Don't Let the Forest In by C. G. Drews agish, I love this book so much ♡ ♥

╰┈• It hadn’t hurt, the day he had cut out his own heart.

Andrew had written about it later in spidery lines from a sharp pen—a story about a boy who took a knife to his chest and carved himself open, showing ribs like mossy tree roots, his heart a bruised and wretched thing beneath. No one would want a heart like his. But he’d still cut it out and given it away.

╰┈• Andrew hated the way his brain did this. Destroyed beautiful things. It was like he couldn’t just hold a flower; he had to crush the petals in his fist until his hand was stained with murdered color.

╰┈• A stark winter forest, every tree burned white with frost. A boy with horns and roses grown from his eyes held a knife, and he was midway through carving the heart out of another boy with moth wings who knelt in the leaves, his face tilted upward in supplication. Vines blossomed around them, tangled and unruly.

╰┈• Get ahold of yourself.

But he didn’t know what part of himself was safe to hold on to.

╰┈• They weren’t used to wealth, to listening to kids talk about their opulent homes and extravagant vacations and famous parents. But Dove could be tossed into anything and she’d bounce. Andrew was a glass figurine. Drop him and he shattered.

╰┈• “I like to write,” he said quietly. “He writes amazing books,” Dove added, forever his one-person hype team. “I’m researching how we can publish them and become millionaires, but I got stuck designing a cover.”

“I could draw you a cover,” Thomas said. “But I only draw monsters, so you probably couldn’t handle that.”

He looked at Andrew as he said it, his mouth a serious line with a challenge tucked into one corner.

“I can handle you,” Andrew said.

He’d meant to say I can handle it.

A smile broke across Thomas’s face, all sharp edges and cleverness. Andrew loved it.

Then a hand shoved Andrew’s shoulder and he stumbled. “Excuse me! Trying to get past!” Bryce shouted, and his friends cracked up, because of course he wasn’t. He reached out to shove Andrew again.

Dove whipped around in fury, but Thomas was faster. He leveled his stick right at Bryce’s chest.

“Touch him again like that,” he said mildly, “and you’ll wish you hadn’t.” Bryce towered over them with a mocking smirk. “Is this even your class, runt? I think the preschoolers went the other way.” He began to reach toward Andrew again. “We’re just messing around. Didn’t mean to make Andy cry like a little—”

Thomas slammed the stick down so hard the forest echoed with the crack of wood against skin. Bryce’s howl was of both shock and rage as he doubled over, a vicious red welt on his hand.

A horribly delicious feeling flooded Andrew’s chest. He could taste pain in the air and for once it wasn’t his, and he loved that.

The teacher stormed toward them.

Thomas casually tossed his stick into the trees and didn’t look concerned. “He won’t touch you again,” he said.

Andrew could hardly breathe. “You’ll be in trouble.”

The light in Thomas’s eyes was bold and ferocious. “But he won't touch you again."

╰┈• "I think someday you’ll hate me.” Thomas’s voice stretched with a loneliness Andrew had never heard before. “You’ll cut me open and find a garden of rot where my heart should be.”

Andrew let the silence sharpen between them, waited until Thomas’s breath caught in quiet anguish from being made to wait.

“When I cut you open,” Andrew finally said, “all I’ll find is that we match.”

╰┈• It was strange, Andrew thought, how when something moved in the dark, everyone’s first instinct was to go inside and hide under the covers. As if monsters couldn’t open doors and crawl into bed with you.

╰┈• He couldn’t fit into a love story the way he was meant to, the way the stories were always told. No one would see a point in kissing him and leaving it at that, but he didn’t think he wanted anything more.

╰┈• From this angle, Andrew had a perfect view of the softest curls at the nape of his freckled neck, the way his shirt tags stuck out at odd angles, the old smear of turquoise paint on his rumpled collar. Thomas, the beautiful wreck.

╰┈• "We sleep in the same bed nearly every night now and we don’t freaking talk about that, either.”

Andrew shoved to his feet. His body felt like an unwieldy colt, limbs detached, and he nearly fell as he stepped over Thomas and hit the damp path. It would start raining again soon. Sodden air pressed against his cheeks, but it did nothing to cool him. He was burning up; he was made of fever.

Thomas said, “It’s ruining me.”

And Andrew couldn’t look at him.

“You could cut me open and devour everything that I am,” Thomas said, ragged and thin. “I would let you. I’d ask you to. But I have no idea what it means to you. What … what I mean to you.”

“Of course I like you.” It came out rougher than Andrew meant.

“But do you want me?” Thomas stood then, too, crumbs on his pants and his shirt half untucked. “How do you want me?” Andrew closed his eyes. “Stop.”

“Because I watch you, okay? I have for years.” Thomas ran a hand over his face, but he was already blushing his trademark red. “You don’t look at boys. I mean, we’ve been in locker rooms, in our bedroom, and you’ve seen me naked. It’s like you look away fast because you don’t want to see. Not … not that you’re embarrassed to be caught.”

Andrew couldn’t do this. A muscle in his jaw clenched. “You like girls. What is this even—”

“Not just girls.” Thomas’s ears had gone beet red. “But you know that.” “I don’t know anything.”

“Damn it, Andrew.” His voice had gone uneven. “Can’t you tell that I’m in … that I like you? Because I-I like you a lot, okay?”

╰┈• All Thomas had done was ask to love a boy lost in fairy tales, and the boy had ordered him punished.

╰┈• If he wanted Thomas gone, he could deal with it himself. He knew how to ruin Thomas the same way Thomas knew how to ruin him.

They could be so beautiful to each other. They could be so cruel.

╰┈• A boy crept softly through the forest, looking for a white stag that legend said could grant three wishes. From his back grew gossamer moth wings that dragged on the ground and tore at a touch, and words had been cut into his skin that wept indigo blood. A wish would cure him of these peculiar miseries.

But he grew tired as he searched, and his feet bled and his tears left tracks of salt down his weary cheeks. He did not find the stag.

He did find a fairy prince, though, with a sharp smile and roses blooming from his wrists.

“You should come with me,” the boy said. “A wish from the white stag will fix me and it could fix you, too.”

The fairy prince looked at him quizzically. He bit a rosebud off his wrist and twirled it before handing it to the boy with a shy smile.

“Why?” he said. “You’re beautiful just as you are.”

╰┈• He flipped back a few pages to the story he’d written last night. A melancholy thing; he wasn’t going to let Thomas see it. A poet with his chest held together by rose vines climbed a tower to kiss his true love, but as their lips touched, a monster with a charming smile snaked into the room. It tore into them and stole a piece of their lungs, a liver, a cracked rib to gnaw on. The end only came when the poet sent his rose vines down the monster’s throat to strangle him. But when the poet tried to kiss his true love once more, he couldn’t. Thorns grew in both their mouths. All they could do was bleed.

╰┈• This was how they were, bones broken and mended crookedly, each entwined with the other. He thought maybe you could love someone so much you ruined them, and then you ruined yourself.

“If you cut open my chest”—Andrew’s voice was wrecked—“you’ll find a garden of rot where my heart should be.”

Thomas tilted his head up, and the way he looked at Andrew was so tender and fierce, so full of fearless worship. “I don’t care how dark the world is for you. I’ll hold out my hand until you find it, and I won’t let go.”