Page 241 of Ominous: Part 1
I smile at her, and I see her shoulders tense, a muscle in her neck shifting as she braces herself. “No one.”
She waits.
“I’ve dated,” I continue, shrugging. “Casually. I wasn’t a virgin when we met. I’ve fucked someone in administration, here.”It’s how I know all about you.
She has a great poker face, but she can’t stop the reddening of her cheeks.
“When I was in Idaho—and I’ve been a few times, you know—I took what I could get. Often, it came at a price.”
“What kind of price?” She says nothing about anything else, and I admire the way she holds back. I’m not sure I could do the same. Not when it comes to her.
“Do you know why people like me are so self-destructive?”
She shakes her head a fraction.
“We’re bored. It takes a lot to spike our adrenaline. The price was often some sort of danger, because we seek out thrills, and usually, the most exciting things to us are illegal, or, at the very least, immoral. When you don’t care about much, least of all what other people think, you’re not held in check by things like laws or the opinions of the masses.” I lift my fingers, drumming them once against my bicep. “It can be freeing. But the consequences are always waiting in the wings.”
“But you don’t care about those either, do you?”
I smile at her. “Not particularly, although I do not want to spend the rest of my life in a cell, whether it be prison or a hospital. I can think of no greater punishment than that. I’d rather be dead.”
“I’d rather you live.”
There’s a lightness in my chest when she says those words. “I could,” I tell her honestly. “With you.”
She shifts in her seat.
“Like I said, there’s been no one like you for me. Fucking, sure; brief, emotional encounters, yeah.” I take a breath, glancing at the table between us. “But even when we aren’t touching, like now, even when we just text, or when I hold your hand, or you’re sitting in my passenger seat… I feel high.”
She swallows as I drag my gaze back up to hers.
“I’ve never felt that way about such little things with anyone, ever before.”
“So, I’m like crashing your car, or going over the speed limit, or burning down a house?”
I roll my eyes, smiling despite it. “Yeah, but you’re better because I can have sex with you too, and housefires and fucking are never a good idea. Smoke inhalation, you know?”
She snorts, bringing her nails to her mouth, but she drops them quickly as she catches herself in the habit.
“For the record,” I continue, “I’ve never crashed a car or burned down a house.”
The corners of her mouth even out, no longer pulled into a smile. “What have you done?” It’s a whispered question, each word enunciated clearly, and for some reason, the little hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. I told her about my involvement with Winslet, and even though I don’t think it’s much, I’ve never told anyone else that, because it would seem likesomething, when I didn’t want to tangle myself further into her. The reason being all the things I didbeforeshe disappeared.
The things Eden wants to know about now.
But I fix her with a stare because there’s no longer any point in holding back. She’s going to stay. “I used to draw guns and knives, when I was a kid, and everyone else was drawing their family or animals and sunrises and shit. The teachers were disturbed, had a few conferences with my parents.” I run my tongue over my top lip, the choker feeling uncomfortably tight around my neck.Idon’t feel uncomfortable, but I know how this sounds, to people who aren’t inside my head. “I pushed a kid from the playground, and he was knocked out. Once upon a time, I peed on a few kids because they were assholes. I made sure to do it outside, around the corner of the school, so no one would see me.”
Eden doesn’t react.
I keep talking.“Callous and unemotional traits.”I mimic the language the psychiatrists used with my parents. I overheard Mom and Dad talking about it in low voices on the drive back from one of the local hospital’s psychiatric wards. “I had never cried much as a baby, and even less as a kid. I can’t tell you the last time I did.” It’s a lie. I remember the last time. When I was thirteen, but I don’t bring it up now. “My parents couldn’t beat remorse out of me, not that they tried very often. They couldn’t ground me into being sorry or take away toys for me to feel bad.” I take a deep breath, moving onto the next thing. “Mom used to throw celery to the rabbits in our backyard. She’d coax them out in the spring, little families of them with brown and white fur.” I can see them so clearly in my head, and Mom’s excited smile as she spotted them. She never smiled at me that way. “I never liked to feed them.”
Eden tightens her fingers around her biceps, but otherwise, doesn’t move and she doesn’t look away.
“But they came to her with the celery. She’d hold it out, by the pool sometimes when I was swimming, her eyes on them instead of me, and they’d slowly reach her, close enough to touch. Anyway… the first time I went to Montford, it was because I did the same. I coaxed one over, and when it pulled the end of the celery stalk from my fingers, I grabbed it by the back of its neck.”
Eden’s face goes pale, but she still has her big, beautiful eyes on mine.
I smile at her. “It makes a crunchy sound, and you canfeelthe bones snap, when you twist their necks. I could feel his pulse, too, faster than yours, even.”
