Page 98 of Fragile Facade
My masks got more detailed after that. If I could no longer control my music, I’d control my situations and surroundings. I learned the art of acting at a young age, but it wasn’t until I lost the music that it turned into the art of pure, selfish manipulation.
I layered lies on top of secrets, dramatized it all with charm and a well-placed smile, and got my personas to do my bidding. Establishing the exact right kind of connection with someone would get me exactly what I wanted from them in the moment, and eventually, I developed so many different disguises that I could pluck them out at random and slip into the role and the power they gave me.
So, where did the real me disappear? Did I lose myself when I lost music?
Would anyone recognize me if I looked at them with a bare face? Under all this confidence I carry around, I’m too cowardly to find out.
The calling cards in my hands slip through my fingers, and I tighten my grip on them, snapping my eyes open. Soren is at the side of the bed—my side of the bed, and I never heard him wake up or get out. His blue eyes calm me, bringing me back to reality, but I latch onto his calling cards like I’m attached to them.
I am.
“I’m just setting them down,” he assures me like it annoys him. I watch him set them on the bedside table and then look at him again when he climbs on top of me. I spread my legs so he can settle on his stomach between them, his hips on my thighs and his chest on my stomach. “Tell me,” is all he says, his breath scented with toothpaste.
“Tell you what?”
What is this? He’s just… on me. Settled. Like he belongs here and it isn’t weird for him to be so touchy. Is this cuddling or is he pinning me down… gently? So baffled. So right. Soren crosses his arms on my chest and rests his chin on them, looking up at me all cute and sleepy. The fuck?
“Where’d you just go? Your mind was so busy you didn’t even hear me call your name.”
I shake my head to pretend I don’t know what he’s talking about. “Was asleep.”
“Riot,” he groans.
I glare.
“I’m not calling you Killian while you lie to me. This is my ‘just in case’ morning, and you’re ruining it by being afraid of yourself.”
“I’m not fucking afraid.”
He turns his head and rests his cheek on my chest instead, and with his eyes no longer on me, the pressure is off. The pressure of what I must look like to him while so unguarded, grasping for masks but trying not to put any on.
“I, uh, was trying to remember when I stopped playing piano.”
“And?” he asks, his chest expanding against my body with each breath.
“I don’t know. It was the piano in Krypt’s room. We played together one night, and I think we were both so lost that we, uh, like, left ourselves in that song. Or I did. He somehow kept playing, but I never could. Any time I tried after, the music sounded wrong.”
“What made you play together that night?”
I recall the day, trying to remember why we sat at the piano together. “I’d had a good day. Krypt—Keegan, at the time—was all pissy because Gia was giving him a hard time about school. He sucked at it.”
“I’m aware. Best friend, remember?”
Right. “I was good at it. So, while Gia praised me for doing well, I drank it in and was too selfish to notice her ripping him apart for not doing well. She called him sick, told him it wasn’t his fault but that he’d never be like me because he was sick and I wasn’t. Selfishly, I just fucking grinned that she knew I was the best.”
Gia, our mom, was sicker than both of us. I hate that I used to beg for her attention and praise.
“He got angry. He got so angry that he scared her, and when Dad got home, they locked him in his room. I think it dawned on me that night that I should have been teaching him how to mask this whole time. I was too self-absorbed to even consider that before. I just went and spent time with him, got him out of the house, had his back, and made sure he wasn’t alone, but I never actually did anything to help him.”
“Yeah, you’re a dick,” Soren says, fingers drumming on my chest to soften that blow. “But so was he, and he probably didn’t want your help anyway.”
“I broke into his room that night, didn’t know what to say, so I sat down at the piano with him. I think he realized how fucked his life was, and he was so caught up in being sick, as Gia said, and I finally clued in on how that was killing him, and we just started playing together. Like an agreement to do better. To change our situation. I mean we were old enough and big enough to fight them but, maybe because we didn’t want to lose each other, we never did. We were both aware of what we were doing that night, but we didn’t talk about it, and when the music ended, I don’t know, I was different after.”
“Different how?”
“Cracked. Like, I cracked in half. The old me stayed somewhere in that fucking house, and the new me built more personas that’d give us the power to change our lives. I forgot to be me and only focused on getting Krypt out.”
“You never call him Keegan,” he says.
