More went on there, but the last time I asked Maks about it, he shut down and paled like he’d seen too much and didn’t want to scar me for life.
Apparently, his dad liked to torture people with animals, and Maks had walked in when Andrei was using a tiger for God knows what.
Maks never spoke of it again, but he suddenly hated Tigger and anything tiger-striped.
“Yup,” Maks answered and made himself comfortable on my bed.
“You said the floor.” I joined him and lay back. It was so easy with him, so comfortable. For years I’d dreamed of lying with him like this, no cousins walking in, no friends judging us, no parents getting angry and telling us we didn’t know what love was.
Why did that dream suddenly seem impossible?
Maksim was pale as he tilted the bottle back. We didn’t speak. I basically just watched him drink and emotionally self-destruct until the bottle was half empty, and he nodded off.
I grabbed it from his hands and gently tucked him into bed, lifting his heavy legs and pulling the covers over his body.
“I miss holding your hand,” he whispered without opening his eyes. “You think you can feel people after you die?”
I froze, watching his innocent peaceful face. “What do you mean?”
“I hope so,” he grumbled. “I hope you can feel me even after darkness falls… maybe my heart will remember yours and try to keep beating one last time—so I can hold your hand.”
“Maks, you’re just drunk; you’re not dying.” I lay down next to him. “Try to sleep.”
He held out his hand and whispered, “Just in case.” A solitary tear slid down his cheek onto the pillow.
Chapter Seven
“There comes an end to all things; the most capacious measure is filled at last, and this brief condescension to my evil finally destroyed the balance of my soul.” —Robert Louis Stevenson
Maksim
I see her.
I recognize her as mine.
I touch her, and it’s so familiar I want to cry.
But something inside my brain hurts—maybe I am going crazy. How great would it be if the very cure is what causes the sickness at the risk of my mental health.?
I fucking hate being sick.
I hate lying to her, and the lies keep falling easier and easier to the people that I love—to the people I swore to protect.
With a muttered curse, I jab the needle into my arm and inject the clear medicine. It takes a solid minute for my body to go numb again, for the shaking to stop, for my muscles to relax; at this rate I’m going to need muscle relaxers, so I don’t tear something—and I don’t mean my shirt.
I fucking wish that were the case, that I could at least explain.
My bed dips as I sit down, letting the drug do its job to keep death at bay, but I feel it even then, how much longer it takes for the medicine to work and how much more of it I need in order to stay normal.
Crying will do nothing, but I still want to. It’s so fucking dumb, but I want to be held; the shitty part is that every time I touch her, I have this inane alpha werewolf like response—something that would be laughable if I weren’t worried I’ll actually hurt her.
It takes everything in me not to rip her clothes from her body, and yet another part of me just wants her to tell me it’s going to be okay.
Maybe that’s what I need, a perfect lie from her lips. I’ll steal it with a kiss and hold it close to my heart until it stops beating.
Then I’ll die with a smile on my face, believing that lie—and loving that girl, until the very end.
I should apologize to her for acting crazy, but what can I say? Do I tell her that blood is on my hands and that sometimes I like it now? Do I tell her that I didn’t have the guts for what needed to be done, so I took the easy way out?
I groan and fall back onto my bed, phone in hand. It buzzes, and I quickly look at it, thinking it’s going to be Izzy even though she’s next door.
But it’s not Izzy.
It’s Nikolai.
“Hey,” I answer, voice cracking, heart damn near stuttering to a stop. “Everything okay?”
“I called in a favor,” he says straight to the point. “Your blood arrived a few hours ago.”
My body tenses immediately. “And?”
He’s quiet.
Shit.
Quiet isn’t good.
“I can’t calculate precisely.” He curses, wow, even better. “Maksim, from the breakdown of your cells and the erratic way they’re reacting to the medicine, you have about seven days.”
I nearly drop the phone. “Before I die?”
“Before you ask me to kill you. Maks, you’ll be… not you anymore, do you understand what I’m saying? Back when we started this trial, you said you wanted a DNR, you signed it, if you want to go back on that, I can fax over another one and—”