Page 204 of Drown Like Heaven
Her lips pressed together tightly and she glanced away, then back. “Fine.”
“Good.”
?????
Mason walked in through my front door, bypassing me sitting on the couch, walking straight through to the kitchen. I tightened my jaw, looking back down at my laptop.
“Is Aamon dead yet?” I asked loudly.
“No, he’s not. Still holding out hope he’ll sneak up on you and end your pathetic life before you get a chance to bring me down with you.”
I could hear him getting out dishes from the cabinets, helping himself to everything I owned, as usual.
“Why are you here, Mason? I’m not asking you to spend this much time at my house.” Honestly, it was pissing me off how often he stayed here. Sure, at first I made him stay over a few nights so I wouldn’t be murdered in my sleep, but I was sick of it. And I had no fucking clue what was taking Mason so long to do the one singular thing he was supposed to be doing. What did he even do all day long?
“You know why I’m here.”
“I don’t.” The urge to do what I’d threatened to do was pushing at the seams of my mind, a disgusting desire I couldn’t ignore. It wouldn’t be particularly difficult. All I had to do was make him fracture bad enough that he’d lose himself in his own darkness. I’d push him straight into it, headfirst.
Then he might explode my entire house, or he might drown himself looking for the high of neon deprivation. Either way, he would end up dead. I’d make sure of it.
“Do you have water bottles?” he asked.
“Garage.”
I stayed in the living room, waiting the two seconds it took Mason to see what was in my garage.
“You kept that fucking truck?” he shouted, storming back inside, sounding more angry than he had the right to.
Yes. I kept it.
A+K FUCK
Mason was the one who wrote that shit on the visor, back when he liked me. Back when we fucked. I’d told Dakota I’d gotten the car used—which wasn’t even true, but she hadn’t known at the time that I might’ve been old enough to buy it new. She didn’t suspect a thing.My name starts with M.
“Do you have a problem with the truck?” I asked, crossing my arms as Mason came into the room. “Too many memories for you to handle?”
His expression morphed into disgust. “You accuse me of being hung up on you because I’m spending time at your place, but you kept our truck.”
“Ourtruck? It’s mine, not yours. And it’s a nice truck. I had no reason to get rid of it.”
He furrowed his eyebrows, his hands clenched, electricity skating over his knuckles.
Looking at him now, I was struck by memories of how his face had looked at the end. The absolute, earth-shattering devastation when I told him I couldn’t keep doing this with him anymore—andmeantit. The way he’d begged me not to leave him, swearing to me he would get better, promising me he would figure out some way around his own fucking nature.
I swallowed the tightness in my throat, shoving the imagery aside.
I didn’t regret it. Icouldn’tregret it.
But sometimes I wondered if he thought it hadn’t hurt me too. If he thought that walking away from him hadn’t felt like a thousand blades stabbing my chest. If he thought it was something I’d done tohim, when in reality, I’d done it toboth of us. Nothing between us had ever been one-sided, and that included our end, becauseI didn’t want it either. But he was going to drown me right alongside himself if I let him, because I couldn’t save him on my own. Ineverwould’ve been able to save him—as hard as I tried.
And I’d tried really goddamn hard.
“No reason to get rid of it?” Mason scoffed. “Getting rid of me was enough?”
I got up from the couch, pushing past him into the kitchen. “You don’t get to be the victim anymore,” I muttered under my breath.
He didn’t say anything, but I could feel his agony.
