Gods & Monsters

Basically, I’m a heathen and my parents — my mom especially — is super unlucky to have a daughter who is anything but a lady. This might be where my mom got all her ideas about heathens, devils and monsters. From her own mom. No matter how hard I try to behave and be good, nothing makes my nana like me.

This year I’m not even going to try. I’m too bitter. I won’t be able to see the boy next door for an entire month, when I have seen him almost every day for the past year.

My footsteps are unenthusiastic as I trudge up to the treehouse for our last evening together for a while.

He’s already there when I climb up, drawing in his pad, and I settle beside him. I’m so lethargic and depressed that all I want to do is put my head on his shoulder, settle my nose in the hollow of his throat and play with his silver cross. I want him to nuzzle his cheek in my hair and fit his arms around the dip of my waist.

He makes me feel safe and warm. His body is so solid and hard and firm that I know nothing can touch me while I’m touching him.

Though I don’t know when we graduated to sitting like this — maybe it was around Christmas when the air used to be so cold that I needed his soft sweaters and warm chest — but this is how we sit now. I’ve often wondered if friends sit like this. If friends talk in whispers like we do. Other times I think that everything is so natural to us that why should I question it.

Before I can move closer to him though, he fishes something out of his backpack. It’s a cellphone. A tiny flip phone that people used years ago.

“I’m not allowed to have a phone until I go to high school,” I tell him, staring down at it like I’ve never seen a cellphone before. It’s true though. I can’t have any electronic gadgets until I’m fourteen and in high school. I use my dad’s computer to do homework, or go old-style: library.

“I know.” He starts pressing buttons. “See, that’s why I got you a small one so you can hide it easily. Keep it on you all the time, got it? You don’t want people accidentally finding it lying somewhere. And I put in my number already, okay?”

“You want me to bring it with me to my nana’s house?”

Dumb question. I know. But I can’t bring myself to ask the right ones. I’m too anxious, whereas only a few seconds ago, I was too tired to even want to breathe.

“Yeah,” he says cautiously.

“Why?”

“Why do you think?” His voice is sharp and his features even sharper.

I swallow. “I-I don’t…”

His sigh is frustrated. Shaking his head, he throws the phone inside his backpack. “Forget it.”

I put my hand on his shoulder, my fingers tracing the softness of his t-shirt, the firm muscles. For some reason, I want to touch those muscles without the fabric. It jars me, completely throws me off, so I take my hand back and wring it in my lap.

“Abel, don’t be mad. Please?” I whisper apologetically. “I’m leaving tomorrow. I don’t want to fight.”

He scoffs as he zips up his bag, almost tearing it apart in the process. “Look, it was stupid anyway. I thought we could keep in touch while you’re gone. Talk or text or something. I thought it’d make things easier. Bearable. But I guess this is kinda too much.”

I go up to my knees and cup his cheek; I’m dying to anyway. His jaw is pulsing as he looks up at me. “Make what bearable?”

“Don’t you know?”

His Adam’s apple vibrates with his words, just like my heart. “Tell me anyway.”

Abel grips my wrist tightly. I rub my thumb across his cheek, trying to loosen up his expression. It’s so fierce and straining.

“Ever since you told me you were leaving for a fucking month, I haven’t been able to sleep. Because I feel like if I close my eyes, you’ll be gone. I don’t wanna miss a single moment of you being in the next house so like a fucking perv, I keep staring at your dark window, imagining you asleep in your bed, praying to God that…” His thumb grazes the flickering pulse on my wrist. “That somehow my Pixie is dreaming about me.”

My Pixie. He said… my Pixie. I’m his, aren’t I?

My pulse jumps. I bet he can feel it on his thumb, sticking out of my skin, trying to break free with every leap it makes.

As I look down at him and his intense expression, I realize this is the big bang. This is how boys with golden hair and angry expressions crash into your life. This is how stars collide and worlds are made. This is how all love stories start.