Page 36 of Possession

“Are you in pain?” My voice scratched in the open air, dry and flat.

“I deserve it.” She closed her eyes and I was grateful for the reprieve.

I didn’t contradict her as my fingers clenched at my side.

“I’m damned, Declan, I’ve condemned us both.” Her voice splintered into bruised purples and my feet moved at her silent cry for help.

I kneeled at the bedside and ran my fingers through her hair.

She betrayed you.

I exhaled, sifting through my venomous thoughts and kissed her cheek as I whispered, “Maybe we were damned from the start.”

The heat from her touch radiated up my arm, fighting off the voices that still screamedworthless, worthless, worthless, as the memory flickered behind my eyes.

“Do you still feel damned?” I asked. Her words, my words still fresh in my head from that day.

Her eyes glimmered in crystalline waves of blue as she said, “On most days… yes, but I’ve come to terms with my fate.”

“Your fate?”

“I can’t have children. I tried, for years, to conceive again, and I think God gave me a gift and then I discarded it. I—”

“We did, Paige, we both did. I let you suffer alone, and there are days I fucking drown in that choice. I want the illness, the blackness in my brain to swallow me up so I can’t remember how I’d treated you that day.” Each breath burned as I spoke past the lump in my throat. I’d let her believe she was damned. I let my own anger punish her with silence. “If anyone has a one way ticket to Hell it’s me.I let it fall apart… I was the one who went quiet, when all you needed was noise.”

She exhaled an unsteady breath and I released her hand.

“I’m sorry I left you alone, captive to your thoughts. I didn’t save you like you’d always done for me, and I’m sorry for not fighting harder to get you back.”

I held her face and drew her watery gaze to mine.

“Did you mean it, Declan? Did you mean it, what you said that day… that we were damned from the start?”

I shook my head. “I was angry and confused, and if I could go back—”

She wrapped her arms around my waist, and I dropped my hands as she brought her cheek to my chest. Out of instinct, of self-preservation, my body stiffened, but then melted as her palms lay flush on my back. The familiar embrace calmed the unnerving feeling of being touched by her again.

“There’s no going back, remember?” She breathed and I felt her smile against my chest as I draped my arms around her small frame. She leaned back but kept her hold on my waist. Having her hands on my body again, it set the pilot light ablaze in my heart. “You and I, we made so many mistakes, and I could let myself fall into each one until I could no longer find a way out, but I’m too tired to get lost, I’d rather just move forward.”

As I cupped her cheek, she closed her eyes and leaned into the touch. The rational thoughts, the dark thoughts, they became a piece of parchment held above a flame. They flaked and burned and blew away into the thick, studio air, and all I could think about was kissing her. Her top lip was fuller than her bottom, and I wondered if she’d kiss my upper lip first like she used to. I could almost feel it, her hesitant breath would brush the skin of my lips. Would I get to smell the sweet mint of her mouth, feel the damp heat of her flesh against mine?

She was once my ruin, and she could easily rip me apart again, and I think I’d let her.

I waited for the hateful hallucinations, the malicious thoughts to grip me, but there was no sound… nothing to cool the warmer thoughts that had begun to brew inside me.

She stared at me, her eyes brilliant under the studio lights, waiting for me to make the choice, to choose the path forward.

I nodded, and her features softened as my lips curved into a smile. I caught a piece of her hair and softly placed it behind her ear.

“Let’s paint.”

“Do you like working at Avenues?” she asked as we packed up for the night.

We’d spent the majority of the past two nights in silence. It was the way it had always been with us. Paints, pencils, charcoal, oil pastels, it didn’t matter the medium, we’d mix it with music and fall onto our own planets, each orbiting the other. She was the Earth, and I was always her night. Working next to her again was no different. I think we purposely didn’t ask questions, knowing it could disturb the weak foundation of the treaty we’d both agreed to. We had discussed nothing but art until now. Paige’s body, still thin, seemed fuller somehow, and she even had color in her cheeks as she stood with her bag already over her shoulder, staring at me, awaiting a response. She was opening the next door, and there was a part of me that didn’t want to cross the threshold, because what if what I had become still wasn’t good enough to keep her.

“I do. It was weird at first, permanently placing a piece of myself onto another person, a stranger, but I love it. I like it best when they don’t give me a reason behind what they pick. I tend to make my own assumptions.” I smiled as I covered my palette.

“So you and your brothers all work there?”

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