I am no longer afraid of Pax Davis. I realized that when I convinced him to kiss me back in the hospital.
Am I still insanely attracted to him?
Absolutely.
Am I still replaying that drunken night in the forest, when I almost fucked him, every single time I close my eyes?
Hell yeah, I am.
But I can bear my attraction to him now. Those memories don’t make me want to run and hide in a dark closet, whimpering into the crook of my own elbow anymore. I can exist alongside them quite happily, and that feels like freedom to me.
Pax watches me for a second, then draws on his vape pen. He laughs as he blows out another cloud of smoke, pointing the pen at me. “I take it by the naïve smile on your face, you’ve decided that you’re not.”
“I have.”
Something cold and hard flashes in his eyes. Something not particularly friendly. “Alright, Firebrand. You’d better be on your way, before I decide to test your theory.”
His words have no effect on me whatsoever. None.
Holy fucking shit.
Before, I would have cowered at the implications of his tone. Standing on the stairs today, I’m nothing but calm. I’d go so far as to say I’m almost…entertained? My confidence spills out of me when I say, “You could try, but I’m pretty sure my fear of you has been permanently cured, Pax Davis.”
The words leave my mouth, and that toying look on Pax’s face evolves; his expression loses its playfulness, sharpening until his smile is a weapon. A knife. A cutting blade with an edge so sharp it could draw blood. “All right, then. If you’re so sure.” He hits the pen again, turning his back to me and heading back inside his room.
This time, he doesn’t close the door behind him.
Uhh…
I glance down the stairs, toward the lower levels of Riot House. Then back up at Pax’s open bedroom door. What the hell am I supposed to do now? Am I supposed to just leave? Or…am I supposed to follow him into his bedroom? And to what end, once I have followed him? Just because I’m not afraid of him anymore doesn’t mean that I’m immune to general boy-related nerves. I’m also not impervious to the butterflies that came to life in my stomach when Pax first opened the door a couple of minutes ago, and those butterflies have begun to riot.
Nausea rolls through me like a wave.
Back on the second-floor landing, the heavy metal music Pax was playing before kicks in again, raging even louder this time.
The door stays open.
Some sort of challenge.
Some kind of threat?
A combination of both, I’m sure. I try to picture what will happen if I walk through that bedroom door and my mind short circuits. I’m sober. I can’t imagine having the nerve to go in there and just hang out with the guy. Am I going to sit on the edge of his bed and make polite conversation with him while he plays video games? No. There’s just no way…
The music gets louder.
I steel myself, taking a deep breath.
I can do this.
I want to do this.
I’m going to do this.
It’s incredible how easy climbing back up the stairs and crossing the hallway is once I’ve made my decision. As easy as breathing. I walk through the door, into the bedroom of the boy I’ve been besotted with since I was fourteen years old, without even hesitating.
On the other side, I’m greeted by a snap and a brilliant, blinding flash of white light.
“Ahh!”
I can’t see anything. For a second, my retinas are so burned that it’s impossible to make anything out around the massive white streak across my vision. It gradually dissipates, though, fading until I can make out Pax standing over by his unmade bed with a camera gripped in his hands.
“You really see people in candid shots,” he says.
He took a photo of me? I wince, rubbing my eyes. “Generally, it’s polite to warn someone before nearly blinding them with a flash.”
He laughs a cold, hard laugh. “I’m not polite. I’m never polite.” There’s an interesting, rough rasp to his voice that has me shivering for some reason. Our eyes meet, and I give him a disparaging look to mask the sudden wave of nerves that hits me square in the chest.
“I should have known better, I suppose.”
He says nothing. He watches me as I enter his room properly, taking in everything as I approach the bed—the large three-seater couch by the window on the far side of the room. The acoustic guitar hanging on the wall. The heap of clothes on the floor by the closet. The stacks of records on the shelf by the complicated sound system, and the battered books on the floor by the side of his bed. Notebooks, scattered everywhere, some of them open, and illegible handwriting scrawled across the lined pages in black ink. Now that I’m looking properly, there are photographs everywhere, tacked to the walls, too. Most of the images are of inanimate objects. Cars. Birds. Ruined buildings. Some of them are of the forest that surrounds Wolf Hall. Some are of the academy itself, captured expertly in all its gothic glory. Others, many others, are of Dash and Wren.
The other Riot House boys are everywhere in this room, laughing, sprawled out on sofas, staring at their laptops, faces lit up in the dark. They’re reading, and working, and eating, and running, and they look so normal and carefree that for a second I think of them as real people. I forget the bitter, hostile façade all three of them face out toward the world. I walk over and study the confusion of images overlapping one another there, above Pax’s headboard, and they’re really, really beautiful.
The composition. The lighting. The content. It all pieces together so perfectly that there’s no denying it: his work is art.
“Am I going to end up on your wall, Pax?” I ask.
“No.”
I face him. “Why bother taking the picture then?”
“I have a hard time developing color. You’re practice, Chase. Your hair’s loud as fuck.”
He means this to sting a little, I think. My hair color has been a topic of mockery my entire life, though. There’s really nothing he can say about it that can make me feel bad. I shrug, hovering my fingertips half an inch above a picture of him. The only one I can find on the wall.
Black and white.
It’s of his side and back specifically. He’s facing away from the camera, half his face in dark, shadowy profile, but mostly turned away, out of sight. The camera is visible, the reflection of it displayed in the mirror that Pax is standing in front of. The Canon sits on top of the shelf in front of his record collection, its lens black and ominous like a silent void, swallowing up the image.
He must have set a timer on it to take the photo. He didn’t want to be in it, clearly. If he did, he would have faced the lens instead of turning away from it. It’s still a beautiful image of him, though. Shadows drape over the definition of the muscles in his shoulders and arm like ink. The light from the window bathes his cheekbone and his hand in light, casting them in white.
“Don’t,” he says.
“I wasn’t going to touch it.”
“I know. Just…don’t.”
He won’t say it, but he doesn’t like me even looking at this photo, I can tell. I give him what he wants, moving away from the wall of photos entirely. “So. You had the surgery then?” I say.
He scowls. “We’re not talking about that.”