“You’re not alone anymore, all right? I swear it.”
Thomas closed his eyes.
“What if it’s your sketchbook?” Andrew said. “It could be cursed. You have to stop drawing.”
“I did stop. The only thing I’ve drawn in ages is a stupid fruit bowl for art class. But I-I have to pass art. It’s myonething. Wickwood will expel me if I fail every class. I’ll lose you, I’ll lose—”
Andrew didn’t want to hear him say Dove, didn’t want that reminder of who Thomas truly wanted to comfort him in this moment.
“You won’t lose me,” Andrew said fiercely.
Thomas’s tie had come undone, his blazer abandoned, old paint staining his cuffs. He looked a mess, mussy and unhinged. When Andrew let go, Thomas slid down the wall and sat there while Andrew stood over him, his legs a protective wall around Thomas’s crumpled body.
“Maybe it’s the pens you use?” Andrew’s mind powered into a frenzied whirl. “Or you’ve bled onto the drawings. And the blood, like, maybe it invoked something.”
“I didn’t.” Thomas played with the cuff of Andrew’s trousers. “I don’t even think while I draw sometimes. I’ll listen to music and draw random shit. It doesn’tmeananything. I just like monsters. Well, I used to.”
Back when their teeth were paper, not bone.
Andrew pressed his knuckles to the wall. “Let’s destroy your sketchbook in the forest tonight.”
“You’re not coming.”
“I’m coming,” Andrew said.
Thomas didn’t argue again. He wiped at his face with the back of his hand and let out a shaky breath.
His breathing evened out, but he made no move to get up. Andrew didn’t care, not while they still touched. He craved Thomas’s affection, with an intensity that left him dizzy. If he never had more, he had this.
It was almost worth being ripped apart by monsters.
TWELVE
They waited till midnight.
Andrew sat in bed, textbook on his lap, but his notebook open over the top as he penned the first lines of a new story. It started with a wicked creature who carved tears off faces to sate his thirst, until he chose a victim who clutched a knife made of antler bone and used it to slash the wicked creature’s face instead.
Writing felt selfish, especially when Thomas lay on his own bed, tapping a pencil against his lips and staring at the ceiling, forbidden to draw. This had to be part of why he’d severed himself with such ferocious finality from Andrew over the last few weeks. Andrew would’ve noticed the lack of charcoal-smudged sleeves and paint in his hair. This had to be a bitter withdrawal.
Thomas sighed for the thousandth time and drummed the pencil against the wall. His old drawings stared back; bone crowns and monster teeth and wicked forests and the curve of a poisonous apple.
“I have till Thanksgiving to decide on my end-of-year art project,” Thomas said dully. “Or, you know, I’ll fail. I’ve convinced Ms. Poppy I haveartist blockand she’s being nice about it, which just makes me feel even more like shit.”
Andrew didn’t answer for a long time. “When’s the witching hour?”
“I dunno. Two a.m. isn’t it? Or three?”
“Do the monsters get worse then? Stronger? It could be… witchcraft.”
Thomas chewed the end of the pencil. “You believe in that?”
Andrew closed his notebook. “You’ve kind of warped reality. I’m pretty sure we have to believe in everything now.”
Thomas bit the pencil so hard it cracked. He lay there with a mouthful of splinters for so long Andrew nearly shook him, terrified he’d try to swallow them.
Finally Thomas got up, picking splinters from his lips. “I guess they appear around the witching hour every night, but I don’t think that’s the problem. I think the problem is me.”
They walked into the woods side by side, so close their shoulders brushed. When they reached a winding, overgrown track, too thin for two, Thomas went first. He kept glancing over his shoulder, reaching back with a hand to touch Andrew and be sure he was safe.
