close to him, I have the feeling that his very glance could put me back together. As if it would save me. As if he would say, “Come on, Paisley, truth for a truth,” and all of a sudden, I could tell him everything. Everything I have left behind—everything I like to pretend is in the past, although it isn’t at all.
It’s clear to me that there’s just no way. To tell him everything. Knox would not put me back together. He would do something or other, something dumb, and break me more than I am already.
It’d be better to make the great effort to push Knox away, to keep him out of my life so that he never gets the chance to hurt me. But it already hurts. No, the fact that I want him, that I really want him, but can’t allow it istearingme apart. I am torturing myself. Freely. Masochistic, right?
I cannot manage to stay awake. I’m the first to fall asleep.
By the time I wake up, Knox is gone.
26
The Smell of Snow
Paisley
Gwen doesn’t have a bed. Instead, she’s got a rabbit named Bing Crosby. I know that because there’s a sign on his cage saying:Hell yeah, call me Bing Crosby.
She sleeps on a thick down blanket, a pillow that looks like it belongs on a garden chair, and a red yoga mat. Levi and Aaron are squeezed next to each other on the blanket, their legs tucked in, and I look over to Gwen questioningly.
She shrugs. “It’s better for your back.”
“After training, you seriously manage to sleepon the floor?”
“It’s a matter of getting used to it.” She closes the door behind her, freeing up a view of an oversized poster of a guy whose palms are shooting blue lightning bolts.
“Who’s that?”
Gwen looks at me as if I’ve personally offended her.
“Seriously?” Levi says. His face is so skeptical I count four furrows. “You don’t know who that is?”
“Umm. No?”
“It’s Magnus Bane,” Aaron says, as if that explained everything.
I’m still confused. Am I supposed to know who that is? “Is he a K-pop superstar or something?”
Gwen snorts. “He’s the High Warlock of Brooklyn!”
