So I say it and he pulls me closer with a handsome grin. I press my face into his neck and the tears come, just a few.
We stay like that on his tiny bed, my body tucked against him, his arm holding me close. And I let myself believe that love is stronger than anything.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
AERON
Ican’t get the fucking ink right.
I’ve been sitting at my desk for twenty minutes, pressing a loaded brush against silk, and every stroke bleeds where I don’t want it to. Maybe the fabric is too thin for what I’m trying to do. Or my hands won’t stop shaking long enough to control the line.
The bedside lamp is the only light source. Just the lamp throwing a single cone onto my desk while the rest of the room is dark.
I set the brush down and flex my fingers. Ink stains the creases of my knuckles. My jaw aches from clenching.
My sister is a real?—
She stood in the hallway earlier with her arm against the wall like a barricade. Like I’m a child who can’t be trusted to walk ten feet to his own room without being intercepted and interrogated about my eating habits andmydecisions.
I know I shouldn’t have shoved her though.
The memory keeps replaying. My palm connecting with her shoulder. Her back hitting the wall. The look on her face, all of the fight draining out of her.
I don’t even remember deciding to do it. My body just acted on its own, all my anger forcing its way out.
I glance down at my hands as they tremble. I pick up the brush again to try another stroke. It feathers out on the silk, ruined.
There’s acid in my throat. I don’t want to be someone who puts his hands on his sister. That person is every man Mom warned June about.
(That person was me, twenty minutes ago.)
I open my desk drawer and reach past the rolls of washi tape, behind the mason jar of paper clips I never use. A half-empty baggie is there. I hold it up in the lamplight, watching the powder settle along the bottom seam.
I’ve been trying not to use but it’s starting to get to me. I’m having mood swings so hard I can’t predict who I’ll be from one hour to the next. Clean is supposed to make me better, but it’s making me worse, making me shove my sister against the wall. Or maybe this is just who I am underneath, and the coke was the only thing keeping the worst version of me quiet.
I shove the baggie back and close the drawer.
The silk piece is beyond saving, so I wipe the brush on a rag and try one more line anyway. It pools and spreads, formless. It’s the representation of my thoughts right now, every creative impulse muffled before it reaches my fingers.
I drop the brush in the water cup and give up. Then I move to the bed and sit. I hunch forward and press the heels of my hands into my eye sockets until I see color bursts. Red. Then white. Then nothing.
“I’m sorry.”
Her voice is in my head.
“I’m sorry I lectured you…”
She didn’t finish but her voice cracked and she sounded like she meant it.
I could tell her about the cocaine. That I’ve been snorting lines in this room for weeks and I can feel it changing me intosomeone I don’t recognize. She’d lose her mind and yell for hours.
Maybe. Or… what if she reacted different this time?
If the crack in her voice was real, she’d listen first. She’d let me talk before she panicked.
I smile to myself. No, this is my sister. All June has ever done when I try to share something is react so big there’s no room left for what I was trying to say. I open my mouth, and she fills the silence with lectures and fixes until I forget what I was going to tell her.
I couldn’t tell Dorien, either. His focus has been somewhere else for weeks, wrapped up in June. I’d have to wait in line for his attention (I’d be waiting a long time).
