Page 95 of Breaking Ophelia
I let her fall asleep against me, breathing slow, her body heavy and real.
I keep watch until my eyes shut against my will.
She wakes before me. I hear her in the kitchen, the click of a kettle and the scrape of a stool, but I don’t get up. I let her have the silence.
When I finally drag myself in, she’s perched at the counter, hair everywhere, mug cradled in both hands. She doesn’t look at me, just stares through the windows at the lake, like she could will herself out of this dream.
At least the sun is shining today and it’s warmer than yesterday. Almost warm enough to go for a walk on the beach.
I make my own coffee, black and scalding. I don’t talk. I wait for her to start.
“Did you ever care about them?” she asks. “The other Feral Boys.”
“Yeah,” I say. “They’re my brothers.”
She snorts. “Doesn’t seem like it. You left them, didn’t even tell them that you went. Didn’t warn them.”
I take a long sip, burning my tongue. “We all had a choice. We all knew the rules. They’d have done the same thing if it was them and a girl they’d die for. Maybe they still will. Unlike those before me, I believe in freedom of choice and I won’t strip that from them just because I made mine. Just because I chose you.”
She flinches at that—just a tic, like a heartbeat. “Are they safe?”
“No one’s safe,” I say. “Not after what I did.”
She absorbs that, pulling her knees to her chest, mug tucked between her ankles.
“They’ll come for them?” she says.
I shrug. “If the Board can’t reach me, they’ll pressure the next in line. Maybe punish them to prove a point. Or maybe they’ll change the rules again. I don’t know. It’s hard to predict what those old fucks will do.”
She doesn’t cry, but her hands go white on the mug.
“I’m sorry,” I say, softer than I mean to. “But it was always going to end like this.”
She wipes her face on the sleeve of my jacket. “It’s not your fault. You didn’t write the rules.”
I want to agree. I want to let myself off the hook. But I can’t.
“Doesn’t matter,” I say. “I’m the one who broke them.”
She sets the mug down with a sharp little clink. “Good.”
She means it. I can see it in her eyes—the defiance, the pride. She likes that I’m the one who ruined everything. She likes that, for once, someone didn’t bend.
“Do you regret choosing me?”
“Absolutely not. I’d choose you, even if it meant standing in front of the gallows. Even if it meant giving them all of me.”
She jumps down, walks to the window, putting an extra little sway in her hips just because she knows I’m watching. The wind picks up off the ocean and slams into the glass, rattles it in the frame. She stares at the empty beach, arms wrapped around herself, lips moving like she’s talking to ghosts.
I go to her. Not because I want to, but because I have to.
She’s shivering, but when I touch her, she doesn’t flinch. She just sinks into me, her back to my chest, my hands locked around her ribs.
The smell of her hair is raw, animal. She presses her skull to my chin.
“You’re not getting rid of me,” she says.
I laugh, voice rough. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”
