Stay present.
Stayme.
My resistance only drew its pity to the surface.“Little death-touch,”the monster began, its concern a familiar weight in mychest. Cold. Horrible. Caring. I hated everything about this… thisthinginside me that was so wrong and unnatural. I hated that it cared so much when no one else ever had. I didn’t want to always need fixing, a broken and pitiful thing so lost in my own head that the simplest gust of wind sent me spinning.
I didn’t want to need something to catch me. Especially not something—
“Like me?”the monster softly asked.
I clamped my bottom lip between my teeth.
“You’ve tried so hard to be rid of me.”The monster coiled inside my chest.“But you don’t need fixing.”
No. I needed a fucking exorcism.
The monster’s presence had once been a relief. I was young when it had first come into being, just a boy with no other company but the voice in my head and the deadly power in my hands. Together, we’d staved off the loneliness that reared its ugly head whenever Mom had worked too late, or when she hadn’t come home at all.
This wasn’t friendship anymore, though.
The monster saw itself as medicine, but medicine could poison too. A cup of tea soothed so many ailments, but how many herbs acted as poison if administered in too high a dose? For years, the monster’s protective nature had over-steeped inside me, turning whatever kinship we once had bitter and toxic with self-loathing.
“Arthur—”
“Stop,” I whispered, too quiet for Eva to hear. I was so tired of its voice. Its soft encouragement. Its brutal demands. It was too much to hold so much contradiction inside me.
“I just want to help.”
I kept tapping against the side of my leg. “I know.” A quiet seed of despair split open in my chest. “But whenever you try, someone gets hurt.”
Cold washed over me, touching every place the monster and I pressed together, hand to glove, soul to body. I wasn’t sure which one of those I was anymore, but I knew I had to resist. For all its talk of care, the monster could be ruthless, even cruel, when it felt wounded.
“I don’t hurt you.”
It had taken control at the cottage, then again in the pit. It would do so again. I knew it.
I needed to stay in control.
Stay me.
I gritted my teeth. “You hurt me every time,” I said under my breath.
Eva turned toward me then, wholly unaware of my inner struggle. Her eyes were bright with tears, and the empty frames lay in a scattered puzzle at her feet. Wild grasses pushed taller where she stood, green blades splitting from their roots in testament to her breaking heart.
“Arthur, please,”the monster whispered. I shivered. It was so rare to hear it say my name. A hot tear rolled down my cheek, in stark contrast to the ice in my bones.“Let me help you,”it urged again, its sadness swelling inside me.“You need to consume.”
“No,” I snapped, and this time Eva heard, though what she made of it, I didn’t know. When she looked at me, I turned away.
Sometimes it felt as though the weight of the whole Earth was pressing on my chest. It felt like being buried alive. I didn’t know how to escape that feeling without the monster’s help, but I knew that I wanted to find a way.
I didn’t want to go numb anymore. Maybe once doing so had been my only means of survival, but that wasn’t living. Eva had shown me that back when she’d taken a boy no one wanted and accepted him as hers.
Even though our mistakes had changed the shape of who we were to each other, I would never forget how her kind of love had rearranged my view of the world. It had made everything brighter, and had made me want to live brighter too.
Squeezing my eyes shut, I pushed the monster back. It was difficult. My body was worn out, sore in too many ways to count.
The monster snarled in frustration.“You don’t know what you’re doing!”
That had always been the case.
