Let Go

12: Scars

Aiden's Pov:

The room Harken was kept in was silent and a little depressing. He lay there unconscious. It smelled like sanitization and pine-scented floor cleaner. The beeping of the heartbeat monitor chimed monotonously.

The feelings boiling inside me were so mixed between anger, hatred, and infatuation all over again.

He was the first guy I fell in love with from that very first day when we sat together in the library. Back when I didn’t know who Harken Red truly was. The boy who hid behind makeup and secrets.

Thomas didn’t speak for the longest time. He just looked at his lifeless brother. Doctors said that he missed organ failure by a feather, but it’s unknown whether he’d wake or not. It was all up to him.

“He really deserved so much better,” Thomas broke our silence. I wanted to know everything that lead up to this point.

“My memory of our past is blurred in places,” I told Thomas, who took a seat by Harken’s side. I sat next to him. “And there’s just so much that I don’t know,”

“You deserve to know everything,” It got me thinking why. Why did I deserve to know his hidden secrets?

“I wanna know why you think I’m entitled to know,” I said firmly.

“Because Harken demanded I be present in all his therapy sessions with professor Linda Grayson, and I know for a fact that he just needed closure with you. He tried drinking, smoking, and drugs. He tried distancing himself as much as he could from you, but he was stupid. He was too stupid to realize that he couldn’t get rid of his past with you if it didn’t start with you,” The thing about Thomas was that he always made sense. I didn’t know how he managed it, but Thomas could put things in perspective.

“Every therapy session with the professor had you in it,” Thomas explained, and honestly, I was too stunned to speak. “He mentioned you. Every single time. There was always you.”

I closed my eyes to prevent tears from forming. My mind went back to the incident. There were too many incidents to count, but my story was important to me.

It all started when Thomas and Raiden started dating. I had been getting freaky every now and then with Scarlet, who I knew as Thomas’s sister of the time. That was probably the first secret I learned; that Thomas and Scarlet were not siblings but cousins.

We were doing nothing, bored out of our minds. She sat in my bedroom dressed all pretty. At first Scarlet and I didn’t meet at my house. But the more time Raiden spent with Thomas, the more he forgot about me and what I did. It kinda sucked. We were close, but I understood that he was finally coming out of his shell more, and Thomas was a really good influence.

He made him go out more. See more people. Attend more events. Raiden was a broken mess, and Thomas was shaping him back to a whole person. That alone let me let him be.

The less Raiden came home, the more Scarlet did. We didn’t speak much. We did do a lot of physical things, though. We both liked the pleasure, and had a silent agreement to keep things hidden between us. Once one person from school knew, the whole school knew. I didn’t wanna be labelled as Scarlet’s boy toy. She had a reputation at school for being a diva. She was, in other words, at the top of the social scale. A nobody like me was gonna be thrown into the spotlight, and honestly, I was better off in the shadows.

There was also the fact that Scarlet had a boyfriend. Mattias (Matt) Jenkins. I hated his guts. Him and Scarlet went far back. I liked the fact that I was the guy Scarlet was screwing behind his back.

“There’s a party at my cousin’s house. Aunt Amanda is out of town and my cousins are hosting this big party,” Scarlet said after scrolling on her phone for what felt like forever. “You don’t have to come, but it would be fun,”

I thought about it for a minute and thought what the hell. “I’ll go,” I said. She lifted her gaze from her phone and looked at me for a weird second.

“Oh, by the way, Matt will be there, so whatever’s happening between us is not there, okay?”

“Alright, cool,” I said, trying not to sound hurt. It lowkey bothered me, but I knew where I stood with her. “Maybe I’ll find someone to hook up with there,”

“Aiden,” Scarlet warned. “If you get up close and personal with any of my cousins,” She was going to give out a life-endangering threat, I knew it. “Wait, never mind,” She took it back.

“What? Why did you stop,” I wanted to know what the threat was.

“My cousins are both males,” She chuckled like it was too far fetched for me to sleep with males. Like I didn’t wanna kiss Harken Red senselessly in the school library back in Hilltown.

It just happened to be that I was goofing around with Scarlet, but I still lusted over boys too.

“Yeah, haha,” I tried not to sound fake, “males, haha. I’m too straight for that,” Then I remembered Harken Red and how I wanted to kiss him so bad.

He was the only thing that made me regret moving to the neighboring Rivertown and switch to Rivertown High. I missed the beautiful Red and his too perfect skin and green eyes.

Then I wondered if Scarlet Red happened to know him. I wanted to ask Scarlet if she knew him, but I decided against it. Speaking and asking about him meant that I was still hung up over him. I wasn’t. it was a recipe for disaster; letting my feelings about Harken Red out.

Especially not when I knew what Blake could do.

My brother had the scars to prove it.

A/N: we reached 2k reads people! Thank you so much. It always surprises me when we hit that amount of reads in such short time.

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