Page 123 of Where Your Scars Meet Mine
Drifting back into my room, my legs know the way even if the rest of me doesn’t.
The pencil sharpener blade is in my hand before I can decide whether I mean to pick it up.
That is the ugliest part. Not the blade. Not the sting. The speed. The awful instinct of it. The way my mind reaches for pain I can control when everything else feels too contaminated. Dragging it over my arm, it’s just enough to feel it, just enough to make the world narrow for one second into something simple.
It’s fucking stupid.
I know it while I do it.
I know it as the blood wells up and starts slipping in a thin line down my forearm.
But right now it feels like the least painful thing in my life.
Standing in front of my closet mirror, I stare at myself without really seeing my face. My hand shakes around the blade. My other hand lifts my shirt so I can look at the scars on my stomach, those old pale tally marks layered one over another like somebody once decided my body was a ledger and never stopped keeping count. Every line is a memory I do not want. Every line is a hand, a smell, a weight, a bargain I never made and still had to pay for.
The article.
The texts.
Do the dead never really die?
Do they just keep finding ways to drag themselves back through the living?
And then, because my mind is cruel or because I am weak in all the places that matter, I think of Silas. Of his mouth. Of his hands. Of those three words. Of the way he said them likethey were heavier than his own body and still gave them to me anyway.
I love you.
The words are still inside me like a fever.
But men lie.
Men use.
Men say the most beautiful things in the world while they are taking what they want.
So what does that make him?
What does that make me for wanting to believe him anyway?
The hand on my wrist comes fast enough to rip me out of the spiral.
Gasping, I look down first, because all I see is blood. His bloodied knuckles wrapped around my wrist. My blood smeared across his skin. Then I lift my eyes to the mirror, seeing him there behind me, his face furious and bewildered all at once, his breathing still ragged from dragging Kadin out of this house.
“Octavia,” he whispers.
My name sounds wrecked in his mouth.
“What the hell are you doing?”
I can’t answer the question he’s asking.
Because the real answer is too humiliating.
My gaze drops to my stomach in the mirror. To the old lines there.
“It’s your turn,” I hear myself say.
The words sound empty even to me.
