The way he looks at her is peeling, eviscerating, and when he puts his thumb to the corner of her mouth, there is such tenderness in his touch. “Why?”
She tries to smooth her emotions, to make herself blank, but every word shakes with inverted venom as it spills from her mouth. “Because I said no.”
“You know that day there was glass in his food? I checked the leftovers in the can. No glass there. I checked the trash. Broken glass. Do you want to explain that to me? Or explain what happened today in the nursery? There’s nothing wrong with the floor, Elodie. You aretryingto scare him.”
“I love my son more than life.” But she sounds hoarse. “I told you it’s thishouse. There’s blood inside the walls and something is breathing in there. Ask Jude. It’s terrifying him. He’ll tell you.”
He looks at her with overwhelming pity.
“I want to ask Jude a lot of things. Maybe I will.” He rests his forehead against hers, his voice barely more than a whisper in the dark. But there is a rich menace to his words that chills her down to her bones. “Maybe I should ask him if he’s really scared of this house—or if he’s just scared of you.”
Air seizes in her lungs. She knots her fingers in his sweater, but she wishes her hands were at his throat. It occurs to her now how quiet Jude has gone in the kitchen, how someone needs to check on him, comfort him, how she is terrified if she goes to him right now, he will cry out for Bren instead.
She is a barely repressed explosion as she says through gritted teeth, “Get off me. I don’t even know you right now.”
“But I know you, Elodie.” Bren’s voice is low and rusted and hard.
She wants to claw his eyes out. “No, you don’t. I need to get Jude. I need—I need to get him away from this fucking house.”
He leans in, his mouth is at her ear, his breath hot with tightly coiled anger. “I know way more than you think I do. And no, you’re not leaving my house.”
6 MONTHS AGO
She can pinpoint the exactmoment Bren falls in love with her.
The way he looks at her is intoxicating, ravishing, and she loses hold of all common sense as she slides toward feelings that should remain boxed. They are on their third night out in a row, a reckless indulgence, but every time he tugs on her ribbons, she spins into him without resistance. She kisses him beneath trees wrapped in fairy lights in the magical garden of a restaurant she couldn’t dream of affording alone, and when he rests his forehead against hers with this breathless whimper of infatuation, she knows he isn’t going to let go. Not tonight, not ever.
It thrills her, horribly, hungrily.
He rests his thumb on the corner of her mouth, forlorn and desperate. “I need to take you out tomorrow too. Elodie, I think I’m dying. I can’t breathe.”
She presses a mocking kiss to the tip of his nose. “You’re pretty for a dying thing.”
“No, I really am.” A vexed strain pulls at his voice as he folds her into a hug, their bodies shadowed by trees blossoming in the dark. Music and lightly clinking glasses fade into nonexistence until it is just them in this garden, in the whole world. “I only think of you. It’s like there’s this blown-out hole in my chest and you fit there perfectly, and I’ve known it since I saw you.”
“Which was all of three days ago.” She’s teasing, but there’s an odd look in his eyes and she wonders if he, too, is nervous at how fast they’re falling.
He presses his face into her neck, his voice muffled. “I’ve never been this way about anyone. It’s like I can tell you everything, it’s like youseeme when no one else does, it’s like…” He’s run out of words, his yearning so obvious she cannot help but melt as he tucks a loose curl behind her ear.
The mocking smile drops from her mouth and there is a sudden ruinous weight in her chest, a clawing desperation for him to keep looking at her like she means something. “It’s like need,” she whispers, raw and shaky.
“I only want you,” he says with irrefutable earnestness. “In the whole world, I only want you.”
There is a messiness to love, a hysteria that veers too close to madness. It is looking at someone and being unable to breathe, being reduced to a wretched, obsessive creature who wants to latch on to the other like a carnivorous leech. They have already kissed so many times. They are moving too fast.
Neither of them cares.
No one has ever wanted her with this much conviction. She hasnever been anything but overlooked and unlovable, her life full of lonely silences, her parents refusing to glance her way in case they see the ghost of their son lingering in her shadow. Her sins were marked in their eyes and transmuted to hate long before she understood why.
She starves for this, for affection, forhim.
When his time in her country runs out, it is an end to their midnight hours spent walking the city and talking nonstop. Once he’s gone she will have only real life to face—long days at the dance studio with no late nights with Bren to look forward to, picking up Jude from preschool where he will commence overtired meltdowns, lying alone on her mattress in a mildewy garage where her future looks like a cracked mirror, the glass shattered all over the floor. Each night so far, she has drugged Jude to sleep and layered makeup under her tired eyes, ignoring how little rest she’s getting. But she needs this fantasy world.
Except, now Bren is going home, and the dream has ended.
She is never getting out of her parents’ garage.
“So… I booked a motel room near the airport. What if— Do you want to stay with me? Just once?” He has her in his arms, her back to his chest, his arms wrapped around her middle, as they stand on the esplanade overlooking the ocean, the moon a chalky smear on the glossy, black surface. Two a.m. has passed; they have been at a street art festival, they have eaten too much sugar like giddy teenagers, they have stolen kisses and flirted and both ignored the cavernous gouge growing between them at the reality that this is his last night.
