He grins as he picks a small dose and shoves it between his lips before handing the rest to me.
They feel dry and velvety between my fingers.
This is a different kind of rebellion.
And it makes me pause.
So far, sure I’ve been reckless … but only with my body. The rush I get from throwing myself off bridges, from climbing impossibly high, from lifting sodas from the gas station—that is all external.
It gives me something to mask the pain inside.
I hold the mushrooms up higher and watch the way the firelight traces their shape with a golden outline.
But this … this might change something inside. It might not just mask it.
And that’s a risk I have to take.
Because I can’t go on living like this forever—holding onto a kite that’s long since flown away, leaving me dangling behind on an empty string.
So, considering I have nothing more to lose at this point, I go with it and swallow a small cluster of the mushrooms. They taste earthy and weird. The spongy texture makes my tongue feel like it’s simultaneously both wet and dry.
I chew a couple times before I swallow and wait for something to happen … which it does.
Not right away. It takes some time for the effects to settle in.
And when it does, what happens isn’t what I expect.
I guess the anti-drug programs in school had prepped me for hallucinations in the form of dragons and monsters or some sort of out-of-body experience where I’d float up above the treetops and look down on my own lifeless corpse.
Part of me was hoping for that. For the fear of creatures in the night to make my ears fill with howling, or at the very least … that maybe if I left my body, I’d leave the pain behind with it.
The effect I get is more subtle, but at the same time, more powerful than any of that.
Instead, Tom is more right than he could have imagined, and I feel more than just something. I feel everything at once.
I feel a longing so intense that it threatens to crush me.
I can’t breathe. I feel like my ribcage is being held together with burning matches.
I look around me at the faces of the boys sitting by the bonfire and I can’t see them anymore. Instead, I see Marlowe and Kaleb and the flames in their eyes are burning more wildly than the bonfire is. I can feel everything inside their bodies, and all of it is calling to me.
I blink, forcing my eyes to close and then open again, expecting my shifters to have vanished—replaced by these strangers sitting in the dim light of the fire.
But when I open them again, the illusion is still there. It’s still them.
And
even though I know it isn’t actually them, that it can’t possibly be them, I let myself get lost in it for a moment.
Because suddenly I understand what Lydia had described when she talked about the boys being bonded to me. I can feel it; the relentless pull that made it painful not to be together. It’s more than just desire, or lust, and passion … it’s need.
I’ve felt it tugging at the corners of my heart and mind ever since I arrived here in North Port, but I’ve never felt it as strongly as this.
I stare into Marlowe’s eyes across from the fire, and I can feel the rushing blood pushing against his veins and the racing heart inside his chest. I can feel that chest heaving, labored with every breath, and the swelling rise between his legs.
When I look at Kaleb, I can feel the rumbling growl inside his throat and the shaking energy that wants to pounce and put his body inside mine. I can also feel his emotions; the love and devotion that seem more important than anything else in the world, and the pain and fear that usurp my entire mind with the thought of not being able to be together.
If this was how the boys felt when they were around me, then I don’t know how they were ever able to live with it. It is the most consuming feeling I’ve ever felt; and I both want it to end and last forever, like a cruel, utopian torture.