― 𝒔𝒕𝒂𝒓𝒄𝒓𝒐𝒔𝒔𝒆𝒅.
❝ you never knew the stars had
a flavor until you first kissed him.
it turns out they taste like ambition
and ancient fire, desperation, and
dark matter, and the mind-numbing
fear of bei...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
STARCROSSED (book one). °• CHAPTER ONE •°
" MY LITTLE BROTHER DIDN'T COME HOME LAST NIGHT. "
▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅
CRYING IS A FUNNY THING. Not in the sense of amusement, of course, but that the body could be overcome with such sorrow that it brings the eyes to leak tears because something you went through was so emotionally painful that it just hurts. And the only way to relieve yourself of that pain was to sit down and cry. Elijah was lucky, unlike most of the men in Hawkins. His father taught him the most important thing was to let himself feel things deeply. He wasn't ashamed to cry or wear his heart on his sleeve and wouldn't apologize for it. The only thing Elijah was afraid of was how badly his peers reacted when Steve outed him because he wasn't just the school's joke. Elijah's life became a threat all because he was a boy who liked other boys and that wasn't allowed, was it?
So Elijah cried sometimes. Usually when he was alone because he didn't want anyone else to see. His father, Tobia Wolfhart, worked long and hard at a pharmacy for over forty hours a week. He didn't need to see that. Then, Nevaeh Wolfhart, the little sister he was responsible to look after when their father was at work, seemed to have the habit of their mother. She already locked herself away for days on end, sometimes even missing school, long enough that she wouldn't have time to see Elijah shed a tear. He had no idea what she did in her room but he had a hunch they weren't too different.
This morning of school was no exception to his little rule. Elijah, under the stream of warm water becoming colder with every minute from the shower's hose, sat at the bottom of the porcelain tub with his teeth biting onto his knuckles to keep the sobs in. It wasn't only the despair of being alone because Hawkins was full of really horrible people. It was also the stress because although Elijah was smart, his grades had been slipping. It was the stack of bills in sealed envelopes he watched pile on the kitchen table that he noticed his father either ignore or was too afraid to open. Elijah wanted to help with their financial situation, had tried submitting application after application to various spots, but he knew the chances of being employed soon were slim. He was still in school after all, and there wasn't one person in Hawkins who didn't hear what dirty deeds "he" did to Steve Harrington in the dark and no one wanted the dirty little homosexual touching their merchandise.
When the water suddenly felt like frozen cubes dragging across his skin, Elijah gave up. He felt just as numb at the cold when he sucked it up and got dressed to at least warm some of his skin enough to move his limbs to make his own breakfast. He made a pit stop at Nevaeh's bedroom door and gave a few gentle taps to the maple wood. "Nevaeh?" There's no response. What a surprise. Elijah huffed at that and considered kicking open the locked door for a moment. His sister always looked to be an empty shell of herself on the occasion that he saw her and he maybe felt that she saw him in the same light.
