Page 80 of A Grave Not Made For Mourning
Then the bathroom door clicks open.
I jolt to my feet, the amulet clutched tightly in my hand. I brace myself to speak—to give it to him and leave. But then he steps out. In nothing but a towel.
No beanie.
No hair.
“Shit!” Azaire mutters, and that easy feeling is sucked out of me. He pulls the towel from his waist and covers his head. Then he runs into his room.
The door slams.
I am frozen solid. The blood does not move in my veins. I should leave but I cannot move, as if I’ve been turned to stone. Azaire doesn’t want me here. He’s confused and angry and in so much pain. In grief.
The match is falling from his hand again.
The house is burning down.
From behind the door of his room, he says, “Did you…” I can’t turn toward the closed door. “Did you see?”
Where everyone else has hair, he has snakes. A mane of them.
He is petrified, cripplingly so. It’s left me frozen, the intake of all his emotion. More than anyone else does.
This isn’t good.
The last time I felt another’s emotions so strongly, Ma was dead and Terran looked at me with more than his usual disdain.
I’d felt his true hatred for me.
The last time I felt another’s emotions so strongly, someone died.
Azaire steps in front of me, a beanie covering his head—his eyes impossibly full of emotion.
“Wendy?”
I open my mouth, but nothing comes out. He grabs my upper arms and shakes me a bit. “Are you all right?”
“Y-yes,” I finally manage, my voice stunted. “Yes, I’m all right.”
He lets me go. His hand runs down the length of his face, dragging his features with it. I hate that Aeliana and Persiphis comes to mind. A constellation, an old story, one that ends in blood like all the others. I should have turned around when I had the chance. Never indulged in a conversation with him.
I should have listened to the boy.
I want to take it all back.
I want to erase the story I’ve started.
“I regretfully apologize for showing up this way,” I mutter, walking to the door with my head down.
“Don’t,” Azaire says, and I halt. “Please don’t talk to me like that.”
“I’ll see you in Philosophy?”
“Wendy, please,” he whispers, and I almost cry for him.
The burning house scorches me; the match in his hand suffocates me. This feeling of his that I think I understand strangles me.
This feeling of his. This feeling of mine.
