Always As You Say (Book One In The Waven Series)

31

I need to stop watching him.

It's getting creepy, honestly. I just - I miss him so much, I miss how he used to look at me, like I was important. Like I mattered to someone.

But of course, that's not true anymore. I had expected him to be mad, to be fuming really, and so far all I've gotten is disgust.

He avoids me now, instead of bringing his girl - and yes I do mean the same one from before - here, he goes to her place. When he passes me in the halls it's with his eyes downcast and his body shrinking in on itself.

Though now that I think about it, it might have been less disgust then it was fear, which I can't really say is any better.

I mean yeah, I had wanted him to hate me, to find me revolting even, but to have Anthony fear me? That was the last thing I wanted.

Though I suppose there is something quite rational about fearing the man who planned to kill you.

~~~~~~~~~

"Will you be back soon?" His voice quivered as he spoke, and it took everything I had not to break down and beg him to please just look at me.

That's the way things always are between us now, me standing tall and hidden inside myself, and him with his shoulders slumped and his eyes absent of fire.

His reaction was ludicrous really, he had seen me kill for next to nothing for as long as he had known me, had looked on in horror as I tore people apart at a single word from The Waven, a single look aimed at Anthony himself. So why, why was this the thing that made him frightened? Why was this the one thing he couldn't get past, the darkness he couldn't shine his light through?

Maybe because he didn't want to try.

Didn't think I deserved to escape the hollow void I had trapped myself in. Or maybe he was just less afraid of this, of what I was now, than he was of who I could be.

"Yes I'll be-

No. Not, not right away." No matter how afraid he might have been, there was no denying the change there, no hiding from the hurt and worry that had clawed its way through his eyes, almost all of his fear vanishing.

Or, maybe that's the wrong word too. Because no, it didn't go away, it only changed.

Went from fear of what I could do straight into fear that I wouldn't return.

But of course I would, I hadn't killed him yet.

"Are you-" He stopped, a question in his eyes that he didn't want to ask, didn't want the answer to.

So instead he shook his head, an almost painful smile on his face and said only, "Come back."

As though he cared whether or not I was here. As though it would make a difference to him.

I suppose it would make some difference, for if I wasn't around then who would he have cower away from?

Who would he look at with pleading eyes and a broken spirit, if not me?

He wanted the chance to forgive me. Which was something I couldn't give to him. I wanted nothing more than to tell him that, to rip up whatever hope had managed to fester in that too big heart of his.

To see the moment that he realized how impossible it should be for him to still want me here.

But all I could manage in reply was, "I will."

The words shouldn't have held the promise they did, the promise they must have held for him to perk up so.

Because instead of the careful avoidance he had been harboring he seemed to only just stop himself from launching at me.

He wouldn't have done that if he knew what I was doing.

If he knew that I was leaving to get what I would need to kill him, to kill my Anthony.

Stepping back I shook my head, I had to do this, and it would only get harder if I continued to look at him that way.

Continued to see him as mine.