Page 29 of Wretched Thorns

Then I caught the perfume on his collar. Not mine. Something sweeter. Citrus.

He’d been feeding.

It hit me cold and clean. Some other woman, in a room I couldn’t see, was sitting hollowed out the way I’d been hollowed out in here, in our house in Atlanta, for years. No doubt, she was telling herself it was deadlines, or bad sleep, or hormones, the way I’d told myself for three years.

He’s psycho, Serena, you’re searching for logic in the illogical. Tara’s words again. She had to have realized I was missing by now. A small wellspring of hope opened in my chest.

He walked across the room toward the bed. Sauntered. The way he’d always walked toward me, like a man who had all the time in the world to arrive. He sat down on the edge of the mattress beside me, hip against my hip, the weight of him too familiar. I wanted to puke.

His hand came up to my shoulder.

A white rose petal was on it. He must have done the small motion at his hip, the one I’d watched him do for the first time the night he brought me here, the one that pulled his roses out of nothing. I never saw him do it anymore. I just saw the petals after, where he placed them.

Three left on me now, I counted. The one he’d just put on my shoulder. One I’d missed in my hair, and one on the coverlet by my hip.

“You look tired, sweetheart,” he said.

I didn’t answer.

He waited.

“You should sleep,” he said. “I’m not going to feed tonight.”

He said it the way another man would say I’ll be late for dinner. Casually. The not-feeding paired with the perfume on his collar, paired with the way his hand stayed still on my shoulder. He wasn’t hungry tonight. He’d already eaten. I was the thing he was keeping. The thing he’d put in a cage he’d spelled with his own hand, but oh, he’d kindly lit a candle for.

Fuck you. The thought rang out through my mind even as my veins filled with fire.

He didn’t lie down beside me. He sat on the edge of the bed and waited until I lay down. The coverlet came up to my collarbone under his hand, the way you’d tuck in a child. Then he didn’t move.

He sat there.

I closed my eyes.

He stayed.

I kept my breathing even. I counted my breaths, keeping them light and steady. The shadows in the corners wanted to come up. I kept them down. The chord in my chest hummed against me. I kept that down too. The hum under the mattress was quieter than it had been when I’d woken up. He didn't know it yet, and that was the first thing he didn’t know about me tonight. There would be more.

He sat on the edge of the bed and watched me sleep.

I didn’t sleep. I’ll never sleep again, I thought, with a wild certainty that wasn’t true and wouldn’t last, but was true enough for that moment in that room with that man’s hand resting two inches from my hair.

What do you fucking want with me? My mind was screaming.

Eventually, he stood up. The mattress shifted. He didn’t say anything. He walked across the room. The door opened. The door closed.

I didn’t open my eyes for a long time.

***

When I did, the candle was shorter than before. Same room. Same nothing.

I sat up. I lifted the petal off my shoulder between two fingers. I held it up and debated for a moment. Then I crossed the room and laid it on the dresser with the other two I had taken off earlier. Three petals in a row; white, small and harmless-looking. I stared at them. I did not crush them. I did not throw them. They were tagging the dresser now instead of me. That was the best I could do tonight.

I climbed back onto the bed and pressed my bound hands to my chest.

Help me, I prayed in my mind.

To whom, I didn’t know. The shadows maybe. The threads still humming low in my chest. Onyx, gold, silver. Still humming. Still mine.