Chapter 4: The Path Deepens
The silence after was worse than the noise. Her breathing evened out into the soft, satisfied rhythms of sleep, her body a warm, compact weight against my side. I stared at the ceiling, at a crack in the plaster I’d been meaning to fix for months, and tried to map the shape of my own ruin. The scent of her, of sex, of my own sweat, clung to the sheets. It was a smell that should have been triumphant, possessive.Instead, it was the smell of a crime scene.
Bear’s sob, buried under her cry, echoed in my skull.A real, raw sound. Not an echo of my guilt, but a broadcast from a locked room deep inside her.
I had to get out from under her arm.It felt like a lead weight.The floor was cold under my feet. My discarded jeans were tangled with the lace of her thong. I stepped over them like they were hazardous material.In the bathroom, the fluorescent light was a brutal shock.I looked wrecked. Shadows under my eyes, a faint redness around my mouth from her fervent kissing. I splashed water on my face, the cold a temporary slap.When I returned, she was awake. Propped on one elbow, the sheet pooling around her waist, her dark hair mussed and her bangs sticking to her damp forehead.She watched me with an expression of pure, uncomplicated adoration.
“Hey,” she whispered, her voice husky from sleep and use. “You left.”
“Just to the bathroom.” My own voice was flat.She held the sheet open, an invitation. The light from the window caught the curve of her shoulder, the swell of a breast. The magician’s words hissed in my memory.Every time you indulge the wish, you water the new path.
“Come back. I’m cold.”
“You should get dressed,” I said, turning toward the closet.My hands were shaking. I needed to do something, anything, that wasn’t this.“I’m hungry. Let’s… let’s order some food.”
A flicker of confusion crossed her face, then was smoothed away by her default programming: please him. “Okay.Whatever you want.” She slid out of bed, her nakedness casual, absolute. She didn’t reach for clothes. Instead, she walked to me, pressing her front against my back, her arms looping around my waist.Her skin was sleep-warm.“I could make you something? I’m not a great cook, but I could learn. I want to learn for you.”
I stood rigid, my hands gripping the door frame of the closet. Inside, I saw Bear’s things—the few shirts and sweaters he’d left here over the years, too big for me, smelling faintly of his cedarwood deodorant. They hung like ghosts next to my own clothes.My gaze dropped. There, on the floor of the closet, was a pair of his old running shoes, the laces still tied in the tight, efficient knots he always made.
“Alex?” Bindi murmured, her lips against my spine.Her hands began to wander lower.
“Put on some clothes, Bindi.” The name felt like ash in my mouth.
She went still.Then, with a soft sigh of compliance, she let go. I heard the whisper of fabric as she finally pulled on the t-shirt from the floor.It was mine, and it drowned her.
I ordered pizza because it was normal. We sat at the small kitchen table, the cardboard box between us like a peace offering to a past life. She sat cross-legged in the chair, the hem of the shirt riding up her thighs, and ate a slice with a bizarre, sensual delicacy, licking cheese from her fingers slowly, her eyes on me the whole time.
“This is nice,” she said, smiling.“Just us.”
I grunted, chewing on cardboard-flavored crust. My mind was racing down dead ends.The stick was dust. The old woman had offered no solution, only a timer I couldn’t see.I was supposed to not reinforce Bindi. To starve the path. But how do you starve something that lives in the same house, that looks at you like you hung the moon, that is, technically, your responsibility?
“What are you thinking about?” she asked, tilting her head.
“Nothing.”
“You have a thinking face.It’s intense.I like it.” She took another bite, swallowed. “Do you… do you want to talk about your friend? The one you’re sad about?”
I froze. “What?”
“Bear.” She said the name so easily, so innocently, that my heart stuttered.“You mentioned him before.When you were… inside me. You sounded sad.”
The room tilted.I had mumbled his name. In a moment of fucking her, I had whispered my friend’s name like a prayer or a curse.And she had remembered.
“He’s… gone,” I managed to say, the words thick.
“I’m sorry.” Her expression softened with a sympathy that was horrifying in its genuineness. “You must miss him a lot. I could… I could try to help you not miss him so much?” She said it like a child offering a band-aid for a broken leg.
She got up then, clearing the paper plates.As she passed behind my chair, she leaned down, her breath hot in my ear. “I can be anything you need, Alex. I just want you to be happy.”
Her hand slid over my shoulder, down my chest.The touch was a promise. A perfectly crafted antidote to loneliness.A prison of my own design.
And in that moment, desperate for any connection to the person I’d lost, I made a mistake.I reached up and covered her hand with mine. It was a small gesture.A split-second of weakness.
She let out a small, happy sigh and nuzzled my neck.Then her body went stiff. Her fingers, which had been softly stroking my chest, curled inward, digging into my skin through the fabric of my shirt. A sharp, pained gasp escaped her lips, hot against my ear.
The voice that came out was a jagged tear in the world.
“Why are you letting her touch you like that?” it growled, low and guttural and utterly, unmistakably Bear’s. It was saturated with a confusion so profound it was anguish. “Alex, man, what is happening?”
I whirled in my chair.Her face was contorted, a mask of struggle. Her eyes, usually so wide and inviting, were screwed shut in terror. Her free hand was clenched into a fist, knuckles white.“Bear?” I whispered, my own voice breaking.
Her eyes flew open.They locked onto mine.For one crystalline, horrifying second, I saw him in there. Saw my friend, trapped and screaming behind those hazel irises.Then her face smoothed. Her body relaxed.The fist unclenched. She blinked, and the confusion was replaced by a dazed, dreamy pleasure.“Mmm,” Bindi purred, a shiver running through her. She brought her hand—the one that had just clawed at me—to her own cheek, rubbing it sensually.“That felt so strange.And so good. Do it again.”
She wasn’t talking about my touch.She was talking about Bear’s emergence. The violation of his consciousness breaking through had been, to her, just another form of arousal.A quirk of sensation.
I stood up so fast my chair scraped loudly on the floor. The sound jarred the domestic fantasy into sharp, ugly pieces.She flinched, her expression morphing into immediate worry. “Did I do something wrong?”
I couldn’t speak. I could only stare at this beautiful, desperate creature, this prison of flesh, and see the raw, pleading horror in my best friend’s eyes, now buried again under layers of enchanted devotion.He was still in there. He was fighting.And every time he broke through, it only fed the very thing that was erasing him.
The path wasn’t just being walked now. It was being paved, and I was the one driving the steamroller.I backed away, my hands up as if warding off a predator.
“I need air,” I choked out.
“I’ll come with—”
“No!” The word was a bark.She froze, wounded.I forced my voice lower.“No. Stay here. I just… I need to be alone for a minute.”
I turned and walked out the front door, leaving her standing in the kitchen, surrounded by the smell of pizza and the deafening silence of my retreat.I didn’t take a jacket. The evening chill was a physical relief, a cleansing shock after the cloying heat of the apartment.
I leaned against the wall in the hallway, the cool concrete biting through my thin shirt.My breath came in short, sharp clouds. He was in there.He was aware.He was experiencing everything.The thought was an abyss. I slid down the wall until I was sitting on the cold floor, my head in my hands. There was no solution in magic shops, no easy reversal. There was only this: a war inside the body of my oldest friend, and I was the weapon both sides were fighting over.
And I had no idea how to lay down my arms.