Page 217 of Ominous: Part 1
Sometimes I forget how young we are. When we’re around our peers, it’s easy to feel older, and wiser, more mature. They don’t care about things I care about. Maybe before Eden, I didn’t care about much at all, but now she’s all I’m fixated on. She is my entire focus.
And I want to play these games with her. They make everything… fun.She’sfun.
“Do you like baths?” I ask her, sidestepping her question. I trace my fingers over the sheets, a meaningless pattern, but she tracks the movement, and I think she’s obsessed with my hands.
I’m infatuated with every inch of her, so our mutual rapture is a little unbalanced, but whatever.
“Yes,” she says slowly. “I don’t take them often at home.”
I stop drawing patterns, pressing my index and middle finger harder into the mattress. “Why is that?”
She shakes her head, and I know she’s not focused on my fingers anymore. “Sebastian is always in there, and he’s messy.”
I clench my teeth together, but I don’t speak. I heard what Dominic said about her brother. She’s not the only one who didn’t ask questions. Why do we dance around these things? For me, I don’t want to talk about them because I don’t want the pity. I don’t want to be psychoanalyzed. It’s boring for me, and sympathy makes my skin crawl.
But Eden isn’t like me, in some ways.
Then again… I think of her with Dom. How she handled him so completely. It was like looking into a mirror, seeing the way she was unaffected when he started to hit his head, when I cut him, when she walked him up the stairs to save me from potential punishment.
But what are the things she doesn’t speak of? What are the things she hides even from me? The medication, for one. The heart defect. The way, lately, she’s been so giddy.Excited.I’m not sure she even recognizes the abrupt change in her moods.
“I just don’t feel like the bathroom is my own,” she finishes, looking up at me through her long, thick lashes, straight instead of curved, now I know it, I can’t stop seeing it. She’s beautiful.
She smiles at me, but I don’t think she means to.
A mask, just like my own. I wonder what it would take to pry it off. Would it be like removing mine, bits of my own flesh stuck in places, the disguise tearing out my skin, blood along the coverup? I wonder if, right now, she’s thinking of horrors from her brother, or maybe what the future holds for him, or things she’s witnessed or experienced or seen, and yet her little smile is still firmly in place, isn’t it?
Does the medicine hide her anxiety so well? How often does she take it with me?
She said it helps with physical symptoms of anxiety. But nothing else. Nothing of the mind. She could potentially break down, and no one would know because her body would keep it hidden inside.
It’s like those pills are a metaphor for my entire fucking life.
How much do you hide from me, too, Eden? How much of your life has been a lie?
I glance at the bed again. My white sheets, the mattress which hasn’t seen me sleep nearly as much as it should.
There used to be a crib in this room.
Mom said I slept a lot, then. I didn’t cry much, she told me. Only when I was hungry. I wonder how many hours I cried for a bottle in here. Did Mom ever shut her door and head to her bathroom, flip on the fan, and get in her tub, the sound of the faucet filling the basin drowning out any of my infant screams?
Unlike Eden, I felt like everything in this house was my own.
I’ve grown to love solitude, but I think, once upon a time, I craved Mom more than anything. I wanted to share this place with someone, but no one seemed to want to share it with me.
“Good news.” I push up, climbing atop Eden, my palms on either side of her head, her body beneath my own, a slight smile on her parted lips. She presses her palms to my bare chest, and I love the way her breath hitches when she touches my skin. “Everything that’s mine here is yours.” I lower my face to hers and kiss her nose. “Let me bathe you. No sex. You can change by yourself, get in alone, and if you decide you don’t want to do this, you tell me, and I won’t come in.”
“You’re a liar,” she says, correctly, her fingers splaying wide on my chest as she looks down, her smile widening. “You willdefinitelycome in.”
I nudge my nose to hers. “Trust me, okay?”
She drags her gaze so, so slowly to mine, and it’s maddening to see the reality in her eyes. She doesn’t trust me. Not even a little.
She’s skeptical, and cautious, and as much as she likes me, maybe even loves me, she doesn’t trust me at all.
But she still says, like a good little liar,“Okay.”
* * *
