For Research Purposes | ✔

CHAPTER TWENTY

     "No, Sam, I have no interest in forgetting actually," Sage says, his tone tempered glass, absolutely translucent, nothing there to read into.

     "Okay," Sam responds confused and slightly distracted by the hickies. The marks are kind of doing things for him. Terrible timing, he knows, but totally out of his control, too. "We don't have to forget it, I guess. It can just be a thing we move on from. It doesn't have to change anything."

     Sage's jaw clenches and the elevator dings as it opens on the first floor. He walks out and turns back to look him in the eye as he says, "You can live in your state of delusion by yourself." A long breath, tired, too tired to fight. Sage isn't waving a white flag. He's just waving. "Goodbye, Sam."

❧

     Sage is not standing on his feet. His feet are gone and now there's just raw, bleeding stumps that ache with each step in their place. These aren't his lungs, either. They're bricks, with no porosity, just dense concrete trapping oxygen on one side and carbon dioxide on the other, the weight of it dragging his chest to the ground.

     Sage is not Sage. Feels like he's stepped outside of his body and is watching it function, and poorly at that, drifting through his classes, avoiding interactions with Sam, dodging texts from Ruthie and his sister. Sage is wandering, dragging, doing the best he can with feet that aren't there, and lungs that don't work until the day's over and he can crawl under his covers.

     Maybe it'll be better tomorrow.

     It's not so he stops trying to get anywhere, at all, deciding to hurt alone in his bed. It's the only place he can truly agonize over what happened, what happened just feet away from his mattress, right there by the door. He tortures himself with reruns of that night. The way Sam's gaze sliced into him. Death by a thousand cuts.

     He'd forgotten about the paintings but then he thinks maybe he didn't. He'd kissed Sam outside the airport and Sam had kissed him back. So maybe he thought things had changed. It was a hope more than anything else.

     Sage wanted it. He wanted it so badly he thought the feeling would tear through his skin and eat Sam alive. It was a monster, the feeling, insatiable. A wicked fiend for Sam — his Frankenstein. The person who'd created this feeling and given it life.

     Sam had snuffed it out, too, with just a look. Built and broke Sage in an instance.

     Sage is ignoring a knock at his door. At first it's a normal knock but after some time waiting the knock becomes a bit incessant, followed by a, "Sage Decourt I know you're in there."

     He gets the door for Ruthie, not opening it wide enough for entry. He lifts an eyebrow. "What's up?" he asks.

     "What's up?" she repeats shoving past him. "What's up with you? You've been dodging me all week." She glances around his apartment. There's several bags of take-out on the counter. It's not messy but it's not the way he normally keeps his apartment. "Have you gone to any of your classes this week?"

     "Tuesday's," he tells her honestly.

      "What's going on?" she asks, dropping her purse on one of the barstools. She starts consolidating the garbage. "Are you okay? Did something happen with your family?"

     "No," he says. "Nothing happened. They're fine."

     "Is it a bad mental week?

     He shakes his head, watching as she shoves all the garbage into one large plastic bag and then moves to his sink. It is a bad mental week and his apartment looks like it. He hasn't made his bed all week, hasn't run the dishwasher, or washed his laundry. It looks like depression. Maybe it is depression. He feels dramatic for categorizing it that way. Hudson had been depressed. Hudson had killed himself. Is Sage trivializing his brother's experience by being upset over what even?