Page 3 of Edged
The door to the basement was tucked behind the pantry, and it was closed. It was dark. I twisted the knob anyway, knowing the steps and the splintered handrail by heart. I knew the layout of the furniture and I knew where Owen liked to sit, so even without a shred of light to guide my way, I knew where to go. I knew where to find him.
“Is it done?” he asked.
I sat down beside him on the cracked brown leather couch. “No.”
Owen was wound tight, like rubber bands coiled around every muscle and bone beneath his skin, ready to crack or implode him without a moment’s notice. He stared at the TV across the room, and I wondered if his eyes had adjusted to the dark. The music was still achingly loud, and it was hard to hear him, hard to think.
“Why not?” he asked. “Mandy wants you.”
I dragged my tongue across the front of my teeth and sighed. “I know she does.”
“And you want her.”
The way he said it—the jealousy, the vitriol—it was sharper than any barb or knife he could have physically injured me with. His words cut like a cleaver right through my chest, like he’d shattered my sternum to get a good look at my heart so he could better understand whose name was etched across the surface.
Mandy’s or his.
“It’s complicated now,” I told him.
“Why, Archie? Why is it complicatednow?”
He knew the answer. I didn’t need to say it, but he was going to make me. Owen always made me. For as long as I’d known him, he’d been the one I’d chased after, the one whose attention I’d wanted. From the playground in elementary school to high school assemblies and summer vacations, there wasn’t a single event in my life I hadn’t wanted to desperately share with him.
Until I fell in love with his sister.
“I read the letter you wrote me,” I told him.
The letter was in my pocket, folded up and crumpled for how many times I’d read it, the ink smeared from his tears and my sweaty hands. I wanted to take it out and show it to him. Wanted to trace my fingertips over the words he’d said that flipped my whole world upside down, but those fingertips had been other places too, and that felt inherently wrong.
It would have been disrespectful to the honesty Owen had offered me, even if it had been meant as a parting gift.
“That’s the point of a letter.”
“Why didn’t you say something before?”
He turned toward me in the dark. The basement had fallen into silence, the song ended even though I hadn’t noticed. Owen’s breathing was loud as the bass line, my heart more frenetic than the drum beat. Mandy’s saliva on my ear, my neck, my mouth, had long since dried and my lips were chapped, drier as Owen’s rough exhales landed against them.
“What would I have said, Archer?”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Because that’s what my sister calls you?” he snapped.
“Because it’s not whatyoucall me.”
Everyone had called me Archie until one day I’d woken up and decided that was a child’s name and I was no longer a child. It had taken a year of correcting everyone to Archer until they’d gotten it right, but Owen always had a pass. I was always Archie to him; I always would be.
“I’ve heard her, you know.” Owen cleared his throat, still looking at me head on. My eyes had finally adjusted to the dark enough to watch the way his stare darted across my face like he was inspecting me for use.
For lies.
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve heard her when you make her come.” The confession sounded like it pained him, and I’d never felt more fucking lost than I did in that moment with him there.
I grabbed Owen around the back of his neck, pulling our faces together until our foreheads touched. The side of his nose smashed against mine, his eyes still open, breath still hot. “Owen.”
“I’ve heard…you when…”
