Awake (Book 3)

Fifteen

August stared at me, eyes following my movements as I paced the room. He grabbed the remote and switched off the TV, and I didn't even know where to start.

"What do you mean?" he asked. "What do you have to tell me?"

Words. Words, Ellie. You can't tell him anything without words. "You get frustrated with me a lot, don't you?"

He frowned. "What?"

"And me running out in the middle of the night like I did, only leaving an obscure note, you're upset with me for that."

"Ellie, what are you getting at, here?"

I stopped pacing, turning to face him where he sat on the bed. Headlights from cars on the nearby road illuminated the outlines of the curtains over our windows. The pizza box sat, half-open, completely empty, on the wobbly table.

"Ellie."

He snapped me out of my reverie. I clasped my hands in front of me, staring down at the tattered shoes covering my feet, feeling inadequate as all get-out. "I don't want to say."

"Why not?"

Tears glossed my eyes, distorting my vision and blurring his face when I looked at him. "Because you'll hate me."

His head was already shaking side-to-side, lips turned down. "That's not possible."

We'll see about that. "Remember when you took that bullet for me in Colorado?"

August winced, absent-mindedly rubbing his chest. "Yeah, I do."

"And afterward, at the safe house, do you remember what I told everybody? About what Angel said?"

"Yeah."

"And at your old house, how I told you it was all a lie?"

No words were exchanged for a moment. A noisy group of people passed by the door, ambling down the hall, probably drunk; easily heard through the cheap, paper-thin walls. My heart beat a furiously-paced rhythm. So did Augie's.

"I did some things I'm not proud of, August." I continued right on with the story because it didn't seem as if August held the capability of speaking right then. "So many things."

"We all do, Ellie-"

"No-no." I angled away so he wouldn't see the tortured expression twisting my features, and grabbed fistfuls of hair, pulling tight, focusing on the stinging pain in my scalp. The words I wanted to say, the words that I'd been holding in for months and months and years, burned the back of my throat and spread fire to my stomach and my throat and my brain. How could I say them? How could I tell even August this thing-this thing that would alter anyone's perception of me forever?

"The Ten Thousand Dollar Man," I said, remembering what seemed like eons ago, but wasn't even yet two years. "All those people I stopped under my illusion of doing good . . . none of them had to die."

"El, that was . . . that was so long ago."

"Not really." The wallpaper was yellowed and flaking, revealing an even less-appealing color beneath it. Amazing what people wanted to cover up. "When I first met you at Yale; when you chased me across campus and then we stopped and we were alone and my head was going haywire."

I picked at the wallpaper, gave a good yank. A generous chunk fluttered into my palm, and I dropped it to the floor. Thoughts scattered to all corners of my head, warring for dominance, creating one gigantic headache.

"I do all the wrong things." Whatever expression adorned his face was unknown to me, as I still had my back to him, and wondered if he could make any sense of the jumbled words spilling from my mouth. "I say all the wrong things. I'm human but only just. You said leaving Jessica and Blake was wrong, but it felt perfectly rational to me. This is what I hate, Augie. Okay? I hate every stupid malfunctioning piece of me. And I can masquerade around pretending to understand myself better and accept these demented pieces of me, but that will never be the truth. And it can't be fixed. Nobody can fix me. That's another illusion I don't want to suffer from."