Page 62 of Lovesick

Tolly snorts a laugh, exhaling large white rings of smoke up into the murky haze already accumulated above our heads.

“Is it like fucking a corpse?” Bram asks clinically, as though the question were purely for research purposes, his blue eyes that match mine, bright behind the crystal clean lenses of his black framed glasses.

“What?” Tolly laughs immediately, dropping his chair back onto all four legs, banging a fist down onto the table. “Bram, you’re a sick fucker,” he laughs louder, smoke flooding from his nostrils as he huffs another chuckle through his nose.

“I’m going to cut you open and eat your insides,” I inform Bram, stabbing my fork into the wooden table top, my head canting to one side, I smile. “Whilst you’re still alive.”

With a long slender finger, Bram pushes up his glasses, fingertip sliding up the length of his nose, before refolding his hands atop the table, his eyes connecting with mine, “What time will you be dining?”

Tolly’s laugh could break glass, the raucousness of it, Rune bellows, and as they fill the room with laughter and more smoke, I wonder how quickly I could do it.

Stab each of them right through the centre of their oesophagus’s.

“Enough,” Gore demands, his usual rumble controlled. He looks to me, sliding his papers into a large black envelope, winding a little red string around a clip at the opening before sealing the entire thing with a black ‘Obsidian’ wax seal. “Her final trial is tonight; Penelope needs to be ready.”

“She-”

“It cannot be postponed; this is the way it is done.” Gore pushes back from the table, standing from his chair, envelope in hand. “You need to do something, or she is going to fail. You know what happens tonight. There will be no union if she does not pass this. The Obsidi-” he pauses, clearing his throat with a twitch of his nose. “Wewill eat her alive if she hesitates.” Gore stops again, looking at me, everyone else around the table silent, all eyes on me. “Don’t let her become a lamb for slaughter, Billy.”

Blood.

Blood is the first and last prayer, the only language gods ever truly answer. I’ve seen it offered in bowls, in baths, smeared on foreheads and altars, burned to steam in the name of salvation, but none of that ever felt holy until I saw hers.

It moves beneath her skin like light trapped in glass, pulsing with defiance, with devotion, with something the faithful will never understand.

The Obsidian demands sacrifice, but blood isn’t a sacrifice. It’s proof. It’s a covenant written in the flesh, a vow that can’t be undone by words or forgiveness. Hers calls to mine, recognition.

Two currents, same river.

Same curse.

When it touches me, I feel the pulse of every vow I’ve ever broken and every one I’d still die to keep.

It’s not salvation I want.

It’s the pulse beneath her throat, the reminder that she still lives, that her heart still beats, that we are bound by something older, by something more.

We walk hand in hand through the mass graves, light fluffy flakes of snow falling from the sky, dusting us in little white melting flecks.

Penelope still does not speak, her silence as deafening as the ringing of the Bow Bells.

Something I can’t stop thinking about.

Trying to understand.

Her birthplace.

How she ended up in care.

Why?

The guilt of all that I’m still hiding from her.

Still trying to piece all of these fractured shards together without either of us getting cut.

I desperately want to hear her voice again. Hear her breathy little moans when I’m fucking her. Hear her speak my name withmeaning. With want.

Love.