Chapter Twenty-Six
She really didn’t know what to expect to happen after she had crashed a truck into Hell.
It felt sort of like immediate death was in the cards, most likely courtesy of a giant hand smashing her to smithereens.
Or a thousand pincers automatically pulling her to pieces.
Or maybe something more surreal and weird like…
experiencing a million years of nothingness in five seconds and then dying of insanity.
Though she had to say it was honestly more unsettling when nothing did.
She took ten minutes of terrified psyching herself up, with the truck playing a series of encouraging anthems in the background, and then she opened the door to find herself in a hallway.
And not even a horrifying hallway, with melted faces for walls and a floor made of teeth and the sound of someone constantly laughing maniacally in the background.
Instead, it was almost dull .
Like the kind of thing you’d find in a run-down town hall from the fifties.
Everything was painted varying shades of green.
Dust hung in the air, as if it had never quite been cleaned properly.
Or nobody ever came to this floor because there was so little on it of interest. And the lighting was so tired.
Fluorescent strips on the beige ceiling, one of which was constantly crackling just a little.
She didn’t like it at all.
It was too quiet, too just ever so slightly off.
But she forced herself to start walking. Pen clutched in her hand, spare pen in her pocket, eyes on as much as she could manage at once. She passed closed doors with glass tops—some of them with words stenciled across them. Though none of them were anything she could read.
They looked like Jack trying to say his name.
Some of them made her teeth buzz. They made her hand prickle around her pen.
She had to write something on her skin, just to get it to abate.
Though the second she did she knew she shouldn’t have.
The lights dimmed once the spell was cast. Like this place hadn’t heard her when she’d crashed through.
But it heard her when she used magic.
And it decided the punishment for magic use was everything suddenly turning upside down, so violently she wasn’t sure what was happening at first. She spun; her legs wound up over her head. For a moment she thought she was being hurled to her doom. Then, suddenly, she was standing on the ceiling.
Or on the floor, only the other way around.
She didn’t know. She couldn’t describe it. All she understood was that she was alive, and she hadn’t dropped fifty feet, and there was a staircase suddenly not far from where she was. And if she could just get to it, she could maybe get back down.
But as soon as she put a foot on it, the whole thing swung .
It turned, it spun. She wound up sprawled on the steps, clinging on for dear life. Even though she felt pretty sure she didn’t have to. There’s no such thing as up or down or gravity here , she tried to tell herself. But it wouldn’t go in.
It couldn’t, until she saw someone else navigate it.
She glimpsed him through a blur of walls moving and floors shifting and everything somehow hanging in space. He simply walked from underneath a staircase, and went all the way around to the other side. No breaking stride, no compensation for the one-eighty-degree spin.
Like it was all one thing.
All one level, even when it looked like it wasn’t.
Amazing, really. But nowhere near as much as when he stood over her, looking just as he had when he left.
Plaid shirt, jeans, boots. Aren’t you supposed to wear big cloaks in Hell , she wanted to say to him.
But before she could do anything as mad as that, or maybe just burst into tears, he shot her the most furious look.
“If this is really you, I am going to be pissed ,” he said.
Then he hauled her up and into his arms.
S HE WASN’T EXACTLY sure where he took her.
It looked like a motel room in a town you shouldn’t visit—plastic drapes, stains on the sheets, a carpet that felt sticky.
She sat gingerly on a sad little chair by an even sadder table.
While he paced. He lit a cigarette, then put it out.
Lit a cigarette, then put it out. How do you even have them in Hell , she wanted to say.
But he got there first.
“I’m still not convinced this isn’t some kind of torment,” he said, and her initial instinct was to be worried for him. To ask him if he was okay, to find out what they were doing to him here. But in the end, she couldn’t, she couldn’t. She had to force herself to be just a little annoyed with him.
“What? Like the one you just put me through?”
“In fairness to me, I did not know that you felt that way.”
“You knew I cared. You knew I liked you. That should have been enough to not persuade me to accidentally send you back to Hell. I mean, my god, Jack, what did you think that would do to me? How did you think I would be able to stand it?”
He had the decency to look sheepish, at least.
And she could see him searching for a good answer.
“It just felt like standing it would be better than you being eaten,” he said, after a long and agonized moment. She could tell, however, that he knew it wasn’t good enough. He looked defeated before she even replied.
“But you saw I was able to protect myself. You knew I could.”
“Not enough to be okay with it. Not enough to want to draw it out.”
“Oh, don’t give me that. Admit it. You just wanted to punish yourself.”
That got him. She saw him jolt, saw his eyes widen and his face redden.
Then suddenly he couldn’t look at her. He looked at the clock on the wall.
The one that said seventy past seventeen.
“Wait—you—I didn’t—that wasn’t what,” he stuttered out, before finally settling on a rather forlorn, “I swear to you that wasn’t it. ”
Even though he had to know how unconvincing that was.
And for more than one reason.
“Your swearing means nothing now. You finger crosser. You hedger.”
“Don’t say that. I truly hated lying to you. I hated every lie I told you.”
“It doesn’t seem like it. Because you’re still not telling the truth now.
Go on, admit it. You did this because you wanted to suffer.
You like suffering. You think suffering is all you deserve,” she said, sure he would give her more weak protesting when she did.
But instead, he just suddenly seemed to break.
He burst out with words, all in a rush, smacking his fist into his palm as he did. “No, I don’t. I don’t. It’s the opposite, all right? The absolute opposite. I just couldn’t stand the suffering anymore.”
And he did it loud, too.
Something somewhere groaned to hear it.
The air rung with it. She almost asked— are we safe here? But truthfully safety didn’t seem to matter in the face of what he then did. He sank back, sat on the edge of that saggy bed, his gaze imploring her to understand, as it all came spilling out.
“I have endured horrors you could not imagine. Things I would never want you to imagine. And yet none of them, not one, compares to being so close to you and yet so far. To bask in your light, like a gloriously warm sun after a thousand years of cold, to feel it on my upturned face and let it fill me, while always knowing that it’s going to be stripped away.
That it is for someone else. That I am not worthy of it, not really, and there’s nothing I can do to make myself so.
I just couldn’t take it, forgive me, I couldn’t take it another second.
You told me to go and my soul could not stay,” he said, each word somehow a razor through her heart and a balm to it, all at the same time.
Upturned face , she thought. Warm sun , she thought.
Then, just as she thought she was about to burst with all the conflicting emotions running through her, she realized what he meant by that last line. She saw it from his perspective—something that had been partially clear before, but now was so illuminated she had to face it.
It had hurt him to hear her tell him to be with someone else.
He had thought it easy, like nothing at all.
Like she not only had no fight in her for him, but not even the barest bit of desire to have him stay.
So she rushed ahead, in one raw tumble. “But it tore me in two to do it, oh god, it ruined me to say,” she said, her voice hoarse with emotion, body heaving it all out of her.
“I just wanted you to be happy, I didn’t want to try to keep you for myself.
I thought it was for the best, I thought you wouldn’t care. ”
Then she watched as he slowly closed his eyes.
As he let himself feel as she had a moment ago:
Ripped raw by this confirmation, but made whole at the same time.
Oh, it made him so whole he put a hand to his chest. And it took him a long time to speak. Like he couldn’t, at first. He had to fight past the emotion to concede. “And I can feel that now. But I could never have then,” he told her, finally.
All of which she understood. Even if she also didn’t at all.
“Just because I didn’t tell you I loved you?” she asked, thinking unfair, unfair .
Yet somehow it wasn’t even the whole answer. It was more.