He did. And so did I. I just hope I’m not right about anything else. I hope … Parrish doesn’t end up dead at the end of this.
I’m shaking now, my own eyes wide as I stare at the beautiful shirtless boy on the screen, the one that I fell so hard for that I feel as if I’m gripping a dual-edged blade, making myself bleed even as I struggle to hold on for dear life.
Parrish is so tense; I can see a muscle ticking in his jaw. His hands are white-knuckled, and his face … oh god, if ever I needed Tess around to spin this story with pretty words, it’d be now.
Parrish is cataclysmic.
He watches the screen with an oil painting for an expression, a work of woebegone art, heartsore and heartsick, crafted by the hand of an angry god. The paintbrush that swept those features across the canvas is surely cursed, an anathematized monstrosity never meant to see the light of day.
I clamp a hand over my mouth. I might very well throw up watching this.
One of the worst parts of it all is how quiet he is, how still, how his eyes bore into the screen even as the muscles in his neck tighten painfully and he grinds his teeth. The video is so fucking long, too. I mean, Chasm and I were at it for a while …
“I want to die,” Chasm whispers, his fingers pressed so hard against his eyes that he’s making his skin red. “This is so fucked. It’s so fucked. It’s so goddamn fucking fucked.”
Even as he’s doing his best to blind himself to the images on the screen, I can’t bring myself to look away. I’m frozen in place, fixated to Parrish’s expression but fully aware of what, exactly, is going on in the video.
“This is hard to watch,” X chokes out, closing his own eyes and resting his forehead against his hand, his elbow propped against his knee. He does, however, open his eyes almost right away, focusing mostly on Parrish rather than the video of me and Chasm. But that doesn’t mean he can’t see it. That he can’t see us kissing and rubbing on each other, stroking each other, rocking our bodies together, gazing at one another.
I could’ve lived my whole life without ever watching myself have sex.
I could’ve lived a hundred lives without hurting someone I care about the way we’ve hurt Parrish.
In a sudden flurry of motion, Parrish rises to his feet and throws the phone as hard as he can against the wall, the same way he did with the wine bottle the other day. It shatters as Chasm drops his hands to his lap to gape, the expression on his face mirroring his friend’s hurt.
We both know why we did it. We both know we had little choice. That doesn’t seem to matter at all in the moment.
“You forget that I know you’re controlling her,” Parrish grinds out, shaking so badly that I wouldn’t be surprised if he threw a punch Mr. Volli’s way. I really hope he doesn’t. Even if he were to somehow get the upper hand in this fight, where would he go from here? On the infinitesimally small chance that the Slayer isn’t actually my bio dad, I still truly believe there’s at least one more person involved in this. Mr. Fosser was not one of the men chasing me in the woods that night; I would’ve smelt that sickness and perversion on him, I’m sure of it. “And anyway, I don’t care.”
He says that, but it’s a lie. It’s such a dirty, fucking lie. His face is open and raw the way it was that night in the basement of his grandmother’s house. His jaw is clenched, and he looks goddamn heartbroken.
“I’m going to fucking die in here anyway, so what does it matter? I want them to be together,” he hisses as Mr. Volli just stands there, and the split screen on our phone switches back to a full screen view of Parrish. “I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again.”
He turns around and looks right up at the camera. It’s as if he can see me through the screen, even though I’m aware that he probably can’t.
“You hear me? You have nothing to feel guilty about. Nothing at all. I … I love you guys.”
Parrish looks down, realizing suddenly that he’s standing in the broken glass; his feet are bleeding.
Mr. Volli says nothing else, turning as if to leave the room. Parrish watches him go and then moves over to the wine rack, grabbing a hefty bottle by the neck. He moves up behind the man, lifting the bottle like a club, like he fully intends on bashing the man over the head with it.
But at the last minute, he stops, closing his eyes and swallowing hard, like he’s trying his damnedest to reign in those pesky emotions of his, the ones he feels so hard and so heavily that they consume him the way they do me.
