Delirium - Lauren Oliver [114]
Alex pulls me toward him and wraps his arms around me. I bury my face in his chest. I seem to fit so precisely, just exactly as though our bodies had been built for each other.
“Shhh,” he whispers into my hair. He’s squeezing me so tightly it hurts a little, but I don’t mind. It feels good, like if I wanted to I could lift my feet off the ground and stop trying at all and he’d still be holding me up. “I’m not mad at you, Lena.”
I pull back just a fraction. I know that even in the dark I probably look horrible. My eyes are swelling up and my hair is sticking to my face. Thankfully, he keeps his arms around me. “But you—” I swallow hard, take deep breaths in and out. “You took everything away. All our stuff.”
He looks away for a second. His whole face is swallowed in shadow. When he speaks his voice is over-loud, as though he can only say the words by forcing them out. “We always knew this would happen. We knew that we didn’t have much time.”
“But—but—” I don’t have to say that we’ve been pretending. We’ve been acting as if things would never change.
He places a hand on either side of my face, wipes the tears away with his thumbs. “Don’t cry, okay? No more crying.” He kisses the tip of my nose lightly, then takes one of my hands. “I want to show you something.” There’s a small break in his voice, and I think of things coming unhinged, falling apart.
He leads me to the staircase. Far above us, the ceiling is rotted away in patches, so the stairs are outlined in silvery light. The staircase must have been magnificent at some point, sweeping upward majestically before splitting in two, leading to landings on either side.
I haven’t been upstairs since the first time Alex brought me here with Hana, when we made it a point to explore every room of the house. I didn’t even think to check the second floor earlier this afternoon. Here it’s even darker than downstairs, if possible, and hotter too, a black and drifting mist.
Alex starts shuffling down the hall, past a row of identical wooden doors. “This way.”
Above us, a frantic sound of fluttering: bats, disturbed by the sound of his voice. I let out a little squeak of fear. Mice? Fine. Flying mice? Not so fine. That’s another reason I’ve been sticking to the ground floor. During our initial exploration we came into what must have been the master bedroom—an enormous room, with the half-collapsed beams of a four-poster bed still standing in the middle of it—and looked up into the gloom, and saw dozens and dozens of dark, silent shapes massed along the wooden beams, like horrible black buds dangling along a flower stem, ready to drop. When we moved, several of them opened their eyes and seemed to wink at me. The floor was streaked with bat shit; it smelled sickly sweet.
“In here,” he says, and though I can’t be positive, I think he stops at the door to the master bedroom. I shiver. I have zero desire to see the inside of the Bat Room again. But Alex is emphatic, so I let him open the door and I pass inside in front of him.
As soon as we walk into the room I gasp and stop so suddenly he bumps into me. The room is incredible; it’s transformed.
“Well?” There’s a note of anxiety in Alex’s voice. “What do you think?”
I can’t answer him immediately. Alex has shoved the old bed out of the way, into one of the corners, and swept the floor perfectly clean. The windows—or what windows remain—are flung open, so the air smells like gardenias and night-blooming jasmine, their scents drifting in on the wind from outside. He has arranged our blanket and books