It wasn’t just that I wanted things I couldn’t have.
It was that I’d built my entire interior life around someone who was disappearing in real time and I didn’t know how to stop it.
I also wasn’t strong enough to let go.
That was the bigger problem.
One night in December he fell asleep before me.
I lay there in the dark listening to him breathe and let myself think it properly for the first time.
Not around the edges.
Not almost.
Fully.
I love him.
Which probably means I’m gay.
Which I guess everyone else knew since I was eight but it took me a couple years to come to terms with it.
These two things are going to be the most important facts of my life and I can’t tell anyone right now.
I stared at the ceiling for a long time after that.
Then I turned onto my side, away from him, and closed my eyes.
By morning he was gone.
CHAPTER NINE
FIFTEEN YEARS OLD
• • •
There were things I was good at hiding.
My feelings for Cassian — mostly. At least I thought at that time. Or I hoped.
The way certain rooms felt too small sometimes, too loud, the walls doing something wrong, closing in on me — that, less so.
The panic attacks had been happening since I was eleven. Since the night of the sirens and the flashing lights and my parents coming back inside with their faces rearranged into something I didn’t recognize.
They came and went. Sometimes months would pass and I’d think maybe I’d outgrown them.
Then one would find me again.
• • •
This one found me at school.
I don’t even remember what started it. That was the thing about them — they didn’t always need a reason. Sometimes the body just decided.
My chest tightened in the middle of a hallway between classes and then the walls were too close and the sound was wrong and I couldn’t get enough air no matter how much I took in.
I made it outside.
