Page 111 of Where Your Scars Meet Mine
Kadin notices me noticing.
I feel it before I look at him. That slight shift in his attention, the way his posture changes when his curiosity sharpens into something more pointed. Dragging his eyes from the screen to me and then past me toward Silas, I already know the question is coming before he opens his mouth.
“Does it look like that in real life?”
He asks it shamelessly.
The words cut through the room in a way the movie never could.
My elbow drives into his side on instinct before I can think better of it. “Jesus, Kadin,” I hiss, horrified by the sheer stupidity of it. “You don’t ask someone that.”
The shame of it burns up my neck immediately, because of course he would ask. Of course he would turn real violence into curiosity the second the room gave him an opening. He doesn’t know how ugly that question sounds. Or maybe he does and thinks honesty counts as innocence if you phrase it softly enough.
Before I can smooth over the damage, Silas answers.
“Worse, actually.”
Silas doesn’t look away from the screen when he says it. The flickering light from the movie catches one side of his face, throwing the other into shadow. The calm in his voice makes the answer land harder than if he had snapped.
“More blood,” he adds after a beat. “More pleading.”
The room goes still around the words.
Even the movie seems to shrink for a second, reduced to nothing more than fake sound effects and actors pretending they understand fear. On the floor, Cheyenne’s hand stills halfway inside the popcorn bowl. Maria glances from the television toSilas and then quickly away again, like she’s not sure whether looking too long would be rude or dangerous. Kadin goes quiet beside me in a way that tells me he hadn’t expected that answer, or maybe hadn’t expected it to sound so personal.
My stomach tightens.
Because it does sound personal.
Not in the obvious way. Silas doesn’t look shaken. He doesn’t sound shaken. But I know enough now to hear the difference between his cruelty and his truth, and that wasn’t cruelty. That was something pulled from much farther down.
The movie keeps going. Some girl on screen is running through the woods, crying hard enough to make her breathing sound broken. No one in my room is watching her anymore.
Kadin clears his throat first. “Right,” he mutters, the word feeling weak the second it leaves him.
I should leave it there. Let the moment die naturally. Let the room slip back into the movie and the false safety of group noise. Instead, I hear myself say, “Can we not do this tonight?”
No one answers immediately, but Cheyenne, thankfully, recovers enough to throw Kadin a look. “Yeah,” she says. “Maybe don’t ask the ex-St. Augustine kid to compare stab wounds for fun.”
Maria elbows her lightly, but not hard enough to count as a real correction.
Silas’s mouth pulls into something that isn’t quite a smile, but definitely isn’t warmth. “It’s fine,” he says.
Somehow makes it worse.
Because it clearly isn’t.
Kadin shifts beside me, his arm brushing mine. “I wasn’t trying to be a dick,” he says, quieter now. “I just…”
He trails off, maybe because there’s no version of that sentence that doesn’t make him sound exactly like what he’s trying not to be.
“Curious?” Silas supplies.
That one word carries enough cold amusement to cut.
Kadin’s jaw tightens. “Yeah, maybe. Sorry if that’s a crime.”
The tension starts to rebuild immediately.
