“It is not. You’re not doing this.”
I look past her to Goose, still in the living room, observing us with a sort of detached curiosity. I hold the knife in one hand and turn the other out, palm up in offering. “Just a small cut.”
Jamie pouts. “What? Don’t pussy out. Cut off a finger or something,” he urges. “Does it grow back?”
“Never done it.”
“No time like the present,” Goose says, his voice edgy now.
“If you do it, it’s over,” Mara says. “We’re over.”
It takes a beat for that to land. Daniel, Jamie, and Goose are uncomfortably, awkwardly silent.
“I mean it, “ Mara repeats. She’s breathing quick and hard, so angry, so fast. “I’m leaving the loft, moving back in with my parents. We’re done, completely.”
“Mara.” Daniel puts a hand on her shoulder—withdraws instantly, as if burned.
“No.”
“Mara, I’ll heal,” I say casually.
“That’s not the point and you know it.” She looks around at everyone, visibly holds herself back from saying something.
“Do I?” I push her without quite knowing why. I’m still holding the knife.
“Um, should we . . . give you guys a minute?” Daniel asks.
Mara looks at me, challenging. But I’ve decided. I want to do this, which is why Mara doesn’t.
I’d done what she asked me to, all those months ago. I started keeping that journal for her, wrote about nothing but her, and then she went behind my back and read it, and we had our most splendid fight.
“You want to hear how I first learned about my ability? About being told that we were moving into yet another miserable home two days before we left by my father’s secretary, because he couldn’t be bothered to tell me himself? About feeling so numb to it and everything that I was sure I couldn’t actually exist? That I must be made of nothing to feel so much nothing, that the pain the blade drew from my skin was the only thing that made me feel real?”
She looked like I’d struck her.
“You want to hear that I liked it?” I went on. “Wanted more? Or do you want to hear that when I woke up the next day to find no trace of any cut, no hint of a forming scar, all I could feel was crushing disappointment?”
“You want me to hurt you,” she’d said.
“You can’t.”
“I could kill you.”
If I hadn’t been so furious with myself, I might’ve laughed. As if killing me would be the worst thing she could do to me.
I took a step toward her. “Try.”
Now she’s threatening me again, but with something worse. So I’m not quite sure what possesses me to take the knife and slide it across my palm. The steel parts my flesh like soft butter, and the blood instantly pours to the white floor, puddling, blooming. Mara spins, deft as a deer, that gorgeous face marred by pain and betrayal, and takes the stairs at a run, with footsteps hard enough that I think she may shatter it.
“Dude,” Jamie says, going pale, backing away.
Daniel rushes for a towel. “Pressure.” He forces it against my palm. I take it from him, let it fall. The blood hasn’t stopped rushing, hasn’t slowed.
Goose even looks sick. “That’s . . . mental. Jesus fuck.”
Daniel again. “Noah, you need stitches.”
A single shake of my head. “Watch.”
We all do, all except Jamie, who has a blood thing, apparently.
“It’s going to be fine,” I say, but the words feel furred, each letter separate and fuzzy. Daniel forces the towel back into my hand, holds it there.
“Dude.” Jamie. “Maybe we should go to the hos—”
“Stop.” I gather myself as Mara did, coalescing around a spark of white I feel in my chest. I close my eyes. “You wanted this. Both of you. Don’t pussy out now.”
I watch the two of them watching me. Daniel watches the clock. Everyone’s heartbeat is rabbit-quick and frightened. I ignore it, them, and listen to myself, a bundle of raggedy notes splintering at the edges. A mangled theme that won’t stop scraping at me. If I blot out everyone else, concentrate on each note, I’ll fix it.
My blood’s soaked through the first towel, but with each breath, it slows, now only petaling the second. They all watch in curious, dazzled horror. But Goose watches with scepticism. I’ve never had to prove myself to anyone before this, and it makes me wonder for a moment—just a moment—whether I’ll heal myself.
I peel off the towel, look down at the cut—still bleeding, pooling in my palm. But not to the floor. A surge of pride, and a gratifying—rush. Like I’ve let poison out, and for the moment, I’m clean.
We wait till the blood stops pooling, which, if I’m being honest, takes a bit longer than I thought it would.
“Well, there we are, I’m a cunt,” Goose says.
“Not news.” I get up to rinse my hand, and my body nearly sways, surprising me, but I right it in time, before they notice. Run my hand under the faucet, and Goose, Daniel, and Jamie are all slack-jawed and staring. My anger’s burned itself out, and I want to talk to Mara, talk her down, really, but the loft seems to breathe and stretch, the stairs seeming impossibly far.
“I’ll be back in a bit,” I say, and push off the counter.
Coward.
All in my head. Back straight, gait long—keep up or fuck off.
I find Mara in our bed, clothes on, curled on her side. Closet’s open, and some clothes lie in a little nest at the bottom. One glance at her bag shows she’d started to pack.
“Going somewhere?”
She doesn’t answer.
“Mara.”
“Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Say my name.”
“Shall I come back later?”
“You can do whatever you want. It’s your house.”
“I had to do it. Goose wouldn’t’ve believed any other way—”
“Bullshit.”
I stay where I am. “It isn’t.”
I can’t hear her. Not her heartbeat, her pulse, nothing. The silence frosts the windows. All I can hear is the train trembling by on the Manhattan Bridge.
“You’re really going to leave?”
She doesn’t answer that, either.
It’s like approaching a dangerous animal—show no fear. I cross to the bed and run my finger along her bare instep, and she kicks out at me and swears. For a moment she lies there, half shadowed by the ash grey sky, turning darker by the second. She leans up on her elbows and twists, lip under teeth. If looks could kill, I would be dead already
“You said you’d never cut yourself again.”
“This wasn’t like that—”
“You promised.”
“Mara—”
“You lied to me.”
“I didn’t lie.”
“You’re lying now. To yourself.”
I sit next to her on the bed. “Do you want to see it?” She looks down at my hand, curled into a fist. “It’s not even bleeding anymore.”
“That’s not the point.”
“Isn’t it?”
Annoyed, frustrated. “Fine, that isn’t the whole point.” There she is, my Mara. “You weren’t just proving yourself to Goose. You were . . . hurting yourself. On purpose. A chef’s knife, a straight razor, your father’s hunting knife. It doesn’t matter how you do it. Or how you excuse it.”
I risk a finger, tracing it down the line of her shoulder to the inside of her wrist. She’s still quiet—all of her—but she doesn’t protest.
“You’re my preferred method of self harm.” She tries to hide a tiny smile. If I didn’t know her the way I do, I wouldn’t catch it.
But I do know her. And I do catch it.
“I know I am,” she says. “?‘You’ll love him to ruins,’ the professor said. ‘Unless you let him go.’?”
“Fuck’s sake, Mara. Really? I’m fine.”
“You’re not, and if you say that again, I really will kill you, and you’ll prove the professor right.” Her heart’s not in it though.
“All right,” I say. “I’m not.” Her body goes slack, and she curves back into the bed. “I’m—I don’t know what to do with all this. Sam. Beth. Goose explains why I’m seeing, feeling more—he magnifies everything we’ve got. Which, by the way, means I’m even more safe around him. You have even less reason to worry.”
Even as I say it, though, I realise the opposite must also be true. He must amplify her, too. I see the thought reflect in Mara’s eyes.
“You think he’s magnifying you, too.”