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I’m so taken aback that I can only stare up at her while I wait for her to explain.
She worries her bottom lip, unable to meet my intent gaze. “Not even Hadley knows this,” she says in a small voice. “I couldn’t bring myself to tell her. Couldn’t admit to myself exactly what it meant.” Gathering her courage, she forces her eyes to mine. I latch onto them like the shining beacon of a lighthouse, safely navigating me through treacherous waters.
"I was only with them for a month before I left. As soon as I arrived, I knew it wasn’t where I was supposed to be. It felt all wrong. I forced myself to stay, but each passing day just got worse and worse. Until eventually, I made the decision to leave. I was able to move into my dorm room early at Halston, so that’s what I did. I went to Halston two months ahead of schedule, got a job in a cafe, and every moment I wasn’t working, I was holed up in my room, crying over rom-coms and screaming at everyhappily ever afterI read in books."
Her face is set in tight lines as she searches my face for a reaction. I continue to gape speechlessly at her until I finally get my dry mouth to spit out words. "You didn’t sleep with any of them?"
She shakes her head.
“And they were okay with that?”
"Yeah, I think so." Her cheeks turn rosy, her eyes dropping from mine to stare resolutely at a point on my chest. "When I first arrived, they talked about a relationship where they all shared me."
On instinct, my body tenses. The thought of anyone else sharing her has a red mist descending over me.Hurt. Stab. Kill.The only thing that pulls me back from the edge is the soft press of her fingertips against my skin. I’m not even sure if she knows she’s touching me as she strokes soothing circles along my side.
"That was the final straw. I broke down and told them everything that happened with Hawk and with us. They understood and said I could still stay, but it no longer held the appeal it once did."
“You didn’t sleep with them,” I murmur. The dawning of realization is like being dunked in ice-cold water—a shock to the system that sends previously dormant neurons firing in all directions.
A heavy silence falls over us, as though blanketing us from the outside world while we sort out our shit. She’s still stroking absently along my side—ironically, the side that was burned.
Gathering myself, I find my voice. "When I was fifteen, I was in a house fire." The room, the bed beneath me, Emilia, all of it crumbles as I'm ripped from the present and dumped in the past. Before me, I can see the large house, flames erupting from the windows, the heat sending glass exploding outward.
It’s physically painful to get the following words out. “It claimed the lives of my three closest friends.”
I hear Emilia’s audible intake of breath, but it reaches me as though through water, barely penetrating the past that has erected itself around me.
As if the scene before me is playing out on a screen, it rewinds to earlier that night. The four of us are spread out across the sofas, some sport playing on the widescreen TV in the background. Cans of beer and bottles of liquor litter the coffee table and are toppled over on the floor, smoke hanging thick in the air with the telltale stench of weed so pungent that I swear I can taste it on my tongue even all these years later.
We’ve been at it for a while, the four of us descending into a drunken, drug-fueled haze for no reason other than a Thursday night. We’re rich, so why the fuck not.
“We were partying hard,” I say aloud in a voice that sounds nothing like mine. “Which wasn’t anything new for us. We were all rich, bored, arrogant teenage boys with nothing better to do and no parents around to police us.”
My mouth dries up as the scene in front of me becomes hazy, the drug-alcohol combination working its magic until the scene fades away into darkness. "I blacked out at some point, and when I came to, the room was on fire. It was so thick that I could barely breathe. My skin felt like it was literally melting from my bones. I remember searching for the others, but I couldn’t see a thing through all the smoke. I guess I must have managed to crawl my way out of the house, because the next thing I knew, I was in the back of an ambulance."
Blinking, I slowly come back into the room. Emilia’s green hues ground me in the present. "One of the nurses later told me that I was the only one pulled out of the fire." Swallowing around the lump in my throat, I choke out, "The rest of them perished in the flames."
“Wilder.” Emilia’s voice is coated in anguish, but I turn my head away from her sympathetic gaze, not wanting to see it. I don’t deserve her sympathy.
Feeling as though my insides are being ripped to shreds, I keep my eyes firmly on the wall as I say, "The firefighters were able to pinpoint the origin to right beside the chair I was sitting in. It’s a miracle I made it out alive, or so they kept telling me." Gritting my teeth, I spit out, "But I can see it for what it really is—a curse. It was me that started that fire. I killed my friends, all because I had too much to drink and smoke."
“Wilder,” Emilia repeats in a broken voice. “You don’t know that.”
Incensed, I snap my head around to face her. "I was smoking weed that night. I was high as a fucking kite, drunker than a skunk. It doesn’t take a genius to put it together. I must have been smoking a joint when I passed out. It fell from my fingers and hit the carpet, spreading outward until it consumed my three best friends." Gesturing with my chin toward the twisted skin covering the left side of my body, I snarl, "And all I was left with were these reminders of my stupidity. My recklessness."
Emilia looks physically pained as she watches me splinter.
Heaving out a long breath, I force myself to relax. “Although that’s not entirely true. I died in that fire. The Wilder that was before, went up in flames alongside his friends.” Wrenching my gaze away from the wall and back to hers, I confess, “The figment that was born from the torched remains of that house was soulless, incapable of normal human emotion. My insides had been scooped out, leaving nothing but a hollow shell behind.
"I was dead, or as dead as one can be, while still carrying around a beating heart. Hadley plucked the remnants of my blackened soul from the ashes, but it was you who breathed life back into my empty carcass."
Searching her eyes for that constant anchor that steadies me, I tell her, "All those months spent around you, you coaxed me back to life. I was damaged and tormented, but I was no longer a dead thing aimlessly roaming."
Seeing the tragic ending coming, Emilia murmurs, “And then I left.”
Defeated, I sag against the mattress. “Then you left, and the relative peace I found shattered.”
Tears gleam in her eyes, but they don’t fall.
