Page 35 of Poison Aches

Don’t fucking break.

Don’t break… not yet.

I find myself repeating what the girl just whispered to my heart, as if it has some actual effect.

She looks directly at me now. “I promise, from now until forever, I’ll do my best to help you in any way I can.”

Don’t promise me anything.

That’s what I want to tell her, but for some weird reason, I find myself almost clinging to her words, made so much more important by the dripping sincerity in her eyes.

“How do I know you won’t change your mind?”

She pauses, as if really pondering it.

“When you get better, better enough to go outside, we’ll seal it with a vow.”

“A vow?”

“An unbreakable one!” she says with a bit of excitement. “We’ll figure out how to make it unbreakable.”

I stare at her.

This is what happens when trust has never been broken. You act naively as she is now.

“Your name is Emmett, right?”

The sound of my name sounds strange when she says it.

Before making friends in the estates, only my mother and father called me by my name.

Because of the sickness and being bedridden, I didn’t have any friends growing up, and the staff always addressed me as Master Easton.

Grandfather just referred to me as the next heir.

This girl… she’s the third person to call me by my name in this very mansion and something about that makes me feel that strange sensation in my chest.

A sensation I’m coming to loathe more than the thing that has a weird rhythm in my chest.

“Say it again,” I demand, grabbing her hand again.

“What?”

“My name. Say it again.”

“Emmett?”

She rolls my name off her tongue effortlessly, softly… with a gentleness that reminds me of my mother.

I stare at her for several beats, but this time I’m too confused to count how many.

“What’s your name?” I ask to mask the weird feeling in my chest.

I already know her name. I just want to hear it from her lips. Will it sound as weird to me as my own name?

“Ivy,” she says sweetly, almost like a fresh breeze after the worst winter, breathing fresh life into my lungs. “My name is Ivy Marie Irving.”

Ivy.

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