Page 152 of Darling Venom
It was clear from the fact that she’d received a final letter from Kellan while Terry and I hadn’t that he’d had a crush on her. Not to mention he’d referred to Charlie by the same name he’d given the book.
I kissed your high school crush, Kel.
I want to do it again.
I want to do more.
Fuck, I suck. I suck so hard. I deserve every single bad thing you’ve ever said and felt about me.
Now I knew what it was like to be a thief, and it didn’t feel nice. I didn’t feel as if I’d gained something at all.
But I knew why I was quiet. Her reason for silence, however, eluded me. Especially with the way we’d left things in the library.
I broke first. “I have a question, Miss Richards.”
“I—” Her voice cracked. It sounded like she’d been crying, and she didn’t strike me as a crier. “I can’t guarantee an answer, Dr. Marchetti.”
“It’s about the suicide letter.”
“Then I definitely can’t guarantee an answer.”
“So, it is a suicide letter.”
“I never said that.” She cleared her throat, and I heard the shuffling of paper. A lot of it, judging by how long it took her to settle. “Don’t take my word for it. Take his. Kellan said in the letter that it’s not a suicide letter.”
I ran a knuckle down the column of my throat, feeling like I had something stuck in there. “So, it just happens to be the last letter he wrote?”
“Yes.” She laughed. The morose kind people used when they didn’t actually find anything funny. “That is nearly verbatim what he says in the letter, actually.”
Says.
I never understood why people talked about the written word in the present tense as if it were still happening.
The author could be dead, and the readers would still say, “Ray Bradbury writes about censorship. Harper Lee tackles racism. F. Scott Fitzgerald brings us back to the Jazz Age.”
It was so Kellan Marchetti to be both his own killer and immortalizer.
I said this aloud, and Charlie laughed.
A genuine one, this time.
“He had a talent for getting what he wanted,” she whispered, like she was letting me in on a secret.
“Except when I stood in the way.”
“What are you doing, Tate?”
“Talking to you.”
“I meant emotionally.” Her voice gained volume. I could picture her nose scrunched up like it did whenever we argued. “I didn’t go over to your home to make you fall apart again.”
“I was never together in the first place, Charlie.”
“Maybe not, but you learned to live with the grief.” She paused. “I didn’t mean to unravel you.”
I had nothing to say to that, so I didn’t reply. We were going on our twentieth minute now, and I still felt like the gum beneath a shoe.
Charlie was Kel’s.
