Knife. Bread. Peanut butter.
But my mind kept reeling back to the past, treading through painful memories, making me relive them as punishment for sins I didn’t remember committing.
Abandoning the perfect meal it would have been when bread met butter, I left the kitchen, my steps staggered as I headed to my room.
The door slammed behind me. But it wasn’t enough. Finding a corner in the room, I curled up in a ball, my arms wrapped around my knees, my forehead pressing against my arm.
The sob tore from my throat before I could stop it, raw and aching.
Everything I had ever held dear always slipped through my fingers like sand. No one would ever stay. They would all move on, just like Rowan did. Just like Callan Raskov did. Happiness was like smoke. I always tried to hold it in my palms, but it always escaped, like a ghost that was passing by.
Maybe one day, the only constant in my life, Kenzo Takahashi, would get tired and move on too.
Maybe I was meant to be alone.
My fingers dug into my arm, my nails pressing against my skin as I tried to hold myself together. But I was already unravelling. Because I was really scared now.
What if I was meant to be alone?
What if Mother’s eternal fingerprints weren’t my punishment at all? What if my innocence that was stolen from me in an alleyway off Rue Augustin Boulevard wasn’t the real price I was meant to pay?
What if loneliness was the debt all along?
What if the one thing I wanted more than anything else in the world was never meant for me?
To be chosen. To be special.
I wanted to be someone’s choice. Second choice. Third. Fourth. Fifth. I didn’t care as long as I was a choice.
But the circle always repeated itself, and no one ever chose me in the end.
Not the boys from the lacrosse and football team.
Not the blonde American from the chess club I spent last summer pretending it meant something.
Not Rowan McRae.
Not Callan Raskov.
No one.
I would never be anyone’s definite choice. I would never be able to keep anyone.
Because life was sand and I had no fist, just opened palms.
10
CALLAN
I wanted her fire. I wanted to burn under her gaze.
I was seven when I realised there was someone else living inside my body.
It was another boy who looked exactly like me. But his eyes were older…colder.
Once, I had a stuffed animal my mother got for me from a thrift shop on a Christmas eve. It was a dirty, old brown bear with one glass eye and one ear missing.
I liked it a lot and often slept with it tucked beneath my chin, hugged tightly in my arms. I never let go of it at night, never slept without it. But one morning, I woke up and he was laying by the foot of the bed, head ripped off clean, stuffing everywhere—pink and white—like something inside him had tried to escape.
