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MATT'S POV
February (4 Months Later)
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"This seat taken?"
He registered the words but didn't think they were directed to him until the voice said, louder this time, "Matt?"
It was a decidedly feminine voice and even though Matt knew it was impossible, his heart lurched like he had just begun a steep descent from the top of an ambitious roller coaster hill. He supposed it was the hallmark of survivor's guilt to always see the face of a lost compatriot in a crowd, to chase after a girl with dark, swinging hair only to find out it wasn't the one he wanted, to feel a thousand and one emotions barrel into him whenever a girl said his name.
The intrusion meant that someone had found his secret space, which came as a surprise since students mostly only entered the library to make out in the back stacks. Matt looked up, a frown set on his face, but it faded once he saw who had said his name.
"Lenox?" The surprise gave way to suspicion. He drew his legs toward his chest and tried not to scowl. Lenox Hill was the last person he thought would find him and judging from the way she was fidgeting with the sleeves of her oversize cherry-red sweater, she was just as uncomfortable about it as he was.
Her cheeks turned pink and with slow, mincing movements, she lowered herself to the floor. "My back is killing me," she said, casually, like they were picking up on a conversation they'd started before. "Can't imagine how you're sitting here. The floor is so hard."
The book spines digging into his back weren't all that pleasant, either, but Matt was used to the discomfort. Anticipating Lenox's next question, he said, "I come here to be alone."
He heard the accusation in his tone, the not so subtle reminder that he didn't want to talk to anyone, but it was too late to bite his tongue.
Lenox flicked her gaze to the books above his head. "I figured." A wan smile crossed her face. "No one is likely to come into the reference section, are they?" She nodded at the encyclopedia in Matt's hands, open to the page on silkmoth caterpillars. "Interesting reading?"
Matt's face burned and he snapped the book shut on the blue-barbed insect whose body showcased a range of colors as vibrant as a Jackson Pollack painting. In truth, he'd been moving his way through each encyclopedia on the shelf, reading the words with glazed brown eyes, but not really absorbing any of them.
"Just killing time"—he didn't miss her wince—"until my next class." He had enough credits to graduate high school already, but the principal didn't want graduation rates going down because of Matt's early departure - especially not after losing so many other students.
"I was in the main office getting a pass to leave early today when I overheard the receptionist on the phone with Fenris' mom," revealed Lenox. Her eyes gleamed bright blue and she leaned forward, hand fluttering on her stomach. "He took off over the weekend and she wanted to make sure he would still be able to graduate. He has a lost of missed days."
Matt frowned, not sure why she was coming to him with this. Was he supposed to care about the asshole who got Mayuri, his best friend, involved with that psychopath, Reed? He could care less whether Fenris was there to walk across the stage on graduation day in May or whether the dude would have to repeat the twelfth grade and spend the rest of his life working a checkout line at the local grocery store.
Why should he care about the future of someone who stole Mayuri's away?
"It wasn't his fault," said Lenox with a hint of pique.
Matt was unable to hold back his surprise. "How did you know—"
"You're not the poker face you seem to think you are." Her smile was wry. "Anyway, I just thought you'd like to know."
"I wouldn't like to know," said Matt. "I don't give a rat's ass about Fenris fucking North."
Lenox tightened her hand into a fist and let it rest in her lap. Her eyes stared at him, strangely unblinking.
It unnerved Matt and he looked away, aware that he was being rude, but also not able to summon the guilt required to feel bad about it. Lenox Hill talking to him was like getting an eleventh chicken nugget in a box of ten. A surprise, and not a bad one, but he didn't know why and didn't know why now.
"You're talking to me more now than you have in the last four years of high school," he said.
"I'm sorry." Lenox finally blinked. "We didn't have the same group of friends."
And a good thing that was, too, considering all your friends are now missing, dead, or on the run.
"Too cool for the likes of me," said Matt, not without some bitterness.
"I didn't mean it like that."
"Yeah." Matt leveled an understanding look at her. "You did."
Lenox's eyes flashed. "Does your shoulder hurt with that huge chip on it?"
Matt couldn't help it. He laughed. As far as insults went, that was a pretty good one, and the wit of it surprised him even though the insult was aimed his way. It would be easy to slip into banter, to point out that he didn't think she had the esprit to make that repartee, but the fierce look on her face made him think better of it.
"I had a huge crush on you during freshman year," he said instead, gratified to see her face light up like a sunburst.
"Really?"
"Yeah. You didn't finish your math homework and you asked me if I had the answer to question fifteen." A reluctant smile tugged at his lips. "And when you realized I did, you asked me for the answers to sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, and twenty."
"That's when you started to like me?" Lenox brushed her blond hair behind her ear.
Matt's smile faded. It was when he had realized that pretty girls like Lenox would never be into him for anything other than his brain. The moment she had asked him for his answers had been the moment he'd fallen out of like with her.
"Um, yeah," he lied. "That was when."
She smiled at him like he'd just given her the whole world and it broke Matt's already shattered heart into a billion more pieces. He couldn't look at her anymore, so he turned his face toward the embossed letters of the encyclopedia and tried to remember a time when it didn't hurt so much to be human.
"I think he's gone after her," said Lenox. "Fenris, I mean."
Oh, so we're back to that. Matt exhaled, frustrated with how intent she was on rehashing the topic.
She swept past the disgruntled scowl on his face and said, "He's so in love with her. I used to work on Yearbook Committee. They're voted most likely to stay together forever."
"Used to?"
"Yeah, I, uh, I had to give it up." She averted her eyes and stared at a fixed spot behind Matt's head.
"Because of—"
Lenox cut him off with a quick "Yeah."
Matt hugged his knees closer to him, not caring that the heavy encyclopedia volume hit him in the chin. "Makes sense."
"Doesn't explain why you're in here," Lenox pointed out.
"Doesn't explain why you are, either," Matt countered. "Wouldn't think libraries were your thing."
He felt ashamed the moment he said it, but Lenox didn't seem to notice—or she only pretended not to notice—his comment.
"You're hiding, that much is obvious," she said, pursing her Cupid's bow-mouth.
"How do you figure?"
"Because you're probably the only person in the whole school who is smart enough to not need to study. You have a 4.0 GPA and you were already awarded valedictorian—"
"Only because they're not here to claim it," said Matt. "Mayuri and...and him." He couldn't say the bastard's name without wanting to scream, cry, or punch something. He balled his hands together and said through gritted teeth, "The principal said that Mayuri would have gotten it, but since she wasn't here, I was third in line for the award."
"Who was second?"
Matt snorted. "That's what I asked."
Lenox reached forward and to Matt's shock, she grasped his fist and squeezed. The skin on skin contact didn't send any electric sparks of attraction, but something inside him felt relief at her touch. In that moment, they weren't a boy and a girl sitting so close together that their feet almost touched, but two souls who felt the same pain.
"Reed," Lenox whispered, understanding the name that Matt couldn't—wouldn't—say. "He was the runner-up after Mayuri."
It felt like a freight train had run over his chest. In a way, it hurt to hear her name more than Reed's. He tore his hand away from Lenox and scrunched himself even further inward, turning away so she wouldn't see his face contort.
"Hey." She didn't give him the privacy he craved, instead scooting closer to him, invading his personal space in one fell swoop. Her hand landed on his shoulder in a light, tentative touch, and then, as his back shuddered, she pulled him to her.
The book fell from his lap and as his fingers clutched at her shirt, all he wished for in that moment was a friend. Making friends had never come easily to him. For people like Lenox, who threw their smiles around like confetti, it was easy. Everyone always gravitated to those who seemed irrepressibly, irresistibly happy. Teenagers like Emily and Baron were able to cultivate the right sort of friendships from a young age, born with an innate ability to seek out advantageous alliances that would propel them even further up the high school social strata.
For boys like Matt, it was harder. Not because he didn't know what to say, because he loved words too much to ever be at a loss for them, but because unlike the other high schoolers, he was committed to not wasting his life with fake smiles, secondhand ideas, and vocal mimicry. He didn't want to be accommodated and tolerated by his peers for being one of the herd. He wanted to think boldly, speak boldly, live boldly.
He wanted to be one of Time's 30 Under 30, he wanted to be the kind of guy that had his quotes on fifty pages of goodreads, and above all, he didn't want to live in a box stamped with other people's labels, asking generic questions and expecting generic answers.
He didn't cry—for which he was grateful, because it would be pretty pathetic to tell a girl he used to imagine running his hand through her hair and kissing her neck and then follow it up by blubbering on her sweater—but his body wracked with violent tremors.
Lenox started to hum, a tune Matt recognized his mother used to sing to him when he was a cranky, sick child, and he felt his body relax in her hold until finally, finally, his trembles subsided.
"Thank you," he whispered, voice hoarse. "Sorry." He began to detach himself from her, and when his hand accidentally brushed her stomach, he felt her flinch. "Sorry," he said quickly, jerking his upper body away.
Her eyes looked luminous, two billowing, ethereal orbs of Neptune. The shades of blue he saw there looked unlike the sky or the water or any shade of manmade blue.
Matt's eyebrows met. Wait, did I actually feel a—
"Yes," she said, answering his unspoken question.
"You're..." He gaped at her like a fish. "But you can't—but how—"
"Yes, Matt," said Lenox, taking a deep breath before squaring her shoulders back. In a steady voice, she told him: I'm pregnant.
Matt couldn't have been more stunned than if she'd told him the child was his. As she talked, he saw her unfold, almost like she was an intricate origami swan. With each passing sentence, she uncrumpled her edges until she was whole once more. A little bent, a little creased, but whole. It was powerful to watch, and yet did nothing to squash Matt's rising hysteria.
Lenox didn't want to keep the baby. It was unthinkable to keep the child of a rapist, she said, no matter how strongly her parents felt about the matter. To them, a child was a gift from God. But for Lenox, the life growing inside her meant something else entirely. She thought of the baby as the product of rape - not because she had been raped, she was quick to assure Matt, but because its father was a rapist.
"I can't be pregnant," Lenox whispered. "It makes me feel worse inside, knowing that I chose to sleep with him. That I even had the choice. That other girls didn't." Her face implored him to agree with her.
He wasn't sure what she wanted from him. He wasn't her priest nor her friend. He could neither forgive or advise her, spiritually or otherwise. So he kept quiet and let her talk, which, he thought, was probably the kindest thing he could do for her.
"It was sort of like"—Lenox traced her finger in circles on the flattened, dirt-brown carpet—"friends with benefits, only we weren't even actually friends, so it was mostly just benefits."
She darted a look at him like she was waiting for his judgment, but Matt kept his face neutral. He'd had a couple of girlfriends in high school, and he'd even slept with one of them in his sophomore year when she'd gotten horny after an intense debate meet. He wasn't a prude or a saint, and when he told Lenox so, she laughed.
"Thank God for that," she murmured. Then, "I don't know why I'm telling you all this."
"Maybe you need to tell someone."
"I bet you're sorry it's you," she said, sounding half embarrassed and half angry. It was the kind of tone that people used when they were frustrated and wanted to lash out at someone else in order to ease the burden in their own heart.
He regarded her thoughtfully. "No," he said. And then on impulse, he reached for her hand and held it between both of them, wondering how she managed to feel so chilled in a heated library.
A moment passed in silence.
"Did you even like him?" he asked.
"Oh, God, yes." Lenox's whisper was ardent, the hushed fervor of an eager acolyte. She dangled her fingertips centimeters from her belly, as if afraid to touch the bump underneath. "I thought I loved him."
How fucking tragic. Matt forced a wooden smile. "He did a good job at hiding his true self." Most people did. He was thinking of Reed Norcross.
"Sometimes I wonder who my true self is." Lenox leaned against the bookshelf, her shoulders bumping against Matt's.
"We still have time to figure it out. I don't think anyone really knows who they are in high school."
"Not even you? You look like you have it all worked out."
Matt steepled his fingers together and focused on the small point they made. "I thought I did. I'm not so sure anymore." He paused, not sure if he wanted to reveal this to Lenox, but considering she'd just cradled him like a child, he figured he may as well bare himself further. "My mom told me that I may feel a little lost after high school. She was Prom Queen in her high school, and she still talks about her old friends and the parties and looks people up on Facebook, so I guess she knows something about feeling lost."
Matt saw Lenox's mouth part in a soft "o" of surprise, and he hid his smile. "Yeah, yeah, I know. It's hard to believe that the nerd had a mom who used to be cool."
"She still sounds cool," offered Lenox.
The weird part was, he didn't think she was just being nice. She genuinely believed his mom sounded like someone who used to rule at the top of the high school monarchy. Matt loved his mom, but he'd also had a first-row view at what life was like for people who never outgrew high school.
His parents frequently discussed high school as the best years of their lives, and Matt wanted to ask What about me? What about when I was born? What about the last eighteen years? Would you give it all up—give me up—for a chance to go back to prom? For one game as quarterback? A day on a float at the Homecoming parade? An hour of tangled hands and tongues under the bleachers?
Why is that the best years of your life are the years without your son in them?
He wanted to tell Lenox that his mom was a mess in a prom dress, make a joke about it, but then he felt disloyal. He knew his parents loved him, but he also knew that he would never be able to relate to them about anything involving school, popularity, or girls.
The first time he'd told his parents he liked a girl—really liked a girl, not the kind of liked that you did when you were in elementary school and you chased a girl on the playground threatening to kiss her on the mouth—they had exchanged a shared look that he hadn't been able to decipher. Then, his father had asked, haltingly, in an unbearably gentle voice, "Son, why don't you just decide to like a girl who likes you back?"
The girl in question had been Lenox.
And Matt, who had been expecting some kind of fatherly talk about how to win a girl's heart, and maybe some suave, flirtatious one-liners, had been stunned to realize that what his dad really meant was Don't reach for the stars. They shine too brightly for you.
He'd buried his hurt feelings and buckled down, nose to the grindstone, determined that if he couldn't reach the stars on his own, he'd be so smart that he could work for fucking NASA, and one day, he'd be able to plant his damn flag on any planet, star, or alien he wanted.
It was one of humanity's most beautiful, terrifying, and mystifying questions. Was love ever something you could choose? Or was it all chemistry? The sum of a Vesuvius-sized eruption of hormones that was sewn into DNA?
He couldn't choose not to like Lenox in ninth grade any easier than he could choose not to like Mayu—
No. He didn't want to even think her name. Matt squeezed his eyes shut. "I don't have my life worked out at all, Lenox. My mom thinks I'll feel lost, but that implies that I was found. And the thing is, I don't think I've ever felt found in my whole life."
Lenox was quiet but Matt still heard the harsh, aggravated sounds of her breathing, and when he opened his eyes and looked at her, he saw the tear tracks down her cheeks. "You're crying," he said, and then wanted to kick himself for being Captain Obvious.
"I'm so stupid," said Lenox.
"You're being harsh on yourself." Matt mustered up a smile.
Lenox wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. "No, I'm not." Her eyes pierced into him like scalpels, making Matt's skin flush. "I've just realized something."
"Want to share?"
"I think you already know." Her smile was watery.
"Didn't you have a pass to leave early today?" Matt's brow furrowed. It wasn't like he was trying to get rid of her, per se, but he still didn't know why she'd sought him out. They might have just shared more with each other than they'd shared with anybody else, ever, but that still didn't make them friends...did it?
"Yeah, they told me to come back when my doctor's appointment was over." Lenox resumed tracing patterns on the dingy carpet floor. "I already have my pass, and I'm definitely not coming back after, so—" She lifted one shoulder in a half-hearted shrug.
"I don't want to be valedictorian," Matt decided. "Someone else should have it. I don't want it if it was meant to be hers."
"Are they going to give them posthumous diplomas?"
Matt's knuckles went white. His nails slowly pulled free of his palm and sensation flooded his skin, turning the numbness into a sharp inhale of feelings. "I don't know," he said roughly. He didn't want to imagine Mayuri as dead, but part of him knew that if she hadn't escaped by now, that was the most likely scenario. The one everyone assumed but was careful not to say out loud, because, officially, the case was still ongoing. "Does it matter?"
"I guess not."
"He killed a few people but, hey, he made straight A's, so let's give him a diploma anyway?"
Lenox pulled her shoulder away, drawing herself inward like she was offended. "I didn't mean it like that."
"Just go."
He heard her soft gasp and felt shitty that he was being so abrupt, but he'd been perfectly fine sitting here day after day, week after week, and he didn't want to feel his whole world pulled from underneath his feet again just because Lenox Hill had decided now was a good time to get to know him.
And then he thought about it.
In ninth grade, Lenox hadn't wanted to get to know him. She'd wanted to copy his answers. She'd smiled at him and said thank-you very prettily when she was finished because she'd wanted something from him.
She wanted something from him now, too.
Their conversation had all been the courteous preamble that came before the inevitable hitting up for a favor.
"You didn't come here to check up on me. You don't care if I'm okay or not," Matt realized out loud. "You're here because you need me for something."
He knew he'd hit the nail on the head when Lenox flushed and averted her eyes, shame-faced, but didn't repudiate his claim.
"I'm right, aren't I?" Matt felt himself sag. Books poked into the small of his back, jabbed their rigid, unforgiving spines against his shoulder blades. He was so stupid.
"Clever Matt." Lenox's cheeks were magenta. "Got the right answer again."
He drew away from her, skin prickling at the venom-tipped words. "Tell me I'm wrong," he demanded.
She couldn't do that, he thought savagely. She just looked at him, her eyes swimming with tears that she didn't let fall.
"How dare you act like you're the only one who lost something?" Her words were soft, but each one landed on Matt like a heavy brick. "You skulk around like a ghost, you look at me like you hold me personally to blame, you snarl about Fenris because you think he led Mayuri down the wrong path—"
"He did!" Matt burst out.
Lenox kept talking over him. "You think that because you knew her better than the rest of us, that your grief matters more? That pain belongs exclusively to you and you alone?"
Matt pressed his lips into a thin line. Of course he wasn't that self-centered. But she wasn't entirely wrong. Their pain was for themselves - his pain was for Mayuri and the life she'd left behind and the rest of her life, still unlived.
"Grief doesn't work like that, Matt!" Lenox's eyes burned and down each cheek, a fat tear rolled. "Do you think you're winning some kind of prize for hurting the most? You think you'll get a trophy? Grief doesn't care about who's popular and who's not. It doesn't care who's pretty or ugly, skinny or fat. It's relentless and it consumes everybody, and it's devastating because it's the one damn thing the human race hasn't managed to find a way to fix with a pill or a shot, and when everybody else just wants to deal with it and find a way to feel better in the morning, to wake up and not be screaming and in a cold sweat, to feel normal again because you can't even remember what that feels like anymore..."
She was sobbing now, and Matt was acutely aware that she was rocking back and forth, hand on her stomach, her words stuttered and loud. He wanted to shhh her, terrified the librarian would hear Lenox's raucous cries, but he knew that telling a girl to be quiet when she was upset was the last thing he would do before she ripped his balls off.
"And while we're still here, still living, you're over there collecting grief, hoarding it, and patting yourself on the back for having some kind of moral superiority over the rest of us?" Lenox's eyes widened and she slapped Matt's knee, the closest thing within her reach.
It didn't hurt, but Matt still flinched.
"Well, fuck you, Matt, and fuck...fuck me for even thinking you'd be the only guy nice enough to help me." She stood up abruptly and swayed, taking a step backward.
"Lenox!" Matt jumped to his feet. "Shit, are you okay?"
She shot him a baleful glare that conveyed a scathing What do you think?
Matt swallowed. "For the record," he said, "I know it's not entirely Fenris and Dominika's fault." Before she could crow about his admission, he added, "I said not entirely."
Lenox touched the base of her throat. "My throat is sore."
"From yelling at me."
A smile flickered across her face. "You deserved it." A pause. "I'm sorry for hitting you."
"Yeah, well, I guess I deserved that, too."
They looked at each other for a long time, and then finally, Lenox relented, allowing Matt to wrap his arm around her waist in order to steady her. "Come on," he said. "What do you need from me?"
"I'm four months pregnant."
"And you need to go to the doctor's."
Lenox nodded. "I was hoping...I mean, if it wouldn't be a bother, I know you have class, but—"
"I'll take you."
"I would ask my parents but they're against it, and I can't...I don't want to be alone. And if Baron's parents knew, they'd want to keep the baby. Raise it as theirs. You know they still don't believe any of it? They're trying to sue people for slander."
Matt gnawed on his lower lip. "Shit." It was the most effusive and effective word he could think of.
"Yeah. That's what I thought, too."
Her previous sentence stuck in Matt's mind. "Wait," he said, eyebrows shooting up. "You said your parents are against it. But they want you to keep it, so...so your doctor's visit." His mouth went dry. "By doctor you mean...not a doctor."
"I can't have this baby, Matt," Lenox quietly reminded him. "It would be a mistake."
Something inside Matt balked. He could barely deal with his own sorrow and anger, and now he was expected to help someone else deal with their issues, too? He knew it was an uncharitable thought, but he felt too young to be her emotional support.
But she was right.
He had to stop thinking about only himself.
"Lenox," he said, "when it all first happened, when the police were talking to us, Dom asked me something. I thought she was crazy at the time."
"Dom's always a little crazy. It's what makes her hot." At Matt's blank look, Lenox explained, "The Crazy/Hot Matrix? Don't tell me there's one graph I know about that you don't. It's this sliding scale thing that basically says the hotter the girl, the crazier she has to be. Learned it from Barney Stinson."
Weird name. "Does he go here?" Matt asked.
Lenox grinned. "You're cute." Her smile dropped. "I wish I'd appreciated that a long time." She grimaced as her hand rubbed circles on her stomach, barely visible in her baggy sweater.
The bell pealed through the intercom system and even sequestered in the library, Matt could hear the sound of a dozen doors being thrown open and the stampeding quake of hundreds of feet hitting the floor as teenagers scampered to their lockers to gather their books for the next class.
"Go on," said Lenox calmly, ignoring the bell, as Matt's ditching class was already a given. "What did she ask you?"
It was his first time ditching. It sent an exhilaration of panic up his spine. "She said 'What if Caroline lied about what Baron did?' And, I dunno, I guess it stuck with me."
Lenox didn't blanch like he expected she would. "Okay," she said.
"Okay?"
She nodded.
"So you...you don't care that he may have been"—Matt swallowed, knowing how painful the word would be for her to hear—"innocent?"
"He was a bully."
"That doesn't mean he was also a ra—"
Lenox shook her head. "Thank you for telling me, Matt, but it doesn't matter."
"But...but it's your baby. How could it not?" Matt waved in the general direction of her unborn fetus, not sure if she saw the life in her belly as a baby or as a thing that had happened to her.
"I'm ready to do this, Matt." Her voice was firm. "I want an abortion. I just need someone to be able to drive me home, after. You can bring my car back to school, leave it overnight in the parking lot, and drive your car back to your place. I'll get a bus or something tomorrow and pick it up."
"The bus won't come to the school on a Saturday."
"Then I'll get my parents to bring it home. They'll be pissed, but it'll be gone, and there will be absolutely nothing they can do after that, so," Lenox exhaled, "that'll be the end of it." Seeing the conflicted look on Matt's face, she said gently, "Maybe one day when I have kids, or when I'm a forty-year-old spinster, or hell, maybe when I'm just wandering down memory lane, maybe then I'll regret what I'm going to do today. But today I won't. I can't think about the future, I can't make decisions based on the future. I can only live for today. This moment."
That went contrary to everything Matt believed in. What was the point of now if there was no later? Everything he did today was an investment for the future. Study hard in high school, get good grades and a good SAT score, go to an Ivy League university, get a good job, maybe get a doctorate, buy a house, find a wife...
Everyone lived their life planning and preparing themselves for the future. That was just the way humanity worked. They all wanted a better tomorrow.
But as he stared into Lenox's desperate face, he knew that he had no control over what her tomorrow would bring. Her life had its own course, the same way that Mayuri, if she was still alive, was also on her own course. One day, maybe their paths would converge again, but even though he couldn't help the girl he had lost, maybe he could help the one in front of him right now.
"Sounds like a plan," he said quietly, watching as she lit up.
"Thank you," she whispered, and before he could stop her, she pressed her lips to the corner of his mouth. It was a soft, chaste kiss, and as he began to pull away, she stopped him.
Her hands clasped either side of his neck, moving upwards, and her lips more securely fastened on his. Lenox's lips were plump and tasted like taffy, pillowing against his in a way that was a hundred times better than his daydreams and wet dreams put together.
"Sorry," she whispered as she eased her face away from his. She shot him a sheepish, uncertain smile.
Matt lightly touched her porcelain cheek. "You don't have to apologize."
One corner of her mouth twitched up. "I kind of do. I may be okay fooling around with a guy on the down low but I do draw the line at kissing another woman's man."
Matt smiled, bemused. "I'm not dating anyone."
Lenox bit her lip. "That doesn't mean your heart doesn't belong to someone else."
"Is that what you realized earlier?" he asked suspiciously.
Her laugh was a delicate tinkle, like dangling charms on a charm bracelet. "Mhm." Her eyes looked impish as she asked, "Did you know we're all made of stardust?"
Oh, he'd read this in another volume of the encyclopedia. "Almost every element on Earth was formed at the heart of a star," Matt recited, closing his eyes as he drew up the memory. "We wouldn't be here if stars didn't explode at the time of their death, because the elements—the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, sulfur, all the things that matter for evolution—those exist within every bone of our skeleton."
"Alright, Einstein, I get it." Lenox's teasing held no malice, and a bright smile had taken command of her pretty face. "I read that in a book before, and I don't think I ever really believed it until now." Elucidating further, she said, "Until you."
"Me?" It was quite possibly the dumbest thing he could have said, and yet, he couldn't hold the ungainly word back.
"You," she confirmed.
"If that's true, then I'd rip myself apart just to form enough stardust to form a constellation so she could find her way home," Matt said honestly.
Lenox's eyes burned into him. "I really could have loved you, Matt Fraser."
Before Matt had a chance to decipher the could have part of that sentence, the warning bell rang in two quick, short bursts, and the cacophony of feet resumed. Distracted, he returned his attention to her, and just as he was about ask her whether she saw him in her future, she put his thoughts to bed with another sweet kiss.
And some of the grief that had made its home in Matt's chest let go of its death grip on his bruised, battered heart.
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Did you like seeing the glimpse into Matt and Lenox's life after Halloween? Did the last 4 months play out anything like you suspected they would?
I tentatively anticipate two more installments of the epilogue bonus before we bid adieu to the characters of Silver Stilettos, so brace yourselves. Shit's about to get real. #kanyeshrug
I gratefully welcome all critiques. Please do vote and comment if you enjoyed! It means so much to writers to know that their work is being read and appreciated, because we take so much time, energy, and love to craft stories and we love to interact with readers. I do my best to reply to all comments and I love to chat with you guys about the story and what's happening in the world of Silver Stilettos <3
Love you all!
Shameless Self Promo !!! If you like my writing and would like to support me, I would be ever so appreciative if you would go check out some of my other stories. I promise they're just as fantastic, although, fortunately, much less murderous :p
P.S. This chapter was mega hard to choose just one song for because I had at least seven I liked just as much but in the end I went with this because it emphasized the friendship that Matt and Lenox share, even though he thinks they aren't friends.
Stay tuned ~ I think I'll be making a big playlist for this story soon. :) Song recs are welcome!