But it’s Sloan under me and on me and beside me in my bed, and my head doesn’t hurt at all.
Sloan
Then - Seattle
No one ever talks about just how loud silence can be.
It’s deafening.
The loudest sound ever recorded was the eruption of a volcano on the Indonesian island Krakatoa in 1883. It was estimated to be around 310 decibels. It erupted on August 27, and collapsed the majority of the island, producing a tsunami felt in South Africa.
But I think silence is louder, and I think it might do more damage.
At least—Bohdan’s silence.
That might be something more like an implosion, because it really feels like this apartment is turning inward on us.
I blink up at the ceiling and the shadows painted there from the light streaming in from the bedroom window.
He shifts in bed beside me, tugging on those seafoam-green sheets I was so certain might help, but it’s not to get closer to me.
He’s so far away.
He’s Krakatoa and I’m South Africa.
I don’t even remember the last time he touched me. And maybe it’s that, the absence of him around me—this person that grew with me and moulded me and shaped me—that has me whispering quietly, not really to him but up towards the ceiling and anyone who might be listening, “Please just talk to me.”
He stops moving beside me, the collapse of his island momentarily paused. I don’t look, but I think he might pinch the bridge of his nose before palming his jaw. His voice is worn, rough around the edges in all the worst ways. “What do you want me to say, Sloan?”
“Anything,” I whisper with this tiny kernel of hope.
He definitely shakes his head, and I feel those waves all the way over on my continent before the eruption comes.
It wasn’t an implosion. It wasn’t quick and quiet, barely a blip on the radar.
He’s louder than he’s been in months. “That I lost my fucking career? That I was supposed to be the best? Supposed to wipe away every fucking record ever and now I can’t even go outside without my brain feeling like it’s bleeding?”
Part of me collapses, but he keeps going, and takes the rest of me with him down, down, down into the ocean underneath us.
Bohdan
“You should wear your sunglasses.”
Sloan taps my shoulder, and her skin only touches mine through the linen of my shirt, but it feels like lightning. She shrugs the tote off her arm, and the strap of her tank top slides down her skin, revealing theB, prominent from the sun. She starts to dig through her bag for my prescription glasses, moving past the myriad of pills and medication she threw in there this morning before we got off the boat.
I wrap my hand around her wrist, her pulse skittering beneath my fingers. I try to smile reassuringly before planting a rough kiss to the side of her head, because for the next few days, I can. “I’m okay, Zlatícko. Promise.”
“Are you sure?” She frowns, glancing down at the open tote again. “It’s really bright.”
Itisreally bright.
It’s the type of day that has the potential to send me into hiding. The sun beating down mercilessly on the cracked streets of Rome where we wait in this impossibly long, snaking line toget inside the Colosseum for some sort of exclusive tour Talon organized. All of us dehydrated because we drank too much at the disco, and Sloan and I certainly stayed up way too late.
Jay groans every time he has to shuffle forward in the line, a ridiculous pair of thick white sunglasses that somehow look good on him hiding his eyes, and his usually immaculately swept-back hair falling askew over his forehead.
Tia’s features contort into a frown whenever Talon shouts—which is a lot. He’s glued to his phone, spouting out random facts about ancient Rome. She tugs the wide brim of her hat down with a whimper to cover her ears.
The corner of my mouth twitches.
