Total pages in book: 184
Estimated words: 186756 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 934(@200wpm)___ 747(@250wpm)___ 623(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 186756 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 934(@200wpm)___ 747(@250wpm)___ 623(@300wpm)
But then again, he doesn’t know the truth about me, does he?
“He told me,” I answer him.
“Dad told you,” he asks in a flat voice, but I know the question is there.
“Yeah,” I say, thinking about her sitting out there, by the window, her eyes on the passing scenery like she wants to be out there rather than cooped up in a bus with a bunch of Neanderthals who can’t stop salivating over her. “I think I was about five. I found him crying in the backyard. He said he’d done something bad. And when I asked what, he told me. He said he’d never done this before and that he wouldn’t, after this.”
I’m fisting and unfisting my fingers.
I’m trying to keep her face in my mind. Her unique metallic gray eyes; her pouty lips; the way she looked when she caught the snowflakes in her hands last night.
“Fucking liar,” Conrad mutters.
“What?”
Conrad looks at me a beat as if he doesn’t know if he should say it. But then decides to and shares, “Wasn’t the first time.”
I go still.
“He got his start long before that.”
He says more, my brother. I can see his mouth moving, but I can’t hear him. And in a few seconds, I know that I won’t be able to see him either. He’ll disappear right alongside the world that’s already getting blurry by the second.
I’m trying to imagine the feel of her hand on my body. I’m trying to imagine her laughter, her voice. I’m trying to imagine the way she looked when I made her come, wings flanking her, black hair sprawled over the pillow, all flushed and hot, dewy with sweat, so beautiful that if my heart wasn’t buried under six feet of ice, it would’ve broken at the sheer beauty of her.
I’m trying to fucking imagine.
But nothing is helping me slow down the race of my heartbeats. The rush of my blood.
“I am like him.”
Maybe it’s just me, but I think the world has gone quiet. There’s a pin drop silence both on the outside of my body and on the inside.
And I can breathe.
I can see.
Aside from the obvious advantages, I don’t know why I said that. What made me blurt out the biggest secret of my life. The secret I wanted to take to my grave.
Maybe it’s the fact that it’s suddenly gotten harder now.
Much, much harder to keep it.
To carry this secret around.
Not from the world, no. The world can go fuck itself.
From her.
After last night.
After how she looked at me with her gemstone eyes. Like I’m her hero. Like even though I have something bad in me, I still have something good too. I’m worthy of redemption.
Of her forgiveness.
Sometimes I think that pretending to be my twin brother and deceiving her were the least of my crimes. Because this is a bigger deception, playing this role of a good guy.
In reality, I’m an unhinged, unstable grenade who couldn’t even look at her without going into a mad panic. The feeling of hopelessness and helplessness that used to overcome me whenever Mom used to make excuses for her bruises.
In reality, I’m an emotionally paralyzed man who couldn’t even take her joke. She was joking about the door, wasn’t she? I could see that. I could see she was trying to put me at ease, but like a moron, I couldn’t take it.
I didn’t even ask her if she was okay.
I didn’t even have the decency to make sure she was okay.
So maybe I blurted the truth out because I had to. I had no other choice. Because if I can’t tell her—I’m not going to fucking scare her; she’s already been plenty traumatized by me—then maybe I could tell someone else.
And fuck, it’s relieving.
It’s a fucking relief. The soothing feeling under my skin is relief, isn’t it?
Although I have no right to feel it because I confessed my crime to the last person I should have: my big brother. Who’s had to take all our shit for so long so he doesn’t need mine.
Who also doesn’t believe me. “You’re like who?”
I know he heard me, and he understood me. But he’s confirming, so I give him what he wants. “Dad.”
Again, he chooses to watch me impassively for a few seconds. “Sit.”
“I’m not—”
“Sit the fuck down.”
My brother doesn’t know the danger he is in. He truly does not or he wouldn’t have asked me to move from my spot. I had deliberately kept myself glued to it, my feet firmly rooted on the floor and my back firmly plastered on the wooden door.
Because I know if I moved, I wouldn’t be able to stop myself or pull myself back from the things I don’t want to do. It’s like you’re afraid of going too fast so you stand still.
But I do it.