CoMari Au (Omori)

Pt 18

After about a minute, I brush my hair out of my face, feeling the need to fidget with something. I'd never really been a very fidgety person, but around BASIL, in this context, my shaky hands felt the need to be playing with something, and although BASIL was a strong contender, I started to adjust my hair instead.

We sat there like that. The silence felt uncomfortable. I wanted BASIL to talk to me. I wanted to talk to BASIL. 

I wanted him to reach out to me and pull me into his arms.

I could feel my face getting hot as the thought crossed my mind.

Our relationship was difficult. I felt no shame in loving a boy, but I did feel shame in the way I acted to him earlier.

Grabbing him like that?

I was a kid with anger issues at best, an abuser at worst.

Unfortunately, the worst possible option had been happening an awful lot lately.

"SUNNY? I... we need to talk." BASIL says, his words soft and light like he was talking to a child.

But that was fair. I'd been acting a lot like a child recently.

"I'm scared though. Scared that if I stop letting you... play with me, you'll hurt me. Badly." BASIL's voice is almost a whimper.

I believe him.

I've been an asshole. He has every right to be scared of me. He has every right to make my right eye match my left one. To take away everything.

Hell, he could kill me.

I deserve it.

But now is not the time to indulge in pathetic self-degradation that only serves to undermine BASIL's role as the victim. It's not the time for me to whine about how badly I deserve to be hurt, true as it may be, it just makes me sound like I want to be hurt, perhaps to continue playing my self-indulgent role as the abused, rather than face the fact that my past actions place me in the opposite category.

Truth is, I have no idea what I want, other than to go back four years ago and have never thrown the violin down the stairs.

Maybe I want to go back a day and have actually jumped.

Or to go back sixteen years ago and have never have been born.

All three sound like equally pleasing options, but considering I lack a time machine, my only option is to stop dwelling in the past and to talk to BASIL.

I breathe in, knowing my voice will be shaky. After all, I've never been that good at owning up to my faults.

"I'm sorry."

It's two simple words, but true, and often dismissed for not fixing anything.

But with an anxious and pathetic boy like BASIL, it fixes most things.

A tear slipped from his sky blue eye, and I could feel tears of my own pooling up in my eye- the one that wasn't covered in bandages.

I brushed them away with the back of my hand, and moved closer to the boy in front of me, taking his face in the palm of my hand, and wiping away is single tear. He's shaking as I do this simple motion. He thinks I'll hurt him if he doesn't do what I want.

And considering my earlier actions, his fear was not unjustified.

"I won't hurt you." I reassure him, hoping with every single cell in my brain, in my heart, in my soul- if that's such a thing- that my words are true.

With his face still in my hand, I can feel his face shift ever so slightly as he bites his tongue, wondering what to say.

BASIL takes a deep breath, and then speaks. "I wish I could say I know."

Another tear slips down his cheek -but my fingers, pale and shaky and thin as they may be- are there to wipe it away.

"But I can't say that this time. Not to myself... and not to you either."

He starts to sob, and I quickly bring him closer to me, letting him put his head on my chest as he cries. I can feel every tear, every drop of anxiety and apprehensiveness soak through my thin hospital gown, but I don't pull away.

As he slowly stops crying, his sobs turning to sniffles, he moves his head away from my chest, his face and eyes red from crying.

"We need to talk. About everything. I know I've said it already, and I don't know when we can talk. I don't want to talk here. Not in this hospital." BASIL says, his voice and body still shaky.

I nod my head. "I thought... MARI woke up. Everything should be fine now, right? Right?"

I take a deep breath. Now is not the time for tears.

"I thought that if MARI woke up that everything would be okay! Because if MARI wakes up... then it was just... a harmless accident."

The blond haired boy's gaze uncomfortably shifts, looking right into my eyes, an unsettling thing. He takes my face firmly in his hands.

"It was SOMETHING behind you."

His words are firm, so much so I want to believe him.

So I do, slowly nodding my head.

(836 words)