Kiss Me in the Dark Anthology - Monica James Page 0,156

lose your mind?

“I can’t b-breathe,” I gasp, desperately trying to slow down my panting. Ironically, I am breathing, just far too quickly to stay conscious. I’m hyperventilating, something I’m unfortunately intimately acquainted with, only normally the end result of a panic attack is a brown paper bag, a dark room, and occasionally a valium washed down with a glass of pint grigio. Now, I’m terrified that if I pass out, I’ll really, truly be dead.

“Tighter or looser?” Rome asks me. He remembers. After all this time, he still remembers how to comfort me.

“Tighter,” I whisper, smiling mournfully as he wraps his arms tighter around me.

“What’s your favourite colour?” he asks.

“Blue.” I don’t even need to think about it. It’s blue, like his eyes, like my dead sister’s skin, like the dress she was still wearing when he pulled her from the pool all those years ago and tried to resuscitate her.

“Favorite food,” Rome continues, squeezing me harder and harder. It probably hurts him, the way I’m pushed into his chest, snug against his shoulder that still sports a nasty wound from the bullet he took for me just days ago.

“I can’t-“

“Favorite food.” He’s firm. “Come on.”

“Ice-cream,” I manage. The room spins around us, as I cling to Rome.

“Favorite ice-cream,” he whispers.

“Baskin-Robbins Love Potion.”

“Favorite person.”

“Adeline,” my voice cracks with grief.

“Favorite living person,” Rome clarifies.

“You.”

I answer him without even really thinking. I suppose I could have said Will or my father or Nathan or Jennifer. But I didn’t say any of those people.

“Me,” Rome echoes, his voice softening with disbelief, with tenderness. Something inside my chest cracks open and spreads through my veins. I might have destroyed what we once had. I might have spent the better part of a decade estranged from Rome Montague’s cold blue eyes and his insistent mouth. I might have loved another boy for that entire time, but loving one person doesn’t mean you erase the other. I never really stopped loving Rome, even as my hatred for his family burned alight in every orchestrated move my family made.

When my father had his first heart attack, shortly after Rome went to prison, I begged him to sell the house so that we could start fresh somewhere else. The horror of passing the pool where my sister Adeline drowned every morning, of looking out of the windows and seeing the crumbling, half-burned Montague mansion next door even more acute after what happened. The flowers, vases upon vases of bright red, long-stemmed roses, that kept coming to the house every day.

Condolences.

So sorry for your loss.

Thinking of you.

In the weeks after my sister was buried in the family mausoleum, all of the flowers wilted and died, and the house turned in to some kind of living burial ground. Daddy was catatonic. Wouldn’t let us throw a single stem away, and I could understand why. Clearing out the cards, the flowers, the vases, would mean it was really over.

Cleaning up the aftermath of Adeline’s suicide would mean that she was really, truly dead.

Daddy had dismissed every single staff member from his house, including the kitchen staff, and the only person allowed beyond the front foyer, apart from me, was my cousin, Nathan. Even Aunt Eliza and Daddy’s brother, Uncle Enzo were forbidden, outcast. My father’s grief was a living thing, a dark sickness that almost killed him.

Nathan broke all of the vases after two weeks of us all living in a rotting pile of dead roses in various states of decay, stale vase water with scum around the rims only making things smell worse. Took each one in his hands, his face red from the bitter words he’d exchanged with Daddy, and threw them at the living room walls. One by one, they shattered, sending cloudy, dirty water and sharp glass all over the tiled floors. Piles of damp rose petals and twisted, thorny stems everywhere.

He didn’t mean to hurt my father. He was horrified when Daddy clutched at his chest and collapsed, the first heart attack for a man who would go on to have two more. Nathan was just angry, the same as the rest of us. Being adopted didn’t mean he loved Adeline any less than we did. If anything, he loved her more. He chose to love her in spite of the fact that he wasn’t linked by blood to any of us.

I don’t know why I’m thinking about that now. Maybe because I thought I’d escaped the Capulet family curse. Survived even as everyone I loved