Page 238 of Breathe Like Hell

I pulled open the drawer in his bathroom, took out the box of razor blades, then sat down on the floor. The lump in my throat grew, my eyes stinging, sobs getting caught in my chest as I tried to swallow them down. Fuck.

Kill.

There wasn’t hesitation in my hands as I took out a blade and made a single clean cut down the center of my forearm, then did the same thing on my other arm. Blood and ichor spilled over my skin, warm and thick. The pain was there, searing through my nerves, but too far below the surface for me to hold as tight as I wanted to. Nothing would ever hurt as badly as watching his body burn.

But if I didn’t focus my eyes, I could almost pretend my arms were his arms.

These lacerations were carved by his careful hands.

He was here, with me, in this dark bathroom. Sitting on the floor, not speaking because he didn’t like to speak about the things that hurt him, but still here.

Any rational person would think it’d been the other way around, that I’d been the one to put Micah onto the high of pain, but that wasn’t the truth. Most angels that thought about Thrausians as danger-seeking also subconsciously thought of how it felt to suffocate, and thought we were chasing pain, but we weren’t.

Suffocation wasn’t pain for me. It was ecstasy.

It didn’t hurt at all. Drowning myself was a hedonistic act.

I’d never chased pain until Micah. Even in Heaven, he spilled his own blood.

It was hard to describe how incredibly rare an act that was. I’d never heard of an angel purposefully hurting themselves the way he did, but there was so much beauty in it. I never knew exactly why. It was just a need for him, a way to spill his thoughts from his mind without having to speak them aloud to anyone.

On Earth, more angels developed this weird relationship with pain, but Micah had always been like this.

I don’t think he really knew why, but it’d always been there. A way for him to get out of his head when he needed it.

I could remember the first time I’d seen it like it was yesterday. He was so beautiful, slicing the same line into his thigh over and over, both of us watching it heal. He did it to me, too. I understood then only a small amount why he liked it. I understood completely now.

Every single night since he’d died, I dreamed about him.

It was agony.

Dreams that he’d never actually died, that this had all been some misunderstanding, and I was so relieved to learn it wasn’t true. Dreams where I knew he was going to die, and I wanted to stop it, but I could never get there in time. Dreams of us still in Heaven.

He consumed every inch of my unconscious mind.

I hated it.

I needed it.

My dreams were the only place I still saw his face—and only ever his face. But sometimes it was replaced with the last image of his face I’d seen. The fire consuming him.

Red flames stealing him from me.

I waited until my skin closed itself most of the way, then sliced it open again. Healing was a lot slower on Earth than it was in Heaven. The pain lasted longer here. But never quite long enough.

━━━━━

“You have to help me,” Dakota sobbed, tears pouring down her face, her hands grabbing my biceps. Wild desperation shone in her glassy eyes as her fingernails dug into my skin. She was shaking.

“I can’t help you, Dakota.”

The fractures, the instability, were too much for her. I almost wanted her to quit trying to keep me together, to just let me fucking die. But every time my mind broke itself apart, my desire to self destruct swallowing all rational thought, Dakota was there pulling me out. She wouldn’t let go.

She wouldn’t stop trying.

I hated it.

I couldn’t let her spend the rest of her life trying to save me.