Page 97 of Creatures Like Us

“Uh, yeah, but?…?He hasn’t been home in ages, and I really want to see him. Can I go, please?” Feeling the need to ask for permission feels weird. Everything about this conversation feels weird.

“Go?” Noah hunches over the kitchen counter, back turned to me.

“I-It’s not like I won’t come back!” I say in a rush. “I’ll just spend the weekend at my parents’.”

A sudden tension passes between us in the wake of my words, and when Noah turns around, his face is that emotionless mask again. Closed off, eyes dark.

“I’m sorry, Ash, but I can’t let you do that.”

My stomach drops. “Wh-What?”

“If you go, you might stay gone, and I need you to be here. With me.” He pushes himself from the kitchen counter and stalks toward me.

“I have to be able to leave sometimes, Noah,” I plead, backing toward the windows. “I’ll come back. Don’t worry.”

He shakes his head. “No, Ash. Don’t you get it? They’ll convince you to stay with them. They’ll discover where you’ve been—howyou’ve been—like that girl did. They won’t let you return to me. If I let you walk out that door, I’ll never see you again.”

This can’t be happening. I told him?…?I told him we were done if he ever thought of compromising my freedom again. This is more than thinking it; this is doing it.

“Please, Noah. You have to let me go.”

“Why?” He’s inches away from me now, reaching out a hand to stroke my cheek. “Why do you need your brother? I thought he didn’t care about you.”

“I?…?I didn’t think he did.” It’s not even about my brother—not really. It’s all of it. Our isolation, Noah controlling me like this. Shit. I turn my face away, tears falling down my cheeks. Why is he like this? Why arewelike this?

“Icare about you, Asher.” His thumb strokes my cheek, drying a tear, and when I look up, I see he’s on the verge of crying too. “There’s nothing else I care about. Only you. Please.”

“Don’t you understand?” I sob. “I can’t be with you when we’re like this, Noah. I can’t love you when we’re like this.”

“Do you?” His eyes light up with hope. “Love me?”

“Didn’t you hear what I just said?” I whine. “I can’t. I can’t love you unless you let me go. You have to let me go, Noah.”

“But I can’t let you go.”

I break down, shoulders shaking. “Please. Please.”

“I’m sorry.” He embraces me once more, but where his body heat used to be comforting, it now feels anything but. It feels stifling, as if it’s erasing my own being, my own will, my own self. “I’m sorry. You have to understand.”

I cry into his shoulder as he strokes my back. It feels like mourning, like the end of it all. Because I do understand.

I understand I can’t be with him. I understand I have to leave him. Or else he’ll destroy me.

He’ll smother me.

He’ll make me into what I was before he released me from my chains, only this time, those chains will be invisible. I can’t live like that. It’s not love; it’s a slow death. An erasure of my existence.

So that is why I lean back and kiss him for the last time, tasting my own tears and his, feeling oddly numb with the gravity of mydecision. I cradle his face, and my hands are shaking. All of me is.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper. It might kill him, what I’m about to do, but all things considered, I think he’d thank me for that.

As quickly as I can manage, I reach toward the counter and grab the heaviest object I can find: a porcelain canister of utensils. Closing my hand around it, I swing it to the side of Noah’s head.

Noah tumbles to the ground, the utensils clattering all around him. He grabs his head, gasping for breath. “Ash?…”

That single word is like a knife through my heart. I could say “I’m sorry” a hundred times over, and it still wouldn’t be enough, but Noah should be sorry too, and I don’t think he is—at least, not sorry enough. And that is part of the reason I have to go.

For the second time that day, I inhale the fresh air of the world outside. I’m going home, but it doesn’t feel like it.