Page 82 of My Lovely Tragedy
BROOKLYN
Every morning I wake,waiting for the moment Tobias wraps his arms around me and guides my fingers over the keys to the song he wrote. A song I hear in my head, even in my dreams—which have taken on a lifeform of their own.
Something vivid and disconcerting. Drowning in a hollow void.
I force unconsciousness in hopes the night passes faster because, for the first time in my life, I vie for the touch of reality.
Tobias hasn’t slept in his bed since he chained me. Every night, he either falls asleep beside me on the couch or in his chair across from me, laptop opened, fingers hammering away as he writes aboutme,bathed in the shadows.
I almost prefer those nights over the ones where he holds me. When he watches instead of touches. Both are equally disarming, but I can pretend much more easily to force distance when I have his eyes. I can’t at all when his skin is against mine and his body heat melts into me.
I crave it already. The feel of him. And I ache when I don’t.
Another fucking addiction formed, viler than all the rest.
My fingers trail over the healing marks on my arm—scabbed and gnarly,real—to behind me where Tobias stands, flipping through his journal and scratching another haphazard note. My arms burn with the strain of having played for hours, but I like it—Tobias using me in yet another way.
My arms are an extension of his. And as he slides his back over mine, fingers resting perfectly on top, I feel another shift. “Let’s try this,” he breathes quietly against the side of my face. I feel his eyes on me, so close he must be cross-eyed.
I revel in it as he guides my hands over the keyboard, repeating the last few notes before hitting a few more that are deeper than what came just before. It rings out, loud and vibrant, and I smile. “That’s it,” I concur. He hums softly in agreement, and we play it again.
My hands, his hands. His body in mine and mine forever in his.
It’s disorienting when he finally separates, and I sway as the room spins. Tobias catches me with a near-silent huff a second before my hands slam across the keyboard.
“Perhaps we should get some food in you,” he muses, ruffling my hair, now longer than it ever has been. I lean into the touch before it disappears—just like everything else.
* * *
We eat dinner in silence.Pasta and wine and caressing glances. But the longer we go without speaking, the more my skin starts to burn. I dig my forearm against the edge of the counter, but the blunt ache of a forming bruise doesnothing.
Tobias has been nothing but gentle. Caring and charismatic and fuckingfunny.Nothing like the monster I’ve seen he can be in those flashes of darkness so inky black, there’s no end. Just an endless, bottomless void within.
Consuming obsidian.
The part of him that’s most relatable—and the one I crave the most.
“You’re going to bruise yourself if you keep doing that,” he muses quietly as he takes another sip of blood-red wine. I grit my teeth, eyes straining on the small bubbles around the circumference of the surface.
His fingers curl around the stem in a gentle caress, and it reminds me of the glass he broke at the sink. When I told him I wanted to know him, and he asked me tostay.
My arm swipes across the counter before I even realize what I’m doing. Steel scrapes over the soapstone, sending plates crashing to the floor. Crystal shatters in front of us, wine spilling outward, more fuchsia than sanguine, andthat’sdisappointing.
By the time my arm is cradled to my chest, stinging with superficial scrapes, the cabin has settled into an explosive silence, one charged and poised, ready to detonate at a single spark.
Give me a spark, Tobias, please. Anything but this.
Anything but fucking kindness.
“You promised,” I croak, hating the way my voice cracks, practically handing him my desperation on a silver platter.Look at me. I need you to cut me again before I lose my fucking mind. Look at what you’ve done to me!
“What, exactly, did I promise you, Brooklyn?” He hasn’t moved a muscle. Even as his wine drips onto his pants, staining the charcoal gray.
“A need for a need, Tobias.” My fuckingfacetingles with shame, and I hate it. That I’m so transparent. “You gave that to me and now?—”
“Now… what?” he asks, but he still won’t fucking look at me. I fist my hands in my lap, digging my nails into the skin there, trying to getsomething.
“And now, you won’t give it to me! It’s been days. I don’t even know how many anymore, and I just—you—yousaid?—”
