Page 231 of Ominous: Part 1
Something terrible. Tangled. I grip my necklace for something to do with my hand. I hold on tight to theouroboros.
Is that what we are?
“Why haven’t you figured that out by now? That there isno onelike you for me on this whole fucking planet.”
Slowly, my head reeling, I sit up. I feel off balance. I feel exhausted. Two days with Eli and I’m worn down. What does a lifetime look like?
Short.
That’s what.
I get to my feet, looking to the door. “I’m leaving.”
He doesn’t say a word.
I wait another minute. Still, nothing.
So, I walk out, I gather up my shit, and not for the first time, I leave Eli Addison behind.
* * *
There’sa soft knock on my door. I flinch, picking my head up from my notebook, my fingers clenched tight around my pen.
Slowly, blinking rapidly, I come back to reality, homing in on my bedroom door.
Mom won’t wait to push it open, and I didn’t lock it, for that reason. I saw the look she gave me when I let myself into the trailer. Even Sebastian was, shockingly, home before me. He’d sent me a bleary glare over the top of the fruity cereal he was eating at the kitchen table.
Reece barely gave me a grunt and a glance, but from the awkward hush that fell over the living room, some sitcom with a laugh track set to run every ten seconds the only audible sound, I knew they’d been discussing me.
Mom steps inside my room without me saying a word, and softly closes the door behind her. I don’t want to talk. I don’t want to do this. I clutch my notebook to my chest, full of scrawls and theories about Winslet and Dominic and Eli. I feel a little like a detective.
My knees are bent and covers pulled to my waist, and I hope Mom has no idea what the hell I was doing, but I feel a sense of paranoia maybe she does.
“How was your day off?” Mom starts, a smile plastered on her face. She turns from me and starts to straighten the books stacked on top of my small bookshelf against the wall beside the door. It’s nervous energy with an outlet. When Mom is cleaning, she’s in her zone.
Luckily, I stuffed the books Janelle gave me in the same drawer as my sigil notebook.
I watch Mom work, irritation under my skin, but I know I need to put my all into this conversation. It could impact future plans I make with Eli, whom I haven’t spoken to since I left his house two hours ago. Because I haven’t checked my phone.
“It was great,” I lie to Mom. I pick a stray thread on my comforter, my book still pressed to my chest with one hand “Went swimming. Watched movies.” I mean, theoretically, these things happened. Maybe not to me. But I was around them. Osmosis, right? “I’m pretty tired though.” It’s a lie. I’m wide awake now, but I still stifle a fake yawn with the back of my hand, abandoning the loose thread.
Mom keeps tidying stacks of books, although she’s really doing nothing at all save for knocking the spines tighter together. “Did you see Eli?”
He role played his murder fantasy with me in his bathtub and told me about another murder he just let happen.
“Yeah, he came over to Luna’s.” I clear my throat. “But her mom wouldn’t let him spend the night or anything.”Little liar,he called me. If only he could hear me now.
The sleeve of Mom’s loose T-shirt slides up as she reaches for a non-existent cobweb in the corner of my room with a book in hand to knock it away. If it wasn’t a particularly dull biography I think she got me from a garage sale, I might be annoyed. As it is, I’m focused more on her skin, and I see the scar on her arm, lumpy and pink.
I avert my gaze, clutching the notebook in my lap with both hands.
“That’s good,” Mom says softly, staring up at the corner of my room with the biography held by her side now the ghost cobweb is gone. She pauses, but I don’t rush to fill the silence. This is the part where she’s going to say something I don’t like, and I cannot react, because it’ll only make it worse.
I take a steadying breath, staring at the back of her curly brown head.
Her shoulders stiffen, as if she’s preparing for me to talk back, then she finally gets on with it. “You know, I think maybe you and Eli need a little time apart.”
My pulse slips into overdrive, despite the fact I expected this. I stare at my sheets, pulling my knees closer to my chest, tops of my thighs pressing into the soft cover of the book. “Why do you say that?” I keep my retorts tucked close but let them filter through my brain.
