Page 87 of The Casualty of Us
“When has me saying no ever stopped you?”
“Also fair.” He lifts the hand from my face before propping it under his head to hold himself up. “Do you believe in God? Or a god?”
I blink, quickly parrying instead of answering, “Do you?”
His eyes hold mine for a beat before drifting. “I think…” he starts slowly. “I think I have to.”
Something about the tentative surety behind the words makes a warmth flare in my chest that has me teasing him softly. “Not even Ollie’s that optimistic.”
“It all has to mean something more.” His gaze comes back to mine, intensity filling it expectantly. “You don’t?”
I let a second more pass before giving into the inevitable. “No,” I sigh softly around the truth because I don’t want to take away from his belief. “No, I don’t.” Quickly correcting myself with a frown. “Or I guess I’m a ninety-ten kind of person.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t discount the possibility, just like I don’t discount the probability of the multiverse.” Another sigh leaves me a little more wearily this time, and I shrug while concluding. “I just think, out of the two, the latter is more likely.”
“So…” He trails off, unwinding our hands enough to tap each of my fingers against his own. “What do you believe in then?”
“Myself.” I run the tips of my fingers back against his with the quiet answer before grinning. “Most of the time.” I tick off the rest quickly. “My family. Science. Facts.”
“That two plus two will always be four.” His dimples flash, face clearing for a second before it falls again with something about this obviously bothering him. “Doesn’t anything ever happen that seems a little too coincidental to you, though? Like there’s some hand reaching down and orchestrating things?”
“I think if you search deep enough, you can find a connection between almost anything that you want to.” I give him another helpless shrug, a frown tugging at my lips because— “I thinkpeople want there to be some bigger purpose so they sleep better at night,” Immediately hopping on the next train my mind supplies. “Because without it they’d have to face the pangolins, Hayes,” I half joke, despite the levity of the topic. “They’d have to accept that in sixty million years worth of evolution, we’re the only thing that’s come close to wiping them out through nothing but our own carelessness. That we’ve become the asteroid to the earth.”
“But what about…” His eyes narrow on me. “Miracles. Love.” He pauses, clearly searching, before countering softly. “The things you truly can’t explain in life.”
I frown harder at him. “Like what?”
“Like the trust you have in your brother.” He runs a finger down my palm. “That’s pretty unshakable, yeah?”
“That’s different,” I argue back. “That’s—”
“Ollie told me once that he knew you were alive for those entire three days.” His words have mine dying in my throat as he lifts a brow at me. “That he could feel you.” I scowl openly at him, knowing where he’s going with this. “How do you explain that?”
I purse my lips for a second before giving him another piece of me. “Did you know that we’re semi-identical?”
His brows shoot down sharply. “What do you mean?”
“One egg.” I tap back against his hand with a sigh. “Two sperm at the same time.” The instant surprise on his face has me giving him a little grin. “A rare phenomenon, apparently, that we split the way we did. I just got the girl swimmer, and he got the boy one.”
His mouth pops open with a quiet, “What the fuck?”
“I know,” I snort. “It’s weird, but what I’m saying is…we were quite literally torn from the same cell.” His eyes flick between mine a couple of times, and I clear my throat. “I think faith is beautiful. I have faith in Ollie. In myself and my parents.”Pausing for a beat before just putting it out there because there’s no way to tiptoe with this one. “It’s religion that throws me. Awful things have been done in the name of it, and I struggle to understand any type of god that would leave his creations to that.”
His eyes spark, face clearing. “It’s the accountability for you.”
“Exactly.” I give him a small nod and look down to where his fingers are still tapping against mine again. “You can’t give a child instructions only to abandon them and then judge them for what they did when you weren’t there.”
The words slip out before I can think them through, and his fingers go still, making me lift my eyes back in time to catch him swallow before he starts tapping away again. “And there’s no part of you that second-guesses yourself when it comes to that?”
“These days all I do is second-guess some things.” I scoff with the confession, my stomach flipping at the fact that he’s the main one. “But no…I decided a long time ago that if I was going to be a good person it was going to be because I chose to, not because someone told me to.” I shrug with the truth, holding his gaze and not looking away from the intensity swirling there. “So I guess if you put a gun to my head…I’d say that knowledge is my god, and anything unexplainable is just because we haven’t advanced enough to have earned the answer to it yet.”
“Faith over religion.” His mouth quirks up on one side with a hint of a dimple. “That there’s some secret of the universe that ensures the pangolin survives.”
I try to fight the grin tugging at my lips, telling him seriously, “Written into its code right there in between the specks of dark matter.”
“That’s a little dark, Ophelia Sage.” He unwinds our hands fully, bringing his own up to trace the line of my jaw while finishing softly. “But I made a deal, so I’ll believe enough for the both of us.”
