Apathy by L.K. Reid

Skylar

When I was ten years old, I asked my parents to buy me a hamster for my birthday. I couldn’t recall why I asked for a hamster, but since my parents didn’t want me to have a cat or a dog at that time, I guess that in my young mind a hamster seemed like a reasonable solution.

I really wanted to have a pet.

Most of my friends had a dog, a cat, a parrot, and I wanted to have a pet I could call my own.

I still remembered the day, as if it just happened yesterday, when my dad brought two small boxes home with tiny holes punctured on the top. His lips were pulled into a wide smile, and as he crouched in front of me, he placed both of those boxes in my hands.

“Happy birthday, Lar,” he said.

I believe that that was one of the last good memories of my dad. I liked to believe that there were many more, but I read somewhere that our minds tend to lock down all those good times when something traumatic happens. Maybe because it was easier forgetting how we used to perceive a person versus who they really were.

But in that moment, when he handed me those two boxes, he was the best dad in the entire world. He didn’t have to tell me what was inside because I knew. I just fucking knew.

My heart pounded so hard that I had a feeling I was going to pass out. I all but ran toward the living room, leaving my dad behind in the foyer, anxious to see my new friends. I asked for one hamster, but he bought me two.

“A male and a female,” he said. “They need to have a companion.”

He must have said something else, but at that moment, my whole attention was on the two boxes and two tiny creatures waiting for me inside.

I placed them carefully on the table, afraid that if I shook it, they would get afraid, and I didn’t want them to be afraid of me. I’d been dreaming of that moment for so long, that once it started becoming true, I didn’t know what to do.

“Why don’t you open the boxes?” Dylan’s voice broke the tension in my body, but I kept staring at the boxes, unable to move.

“What if they hate me?” I asked him as I turned around. He was already starting high school, and I couldn’t wait to go to his football games since he just made the team. “What if they don’t want to play with me?”

“Hey, hey, hey.” He crossed the small distance between us and sat next to me. I didn’t realize he was holding a small cage in his left hand, and it warmed my heart that he did this for me. “I chose them for you, and I just know that they’re going to love you.”

“Promise?”

“I promise, Little One. Now,” he leaned forward and pulled the two boxes closer to the edge of the table, “open them. Don’t make them wait for too long.”

And I did.

The first box revealed a scared little guy, coated in brown fur with one white line running over his back. He sat on his back legs and stared at me, his dark eyes full of wonder and a small amount of fear. I gently pushed the box on its side, and after a minute or so, with tentative steps, he came out, sniffing over the table, trying to understand his new surroundings.

“He looks beautiful, Dy,” I mumbled. “And he has a white stomach,” I pointed out, my voice high-pitched and filled with excitement.

Dylan slid down from the couch and sat on the floor, extending his hand toward the hamster. “This is the male one,” he murmured as he dragged his finger over the hamster’s back. “And that other one,” he looked at the second box, “is the female. I really think you’re going to love her.”

I slid down to the floor and started opening the second box. The moment I opened the lid, a lithe, white body jumped out, and stood on all fours, staring at me.

She was the most magnificent creature I had ever seen.

Dark red eyes stared back at me, and her entire body was pure white, just like the first snow. She didn’t move, didn’t sniff around like her male companion did. She just sat there, observing us just how we were observing her.

I was in love.

As soon as I showed my hand to her, she approached me and sniffed my fingers before climbing onto my palm.

“Hi, Nala,” I murmured, feeling Dylan’s eyes on me.

“Is that her name?”

“Yep.” I smiled. “And he is Donny.”

“Those are amazing names, Sky.”

I extended my palm and placed my hands next to each other, letting Nala climb from one side to the other. The sound of the cage door opening made me turn to Dylan, who was already taking Donny and placing him inside. I slowly did the same with Nala.

The only problem was, as soon as the doors closed behind her, she attacked him, chasing him through the cage.

“What is she doing?” I asked, with panic lacing every word. I wanted them to be friends, to be good to each other, but Nala had other plans.

“I don’t know, Little One, but I’m sure they’ll be fine. They’re just getting to know each other.”

And I believed in that.

I was happy when she finally calmed down after three weeks of relentless chasing, of wounds on Donny’s body, and one morning we found out why.

Nala had babies, but she didn’t want them. She refused to tend to them, while my poor Donny behaved like a mother hen. I again thought everything was going to be fine, that it was just an animal phase, but when I came home from school, only two days after they were born, the grim look on Dylan’s face told me that something was wrong.

He took me to my room, where their cage was located, and the sight in front of me was one I would never forget.

“S-She,” I stammered. “She ate them all.”

Nala was sitting inside the cage, chewing on the body of one of the pups—unapologetic, satisfied, and beyond monstrous. But I couldn’t see Donny.

“Where is—”

“I’m sorry, Sky. She, uh… she killed him.”

My perfect albino hamster with red eyes and the missing piece on her ear, ate her pups and killed the male she shared a cage with. My ten-year-old mind couldn’t understand, but I tried.

And the older I got, the more I understood her actions.

Nala died two years after that, but her defensive behavior and the need to always be alone somehow stayed with me.

Just because somebody is biologically your father or a mother, or even a sibling, that doesn’t make them your family. Blood is just that—blood—but actions are what matter.

I’ve been going over the things my family did for me, the actions and reactions they had, and even excluding how my father behaved, none of them were behaving how a real family should.

None of them except Dylan.

He would be disappointed if he knew that every single night since I came back from the hospital, a dark-haired boy he didn’t like all that much sneaked into my room just to hold me. Just to talk to me. Just to tell me that everything was going to be okay.

Ash was fast asleep, his head on my chest, his arms wrapped around my torso as if he didn’t want me to leave. That first night we didn’t talk. He held me while I cried, while I wept for the little girl in me that wasn’t alive anymore.

On the second one, he told me about his brother, Sebastian, and how smart he was. On the third one, he kissed me for the first time since the forest, and I felt as if thousands of butterflies invaded my stomach. As if it was my first kiss.

And perhaps it was. It was the first light kiss I ever got.

The gentle touch of his lips on mine, no rush, no panic, no dark thoughts invading my mind, just him and I, holding each other.

I just wanted to stay here forever, with Ash wrapped around me, far away from the outside world. Far away from the things that could hurt me. Far away from my family who didn’t even call to see how I was doing.

I spent my days with Dylan, who refused to go back to Seattle until the culprit was caught. But my nights… my nights were reserved for Ash.

Ash who held me while my whole body shook, when the fear I was hiding away from finally managed to find me. Ash who wiped the tears from my cheeks and played with the strands of my hair, humming songs I had never heard of.

Ash who made me watch the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy when I couldn’t sleep, too afraid I would see the golden mask instead of the usual darkness.

But Ash still hid parts of himself from me. Even though he talked about himself, about his childhood, about his brother and his uncle, I still had a feeling that he didn’t share the most important parts, and that sucked.

It sucked because with each passing day, he went deeper and deeper, burying himself in my soul. It also sucked because I didn’t know what reality would bring to us once we got out of this warm cocoon we created.

Would he still hold me like he was holding me now, clinging to me like I was important to him, or would he go back to the painful game of indifference?

I was too afraid to ask what was happening between us. I was terrified because he became the air I needed to breathe, and I didn’t want to lose him.

In the endless darkness I was surrounded with, he felt like the light I was desperately looking for. But I wondered if this was real, or if my fucked-up mind just found another thing to be addicted to. I wondered if maybe Ash was just the replacement for all the drugs I used to take, for the alcohol I used to drink.

Maybe he was just another form of self-destruction. But no matter how unhealthy this was, I couldn’t let him go.

He stirred in his sleep as I dragged my thumb over his eyebrow, wanting more than ever to know how he got the scar slicing it in half. I wanted to know his deepest, darkest secrets, but as much as I wanted to know, I also wanted to keep him in this idolized box I created.

I learned that sometimes the truth wasn’t what we actually needed, and right now I needed to believe that not everything was dark. I had to believe that there were people in this fucking town who didn’t want to see me fail.

I had to believe that the guy I was falling for was also falling for me, for all the good and bad things I had inside me. I had to believe he was okay with the mess swirling through my head, because if I didn’t, this endless hole I was falling through would swallow me whole.

“Your thoughts are loud,” he murmured, halting the movement of my hand immediately.

“Excuse me?”

“I said,” he pushed himself up, and leaned closer to me, “your.” Kiss. “Thoughts.” Kiss. “Are.” Kiss. “Loud.”

I wrapped my arms around his neck as he pulled me closer to him and then flipped us, so that I was on top of him. What would life be like if I could do this every day? Wrapped up in the cocoon of warmth, consumed by him, consumed by these feelings he was evoking in me.

I swiveled my hips, earning a grunt from him, feeling the rising of his dick. He gripped my hands as I started dragging them down his chest, toward the edge of his jeans. There was a warning in his midnight eyes, but I wasn’t one to shy away from danger. If I was, maybe I wouldn’t be in all these fucked-up situations lately.

“You’re playing with fire, baby,” he grunted, earning a smile from me.

“I know,” I whispered, swiveling my hips again. “But I like fire.” I leaned down and pressed my lips against his, torturing both of us with excruciatingly slow movements. He wound one of his hands around my neck, holding me at the nape, while his other one slowly dragged over my lower back, all the way to my sleep shorts.

I moaned as he slipped his hand inside my shorts and my panties, and started kneading my ass, moving me on top of him.

God, if this was just a fantasy, I didn’t want it to end.

He started lifting his hips, now fully controlling my movements on top of him, letting me know that he was in charge. And I didn’t mind it. I didn’t mind it at all.

Sometimes I had a feeling that he knew what I really needed. Whether it was for him to give me space, or to take control, but he knew.

As he pulled my head back, holding my hair, I realized that I wouldn’t be able to accept his cruelty after all these nights together. The world was a cruel place already, where the strong fed on the weaker ones, and sometimes you had to become a villain to survive. But that I could live with.

What I wouldn’t be able to live with would be the world in which he and I ended up being simple strangers. Just two people who used to know each other but weren’t talking anymore. I wouldn’t be able to survive this entire year if he started behaving like this didn’t mean anything to him, because it meant everything to me.

Even though I was too afraid to voice all this out loud, I prayed to God that he would hear the cry of my heart, and that he would know not to let me go. If he did, I didn’t want to think what would become of me.

If he was just another addiction, just another toxic thing I accepted in my veins, I still didn’t want to stop, even if it killed me.

“Stop thinking so much,” he growled and bit into my lower lip.

“I’m not.”

“Yes, you are.” He moved the hair that fell between us as he let me go, placing it behind my ear. “Here.” He tenderly pressed his thumb between my eyebrows. “You have lines here, and I don’t like seeing them, Moonshine.”

“And why is that?” I asked, my voice barely audible. I was scared he would hear the tremble. That he would know how much he affected me, how much I didn’t want to get back to the real world where he and I could never be together in the open. Where monsters like my father would never let me live my life how I wanted to live it.

Where my life was planned for me before I was nothing more than a little blip in my mother’s stomach, just because I was a legacy and I had to do something with my life. They wanted to control me. They wanted to tell me who I needed to be, just like they did with Dylan.

Every time I saw him since he finished high school, it was as if the brother I once had was slowly disappearing in front of my own eyes. I couldn’t remember the last time that he smiled, a real, genuine smile.

Before he started college, he used to smile all the time. People used to joke that the two of us were like the sun and moon—completely different on how we dealt with people, yet so similar.

Now that sunshine was gone from him, and I feared what would become of me if I allowed them to control me later. That’s why I had to leave.

That’s why I had to run as far away as possible, because there was no way in hell that my father would stop looking for me. Dylan might, if I told him I was safe and happy, but my father… No, that monster would never stop haunting me.

“There it is again,” Ash protested. “What are you thinking about?”

His eyes were a molten lava, burning into my own, waiting to hear answers I couldn’t give him. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to, I did. I just didn’t know how to form the words, how to explain what was passing through my head. Or maybe I was still unable to come to terms with everything that has happened in the past two years.

He suddenly pulled himself up and leaned against the headboard, taking me with him. My legs were on his sides, my center pressed against his hardness, but I knew that he wouldn’t let this go, even if I started stripping right now.

He had that determined gleam in his eye, and the way he looked at me told me everything I needed to know.

He cared.

Ash cared about me—a thought that both scared and excited me.

It scared me because I didn’t know if he liked it or not. Did he despise it? Did he wish I was somebody else? Did he like me for me or just because I was a Blackwood?

Was he suddenly nice to me because he had something to gain?

But no matter how much my brain pushed me into overthinking, the fact that he seemed to care about me excited me. I couldn’t remember the last time that someone besides Dylan cared about me.

I couldn’t count my friends because it wasn’t the same level of caring. I loved Lauren, I loved the rest of our crew of misfits, but I couldn’t help but wonder if we would ever hang out if it wasn’t for our families.

“Moonshine,” he murmured, pulling my head closer to his. He pressed his forehead against mine, exhaling softly. “You need to talk to me. I don’t like seeing you worried.”

“I’m just…” I shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess I just don’t want to go back to reality.” I played with the soft hair at the nape of his neck, while he held me in a tight embrace. His chest pressed against my chest, his heart beating in the same rhythm as mine. “I don’t want to lose this,” I whispered, admitting my biggest fear.

I wasn’t afraid of a faceless man that was still out there. I wasn’t scared of pitiful looks or judgmental ones, but I was terrified of losing this, whatever this was.

“I’m scared that once the light comes up in the morning, you’ll go back to ignoring me—”

“Hey.” He moved back, looking straight at me.

“No, wait. Just let me get this off my chest and then you can say whatever you want to say.”

I thought he would protest, that he would try to convince me without listening to me, but I should’ve known that Ash wouldn’t do things I would expect other people to do.

I moved further away and sat at the edge of the bed, avoiding looking at him. If I looked at him, I would lose all the courage I gathered, and I needed to get this off my chest.

“The last two years have been filled with sorrow and cruelty you could never imagine,” I started, looking at my hands folded in my lap. “Some days, it felt like I was stuck in an endless loop of bad dreams, and I could never wake up. At first, I thought I was imagining things, that my mind started creating scenarios that weren’t real, but they were. They were so real that I sometimes woke up in the middle of the night with screams waiting on the tip of my tongue. Sometimes I remembered those things in the middle of the day, and it was like a flashback slamming into me. And no matter how many drugs I swallowed, how much alcohol I drank, how many faceless guys I slept with, I could never forget.”

“Moonshine,” he choked out, reaching out for me, but I moved further away.

“Wait, you need to hear this. Just… Let me say these things, okay?”

“Okay,” he agreed.

“But then you came, and I still don’t know what pulled me to you, what called to me, but something did. Ever since that day in that first class, you were living in my head, and you didn’t even know. And then, well, things happened between us, and you started ignoring me. Which was fine, because I made myself believe that it didn’t mean anything, because it couldn’t. How could I care about somebody else when there was nothing left inside of me to accommodate another person?” When he didn’t say anything, I continued talking, playing with the bracelet Dylan gave me when we were just kids. “But as usual, as with everything else, I was wrong. And now you’re here. You’re everywhere, Ash, and I don’t know what to do once you go back to your usual cold demeanor.” I looked up, only to see him listening carefully. “I don’t know what to do once you decide that you don’t want to have anything with me and my fucked-up head, because I care. I care about you more than I would like to, and it sucks, because I don’t know if you care about me. I can’t take one more disappointment after everything I went through.”

My hands started shaking, and I pushed them underneath my thighs, hiding how nervous I was. I was baring my soul to him, and I hoped that he would accept it. I hoped he wouldn’t reject me, that he wouldn’t run from what we could have.

“And I’ll understand if you can’t do this, whatever this is, in front of everybody else, but I think you should know that I can’t do it only behind closed doors. I refuse to be a secret. If that’s all you’re looking for, I think it would be best if we just end it all here.”

One second… two… three… four… and then a whole minute passed before he reacted. Of all the reactions I would’ve expected him to have, this one was the last one on my list.

Ash smiled.

Not one of those wicked, little smiles I liked so much. Not the egoistical one that Kane so often had, but the relaxed, satisfied smile that took over his entire face, lighting up his eyes, warming the entire room. I never saw him smile like this, and I cherished the moment, because it was only mine.

His smile was only mine.

I didn’t care that he was forbidden fruit, and my father would’ve killed me if he knew I was sleeping with a guy he didn’t know about. He would make my life a living hell, more so than now, if he knew that I wasn’t collecting his precious information from Kane and his family.

I thought Ash would be angry, that he would get up and leave, but when he moved from the spot where he was sitting and closed the distance between the two of us on the bed, I knew I made the right choice by telling him how I really felt.

“Are you trying to get rid of me, Moonshine?” The bastard smirked as he pressed his palms against my cheeks, pulling my head higher so that the only thing in sight was him. “Did you really think I could let you go after all this? Do you know what I do the entire day that I’m not here with you?” he asked, as his thumb started making circles over my cheek.

“What?” I croaked, burning with the need to know.

“I think about you. I think about the taste of your lips, or how you lift your eyebrow when somebody is pissing you off. I think about this body of yours,” he said as he placed one hand on my hip. “This body that was made for me.” He lowered his head and pressed his lips behind my ear, eliciting shivers all over my body. “I started putting vanilla syrup in my coffee because it tasted like you. I want to be with you every single moment of every single day. I want to hold you. I want to tell the world that you belong to me. You know why?”

I shook my head, unable to utter the words. He was destroying me and building me up with his words. He was taking the broken pieces of me and starting to glue them back together.

“Because I belong to you, Moonshine.”

It wasn’t a declaration of love. It wasn’t a promise of forever, but it was a promise of something better. He was giving me everything I never even knew I wanted, and he was doing it so delicately, so carefully, as if I was made of porcelain.

As if he knew that one sudden movement, one more surprise, would shatter me.

“Y-you… You drink your coffee with vanilla syrup?” I frowned as I asked because vanilla syrup in coffee tasted like pure shit.

“Of all the things I just said,” he started laughing, “you only heard that?”

“Vanilla syrup sucks,” I protested. “You can’t blame me for—”

I didn’t manage to say anything more, and before you could say sex, he had me pinned down, hovering over me, holding my hands above my head.

“But it tasted like you.” He bit into the crook of my neck. “Sweet, delicate, and forbidden to be in coffee, but I still want it. You don’t scare me, Skylar. You and whatever is going on in that pretty little head of yours, it doesn’t scare me. What scares me is that you will never look at me like you’re looking at me now when I tell you my story.”

“Ash—”

“No, don’t tell me that you won’t. I promise I would never lie to you, but please don’t ever lie to me either.”

The way he looked at me, the way his eyebrows pulled together, I knew that whatever it was that he wanted to tell me wouldn’t sit well with me. But I didn’t want to think about the future and what it would bring.

For the first time in my life, I wanted to live in the moment. I wanted to enjoy the things I had right now, instead of daydreaming about things that could come.

He moved to the side, and pulled me to him, my back to his front, his hands around my middle and his mouth pressed against my neck.

“Tell me something I don’t know about you,” I murmured as his lips skimmed over the soft spot behind my ear, fighting the goosebumps threatening over my skin.

“What do you want to know?” One of his hands traveled beneath my shirt, and he spread his fingers over my stomach.

“Anything,” I said, but my mind screamed, Everything. I didn’t just want to know trivial things, like his favorite colors, or his favorite band. I wanted to know who gave him his first kiss, what made him smile, what made him angry. I wanted to know more about his brother, about his family. I wanted to know every single thing that made him who he was today.

He paused for a second, his hot breath caressing my skin, as if he contemplated where he would start. As much as I wanted to push him, I knew I had to be careful not to scare him away. Even after everything he said, I had a feeling that we were still on very thin ice, and the last thing I wanted to accomplish was to push him away.

“My last name,” he started, “isn’t really Weber.” His voice was laced with pain, and my gut told me there was more to this story.

I turned around and faced him, seeking his eyes in the dark. So much pain, so much sorrow, guilt, and anger, hid there, swirling in the midnight blue. Lifting my hand, I placed it on his cheek, earning a deep exhale and the closing of his eyes. He placed his other hand over mine and turned his face, kissing my palm.

“You don’t have to tell me that,” I whispered, as if I was talking to a frightened child. “If it hurts you, you don’t have to tell me.”

He pinned me with his eyes, a thousand stories told in that one look. He moved the hair away from my face before he started talking again. “I know I don’t have to tell you, but I want to.”

God, I wanted him to tell me every single thing as well, but not if it made him feel uncomfortable.

“But this… this thing you want to tell me, it hurts you?”

He nodded and moved away from me, the grim expression on his face now directed at the ceiling.

“There is not one single part of this story that doesn’t hurt, Moonshine.” He exhaled and took a deep breath again. “But I want to tell you. I want to share this with you.”

Tears threatened to spill over my cheeks, my heart piercing with the pain lacing his every word, and I grasped his hand in mine and kept quiet, waiting for him to continue.

“My parents were killed when I was six years old.” Oh God. “Truth be told, I can’t even remember what they looked like anymore.”

“Oh, Ash.”

“And I was there, you know?” He turned his head to the side and looked at me. “I was there that night when they were killed. And even though I can’t remember their faces anymore, sometimes when the wind blows too strong, I can still hear my mother’s screams.”

“Did they—” I choked. “Did they catch the murderers?”

A sorrowful smile played on the seams of his lips. “No, Moonshine. They never caught them.”

“I’m so sorry, Ash,” I murmured as I placed my head on his chest. “I am so damn sorry.”

“You have nothing to be sorry about.” He started playing with my hair. “You weren’t the one holding the knife.”

Jesus Christ.

I tightened my hands against his shirt, as if me being here could erase the pain and anger he lived with.

“What happened to you guys after that?”

“Uncle Neal adopted us. He’s not really our uncle, at least not by blood, but he took care of us. He took us away from Winworth and gave us his last name.”

And I thought I had a fucked-up life. I couldn’t even imagine the pain, the suffering he went through. He was just a child.

“You’re too quiet now,” he said, and I could hear the worry in his voice. “I didn’t want to scare you, I just—”

“You didn’t scare me.” I lifted myself up and looked at him. “I’m just sad, Ash. Sad that you and your brother had to go through something like that. Sad that you were dealt such a shitty hand in life.”

“I’m okay, Sky.” He pressed his lips against the pulse on the inner part of my wrist. “You don’t have to be sad. Hell, I don’t want you to be sad. I’m okay. I’m alive, Sebastian as well, and that’s all that matters.”

“I know.” I sighed. “I just… I don’t know. I’m just pissed, that’s all.”

“I like you when you’re pissed.” He grinned and pulled me on top of him. “But trust me, we are okay now.”

“But you shouldn’t be only okay.” I frowned. “You should feel amazing, full of life, wonderful—”

“And I do. I feel all those things when I’m here with you.” His lips found mine, and I let myself fall deeper and deeper, wrapping my arms around his neck. “You make me feel alive, Moonshine. You make me feel, and I cherish every single moment spent with you.”

All the worry, all the pain, they just melted from my heart, like ice on a sunny day. It felt as if a swarm of butterflies flew through my stomach, lifting me higher and higher, all the way to him and his perfect smile.

“Wait.” I stopped and smiled down at him. “What was your family name?”

His hands on my hips tightened, and his eyes glistened in the dark. “Crowell.” He swallowed hard. “I used to be Asher Crowell.”

Crowell.

Why did that sound somewhat familiar?

“So, you were a little crow then?” I smiled and leaned down, stealing another kiss. “I like it. I think it suits you.”

“Yeah?” A smile slowly returned to his face. “You think so?”

“Mmhmm.” I nodded. “It suits you better than Weber.”

“I think so too.” He lifted his arms and wrapped them around my lower back, holding me tight on top of him. “Maybe one day I’ll go back to being a Crowell.”

“Maybe.” I grinned. “And maybe I’ll be there to see that.”

And maybe, just maybe, we would be able to protect each other from the wicked past.