Ethereal | Twilight |

017

Sora pretended indifference. The weight of the world under the burden of dissatisfaction, the weight he carried. Paul crawled from his throat, the same harsh look always in his mind. Leah, thought daughter, sarcastic, who reached from the bottom of his ribs and wrapped herself around it like an ordinary woman. Women and their sneaky methods of torturing without even trying.

He knew he should have been used to it by now. The way people wormed their way into him, found the soft parts without even trying, without even knowing. It was never the loud ones that hurt the most. It was the quiet ones. The ones who smirked and shrugged and said things they didn't realize would echo in his chest hours later when the world went silent again. Maybe they didn't mean it. Maybe they did. It didn't matter. It still left marks. It still dug in.

Sora hadn't slept home that night, not after red curls passed him by the gas station. He didn't know what it was exactly — the way she looked at him, or the way the air changed around her like it knew something he didn't — but it peeled something open inside of him that he didn't know how to stitch back together. So he didn't bother. He slept in the reservation's forest, the sun shining down like he was at the bottom of a hell, his throat dry, his stomach a bottomless pit, a void, all of the acid in his stomach burning away nothing as it reached to his throat, a sizzling sound in his stomach at the hunger.

He hated this part. The waiting. The slow, miserable eroding of his body while his mind kept running like a broken machine that wouldn't turn off. He could feel the hunger gnawing at him, like it was angry at him for being too stubborn to move. His tongue felt thick in his mouth, useless, dry. His skin stuck to the dirt underneath him like he belonged to the ground already, like it was getting ready to bury him.

He thought about going home. He thought about the walls he hated and the bed that didn't feel like his anymore.

He stayed there, maybe for a few hours, until he could no longer endure it, crushed beneath the smothering weight of his own pride. He could not allow Jared or the others, especially Paul, to catch him like that, curled in the woods like a mangy dog abandoned by the world. He would have ended his life right then if they had seen him so stripped of everything. So he forced himself up, his palms sinking into the cold, vindictive ground, the dirt clinging to his skin like guilt, desperate and staining, as he dragged himself upright. He made his way out, his body moving on sheer instinct, so intimately acquainted with the forest that even without his wolf form, he could still navigate every crooked tree and scarred path as if they were tattooed into his soul. 

He stumbled to his broken window, the jagged shards of glass glittering under the frail morning light, sharp as a mouth full of fractured teeth, and climbed inside the barren, breathless room. Paul was nowhere to be found, the emptiness thick enough to choke on, but his bags remained slouched against the bedpost, and his scent lingered in the air, dense and fever-warm, like he had only just vanished. He could only assume Paul had gone patrolling early, likely dragged out by Sam, whose presence was a perpetual splinter festering beneath everyone's skin, a pain in the ass.

He showered as quickly and as violently as he could, scrubbing at his skin with raw, near-frantic hands until the scent of earth and pine was stripped from him, until the drain swallowed it whole and the air stopped smelling like the forest that had betrayed him. He hoarded Paul's name in his mouth like it was a sacred thing, whispering it under his breath, mouthing it silently, reverently, as if the very syllables could anchor him. He prayed with it, pleaded with it, used it to tether himself to the present so he wouldn't go looking for him and ruin everything by confessing that they could fuck all they wanted and pretend nothing was wrong. He was the rot in the equation and he knew it. He didn't want anyone close—not really—and that was the problem. He was the problem.