In front of the little bakery, I stared up at the sign shrouded in darkness. To the right, high in the sky, was the moon with only a sliver of itself showing.
A crescent moon.
A slow, nearing-on-mad smile crept across my face. It hurt, tearing at a fresh wound on my lip, and it tasted coppery, but I let it form. The irony of it all wasn’t lost on me.
Above me, the sky started to tilt. The stars flashing their signals from thousands of light-years away began to blink in and out of my vision. I suddenly felt heavy. A decade of torture had finally caught up to me, forcing my knees to buckle as I collapsed onto the asphalt.
Tiny rocks dug into my knees through my pants. If I listened close enough, between my slowing heaves and panting breaths, I could hear the daisies whispering to me.
They didn’t say kind things. They didn’t try to comfort me. They told me a story. A story of a broken man who loved another so much, he let the man ruin him. Kill him.
Suddenly, their voices raised in pitch and volume. They almost sounded concerned for me—a direct contradiction to what they were just telling me.
“Holy fucking shit, are you okay?” The voice got even closer, right beside me.
I lifted my head up, finding a kind woman. I blinked a couple of times, wondering if it was possible I could be hallucinating.
“Hey, can you hear me?”
I nodded.
“What happened?” She knelt down, hovering her hands over me like she was afraid to touch me.
That’s okay. I’d be afraid to touch me too. “Pocket.”
“What?”
“My pocket. Crescent.”
“Which pocket, honey?” Her face was getting blurrier by the second.
“Left. Crescent’s phone number. Call him. Please.”
The mysterious woman dug around in my pocket, pulling the note out. “It’s gonna be alright, honey.”
Crescent—a word that meant growing. In my heart, just behind my broken rib cage, something that felt a lot like hope began to grow.
Chapter Ten
Ten Years Ago
The sun beatdown on my skin, so warm that I wondered just how safe it was for us to be out here. My skin was sensitive and easily burned, though I was sure part of that was due to how little I went outside.
I grabbed the stolen bottle of whiskey and poured some into my mouth. I’d never get used to the harshness of it, shocking every taste bud on my tongue. It burned as it went down my throat, a liquid heat passing through my chest from the inside. A tickle started in my throat, and no matter how hard I tried to pretend it wasn’t there, I still coughed and sputtered.
Crescent laughed beside me. “Bro, take it easy.”
“Shut up.”
He took the bottle from me, dragging it through the grassbeneath us. We’d found this little field, deciding it was our new hangout spot when we needed alone time. It was overgrown, but beautiful. Something I’d probably paint if I’d thought to bring my supplies. Flowers of every kind sprouted around us. Weeds, too.
“Look, daisies.” Crescent nodded to a patch of gorgeous white flowers with yellow centers.
I tilted my head, picking up the whiskey bottle again. The taste was still on my lips when I licked them, and it made me realize I wasn’t quite as drunk as I wanted to be. “They’re pretty.”
He plucked one from the ground, twisting the stem between his pointer finger and thumb. “Remember the daisy game all the girls used to do when we were kids?”
“Daisy game?”
