I prowl toward the bars, snatching them in the palm of my hands.
“No,” I state so slowly and so boldly that I almost see a shiver live wire through his body.
Tears prick like needles at the back of my eyes, but I don’t let myself cry.
“Not until you tell me why the fuck you are avoiding me.”
I’m trying to find his face, but it’s still hanging low, buried in his chest. I can see his mouth, only the corner, he’s sucking on his front teeth, shaking his head.
“Chase, please—” I start to speak, but he barrels over the top of me.
“Do you trust me?” he asks coolly.
And it’s at that moment, in the depths of his question, that I realize I can’t tame my tears any longer. They fill my eyes and fall in a stream down my cheeks.
I wanted to lie, then,I wanted to die.
“Till death,” I whisper and when silence presses, I try to stare into the deep-brown eyes of a broken boy battling a storm he’d long forgotten we’d shared. But he doesn’t offer them to me the way he used to.
“Then hear me when I tell you this is for the best,” he rasps.
I’m crying so hard now that I feel every rib splinter in my chest.
I felt cast aside.
Kicked away.
“What the fuck does that even mean?” I beg.
Chase stays silent, so I seek some kind of clarity in Harlen, hoping he will help me understand. But he doesn’t even try, he keeps his head turned away.
I force my gaze back to Chase, swallowing my next cry, wiping my cheeks with both hands, taking a breath, stepping away.
I let my eyes take in the length of the boy that I believed used to be able to see me, even when I could barely see myself, and I scoff. Because now, I am pissed.
“You selfish son of a…”
I don’t finish when Chase’s hands slam against the steel, wrapping around the poles, his forehead drilling into the panel. He still hasn’t given me his eyes, but beneath his breath he tells me, “I killed her you know, my mother, then I killed my father, I’m…not…a good person.”
I wasn’t sure I was still breathing.
I press my quivering fingers to my mouth, silent tears roll down my face and my knees begin to shake.
I didn’t know what to say, didn’t think words could find a place. So, I step forward instead, reaching for him, and he lets me run my thumb across his bloodied knuckles, but he’s quick to pull them away.
Chase swallows, then rasps so quietly I barely hear him, “It’s only a matter of time before I kill you too, Laiken. Save yourself while you can.”
I wasn’t willing to accept that.
“You don’t get to make that decision, Chase. You don’t get to push me away.”
He is back at the bars and the anger contorting his once playful face makes him unrecognizable,ugly.
The Chase standing in front of me today isn’t the Chase I knew four weeks ago.
His eyes remain pressed to the ground when he spits, “I don’t want to see you. I don’t want to be around you. I can’t fucking stand looking at you.”
I flinch.
