Page 56 of Together We Rot

My own shirt follows suit. His words lodge tight in his throat. “Then came the dreams.”

“D-dreams?”

“Every single night,” he says, and there’s a wavering edge to his voice, desire cutting each word jagged.

His lips carry from my chin to my collarbone to my chest. “Without fail.”

“What kind of dreams?” But I think I know.

“Ones that had me praying,” he confesses, voice darker than I’ve ever heard it.

The lie I’d fed myself for years finally breaks. Just a friend, just a friend, just a friend.

“And then when you asked me if I liked anyone.” He breathes, and his fingers reach to my hair like they did that day. But this time he’s grabbing a tight fistful. “I didn’t tell you, but it was you. It’s always been you. And if you asked me now, I’d tell you I love you.”

He cradles my face between his hands and his kiss is hungrier than all the others. I can barely keep up; my mind is still reeling from his last three words.

“You don’t have to say it back,” he assures me, his voice soft against my skin, “I only wanted you to hear it.” And there’s that dopey, boyish grin of his. A confirmation that as much as he changes, there are parts of him locked in stone.

The night carries on and the wind slashes fiercer than before. He becomes mine in every sense of the word. Mouths and hands and bodies tangled. I love him. My heart is willing to part with the words, but my tongue isn’t. Not yet.

I show him in the flutter of my lashes against his shoulder, in my kiss against his temple, in the moments that follow, hearts racing, my face buried into his spine.

I love you. I really, really do.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

ELWOOD

As soon as I sleep, the forest invites me back.

The woods—once beautiful—have become brutal. Screams peel from the bark and the trees are bathed in an otherworldly shade of blue. Wil’s body is crumpled in on itself amid the foliage, constricted beneath masses of green tangles. Ivy bites her skin, digging deep into the delicate flesh underneath.

I search for the beast who did this to her, but all I find is my own reflection. Just like the motel, it only took a second. One singular moment of lost control and now she’s mangled beyond recognition. The forest is ready to claim her. Her body is more green than pale and bathed in weeds.

The dream shifts, my subconscious floating above the scene and forcing me to stare down what I’ve become. My reflection is worse than I imagined—my human head bobs lifelessly on my neck, my skin an asphyxiated blue, mouth gaping, eyes rolling back in my skull. The beast has cut me off, claiming my body as its own. No longer the parasite but the host. This has always been the future, hasn’t it? Either die by my father’s hand or live long enough to lose myself.

Wil and I are bound together in all the worst ways—vines shoot out from me and sink into her, poised and ready to kill. One final squeeze and she will be no more. With the last of her energy, Wil musters the strength to glare up at me. “Kill me, then. G-get it... over... with.”

And I do. I kill her.

The moon hangs in the sky above us and the transformation is complete.

I lurch awake. Wil’s cuddled in bed still, her appearance smoothed over by sleep. She tries to seem stronger than she is, tougher and fiercer. Looking at her now, I see none of that. I see a porcelain doll with a tiny painted sneer and a furrow in her brows. And I’d dreamt of... Oh God. Have you ever thought about killing me?

There’s a vine snaking toward her throat—the very same from my nightmare, but here and real and ready to choke the life out of her.

“No!” I throw my hands toward her but don’t make it very far. The vine switches direction at the sound of my voice and stretches toward me, a rich, wet shade of green. A branch coils around my wrist, another snaking toward my cheek like a lover’s caress.

I swat the limb away. My horror sends it scuttling back to the floor. In the span of a single blink, it dies. Curling in on itself like a dead spider. It lies there on the floor like something that clawed its way out of the depths of Hell.

Red circles my skin. That could’ve been her throat.

If I’d stayed asleep any longer, it would’ve taken her and it’d be all my fault. Her mother, dead? My fault. Her motel half-collapsed? My fault. I’m a monster no longer in control of myself, as dangerous now as the church warned I’d be. I’d lost myself in desire earlier, but I can’t let my feelings get the best of me now for her sake.

I could be sick. I lift a queasy hand to my lips, resisting the urge to vomit on the carpet.

No. I will not be the one to break her. Loving her is selfish. Dangerous. I’d touched her back in the motel, and she’d gone ghost white. She’d lurched away from me, terrified. It doesn’t matter how much she swears she’s okay. It doesn’t matter because I saw. Deep down, she’s afraid.

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