Total pages in book: 169
Estimated words: 156210 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 781(@200wpm)___ 625(@250wpm)___ 521(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 156210 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 781(@200wpm)___ 625(@250wpm)___ 521(@300wpm)
Creepy much?
But he’s both odd and unnaturally attractive, so I can’t help but look back at him every now and then as I pretend to clean.
He picks up one fry out of the packet with his long fingers, and glares at it as if he expected to find poison. Satisfied with whatever assessment he’s made, he bites off half of the fry.
I hold back a smile when his perfect eyebrows rise.
“This is just the best,” Kurt whispers as he sneaks a candid photo of Kyranis grabbing more fries.
“Do you think this show is for our benefit?” I ask while we watch the stranger try the milkshake next. I won’t lie, it is pretty entertaining.
Kurt nods. “Probably, but I’m enjoying myself. You should give him a shot for all this effort. And you have to admit he’s hot. In your kind of way.”
I’d ask ‘what is that supposed to mean?’ if I didn’t know the answer already.
As goofy as Kyranis looks while pretending he’s not sure how to use a straw, he’s tall, graceful but wide-shouldered. He has long dark hair, and the aura of a Byronic hero. He is my type on paper. And the fact that I’ve not seen him around town makes him mysterious.
Kurt’s words finally hit me.
“What? Do you think he was actually asking me out?”
He rolls his eyes. “Well, duh. That whole talk about marriage, the ‘dark companion’ thing, and now he’s waiting for you to finish work.”
I swallow, and frost grows over my heart. It’s all fun and games to thirst from afar, but would I actually date this guy? I’m not sure how I feel about that. The perfect goth prince is too real all of a sudden. He’s not a hot dude on Instagram. He’s here.
Would I fuck him? Sure. But he seems to want more, and it’s all too much too fast.
And it’s not just that I’m used to hookups and therefore getting cold feet about dating. I can’t get it out of my head that he mentioned tying a thread to my shadow. It was so specific.
I’d pretty much erased that nightmare from memory, since I assumed it to be a figment of my overactive imagination. A fantasy my brain conjured at the worst moment of my life, when darkness almost swallowed me whole.
When I woke up from the dream, my wrists bore no trace of deep wounds, which convinced me that I must have hallucinated hurting myself after swallowing too many painkillers. But in the deep sleep I fell into, I drowned in a thick darkness, and its salty current pushed me toward nothingness. Eventually, I found the strength to reach above the violent waves, and someone grabbed my arm.
At that moment I felt I weighed as much as a thousand corpses, but the person who caught me didn’t let go.
My memory of what happened next is fuzzy. After all, I was only fourteen at the time. But as I gasped for air on the bank of the imaginary river, a shadowy creature, who could have been the devil himself, asked if I wanted to live.
Faced with death’s cold breath, hands grasping at air and blurry faces with purple mouths desperately trying to stay above the waves, I knew I didn’t want to join them again. Crying my little heart out as my wrists continued to bleed, I told the cloaked demon I wanted to go back home.
The exact words we exchanged are a blur, but I agreed to trade my shadow for another shot at life. In the bright light of a giant full moon, both our shadows lay on the ground like two human-shaped blankets.
The living nightmare plucked a single strand of long hair from his head, threaded it through a needle, and then used it to attach his shadow to mine. All very surreal and therefore appropriate, since it was a dream. The pain in my wrists was strangely elusive when he poured something warm onto the wounds, but when I woke up, I was back in my room at the boarding school.
Which makes sense.
I had a nervous breakdown, I took too many painkillers, I thought I cut my wrists, but I guess I ended up not doing that, and then had the strangest, drug-fueled nightmare.
So why is this weirdo talking about tying one shadow to another, as if he knows my dreams?
He looks so out of place in the bright lights of Best Burgers Bonanza. The leather outfit he’s wearing is so black it seems to suck the colors out of the seat, so much so that the mint upholstery appears to be a faded gray with only a hint of green. I can’t help but think it resembles the skin of a dead body drained of blood. Especially with the old leather peeling and cracking.
It has to be some trick of the light, because what other explanation is there? I know from experience in painting that colors can seem different relative to what they are put next to.