Page 89 of The Villains of Winter

One summer, she was accepted into Spelman College Department of Dance.

He was proud of her, even as the heartache destroyed him. He hadn’t gotten into Morehouse College. Spelman was a private, historically Black, all-women’s college. The institution did not admit applicants that were men.

Their contingency plan was to attend Howard University together. Halle almost abandoned her childhood ballet dream since she was three for him, all of her grandmothers and her mother attended Spelman, and their new ballet major had already reached international recognition. It terrified him that she would leave him. Yet he encouraged her to leave. She took his heart with him to Georgia.

He hoped to earn a prestigious degree from one of the top colleges in Connecticut when Æscwulf admitted him, he could provide for her if he finished.

He spent years on his own, until last August. That summer, he met a girl with Halle’s gapped smile, soft dark brown skin, abundant hair curls, balletic grace, and infectiously adorable laughter. Afterward, he dated a string of girls that reminded him of his Halle. He couldn’t resist. He couldn’t make any of it last before he ruined it.

In the end, he always returned to her. He always took the train to Georgia for her.

After Halle left, James promised to look after Elliott. Now, it was time for Elliott to look after James, pinning everything on himself, but Warner Hammett vanished completely.

Elliott returned to folding his clothes. “I think I hate laundry as much as you do, James. How do people manage to do this every week?”

“You would tell me if you regret anything, wouldn’t you?” James asked instead. His mind was still thinking about last week in the dormitory. The intense breathing. The dusky air. The sounds of pleasure.

“I don’t regret it. If anything, I’m glad it happened.”

James couldn’t trust the words. Fragmented, James whispered underneath his breath, “Is it…because I have killed, then?”

His eyes were afflicted with pain. Elliott wouldn’t want to be with a murderer. He’d seen James kill Lucien. What had James thought would happen? That Elliott would desire a man with blood on his hands? That Elliott, miraculously, would want someone more troubled than himself? That was the fatal flaw of James, he knew inside, he wanted too much. He had asked too much of him. “Never mind.”

Elliott hadn’t even heard him, his mind had returned to the disappearance of Warner Hammett. “Never mind…what?”

James lied, “I said, are you going to rekindle everything with Halle?”

“I don’t have plans for that yet.”

“You’ll let me know if that changes?”

Elliott nodded. In the humid, ardent silence, James stared out of the window as though he couldn’t bring himself to look at Elliott. Then Elliott asked a question of his own. Elliott didn’t know how to start it and he tripped over his words for a few incomprehensible moments, before he finally took a breath and he asked, “You would tell me if you had certain feelings about me…wouldn’t you?”

“No, Elliott. I wouldn’t tell you.” James was honest. He didn’t think Elliott could handle it if their friendship changed.

Elliott sat in front of the dryer. His clothes tumbled over as frenetically as his mind tumbled his thoughts around. His eyes misted as he went quiet after awhile.

“For you, I would.” Elliott only murmured six words, but James comprehended every syllable. For you, I would love you that way. “I want you to know that.”

James roughened Elliott’s soft hair. “I know.”

I would do anything you asked; I would be anything you asked.

Warmly, Elliott smiled at him. “In a different lifetime we would’ve been great together. Right?”

“We would’ve been the best.” James smiled back. However, they both lived in a world that had no air for that, not with the weighted murders between them, therefore it was better to never breathe at all.

James read in the dictionary once that limerence was the state of involuntary obsession with another person.

His altered state of mind was an inner battle he wouldn’t wish on anyone. His intense infatuation with Elliott left him without control. All he could do was suffer in his fixation with Elliott.

Elliott and James returned to talking about the star pattern for James’s new ceiling. They were concentrated on constellations, asterisms, stars in orbit of each other. However, Elliott leaned over himself in his seat as the dry wind strayed through the dense, laundered air from the windows. He grasped his hair.

“I want to go back to how our lives were before, is that fucked up?” He choked. “To forget Lucien was ever killed?”

James sat beside him. “No, I’ve wanted to go back to how our lives were since last fall.”

They couldn’t go back to how they were on Samhain or Yule, or even after the hibernal ceremony, but James didn’t want to. He’d rather tear his own heart out and devour it raw in his hand instead, but he kept the fleshy, needy organ inside of him for Elliott. Elliott loved their friendship. All he wanted was for Elliott to say he was his.