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How long have I been in here?
I didn’t think that long…
Why the fuck didn’t I just play it safe and lock the doors?
“What are you doing here?” I hear myself ask, my voice distant even to my own ears.
“Izzy forgot her lucky scrunchie.”
I frown. “She doesn’t have a lucky scrunchie.”
“I know,” he murmurs, barely audible.
What the hell?
I can feel more than hear the drops of blood that crash to the tile.
As if Mason too senses it, his head lifts at the same time he gently closes the tin box, having seen all that he needed to see.
My heart pounds. Heavily in my ears, but the pulse of it is felt at my wrist.
He steps further into the room, pale blue eyes drifting up to my face. I don’t tear my gaze away, even when our eyes lock, and I’m crawling out of my skin to get away.
I can feel more blood trickling down my wrist. I don’t need to look to know. Maybe if I pretend it all away hard enough, I can make it all disappear. All of this. Go back in time. Wake up…
Please be a fucking nightmare.
There’s a dangerous sort of quiet to Mason I’ve never witnessed before. An ease with which he blindly, yet carefully, sets the can on the counter, rather than flinging it across the room like I’m expecting him to. All the while, his gaze remains fastened to mine, growing more distant with each passing second.
Mason doesn’t do quiet. He doesn’t mentally check out like this. He doesn’t hold shit in. It’s not in his nature. He’s like my sister in that way—hot-headed and passionate, with a hair-trigger temper.
Not that he turns it on us, or anyone undeserving of it—neither of them do. They’re just…intense.
He’s intense.
Always has been.
Whereas I’m the smoke that trickles up into the air from black, chipped husks, those two are the embers in the ashes. Fan the flames, and they ignite.
But unlike my sister…
He can bottle shit up. And he does.
He’s just far more calculated about when he unleashes. Repressing it never lasts for long, not for him. He always finds an outlet, even if it’s just to storm into my room, throw himself on my bed, and vent about it, if all else fails.
All else being taking it out on a piano, or screaming into a pillow like he used to do as a kid.
My feet carry me back a step, then another. My jaw trembles. Our gazes are wide against one another’s—mine panicked, his in disbelief.
“It’s not what you think,” I find myself uttering.
His lashes flutter, and I realize then that his eyes are red around the edges. “You…” That’s all he manages to get out.
His brow creases, and he’s shaking his head.
“Mason?”
His brow furrows, his gaze lowering to the floor. And I watch as all the color seems to leech from his face. He stumbles back a step, shaking his head faster and faster.
