The door of the closet creaked as Elio opened it. I looked around him, noticing the paint supplies on the top shelf. “Are any of those even usable still?”
“Some of them, no. But there are quite a few that are still sealed pretty good. I guess we’ll find out.” He stood on the tips of his toes, pulling all of them down.
He lined them up on his desk, all in order of the rainbow. I watched him set everything up, lying on my side, content to see him in his element.
I watched him use a pencil to make the basic outlines, though I could never tell what they would end up creating. He knew, though. Elio always knew. His talent shone through everything he did. Every pencil stroke, every drop of paint, every content and concentrated smile on his face.
When we were in school, I’d spend all of art class watching him start a painting more than I did watching him paint it. It was fascinating to see the beginning and the end of his ideas.
There was nothing else in the world I’d have rather been doing. Once he started painting over the canvas, beginning with a dark blue in the top half, the sound of his brush against it started to gently rock me to sleep. I could hear little whispers beneath the sheets. Small, tiny things amongst the louder, comforting strokes of the paintbrush.
Before long, I was dreaming. Dreaming of a life that Elio and I hadn’t yet made it to. We were happy and healed,walking along a pond somewhere different. He wore a forest-green tuxedo, and I wore a dark brown one. Together, we made a forest of our own, full of nothing but love and undying commitment.
When I woke up, the moon was shining through the window, and Elio was lying on my bare chest. I looked to the side, staring at the canvas in front of us.
There was just enough light to make it out. A starry sky, with a crescent moon high above. Below it, a field of daisies. Right in the middle of the daisies were Elio and me, with Elio resting his head on my chest and me pointing above us.
And there, shining over us, was the most beautiful rainbow I’d ever seen. Even on the darkest of nights, there would still be light when two souls learned how to combine.
Chapter Thirty
How hadI convinced myself that I couldn’t see artistic beauty in anything anymore? Crescent was all of that and more, down to the way he cut the potatoes on the cutting board. There was an elegance to how his wrist lifted and how it fell. We’d just gotten home from my therapy session after he’d worked all day, and he’d decided we needed to eat as soon as we got home. I wasn’t really complaining, but it was our second day home since his parents’ house, and we still hadn’t talked.
I watched him finish the final slice, putting the knife aside. He had his earbuds in and his hair pulled up in a hair tie, showing off his handsome face. “So, I’ve given you some time, and I’m all therapied and taken care of for the day. Can you tell me about what’s been going on that you haven’t told me?”
Crescent paused, holding some of the potato slices inhis hands, right above a large, boiling pot of water. “Is it bad I really hoped you’d forget all about that?”
“I don’t think it’s bad, but it was definitely inaccurate. You do remember me telling you I love you, right?”
The potatoes tumbled into the pot, some of the water splashing out and onto the stove. It sizzled, the sound almost pulling me away and into a bad memory. One of Jude and an incident with the kitchen stove. I took a deep breath through my nose, reminding myself of where I was. Reminding my nervous system that I was safe.
I shook the memory away just as Crescent started to speak again. “Oh, I absolutely do, baby. It’s just a little scary. Makes everything a bit more real.”
Yeah, I definitely understood that. “I know, honey. But I’m here, no matter what. I just want to help you in any way I can, just like you want to help me in any way you can. It’s the same.”
He sighed, grabbing a pack of steaks out of the fridge. “Looking back, I’ve struggled with sadness of some sort for a very long time. I didn’t realize it for an even longer time. Like, until I’d been in therapy for a while. But one day, when I was seventeen, I woke up and I didn’t want to exist anymore. I was so sad—I didn’t want to kill myself, but I didn’t want to wake up the next day, either. It was different. Heavier. Lonelier.”
Seventeen.“When I left?”
“It was some time after, and it wasn’t because of you, but yeah. If you want to get technical, it was around the same time.” He flipped one steak over, seasoning it. “I dealt with the depression for a while, just going through it without really telling anyone. I truly felt like I was losing my mind. Getting out of bed, or even opening my eyes, was exhausting. Everything took ten times more energy. That wasn’t the hardest part, though.
“The hardest part was when I started hearing shit. Random words here and there that no one around me said. Then, they turned into complete sentences, and multiple at a time, then screams and yells and…” Shaking his head, he closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them, the lines around them had deepened. The golden brown I’d come to love was dull. A dull brown. “And then I started seeing shit, too. Nothing crazy at first. And then it was these weird fucking holes everywhere in the most random places. Black, empty voids. Then, there were the shadows. Shadows without faces or determinable human features. Those scared me a lot. Still do. Sometimes, I’d see a person in front of me I knew, and they’d be off to the side, and I’d look back only to realize they were a hallucination too. It was fucking terrifying.”
I had to force back a shiver, feeling the fear as if it were my own. “Did you tell anyone when that started happening?”
He laughed, though it was humorless. More of a breath through his nose than anything. “Fuck no. That’d be too smart of me, huh? I kept it all a secret. The symptoms came and went, along with the depression. A constant cycle that never truly ended.”
“When did you go to therapy?”
“When I had my breaking point. After years and years of slowly losing myself, I tried to end it. Truly end it.”
Crescent turned around, lifting the lid of the pot. I didn’t want to see his back. I wanted to see his face. The face I’d always known and always trusted. The face of the boy I grew up with and the man I fell in love with.
I think, in a past life, we’d been angels together. Soaring through the skies, hand in hand, looking down at the world below us. Because he, too, had known the urge to fly without wings. Maybe even with broken ones. We’d both goneto the highest point, looked down across the waters below, and convinced ourselves we could jump off and find the answer to everything. Everything, yet nothing.
When he turned around, he wouldn’t look at me. His eyes were turned down, staring at the steaks. I understood it—the vulnerability in his very soul. “The bridge?” I whispered.
“No. The bridge was a little over a year ago. This was around two years ago.”
