READ THE WARNING

Chapter twenty nine

!TW!~Implied homophobia, mentioning of pedophilia, brief mentioning of fire, child abandonment, emotional abuse, self hate, mentioning of death, arguing, brief implied transphobia, child abuse

"I've tried so hard to figure out where we could possibly be going, but we're in the middle of nowhere. Seriously, where the fuck are we going?"

"You'll see."

They'd been walking for fifteen minutes and they were in the middle of the woods. Alex had no clue where Erebus could be taking him. With anyone else, he probably would've been nervous, but he trusted Erebus.

"We're here."

Alex glanced up. They'd made it into a clearing in the woods, a bunch of bright red roses in the ground.

"It's beautiful." Said Alex.

Erebus sat on the ground, reaching for one of the roses. His thumb slid on one of the thorns, skin breaking a bit, but he ignored it. He handed the rose to Alex and beckoned for him to sit beside him.

"Thanks." Alex smiled and sat beside him, leaning on his shoulder.

"We'll have a good view of the sunset from here as well. I've watched it here before, just never with anyone."

"Are we planning to stay here that long?"

"We can stay here all day, the reason I wanted to come here to begin with was so we could just talk. I want us to be able to get to know each other more, we don't talk about each other and ourselves enough. I want us to be able to show each other the beautiful and the ugly."

Alex nodded. "That's definitely important to a relationship. Adam and I never did that, I guess 'cause there wasn't a 'beautiful' side to him that was real."

"If you're comfortable with it, talk to me about Adam. How did you guys meet?"

"We met when I was fifteen. We just met through Marina because he was picking her up from school one day and he talked to me for a bit. He seemed really nice back then. He started taking me places, and at first he took me and Marina places together, you know, as a group. After a while, he started picking me up alone and saying he thought it'd be cool if just the two of us hung out. Despite hanging out a lot, we never really got to know each other enough."

"When did you start liking him?"

"I honestly don't know when I got feelings for him because I denied them in my head; if my mom found out I liked a guy, she'd kill me. I discovered he liked me when we were in his yard watching-...watching the sunset, actually. We used to do it a lot. One of those times, he kissed me and I went insane in my head. I was horrified my mom would find out." Alex sighed, looking down at the rose in his hands. He'd been holding it so tightly that the thorns had started poking into his skin. "I thought I loved him. I thought he was the one...but, oh, was I wrong."

"Did no one ever say anything to you?" Asked Erebus.

"What do you mean? No one knew Adam was a bad person."

"No, like, were people not weirded out by you guys dating? He's over eleven years older than you and you were only a kid."

"We definitely got our weird stares when we kissed in public. Other than that...actually, Caroline was upset by it. She told me frequently that I should wait until I was an adult too, but I told her it was okay, I told her she was the only person who saw a problem with it. I'm so fucking stupid, if I would've-"

"You're not stupid, never say that. You were young and naive and you didn't know. Adam was manipulative and just told you what you wanted to hear, he knew how to get you where he wanted you. He's a predator. Nothing that he did was your fault, you were, I'll say it again, young, and he seemed like a nice person. There's no way you possibly could've known."