Page 54 of Where Your Scars Meet Mine
“Claiming,” he whispers.
The word doesn’t just land. It brands.
Something hot and violent flares low in my stomach, so immediate it frightens me. My grip tightens on his wrists instead of shoving him away.
He feels it.
Fuck me. What am I doing?
A dark satisfaction flickers behind the haze in his eyes, gone almost as quickly as it appears. The hand at my hip presses in harder beneath the water, fingers curving with bruising intention as if he wants to leave proof of himself there.
It would be so easy, in this one terrible second, to stay exactly where I am.
To let the noise around us disappear completely.
To let his mouth finally close the distance, just to see what it would do to him.
Then a scream cuts through the backyard.
Not playful. Not drunk. Not the sharp shriek of someone being dunked or splashed.
It’s real… panicked.
“We need help!”
The sound tears through the moment like shattering glass.
Everything in me recoils at once, my body going cold in a way the pool never managed. The words hit some old, rotten place inside my chest, ripping it wide open.
Outside the water, near the patio, a cluster of bodies surges backward. Someone is on the ground.
My lungs seize.
No.
No, no, no.
That night rushes up so fast I almost choke on it. Stained carpet. My mother’s lips turning blue. The gurgling in her throat. The phone slipping in my hand while the 911 operator kept saying my name like she could somehow reach through the line and force me to move.
That isn’t intoxication, that’s-
The thought doesn’t even finish.
“Overdose,” Silas says quietly.
The word is already there before I can force it out, spoken in that same low voice that had been against my mouth a second ago, except now it is stripped clean of heat. No possessiveness. No anger. Just recognition.
“He’s overdosing.”
The hand at my waist is gone.
The loss of it is abrupt enough to feel like being dropped.
Silas moves away from me before the water has fully settled, turning in one swift motion, cutting through the pool toward the edge with a speed that sends waves slamming into my ribs. He doesn’t look back. He doesn’t hesitate. Water pours off him as he hauls himself out, soaked clothes clinging to every line of him as he pushes through the crowd gathering around the boy on the patio.
I stay exactly where I am for half a beat too long, chest tight, ears ringing, the whole world collapsing inward around the shape of one terrible memory.
This backyard is no longer a party… it’s a crime scene.
