42. EZRA: AN UNDERSTANDING

“Are you planning on jumping?”
I licked my lips and answered without looking at him. “Depends, will it make you happy?”
“Fucking ecstatic,” he muttered after a few seconds of silence.
“Then no, I’m not planning on jumping,” I told him.
Obsidian sighed. “You’re not supposed to be up here, Ezra, especially not while you’re fucking healing.”
“I’m fine,” I growled.
I continued to stare down at the city even though I could sense him moving closer. A moment later, he took a seat next to me.
“Here,” he hissed, holding out a bottle to me. “Drink all of it.”
I stared down at it for a few minutes before I reached out to take it from him. Opening the bottle, I raised it to my nose and sniffed at it.
“I might feel like killing you most days but it doesn’t mean that I actually will.” He sneered. “It’s not fucking poisoned, Ezra.”
“I wasn’t sniffing to find out if it’s poisoned,” I muttered. “I just want to know what it is.”
“Soda. Drink it.”
I rolled my eyes but pressed the bottle to my lips and took a sip. It had no flavour and it certainly didn’t taste like soda, but when I glanced at Obsidian and found him glaring at me, I downed half the bottle.
The silence between us stretched but it was occasionally broken by sounds from the streets below us.
I closed my eyes and tilted my head back as the wind picked up once again. The smell of rain still lingered in the air but it didn’t smell the same as it did on the island after it rained.
“You knew about Mel’s pregnancy, didn’t you?” I asked him.
Obsidian didn’t answer me immediately. “Yes, and so did Vanya.”
My eyes snapped to him in surprise.
“I was happy when I realized that she couldn’t remember much about her childhood and the time she spend with us while her mother was still alive,” he admitted. “It didn’t even cross my mind to find out why she couldn’t remember. I was glad that she didn’t have to suffer through that pain for the rest of her life.”
“There’s more that we don’t know, isn’t there? Why didn’t you ever tell us about Mel’s pregnancy or about the fact that Vanya knew all about it?”
He blew out a breath. “Vanya. . .she was there the first time Reeves hit Melanie. It was when he found out about them visiting us regularly,” Obsidian explained. “She fucking cried for hours.”
“It’s why you were so mean to them the next day, why you wanted them to stay away.” Things were starting to clear up.
“They didn’t stop visiting but Vanya never mentioned it again. I knew better than to assume that Reeves only hit her that one time because he lost his temper as Melanie claimed.”
“She had no bruises and she—”
“—that we could see,” Obsidian interrupted.
“Her behaviour didn’t change. She was still the same person we got to know when she was taking care of us,” I told him.
Obsidian remained silent.
He raised one leg and rested a booted heel on the edge of the ledge we were sitting one. Placing his elbow on his knee, he pulled a knife from his boot with his other hand.
The sight of it made my eyes jerk away. If I had my way I would never fucking look at a knife again. Every time I saw it, all I could remember was the way her had stabbed her and then licked her blood. I had seen Obsidian then instead of the man and I couldn’t stop myself from imagining him doing that to Vanya.
“Melanie got pregnant and things got complicated,” he continued, snapping me out of my thoughts. “They didn’t think that it would be a possibility but it happened. She even considered terminating the pregnancy but she wanted it too badly to kill it.”
“She made it through the whole pregnancy?”
“Yes, the whole pregnancy and the birth. It was why Darial started building the house.”
I glanced at him from the corner of my eyes when he fell silent again.
Obsidian pressed the tip of the blade to his palm and slowly turned the knife around and around, making it dig deeper into his skin.
“Do you remember that time Mel and Vanya just. . .disappeared?” he asked.
I nodded. “I remember.”
“They stayed with Darial at his cabin. Darial was out hunting when Mel went into labour. Vanya went to search for help but she got lost. She was hysterical when I found her, kept talking about her mother dying because there was so much blood.”
“Did. . .did the pup survive?” I questioned.
His movements stilled and for a moment I thought that he was going to pull away. “They both survived,” he rasped.
For a moment, he smiled but it quickly faded. The scent of his blood filled the air between us when the knife penetrated his skin. He didn’t even fucking flinch, it was like the pain didn’t affect him at all.
“What happened then?”
He sighed as he dropped his arm and wiped the blood on his pants. “We all knew that Melanie and Darial’s relationship was doomed because of Reeves. They were meant to be together and the birth of their daughter proved it, but Mel knew that if they stayed, their pup would never be safe.” Obsidian looked up at me. “She asked me to take her away. To give her to someone who would love her and protect her, someone who knew what kind of man Reeves was.”
“Did you?” He nodded. “Is she still alive?”
His eyes darted over my face and then dropped as he looked away. Pursing his lips, he sat up a little straighter and raised his head to stare off into the distance.
“I don’t want Vanya to remember the bad memories because I don’t want her to hurt,” he rasped. “There are good memories but as she gets older those memories go from good to bad.”
“We can’t always stop Vanya from getting hurt. It’s basically unavoidable but the best we can do is be there to support her and help her through that pain,” I said. “Keeping things from her will make things worse.”
“Ezra—”
“It’s not about what you want, Obsidian,” I interrupted him. “It’s about Vanya and what’s best for all of us.”
I drank the rest of the soda and held the bottle up for him to see that it was empty.
“Good boy,” he praised.
I growled at him which made him smirk. “I don’t want—”
“What do you want?” he questioned.
I blinked at him. It was not something I expected him to ask me.
“What do you want?” he repeated his question when I remained silent.
The answer was easy. “I want to be like you.”
“You want to be a paranoid bastard who always ruins things?” He chuckled. “You want suffer from nightmare night after night? You want to always second-guess whether you’re good enough for them? You want to always fear waking up and finding everyone you care about gone because they couldn’t handle your trust issues? Believe me, Ezra, you don’t want to be like me.”
I swallowed. “I wish I had your ability to switch of emotions. I was I could kill without regretting it or wishing that there had been another way to do things.”
“I wish I was like you,” he growled. “I was I had your ability to make Vanya smile and to say what’s on my mind.”
We stared at each other until a flash of lightning caught my attention. I glanced up at the sky and sighed.
“We should go inside before it starts raining again,” I told him.
“I wish I could be everything she wants me to be,” he whispered, ignoring my words. “I wish I could stop hurting her and tell her how I feel without fearing that she was lying about her feeling for me. I wish a lot of things Ezra, but I know that what we wish and what we get are two different things.”
I looked at him. “We can get what we wish for but only if we work for it.”
Obsidian swallowed loudly and stared down at the knife in his hands for a few minutes before he looked back at me. “Help me,” he pleaded. “Help me fix things.”