Chase dips out, chin to his chest. He was no longer looking at me, and he was no longer smiling.
“You don’t want to know what I think of you.”
I laugh, resting my elbows to my knees, grabbing my shoulders. “Maybe I do.”
Chase doesn’t reply, but he does touch his eyes to mine, and the look in them tells me not to push it.
I swallow tightly, jerk my chin toward the notebook sitting next to him.
“Were you writing again?” I ask.
He laughs, though the husky melody carries strain.
“If writing looks like me sitting here scribbling solo words onto the paper, then circling, crossing them out, finding a way to link all of my stinking shit together…” He exhales a weighted breath and drags his hands through the top of his hair, pulling it back into a low bun. “Then yeah, I guess so.”
I feel my body tense.
“What’s it about?” I ask warily, my heart thumping hard enough to press against my ribs.
“You wanna read it?” Chase’s voice is barely a whisper when he holds out the open notebook to a page titledSevered Veins.
I reach for it, fingers shaking the moment they skim across Chase’s.
He lets go, hanging his wrists over his knees, dropping his head back to the wall with a thud.
I sit there frozen.
My throat is dry.
I wasn’t sure why he was giving me this.
“Chase, you don’t have to?—”
He keeps his head where it is, closing his eyes. “Read it.”
I swallow, drop my chin and trace my pointer finger over the title, feeling the ridges of where the red ballpoint pen had pierced through the thin paper.
“Out loud,” he says, his voice hoarse.
Something cold and so very familiar settles in my stomach when I whisper the first line, “You were never a number.”
Chase releases the breath he’s been holding, as though resigned to what’s to come, and what I was about to read.
And that in itself…terrifies me.
I squeeze my eyes closed, my throat thickening with a tempered cry. Taking another breath, I blink them open, and the words that stare back at me, wobble perilously with the tears at the edges of my eyes.
“A bright spirit of wonder.”
Chase’s bleeding truth pushes them over, and I feel myself falling.
I can barely speak, can barely think, can barely breathe, a surfeit of unhealed trauma taking to every limb, and I can taste the terror again when metal fills my mouth.
I’m gnawing on my bottom lip, then the inside of my cheek.
Severed Veinsis forJade.
My best friend.
