Page 50 of Forever We Fall

For him, I will.

He sets me at arm’s length and rushes around the room, throwing on clothes and packing just a few in his ratty old bag.

“Use my bag.”

His head shakes. “He’ll destroy it.”

He’ll destroy you if you go.

Arlo sets the makeshift bag on the simple bed that he never sleeps in, grabs my towel, and wraps it around my waist. “I’ll be back. I promise.”

I nod. It’s all I can muster.

He grabs his pillowcase, takes one last look at me, and then leaves.

I know it’s the last time I’ll see him. I know he’s taking my fucking heart with him as he goes too. I don’t stop him. I don’t follow him.

I promised I wouldn’t.

Hota won’t stay to protect himself. I know he’ll stay to save me.

I hate that I used his devotion against him. It’s the only way.

For some unimaginable reason, he cares for me. He loves me. Completely. I don’t understand how he could love someone so broken. Especially when he could have anyone or anything he set his mind to. But I don’t question his loyalty. Not for one second.

If my heart was inside my chest, it would feel all warm and gooey at the news.

Leaving him in the room carved it from my body.

My feet move as if concrete blocks formed around them. A narrow plank is laid out before me. The rippling waves of the ocean taunt me with its unending expanse. The captain is shoving a pointed blade at my back.

The moment I hit the water, or the quad as it were, I see the shark.

Somehow, he seems bigger and more threatening than ever before. Suddenly, it doesn’t matter that I’m well fed. That I can bench nearly three hundred pounds. That I know the sequence of hand and foot movements to take him to the ground. I can’tuse any of them on this trip to hell. If I kill him while I’m there, they’ll know it was me.

The knots in my stomach turn solid, threatening to fall out of my ass.

He pushes off the wall of the main office and waves me toward the car, not giving me half a chance to say anything to the headmaster or even the secretary. I divert toward the car because it means I don’t have to get closer to him for the moment.

That moment goes by too fast, and we’re standing next to the car he hired.

“Look at me, you ballsy little twat.”

I look directly into his eyes, praying he knows his days are numbered. I wonder if he can see it in the set of my jaw, the hate pouring from my gaze, or the careful planning I’ve done to ensure his end at my hands.

His upper lip curls, and I know he does.

The meat of his hands turns into fists. He sails the left one into my belly.

It’s his traditional welcome.

As the air evaporates in my lungs and my intestines threaten to burst inside me, I’m thankful he can’t fuck me here. I’m thankful he can’t get his hands on Hota. I’m thankful the holiday is only two weeks.

There is an end in sight. Someone is waiting for me to return.

And somehow, he pushes me so hard, he breaks me down one torturous minute at a time, that even those two things become haunting ghosts instead of reassuring notions.

The sunlight streams in through the window, burning my retinas even through my eyelids. I wish it was night still. The day holds too much, as have the last fourteen days without Arlo.

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