I close the notebook. Press the heels of my hands against my eyes.
He grabbed my hair and slammed me face-down on the pool table and I couldn't move and I couldn't breathe.
I did that. I remember doing it. Remember the grin on my face when he shoved me—the thrill of it, the satisfaction of finally getting a reaction from the boy who'd been a ghost for weeks. I remember pinning him to the felt and feeling his body tense underneath me and thinkingthere you are.
I wasn't thinking about what it felt like from his side. About the iron grip on his arm. About his head hitting the drywall. About being held down by someone bigger and stronger in a house where he already felt like prey.
And my body was on fire. And those two things lived in the same moment.
That line. The one that makes my chest crack. Because he wasn't just scared. He was wanting—wantingand hating himself for it, terrified and aroused in the same breath, and I was too busy enjoying the fight to see any of it.
The self-loathing is familiar. I break everything. Push away everyone. Turn want into violence because I don't know how to turn it into anything else.
But this is worse. Max left this house and drove into a trap because I—because all of us, but mostly me—made this place feel more dangerous than a parking lot at midnight with a stranger.
I need more. I need the whole picture. Not just the last few months—all of it.
I need all of Max.
I take the notebook and go to his room.
The scent hits harder here. Days old but soaked into the walls, the sheets, the carpet. Vanilla and honey and smoke. My body responds—pupils dilating, blood rushing south, a want so acute it borders on grief.
I stand in the doorway and breathe it in. Let it hurt.
The room looks mostly the same. Bed unmade—the same as when we came searching for him the other night. A drawer left open from someone searching. But most of Max's things are still here. He only took the one bag. Everything else stayed behind.
His books are still here. Organized by spine color—reds together, blues together, greens fading into yellows. Objectively insane. Makes my mouth twitch despite everything.
Index cards on the desk covered in story ideas. Character sketches. Fragments of sentences that go nowhere and everywhere.
Max is a writer. I keep forgetting. Keep seeing the omega, the body, the scent—forgetting that underneath is a mind that creates worlds. A mind that noticed I smelled like rain and gunpowder and wrote it down because noticing things is how he survives.
I move through the room. Searching. If there's one notebook, there are more.
The chest at the foot of the bed. Old, wooden, thrift store find. I lift the lid.
Notebooks.
A stack of them. Eight, maybe ten. Different colors, different sizes, different stages of wear. The oldest ones are falling apart—covers peeling, pages yellowed. And underneath, the older volumes. Years of writing. Years of a person processing the world through words because the world was too much to process any other way.
I sit on Max's bed. Pick up the oldest notebook. The cover is red, faded to rust. The first entry is dated seven years ago. Max was thirteen.
I read.
I woke up with the sheets wet again. Not pee—I know what pee smells like and this isn't that. It's something else. Something thick and slippery and sweet-smelling that soaksthrough my boxers and stains the mattress and I can't make it stop.
I tried to wash the sheets before Linda woke up. Got them into the machine at 5 AM, used extra soap, scrubbed the mattress with a towel. But the smell was still there when she came downstairs. She can always smell it. It's like she has a sensor in her nose tuned specifically to whatever is wrong with me.
She didn't say anything at first. Just stood in the laundry room doorway and watched me trying to shove the sheets into the dryer with shaking hands. I could feel her staring. Could feel the temperature in the room drop.
Then she grabbed my arm. Twisted it behind my back. Marched me into the bathroom. Shoved me to my knees on the tile floor.
"Strip," she said.
I did. I always do what she says when her voice sounds like that—flat, disgusted, like she's talking to a cockroach she found in the kitchen.
She turned the shower on. Cold. As cold as it goes. Pushed me under the spray and held me there by the back of my neck while I gasped and choked. The water was so cold my muscles locked. I couldn't move. Could barely breathe. Just kneeled there on the shower floor, naked, shaking, while she scrubbed me with a washcloth and dish soap. Not body soap. Dish soap. The yellow kind that strips grease. She scrubbed until my skin was raw and red, especially between my legs, especially where the slick had been.
