Page 17 of Poison Vows

“Break her heart.”

What the?—

“Fuck you!” I blow up, unable to stop myself anymore.

“Listen man, it’s the onl?—”

“Like hell! I’d sooner stand in front of a firing squad, dance in a minefield, and drown in a pool of acid before I ever break her heart!”

Because doing so is the same as shattering mine.

“Do you love my sister?” Spider suddenly demands, shocking me into silence.

Spider steps closer, his voice dropping low but serious. “You just said from the beginning it’s always been her. If you mean that then you’ll go and stand in front of a firing squad and be riddled with bullets until you’re unrecognizable! You’ll dance around a fucking minefield like a damn ballerina! And if that’s not enough, you’ll go drown in fucking acid to protect her, because that’s exactly what you’ve been doing all along!”

My entire body and soul grow numb, frozen in time.

How can he possibly know what I’ve been through just to get Angel back?

That I’d do anything and everything for her still…

“I know you’re in love with Ivy,” he states forcefully, like a hammer pounding down on a nail. “You’ve always been in love with her. Right from the start.”

I don’t respond. What can I say anyway?

That she’s all I think about in the busiest, most intense, life-threatening seconds of my life?

Do I confess that she’s all I see when I’m aimlessly lagging from moment to moment, questioning my existence when it’s already so useless and cursed?

Should I mention that she exists in the in-between, in the mundane and the precious, in the most sensitive and the minor?

I don’t know when it happened or how, but that girl… she’s all I want.

When I couldn’t move, too sick to go to school, she’d skip her own classes without her grandmother’s knowledge, just to come over and lie down next to me on my deathbed.

She’d ramble on and on about all the pesky thoughts that bothered her, like how she finds school difficult.

How she’s worried about her brother.

How she wants to be friends with Astraea and all the little crazy, yet curious questions she’d have about random stuff.

That girl saw me through my worst days.

My cold days.

My solitary days.

My most brutal, agonizing days.

The nothing-but-numbness days.

She was there for them all.

Her physical presence was crucially important, but even when she wasn’t there physically, she was still with me in strange ways I both hated and obsessed over all at the same time.

“Break her heart.”

How can I do that when her heart is more valuable than mine and everyone else’s combined?

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