She’s quiet, and I wouldn’t know she was crying if I didn’t feel the wet prickle of her tears as they drop against my chest.
“Can I ask you something?” My voice breaks on the question.
“You can ask me anything.” Her voice breaks too.
“Do you think it was my fault?”
Trepidation chokes me, hard enough to sever my throat as I wait for her response, for a voice to the truth I’ve been terrified to hear.
“No,” she whispers, her tone steady. “I’ve never thought that.”
Pressure lifts off my neck, my airways opening once more, and only now do I realize the weight pressing down on me the past four years. Only now do I realize that I’ve been living without oxygen—that her empathy is my atmosphere.
“I do think that we’re both responsible, though,” she admits quietly. “In our own ways.”
“I think that too.”
Her hand brushes over my chest, like she’s searching for hope beneath my skin. I run my fingers through her hair before cradling the back of her head, like I’m searching for healing in her arms. Solidarity in a catastrophe only the two of us can understand.
“Can I ask one more thing?” Her voice is low, hollow, and distant after sitting in silence.
“Always.”
“Do you think I’m crazy?”
A surprised laugh escapes me, and she tenses at the sound. I’d do anything to root inside Elena’s mind, to understand her thoughts and how they surface, how she finds the courage to voice them all, her unrelenting curiosity—a force more powerful than any fear she has or the reaction it may garner. “Maybe a little.”
I expect her to laugh back at me, but she doesn’t. Her voice is stoic in the darkness of my room as she asks, “Is that why he never loved me? Why nobody can?”
I turn my head, finding her eyes blazing through me, still wet with the tears she just stopped shedding. New ones brew behind her lids, glistening in the hazy moonlight slipping through my curtains.
“No, Elena.” I kiss her forehead. “I think we’re all kind of crazy—wild—with the right people. He was never your brand of wild, but that doesn’t make something wrong with you. Just wrong for each other.”
“So, if I’m crazy…” Her delicate throat works as she swallows. “Does that make you crazy too?”
“I don’t know how else I’d describe any of this, Elena,” I admit, stroking her hair. “The complexity of wanting to hate you, and love you, and fuck you all at once.” I trace the outline of her beautiful face in the darkness, halted by the way she bites her lip as she watches me. “I want to run away from you and hold you closer at the same time. There are moments I wish I’d never met you, while painfully aware that I’d die without your existence.” My hand finds her jaw, thumb resting on her bottom lip and pulling it from her teeth. “I miss you even when I’m right next to you, and I loathe you when you’re far away. But one thing I always know for certain is that I’ll take you any way you come, any pain you cause, no matter how brief the moment, because simply experiencing you…it’s more valuable to me than the air I breathe.”
I expect her to react with surprise, to gasp or widen her eyes at my heart-wrenched confession, but she doesn’t. She blinks, eyes glowing with something like understanding, like she already knew those words because they came directly from her soul too.
“Is it wild that I feel the exact same way?” she asks, bringing her hand to my face.
I choke on a laugh. “Yeah.”
“So, we’re each other’s brand of crazy?”
She makes the same motion to my lip that I did with hers, and I wonder which one of us will cave first. Who will finally put us both out of this unending misery by replacing their hand with their lips.
Neither of us do.
“Yeah,” I finally respond, feeling her thumb bounce against my mouth with the movement. “We always have been.”
She nods, moving her hand over my chin and down my chest, back to the same spot it was resting before. She traces the tattoo of raven wings beneath my sternum.
“I should go to my own room, Augustus.”
“No,” I rasp. “Stay here with me. Please.”
She lifts her eyes to mine, uncertainty shining in her chocolate-colored irises.
