Chapter Twenty-Three #2
I hated you so much for doing it, I really did. Suggesting I didn’t belong, mocking me for doing the wrong things, and going
to the wrong places, and terrorizing me with tall tales of what would happen to me if I would stay,” she said and knew he
would seize on it.
He had spent too long doing it to stop using it as a prop.
“Yes. Precisely. I was hideous.”
“You were. But you see, now I can understand every bit of the motivations behind it. I can grasp each step you tried to take.
And the first one was targeting insecurities you knew I had, to make sure I didn’t stay in a place I wasn’t safe.”
There, she thought. Get out of that one.
And it did seem to take him a second. He jolted on the last word, then simply stood there, flummoxed. Thrown, she thought,
by the fact that she’d guessed. Before something seemed to click behind his gaze, and a brand-new argument jumped to the tip
of his tongue.
“Does that somehow make it anything other than cruel?”
“Of course it does. Because now I can see every single way you couldn’t stand to carry on. Like when you saw how much it hurt me in the hall of headmasters, and changed tactics there and then. Instead
of insisting that I should go, you started doing things to help me stay. Like sending me back to the beginning of the maze,
so I wouldn’t end up in some terrifying tier I couldn’t cope with.”
“I only did that because I didn’t mean to draw you to the middle,” he said, the extra bit of confession bursting out of him
before he could realize and drag it back. He even seemed to curse himself in the aftermath—eyes up to the heavens, a faint
fuck on his lips. But it was too late for that.
“So you did that, too,” she said. “You made the maze shift to spare me other dangers.”
“You were just so—you couldn’t remember how to do things.”
“Like deflect a fireball.”
“All I did there was give your friend a lift to the top of the maze. She did the rest.”
Again, a confession he didn’t need to make.
However, this time he didn’t curse. It was her, instead.
“Holy shit. So even that was you? Everything was you? Did you let me drag you back to the beginning, too?” she asked, and didn’t even have to wait for his answer. His
face scrunched up on one side; he wouldn’t meet her eyes. “You did. You actually fucking did—though I suppose I should have
known that one, too. I mean, what better way to watch over me, right? Pass me notes in lectures. Clock anyone who might be
a threat. Always be sure to see when I went to the library, to warn me before it closed.”
She half expected him to deny it, when she was done.
Only somehow he didn’t.
He let them all stand.
Then shook his head despairingly.
“While berating you for loving books.”
“That’s the worst you’ve got?”
“I don’t know what worse there could be.”
“Doing it again, after I told you how much it stung. After I said what it was like to feel so robbed of everything I longed
for, how you were ruining my joy, my most loved things,” she said. “But instead, you just shifted gears again.”
“I turned up at your door, fangs bared.”
“To scare me into agreeing to your terms.”
“There were no terms. It was your idea to do the lessons.”
Oh you little liar, she thought.
Mainly because she could see it all over his face.
That cocky certainty, now crumbled down, down, down, into a frantic attempt to convince.
“That you steered me toward. And always so carefully, too, so as to retain your air of threat. To make sure I was still too afraid
to ever like you, or form any of the old attachment, even as you taught me how to survive.” She half laughed, marveling. “You
know I always wondered why the idea of me tattling worked so well, considering how hard it would have been to do it. I wondered
a thousand things like that. Why you were so willing, why you never a found a way out of it. I should have known.”
“Nobody would ever if someone was that rough with them.”
“You mean because of the velvet curtain.”
“Yes. Yes, that and—” he started to say.
Only something seemed to hitch in his throat, before he could get to the rest. Like he was doing his best to hammer home just how awful he was, how untrustworthy, how cruel his measures had been.
But his own horror over the very idea of them kept getting in the way.
So she helped make it clear.
“Pinning me down. Making me stab you. Throwing snakes, and spiders, and blades. Scaring me, scaring me, scaring me,” she said,
lingering on each one in a way that made him flinch. It made him feel it. Then just as he couldn’t seem to stand it, she ripped
it all away. “And yet at the same time, you know what I realize? Deep down, I was never really afraid at all. As if somehow,
I understood. I saw without seeing. I felt it without letting myself feel. All the ways you looked after me, and loved me,
while never being able to say a kind word, or hear a single one in return. My god, how unbearable it must have been for you to never hear a single one in return.”
And oh, the look he gave her for those last words.
For that crack in her voice, in between every one.
It was agonized fire. “Stop thinking of me. Think of yourself,” he begged her, in a voice more raw than her own. Horrible to hear, now that she understood it all. Now that the lengths
he had gone to were clear. He had burned himself alive, just to let her warm herself with the glow.
“How can I? How can I, how can I?” she cried. “You made yourself the object of all my loathing, you endured all my loathing—while
loving me so deeply it defies description. You did it out of love for me. Tell me you didn’t do it out of love for me.”
“I could have just told you. I should have.”
“Oh, but we both know why you didn’t.”
“Don’t say it. Please. Just let’s stop now.”