Scratch marks.
I froze, my hands clamped down on her forearms so hard that she couldn’t move them. “What the hell is this?”
She shook her head. Tears streamed down her face, dripping off the end of her chin.
I shook her so hard that the back of her head hit the wall again. “What the hell is this, Bray?!” I roared in her face.
“It’s not that!” she screamed back in my face. “It’s not what you’re thinking!” Her face was contorted by pain.
“Then tell me what it is!” I remembered her telling me about this before, when her mom found her clawing at her wrists and sent her to a shrink afterward. But I needed to know more. I needed to know everything and she was going to tell me or we’d sit here like this forever.
She started to twist her body in a way that if I didn’t let go her arms would break, so I released her.
“Just go. Go home, Elias. Please just go home.” Her voice was strangely soft and distant, it felt like every part of her had given up.
She buried her head on her knees again, wrapping her arms around her legs.
“No, I’m not leaving this room until you tell me what that is.”
Her head shot back up. “If I tell you, will you go home?”
“No.”
“Then forget it. I’m leaving here, Elias. Not with Tate or with anyone else. I’m leaving here on my own.” Her voice was firm, resolute.
“What are you talking about?”
She was scaring me. Her wrists. This burst of despair and pain that came out of nowhere and blindsided me. This crazy shit she was saying about leaving without me. She shook her head back and forth over and over again, looking at anything but me. And it was infuriating. I rose from the floor and into a crouched position, pushing up with my knuckles pressing against the linoleum. She still wouldn’t look at me and I had given up expecting her to. Was she serious? Did she really want me to leave? What was she planning to do?
My heart sank. I knew I couldn’t leave her. I wouldn’t have, anyway, but I knew that even if I had wanted to I couldn’t.
“I wasn’t trying to kill myself,” she said in a soft voice. “I was… I just do that sometimes.”
“Do what?” I couldn’t for the life of me understand what the hell she was saying to me.
“I’ve done it since I was a teenager,” she said. “It’s no big deal. It’s just a release. I wasn’t trying to kill myself. I told you I’m stronger than that.” She finally looked up at me and her face was full of darkness and finality. She was tired of who she was, tired of hiding, from me, from herself, tired of pretending to be someone she wasn’t, because she knew she wasn’t what society deemed normal. I felt it as I looked down into her eyes.
She was tired.
“I’d say that clawing at your wrists with your fingernails is a pretty big f**king deal, Bray.”
“To you, I guess it would be.” She was eerily calm and her tears had already begun to dry up. She sniffled back the few remaining.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.
She hesitated and looked at the pedestal sink next to her. “You would never understand.”
“Try me.”
“They always say that.”
“I’m not ‘they,’ ” I said. “I’m the one person in this world you know loves you more than anything. Never throw me in the closet with them. I don’t belong there. I never will.”
Her throat moved as though she were swallowing more tears that were trying to rise to the surface.
Finally she said, “Sometimes the darkness feels like it’s right there beneath the skin. It’s right there. I hate it when I can feel it, because it’s like it’s taunting me. It knows I can’t get to it. I scratch and claw”—her voice began to shake, her eyes were brimming with tears again, tears of anger—“and I try to get it out but I can’t. I can’t because I know I’d hurt myself if I went that far! But I try so hard!”
I sat down in front of her again and took her gently by her forearms, my thumbs pressing in the center of the soft underskin. “Tell me. I want to know everything. How it feels. What makes it go away. How often it comes back. I need to know, baby.”
She choked the tears back and sniffled. “It doesn’t happen very often anymore, not like when I was a teenager,” she said. “And it eventually goes away after I’ve cried it out.” She laughed drily. “Well, I always try clawing it out, but it never works. It always comes back. And whenever it comes back, I always go for the wrists first.”
She looked me in the eyes. “Elias, I wasn’t trying to hurt myself. I just wanted it out.”
I believed her. I couldn’t understand exactly how she felt, but in a way I could. I couldn’t imagine living like that. I tried to picture myself in her place, going through the motions all her life, and it only made me squirm inside my skin. I thought she was much stronger than I could ever be for dealing with something so dark, so strange, practically all her life. I knew I could never have done it.
“Elias, I want you to go home.” Her tone was calm, but abandon lay evident in her eyes.
I was an idiot to think she had forgotten about that part. I shook my head. “You know I won’t do that.”
“Look, this isn’t some cry for attention,” she said as she speared all ten fingers through the top of her hair, pulling the hair away from her tear-streaked face. “This isn’t me telling you to go home because I need to hear you say that you won’t. I really mean it, Elias. You need to go home. This isn’t your problem and I’m tired of making it yours.”
“It is my problem,” I said. “Whatever you go through I go through with you. I always will.”
The palms of her hands slapped against the floor on each side of her. “Dammit, Elias! Stop doing this! You deserve better than what I could ever give you, and I’m never going to be able to change. Ever. Stop being my safety net and just go. I want you to.”
“I don’t care if that’s what you want,” I said. “I’m not leaving you. I’m with you to the end, whether you want me there or not.”
She gritted her teeth and inhaled a deep, infuriated breath. She was telling the truth about really wanting me to leave. It was exactly as she had said, that this wasn’t about needing to hear me say I that I wouldn’t. She was determined to make me leave her behind and angry that I refused. But I didn’t care.