“This is a nice spot.” I sit down on the step with my back to him for some reason. I need him to make a move, or I’ll fucking run down these stairs and hide from absolute shame. Embarrassment tries to take a hold, but I fight it off.
After a short moment, I hear his shoes drop a few levels. He sits beside me. Our shoulders touch and we both sigh so hard, somehow expelling the weight we carry alone, that somehow feels lighter when we are together.
We don't say anything for a while. The stairwell hums, pipes, a door somewhere above, the muffled ordinary life of a building full of normal people not drawn to places like stairwells and darkness. Not kept by those places.
"I read the letter.”
"Yeah…”
"I never liked elevators.”
He laughs once, but it’s flat.
He looks at his hands. "Yeah.”
"I don't want to see him.” That truth buzzes in my every cell.
"I know,” he says.
"I've never written. Never wanted to acknowledge that I come from a man like that, that can do such…”Terrible things.
“I know.”
I pull my knees up and wrap my arms around them. "But I’ll go withyou.”
The corner of his mouth moves upwards, a tiny sigh-smile. "Let’s just tick it off our fucked-up bucket list."
“Yesterday was…” I want to cover my face as I envision Konnor’s fingers inside me, his warm body behind me, my brother’s words purging through my lips while I sob and come. “I’m ashamed.”
“Don’t be, Blesk.”
I rest my cheek on my knees and look at his profile, his light brown hair messy, his green eyes shining despite the grey and shadowed stairwell.
He's already looking at me, studying me. “I am being eaten at by that,” he admits, his timbre dark and rough. “Whether I should have stopped or… Let it play out like that. I don’t fucking know.” He looks straight ahead, elbows on thighs. Erik always led me. No, he’s dragged and manipulated. I see that now. Konnor and I are navigating together, like two children running through a field of daisies with no idea which way to go or who to trust.
We are still them.
"I'm tired," I finally say. Not to him exactly. I breathe it into the stairwell, into the dark and the concrete and all the lies and hiding. Into the air between floors. "Of carrying it. I'm so tired of wearing it inside. I want to know, too," I say, my voice floating around that confession like it may get swept away. "I don’t know what he’ll say.”
He turns to look at me, and something in his face shifts—not pain, not relief, something quieter than both. "It might not matter, but we just go… forwards. Each step, yeah? Try to figure it all out. But it changes nothing, Blesk." He reaches for my cheek, cups it, and his lips hit mine, already parted and soft, his tongue sliding in to connect with mine. He pulls back. “I’m yours, and you’re mine. Nothing and no-one, past or present, or future, changes that.”
Neither of us move for several long moments, our eyes caught together, our minds reeling and exhausted.
We sit on the stairs between floors, and the light coming through the small, frosted window a story above us changes as the sun moves from behind a cloud, and it feels like something is ending and something else is beginning.
Reaching for my hand, he interlaces our fingers. He tries to grin, a slow, emotionally fatigued curve I imagine will become one that means everything. It means he’s always trying, even when he has very little to give. “So, Duch. What will it be? Up or down?"
I stare at him.My Konnor."Up.”
We stand together.
We climb.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
konnor
I can’t look away. I know I’m probably acting like a fucking creep, but I watch her every step in case she falls. Not literally. But… I can’t shake the memory of my fingers inside her as she processed whatever that fucker did to her.
