❝tired of feelin' like i'm trapped in my damn mind

tired of feelin' like i'm wrapped in a damn lie

tired of feelin' like my life is a damn game

ni**a really wanna die in the nighttime.❞

➼ XXXTENTACIÓN, "everybody dies in their nightmares"

Peter still hadn't returned Charlie's calls. Her parents left for a dinner, and she buried her face into the pile of stuffed animals on her bed.

All the aloneness in the world stirred and settled within the walls of her room, every facet of her life now branded with Jonah's name. As if everything she'd worked for was a house of cards and all he needed to do was give it a light flick.

Charlie wanted to claw him out of her skin. She dragged her fingernails down her cheeks, pulled at her hair until it hurt, things she'd refused to think about for years swallowing up her dread.

They used to spend most of their waking life together, their few moments of solitude like limbo until one of them returned. Desperation: escaping themselves by becoming each other. He basically lived at her house, in her room—this room. So why did he once go days without talking to her when she admitted she loved him? A slip of the tongue, a mistake that tore her up until he came to stitch her back together. Until he knocked on her window in the middle of the night, scaring her half to death.

That day, she made him beg to come in. Made him plead, and she'd reveled in how he'd said "please" like he couldn't stand the sound of it on his lips.

She reminded herself of their fight as she led him to her bed, and she had to keep reminding herself when the tips of his fingers brushed her arm as they slept. As if she'd somehow disappear if he didn't. As if she'd somehow leave him.

Present-day Charlie stared at her phone, enclosed in a bulky Hello Kitty case.

Lilith's high-pitched Spanish mew in her head: ¿What do you think you're doing?

She pulled up the number Jonah had been using to harass her.

Lilith: ¿Don't you see that this is what he wants?

Her fingers hovered over the screen.

Lilith: Go back to your stuffed animals.

Charlie swallowed hard. The stuffed animals in question chanted a unanimous noooooooo as she typed the message:

Meet me at the football field tomorrow. 8:00 am.

●     ●     ●

Charlie waited at the top of the bleachers.

Fog drifted over the empty football field, so thick it blurred everything into a dream: the white markings on the grass, her pink skirt, and the thigh-high kitty socks she'd worn out of spite.

There was something uncanny about the campus on weekends, all noise and commotion gone. She should've brought her camera.

Her fingers dug into her thighs once she saw something on the other side of the field. A figure, limping toward her.

Him.

He materialized from the fog, wearing combat boots despite the heat and a black t-shirt, becoming less wraith and more flesh. Bruises. Human boy. In her chest, caged butterflies flapped desperately in an attempt to get away.

Lilith: You, rosita, are a very stupid girl.

Jonah stopped at the bottom of the bleachers and waved. Charlie gripped her knife—as much a part of her as a limb. In the quiet, she heard every clack of his crutches as he made his way up. In the quiet, she had no distraction from the memory of blood on Lilith's fur, her slightly open mouth before Charlie covered her tiny face in dirt.

"I appreciate you sitting at the top," Jonah said as he paused to breathe. The swelling on his face had gone down. She noticed a few stitches above his brow... and more along his jaw. The bandages over his nose were gone, revealing the scabs beneath.

She didn't know how she resisted the impulse to run. Didn't know how she found it in her to angle herself toward him, showing off her kitty socks.

"I appreciate you being thirty minutes late."
His bruised eyes trailed up her legs. He took both his crutches into one hand and sat a safe distance away—as if she was the dangerous one. Then, after a long, butterfly-having-a-seizure-in-her-chest pause, he finally said, "Heard your boyfriend's game got canceled."

"I know it was because of you," she whispered.

"Was it really?"

She scanned him for any fraction of the fear he'd made her feel this month, the last four years as she mistook him for dead, but found only his cold gaze.

Lilith: Just speak. Start with something simple.

She chose the most mundane question possible: "How did you get into this school? I didn't know they were open for registration this late."

"I'm the exception," he said, staring ahead into the fog. "Haven't you heard I'm a genius?"

"...and who drives you home?"

"What is this, an interrogation?"

"...I just want to know what you've been up to."
Was there a minuscule chance they could resolve this and things could be okay? They didn't need to ever talk again, but to know that he, somewhere out there, was still breathing—that would be enough.

His upper lip, still red and slightly swollen, rose in a sneer. "What I've been up to? Really? Let's see: intensive physical therapy, chronic bladder issues, medical bills without insurance. The time of my life. Thanks for asking, but do me a favor and skip the small talk."

"I'm so sorry," she mumbled—more out of instinct—and she immediately wished she hadn't.

"Sorry for what you put me through?" he asked, his controlled calm faltering. "Sorry for my broken spine?"

She pulled her knees to her chest. The fog around them morphed, the dark cloud of his rage now directed at her.

Lilith: ¿What did you expect?

"They say it's luck I can walk again," he said. "They say it's luck I didn't hit my head. That my brain wasn't damaged to the point I forgot my own name. But I know better."

He brought his gaze to her cross necklace. She'd forgotten to take it off. She couldn't now. It seared into her skin in her shame.

"I got better only for you," he continued, his tone softer now, too soft, mocking. "I could have killed myself easily. Stolen some pills, overdosed in the hospital bathroom. I could've even flung myself out the window for round two. Not that I would've died anyway, before seeing you again."

He took in a deep breath, relishing it, like even he hadn't gotten over the improbability of his survival. "Ask me how it was possible. Ask me how I lived."

He lived. And she ached to let it mean nothing would ever hurt as bad as the years she spent thinking otherwise. Paranoid he was haunting her. Except he had been. Maybe he could only do so because he was alive. Alive to feel her betrayal. Alive to never let her sleep soundly again.

"How," she breathed. "How did you do it?"

He leaned forward, elbows against his knees. "Do you remember that day at the pond by your house? When we..." The memory nearly sent her falling down the bleachers—the day they sealed their suicide pact into their "fates", blood against blood and the perversion that followed. Jonah's idea.

"Now," he continued, laughing a little. "I used to worry magic only existed in my grandmother's stories. But you and me... we tapped into something that day, didn't we?"

She had no idea what he meant anymore—his metaphysical talk was so much like the Jonah she remembered she was hypnotized and horrified at the same time—and she didn't think before blurting out, "We didn't have to jump."

He checked the black watch on his wrist. "You're about four years late for that one, Reyes."

"I tried to tell you," she breathed. "I did everything I could do stop you." The rainforest, the city, the world meant to be theirs. "You made me agree."

"I didn't make you do anything," he snapped. "If you were that worried you would've called one of those hotlines and gotten me institutionalized. But you've never been anything but a coward."
Coward. An invisible word carved into every inch of her skin.

"I know I should've," she said. "I've regretted that every single day. But still, I—I tried to tell you. I tried to stop you, but you made me hold on to every bad thing." Her voice was shaky, quiet and meek like always, but the words somehow spilled out of her: "Every problem I had, everything I opened up to you about... you made me think the only solution was to kill myself, and it's so... it's so messed up." She finally faced him, four feet away but still too close, his hands curling over the edge of the bleacher like he wanted to break it. "You'd never be able to do it without me. You always said you didn't need anyone, yet you needed me, but I realized I didn't want to die. I just wanted... I just wanted..."

You, she thought.

For a moment, a fifteen-year-old Jonah flashed onto his expression, hunched over with venomous eyes.

"I'm going to kill you," he said.

His voice: deeper. His accent: morphed into something indistinguishable by region, something exclusively his, throwing her off until she realized what he'd said.

By the time it sunk in, he was less than two feet away. Charlie backed against the railing lining the bleachers, and a sense of disaster gripped her, as if a tornado would tear through the field and fling them into the air, as if the sky would fall to crush them both, as if—

"I'm going to kill you," he repeated calmly. "Feel free to try to stop me. It's your word against mine. It's your word against my broken spine." His words took on a satirical flair, purposely dramatic. "Tell me, Reyes, have you ever felt anything strong enough to defy death itself?"

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A/N: Ahh, I like this chapter a lot. Hope you did as well, and that you have a bit more insight into their past/relationship (though some mini flashback things are coming up in the future chapters, so there's definitely more to come). Whose side are you on? Jonah's? Charlie? Is it Jonah's fault and should he just accept it and move on? Or is it Charlie's fault and should she just genuinely apologize for what happened? How truthful do you think Charlie is being when she says that Jonah "forced her to agree"?

So yeah, be sure to let me know what you think, vote if you liked it, add to your reading lists, and be sure to follow me for more updates xx

(dedicated to qwertyist for all the lovely comments x)