Page 59 of Hellfire & Tinsel
Only Beau had never looked like that when he’d been with him.
He took another tentative step forward and those eyes locked onto him, the blush deepening to a rose red.
“Kassel?” the figure murmured hopefully.
Heaven had just spoken to him. He’d been blessed by something holy. In the presence of the divine.
Beau.
It was really him. Beautiful and warm, his soul burning so brilliantly it was hard to look at.
Because it wasn’t blocked by his human skin any longer.
Beau was dead.
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Beau
Beau was full of regret.
As he stared at the empty space Kassel had occupied, all he wanted to do was take it back. He wished he’d never opened his mouth. Maybe they could have had longer. Who knows when Kassel would have been called back to Hell? He’d said he didn’t need to.
“Kassel?” he whispered into the empty night, voice on the verge of breaking. “Are you still there?”
Only silence answered, reverberating in the cavern of his hollowed-out chest and the emptiness of his home.
It wasn’t fair to Kassel. He couldn’t keep him. He couldn’t be selfish.
He knew all this, but…
“I didn’t mean it,” he croaked. “I don’t want you to go.”
No reply.
“I already miss you.”
A few tears streaked down his cheeks, but he tried not to lose it. It was for the best. Kassel had a life, and Beau couldn’t tie them together forever, no matter how much he yearned for their threads to be woven.
There was something about him that not even a demon summoning could fix. He’d known that all his life. There was a broken, cold jaggedness around his tender heart that didn’t let anyone get close or stay, unable to withstand it. No matter how desperately Beau tried to reach past it, dragging himself through the shards, it was futile in the end.
He was left bloody and cut open, destined to be alone.
“But I don’t want to be alone,” he whispered.
He buried his face in his hands and sobbed, his heartbreak his only company.
He didn’t sleep. He spent Christmas Day not even registering anything, trying to convince himself to be happy with what he had received in his lucid seconds. To bask in the beautiful memories and be satisfied, even though they felt more like torture than solace.
He opened the gift Kassel had brought with him when he came back and found a misshapen black candle. He lit it and the scent of fire and ash filled the air around him. Kassel’s scent. He let it burn and inhaled as deeply as he could, comforted by it but at the same time filled with despair, because what happened when the candle burned to the end? What would he have then?
Time passed in a blur. He couldn’t tell when the sky turned from dark to light and back again. He simply sat in front of his tree, staring at the once joyous lights in mourning. The days began to trickle by at a sluggish pace. Beau grew dehydrated and exhausted from crying so much. He called in sick to work. He hardly ate.
The person who said it was better to have loved and lost was a complete liar.
They couldn’t have felt this sort of pain and preferred it.
Beau wished he could go back to the naivety of before, where he didn’t know what he was missing out on. When the love and affection he’d so craved hadn’t carved scars into him that would never heal.
