Page 65 of The Shadows Beyond
Cinn sighed and closed his eyes, pressing his fingers to his temple. “No.”
“I’ve realised it was probably very rude of me to assume you’d want to go back to your room.”I’d have far rather woken up with you in my arms.
Cinn turned the page of his book, placing his overlay on the next sentence.
A sickening jolt passed through Julien’s heart. Whatever he’d done, Cinn seemed extremely pissed. What if heneverforgave him?
Mind-blowing sex aside, Cinn’s tentative inclusion into his tiny circle of friends was more important to him. Too important to fuck up. Even though he’d only been in his life for a handful of weeks, he’d feel his absence like a missing puzzle piece. And so would the other two.
Why, oh why, had he not listened to Darcy?
“Cinn?” he practically whined, unable to keep the panic out of his voice.
Cinn’s eyes snapped upwards, angry storms swirling in them.
“You didn’t tell me if you were clear, yesterday.”
Julien blinked. “You didn’t tellme, either.”
“Well, I don’t go around sleeping with every Tom, Dick and Harry! Plus whatever their female equivalents are.”
“What? Who are they?” He was fairly confident he’d never slept with a man called Dick. He’d remember that.
“It’s an expression! It means you fuck around a lot.”
Julien winced. “Really, Darcy was exaggerating that the other day.”
“Just answer the question.”
“I’m clear.”
“You sure?”
“One hundred percent. I’m actually offended that you think I’d endanger you like that. Who do you think I am?”Someone that sleeps with every ‘Tom, Dick, and Harry,’ clearly.
Cinn placed his headphones over his head, turning the volume on his Walkman up to what must have been maximum. His eyes returned to his book, jaw clenched. A frown etched a deep canyon into his forehead that Julien itched to smooth with his thumb.
Look at what you do to the people you care about.
Unable to bear the oppressive atmosphere, Julien scooped up his papers and slipped out of the conservatory. His feet led him past his rooms, and up another flight of stairs, to Béatrice’s.
Her childhood bedroom was, of course, exactly how she’d left it: lilac frills and a forest of memories. She watched him from the corner of his mind as he collapsed onto the silky sheets of her bed, reaching for her one-eyed stuffed bear. Bernard Bear.
The toy stared at him judgmentally, burrowing deep inside his soul.
Why haven’t you found her yet?Bernard grumbled at him, in the gruff bear’s voice his mother used when she’d wiggled him in the air.
The ghost of Béatrice’s laugh echoed through her room.
Another person he kept letting down.
A drop of the grief he kept so tightly bottled up leaked out. Panic crept in. If he allowed his sadness to spill out of its airtight container, it would flood him, sink him under, drown him like it had done for that first month after she died.
Béatrice had been his rock, his anchor through the shitstorm of their childhood, and then she’d been his very best friend. The only one that truly understood him.
The grief he’d felt after Béatrice’s death was nothing like the grief he’d felt for his mother. His mother’s passing had been a tempest, a relentless storm lasting years that battered his soul, leaving behind a landscape scarred and barren, where every memory was tinged with sorrow.
Béatrice’s departure was different. It was like a quiet mist that randomly descended upon him, subtle yet suffocating, wrapping around his heart with delicate tendrils of loss. While his mother’s absence, in the years after her death, pounded into him like thunderclaps, reverberating through the chambers of his being, Béatrice’s absence was more akin to a silent scream. He often found himself trapped in a vacuum, an emotionless state that left him suspended in a haunting stillness.
