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“I promise you we’re getting out of here,” Rome says, pulling me to his chest, wrapping me in a bear hug. He’s careful to hold my injured arm higher than the rest of me, his large palm acting as a makeshift seal across my bleeding skin. I’m crushed against him, both of us on our knees, but he’s supporting his weight and mine. This isn’t the first time he’s rescued me from a panic attack. I was having them long before somebody decided to kidnap us and put us in hell.
“It’s okay, it’s alright,” Rome murmurs, his words hot against my neck. He buries his face in my long hair and breathes loudly, slowly, as if he’s demonstrating the rhythm for me to mimic. I can’t stop shaking though, the numb safety I’ve managed to ensconce myself in - mentally, at least - sliding away like a fucking avalanche. It all hits me at once. Two weeks ago, my worst fear was being married to a man I loathed. Since then, my father has been shot, I’ve been kidnapped, beaten, raped, I have internal injuries from my IUD that I’m pretty sure are causing me to slowly bleed to death, and I’ve watched Rome get shot while our captor rutted into me at the same time. I’ve kept my cool throughout the lot, even with the crying and the begging and the screaming; I’ve never once lost my shit, not like this. But there’s something about the collar around my neck, about the newspaper soaked in my blood, about the sheer amount of time we’ve been down here, that just absolutely fucking destroys me.
Is this what it feels like to lose your mind?
“I can’t b-breathe,” I gasp, desperately trying to slow down my panting. Ironically, Iambreathing, just far too quickly to stay conscious. I’m hyperventilating, something I’m, unfortunately, intimately acquainted with, only normally, the end result of a panic attack is a brown paper bag, a dark room, and, occasionally, a Valium washed down with a glass of Pinot Grigio. Now, I’m terrified that if I pass out, I’ll really, truly be dead.
“Tighter or looser?” Rome asks me. He remembers. After all this time, he still remembers how to comfort me.
“Tighter,” I whisper, smiling mournfully, as he wraps his arms tighter around me.
“What’s your favorite color?” he asks.
“Blue.” I don’t even need to think about it. It’s blue, like his eyes, like my dead sister’s skin, like the dress she was still wearing when he pulled her from the pool all those years ago and tried to resuscitate her.
“Favorite food,” Rome continues, squeezing me harder and harder. It probably hurts him, the way I’m pushed into his chest, snug against his shoulder that still sports a nasty wound from the bullet he took for me just days ago.
“I can’t-“
“Favorite food.” He’s firm. “Come on.”
“Ice-cream,” I manage. The room spins around us, as I cling to Rome.
“Favorite ice cream,” he whispers.
“Baskin-RobbinsLove Potion.”
“Favorite person.”
“Adeline.” My voice cracks with grief as I say my dead sister’s name in the room where I’ll most likely die.
“Favoritelivingperson,” Rome clarifies.
“You.”
I answer him, without even really thinking. I suppose I could have said Will or my father or Nathan or Jennifer. But I didn’t say any of those people.
“Me,” Rome echoes, his voice softening with disbelief, with tenderness. Something inside my chest cracks open and spreads through my veins. I might have destroyed what we once had. I might have spent the better part of a decade estranged from Rome Montague’s cold blue eyes and his insistent mouth. I might have loved another boy for that entire time, but loving one person doesn’t mean you erase the other. I never really stopped loving Rome, even as my hatred for his family burned alight in every orchestrated move my family made.
When my father had his first heart attack, shortly after Rome went to prison, I begged him to sell the house so that we could start fresh somewhere else. The horror of being anywhere near the pool where my sister, Adeline, drowned, of looking out of the windows and seeing the crumbling, half-burned Montague mansion next door, even more acute after what happened. The flowers, vases upon vases of bright red, long-stemmed roses, that kept coming to the house every day.
Condolences.
So sorry for your loss.
Thinking of you.
In the weeks after my sister was buried in the family mausoleum, all the flowers wilted and died, and the house turned into some kind of living burial ground. Daddy was catatonic. Wouldn’t let us throw a single stem away, and I could understand why. Clearing out the cards, the flowers, the vases would mean it was really over.
Cleaning up the aftermath of Adeline’s suicide would mean that she was really, truly dead.
Daddy had dismissed every single staff member from his house, including the kitchen staff, and the only person allowed beyond the front foyer, apart from me, was my cousin, Nathan. Even Daddy’s brother, Uncle Enzo, and his wife, Aunt Eliza, were forbidden. My father’s grief was a living thing, a dark sickness that almost killed him.
Nathan broke all the vases after weeks of us all living in a rotting pile of dead roses, in various states of decay, stale vase water with scum around the rims only making things smell worse. Took each one in his hands, his face red from the bitter words he’d exchanged with Daddy, and threw them at the living room walls. One by one, they shattered, sending cloudy, dirty water and sharp glass all over the tiled floors. Piles of damp red rose petals and twisted, thorny stems everywhere.
He didn’t mean to hurt my father. He was horrified when Daddy clutched at his chest and collapsed, the first heart attack for a man who was far too young and healthy to worry about such things. Nathan was just angry, the same as the rest of us. Being adopted didn’t mean he loved Adeline any less than we did. If anything, he loved her more. He chose to love her in spite of the fact that he wasn’t linked by blood to any of us.
I don’t know why I’m thinking about that now. Maybe because I thought I’d escaped the Capulet family curse. Survived even as everyone I loved either died or was sent away. Made it to my twenty-fifth birthday. Endured my public betrothal to a man I could never love.
