MY KNUCKLES HOVER, CENTIMETRES FROM rapping the wood of my own front door. My keys remain trapped inside, behind the confines it blocks me from, indistinguishable in the thick darkness and dim flashing light from the TV igniting in the peep-hole at level with my eye.
A pause, and Archer opens the door, shifting a hand through his hair.
"Oh." A beat, and the simmering look in his eyes becomes cold and vacant, projecting disdain in each slow, deliberate blink. "You're home."
"Yeah." I pull the sleeves of the hoodie over the cuffs of my hands―a nervous habit. Archer Finley being standoffish should not be a surprise to me, but something about him giving me the cold shoulder leaves a pungent taste in my mouth. "I'm home."
His gaze doesn't waver, fixed on me, even though his arms are crossed and his expression bitter; his body language telling me he'd rather be anywhere than here, talking to me. I don't know why he is, and part of me wants to tell him to make up his mind, to decide whether he wants to talk to me or not, but the other, larger part of me is afraid. Afraid, if I let him, he'll walk away again, and I'll be left in the doorway of my own home, feeling like a stranger.
"It's early," he finally says, eyes flickering to his watch. Straightening up, so if I stare straight ahead, only his throat is visible, and I can watch his every swallow and every time he rubs the front of his neck, visibly uncomfortable. "For a Saturday night, I mean. Don't Witches"―he spits the word like it's venomous to him―"have to stay until the end?"
"Yeah." I shift my feet, glancing down. "Witches do. But I―I'm not a...not a Witch. I'm not anything." My fist curls beneath the confines of the fabric, hidden in the expanse of Finch's sleeve.
"Took you long enough," he states, the coldness in his voice razor-sharp. "Your brother got hurt for you, and you didn't even care. Why'd I have to pick up the pieces for that, then, Ivory?"
"It's not that I didn't care." I stumble over my words, though the bitterness growing steadily in Archer's voice has me reeling. "Rebel never would have let me help him, you know that."
"So, you put your reputation over your own brother?" Merciless and unforgiving, Archer's tone is deadly, and cuts into me like a knife.
"I was wrong." Sickness, down to the bone and scraping at the marrow. I repeat the words again, to Ebony, who is stood in the hallway and half-engulfed in shadow. "I regret it. I regret ever becoming a Witch again. I should have just stayed Ivory Blue"―though the thought has me hanging my head and swallowing―"nothing, with no personality, and important to nobody."
Archer opens his mouth as if to say something, but snaps it shut once more. His eyes shift, sweeping the distance between us, before he lets out a sigh. "Oh," he eventually mutters, his fingers reaching around to the back of his neck; lips parted in some semblance of shock. He glances over his shoulder, to Ebony.
The latter steps forward as we lapse into silence, his ever-perceptive eyes registering each of my slight shivers―subtle movements in the stagnancy of the situation unfolding in front of us.
In truth, I expect an earful. A bucket-load of questions, like Archer. Maybe a typical Ebony silence, in his stubborn, murderous way.
We've never been friends, and now, more than ever, he should be on Archer's side, but I can't help but think differently when he asks, "Did you walk home?"
"No." I hug myself, suddenly feeling self-conscious in the dress riding halfway up my thighs. And though my gaze is locked on theirs, I can't help but think about each time the insides of the hoodie graze my bare skin, a reminder of my vulnerability, invisible to everyone but me. "Finch offered to give me a lift home."
"Good." He then frowns at my wrists, exposed in the minimal light. "Is that his hoodie?"
I nod. "He leant it to me."
"Nice of him," he says.
"Yeah," I agree.
The silence between the three of us is awkward, penetrating any semblance of normal conversation and shattering it. The two boys exchange glances, a cataclysm of conflicting emotions on the precipice of eruption. A whole conversation emitted by flickering gazes, before Archer announces he needs to go.
He slips a coat over his arms, zipping it halfway up his chest. Ebony has slipped away, leaving the two of us in the dimly-lit hallway, opening out into the living-room that glows with ghostly light. He's at the door, ignoring me as he strides past and curls his fingers around the handle.
My hand grabs his wrist before he can react, holding him back in a non-existent grip. Archer isn't staying because he's forced to. I think he wants to listen.
"Why were you here?" I blurt, training my eyes on his face as if to look for any clues to his appearance here, of all places.
He shrugs a shoulder, suppressing a burst of some other emotion. "I was hanging out with Ebony,"
"Oh," I mutter, releasing his wrist. Though my grip on him has faded, he's still standing there, waiting for me to speak. "Something Rebel said tonight reminded me of you. She said I had no personality, and it makes me think...you tried to have my back. And I know there are a lot of people I need to apologise to for the past couple of weeks, but you're one of them, because I didn't listen to you. I'm sorry, Archer."
He doesn't acknowledge my apology.
"See you around, Ivory."
Offering me a salute, a boy whose eyes are as dark as midnight and pitched like the obsidian waves of his hair opens the door and slips out into the darkness, his back on me as he leaves. Winds whisk around him, a cacophony of falling leaves and endless silence, permeating all else. He doesn't look back once.
And in his departure, Ebony reappears from the kitchen, two scalding mugs of coffee in hand. Catching sight of me, he offers a nod of acknowledgement. A flashback to when the rockiness of things between us had subsided, and we had finally learnt what normalcy was. For a matter of moments, anyway, before I thought I'd torn us apart for good.
"When you get back downstairs, then we'll talk," he says, voice slightly rising to carry across the silence to me.
I nod with one foot on the staircase, my fingers curling around the banister for support. "Yeah. Then we'll talk."
And I hold that to myself as a promise, but there's something I have to do first. Retracing my steps, I race out the door and hug myself against the biting chill.
Archer's only a few stairs down.
"You know, it feels like I always have to be the one chasing after you," I say, my words suspending themselves in the air like time has frozen them, like it has frozen us, too.
"No one's asking you to." Archer's sigh seems to cut through the air, but he doesn't even turn around to look at me. "JJ's not the only one you disappointed tonight, Ivory."
His words sting. I stare down at my feet, frost seeping in through my socks and forming patches of gray where the moisture leaks through. "I know I disappoint you. I'm sorry I'm not different and special like you thought I was. I'm sorry I'm the same that I've always been."
"It's not that." Something sharpens in his voice and he rounds on me, dark eyes flashing with a passion I've never seen on him. "You're something special, I'm just sick of you selling yourself short when you throw yourself back to Rebel. You're better than that."
"Maybe I'm not," I whisper, bitterness snaking in under my skin. "How would you know? You don't know what she's like. You're so full of hatred for her that you don't―,"
When he notices how I cut myself off, the hard angles of his expression soften a touch. "I don't what?"
I can't look at him again. "I don't know. I'm sorry."
"Don't be sorry." He sounds closer now, and when I dare to lift my gaze, he's right in front of me. "Just tell me."
I tip my head back to look at him, facing those charcoal black eyes that'll haunt me to my grave. He knows how to look at me in a way that makes me smoulder, and burn, because my guess is he knows regret like no other.
So, I say it. "I wish you weren't so full of hatred."
Through time and space, I witness his face fall, the facets of his image folding in on themselves like a tesseract.
"Yeah," he says. "Me too."
☆☆☆