"I love you... more than anything." Her soft fingertips cup beneath my chin, dragging my eyes to meet hers. "But we can't pretend we're alive when we're not. I can't pretend death is fair for either of us."
It's not fair. I know that.
We've been robbed of so much.
"I'll follow you anywhere, Noah. Til the end. But I can't follow youyet."
"Why?"
"Because..." She shakes her head. "I'm not going to let it go. I can't..."
"You can't go back." I remind her. "You can't change it."
"I don't need to change it." She sighs, letting her head fall forward onto my chest. "I just need to feel like I didn't let it happen..."
"Nikki. I..."
The words stick in my throat, because I don't know what to even say about it. Our best friend betrayed us both. It wasn't bad enough that he killed me, he had to go and abuse my girlfriend too? He drugged her and violated her trust and her body. And worse, still, he stood by and let his friends do the same.
"Noah." She smiles softly, a sad little tip of her lips. "I can't go forward. I'm too angry."
"I'm mad too." I promise her. "I wish I could—"
"I'm done wishing and hoping. I wished for a long time that someone would get through to Nick, that he'd realize he could be better than the company he kept. The joke's on me."
I want to tell her it's not... that the joke's on both of us, because webothfell for it. But she speaks again before I do.
"Not for much longer."
Chapter 10
Noah
Afterwhatfeltlikean eternity of longing and sorrow and grief, it feels good to feel something different. Once my sweet angel showed me her anger, it started to bleed into me, waking up parts of me that died when I did. And fuck if it doesn't feel amazing.
It's seductive, a balm to all of the hurt and the sadness. And it acts as a fire, keeping us both warm. The more we stoke it, the greater it gets.
I never thought I'd kill a person, but I don't even have it in me to debate the morality of what I'm doing. Morals exist because they help us maintain our humanity; whatever I am, it's no longer human. No part of me feels bad at the slaughter we've planned, and if it did, I'd simply close my eyes and remember Nikki's blood in the snow, how helpless I felt watching everything unfold, how horrified I was from the first minute Nick got her beneath him and stayed all the way until she woke up dead and I had to hide my horror for her. It's part of why the anger feels so good; I don't have to hide it from her.
"I didn't get to go ice skating this year." Nikki says quietly, her eyes on the pond that's frozen over behind the little dilapidated house. It's a small one, surrounded by banks of snow that fell overnight and into the morning.
The sun is weak in the sky, like it can't touch everything around this part of town, like it knows better than to try. Church and Lakes is a strange town— there are more extremes than not.
Half the town is so incredibly impoverished that they're forced to live in houses like the one we're standing in front of... houses that are missing shingles beneath the snow, with overgrown front yards choked out by the winter and cracked, broken siding peeling off the brick. The other half, like Nick Ryan, live in homes that cost more to heat than the other half tend to make in a year. Very few people fall in the middle, and those who do are often just a few bad strokes of luck from ending up in a neighborhood like this one.
I turn to take Nikki in, her sad eyes still trained on the frozen body of water. When she senses me looking at her, she shakes her head, as if that will put it out of her mind.
I know how much she loved skating-- how every year once the lake in the center of town was frozen solid enough, she'd drag me to it and skate circles around me for hours as we watched the Town Improvement Council decorate the tree that was chosen to be the centerpiece of the season. We did it every year, without fail, and I even considered dropping down on one knee last year in the center of the ice to propose. I had the ring in my pocket, but the timing hadn't felt right. Now, I wish I'd done it. Maybe she would have found it in her heart to venture back out to the rink this year if I had.
"So, let's go." I tell her. "We can come back later..."
"It wouldn't be the same." Her voice is soft, and she works hard to keep the sadness out of it, but it's there regardless. "If you can't feel the wind on your face or the cold in your lungs, orhave the risk of falling if you miscalculate a turn..." She shakes her head again, banishing the thought. "No, I want to do this."
She's right. Even if we can feel things when we're with each other, it's not the same as being alive. It's enough for me, but I'm not sure she can say the same.
“Well, you're in luck," I say, swallowing my fear that she doesn't love me as much as she used to. "I think he's coming out."
Nikki's eyes sharpen, and the sad girl from a moment earlier disappears as the rage slips back in, settling her enough to focus on the task at hand.
