Lorik #2
And I understand what she’s actually asking.
She’s asking the thing she begged me for in that hallway with her fists on my chest. Tell me you don’t love me, because I can’t do this if it’s real.
Because a hunter’s patience she could survive.
She could walk away from a man who only ever wanted to own her.
But a man who actually, genuinely loves her, who was remade by her in the dark, that man she has to reckon with, because that man might mean she has to reckon with loving him back.
I give her the only answer I have, and I give it with whatever is left of me.
“You didn’t just change what I felt, Brooklyn.
You changed what I am. The man who walked into that gym would have used you and thrown you away and never lost an hour of sleep.
The man in this bed let his own mother break one rib at a time for days rather than say one false word against you, and would do it again tonight.
You did that. Not the mask. You. The realest thing that has ever happened to me is the person I became because I couldn’t stop loving you.
” My voice finally breaks all the way. “So yes. It’s real.
It’s the only real thing I’ve got. And I would give it all back, the love, the years, my own worthless life, if I could give you back the choice I stole.
That’s the part I can never fix. I can be honest with you now.
I can never make it so you got to pick me with your eyes open from the start.
That’s gone. I took it. And I will be sorry for it every day I’m allowed to keep breathing near you. ”
I’m done. There’s nothing left. I’ve handed her the last weapon I owned, the truth, and now she has all of them, and I make myself say the rest of it, the part that costs the most.
“You don’t owe me forgiveness. I haven’t earned it, and asking for it would just be one more thing I take from you.
So I’m not asking. Here’s what I’m doing instead.
” I think of an empty gun I once put against her flesh.
“I’m giving you the door. If you want to walk out of this room and never see my face again, I will let you, and I will not come after you.
Not ever, not once, I swear it on the only thing I have left to swear on, which is you.
The man who told you he’d always come after you is dead.
He died in that warehouse. Loving you turned out to mean I want your freedom more than I want to own you, and that is the single most unfamiliar thing I have ever felt.
So go, if going is what saves you. I’ll spend the rest of my life glad you got free, even of me. ”
And then I shut my mouth, and I wait, flat on my back, with my whole life in the hands of a nineteen-year-old girl I wronged in every way a man can wrong someone, and I find out what it feels like to be the one who doesn’t get to choose.
She is quiet for a very, very long time.
When she finally moves, my heart stops, because she stands up, and for one endless second I’m certain she’s walking out, and I make myself be glad, I order every cell in my body to be glad she’s free.
Instead she crosses the half-meter of space that’s been a canyon between us all night, and she sits down on the edge of my bed, careful of the wires, careful of the broken parts, and she takes my hand.
She takes my hand. The sentence she wouldn’t say. She says it.
“I’m not forgiving you.” Her voice is wrecked and absolutely steady, both at once, the way only hers can be.
“Not tonight. Maybe not for a long time. What you did doesn’t have a clean ending where I tell you it’s okay, because it isn’t, and it never will be, and if you ever try to make me pretend it was, I will walk out that door and you will keep your promise and let me. ”
Her fingers tighten on mine until it hurts, and I have never been so grateful for pain.
“But I’m not leaving either. And you need to understand exactly why, because it’s not the reason you think.
It’s not because I’m weak, and it’s not because I can’t live without you, and it is definitely not because the love makes the lie okay.
It’s because you’re right, we have the same wound.
And I have spent my whole life believing nobody chooses me.
” She leans down, close, until I can see every fleck in her impossible eyes.
“So I’m going to do the one thing neither of us has ever had done for us.
I’m choosing you. Out loud. Eyes open. Knowing every single thing you are, the stalker and the monster and the man, all of it, no mask, nothing hidden.
I’m choosing you anyway. Not the version you built for me to fall for.
This one. The real one. The one who doesn’t believe he’s choosable. ”
I can’t speak. There are no words anywhere in any of my languages.
The unwanted son, the spare, the boy on the plane.
Someone is choosing him, on purpose, with the truth on the table, and it is breaking something in me that has been calcified shut for twenty-nine years, and I’m crying, openly, for the first time since I was a child, and she watches me do it and doesn’t look away.
“But the ghost is dead,” she says, fierce now, wiping my face with her free hand.
“You don’t ever get him back. No more masks.
No more careful pieces. You don’t get to come after me anymore, Lorik.
From now on I come back, or I don’t, and you let me, every time, with your hands open.
You spent eighteen months making a girl fall in love with a lie.
Now you’re going to spend the rest of your life earning the woman who knows the truth.
And if you can love her even half as much as you loved the girl who didn’t—”
“More,” I get out. “God, Brooklyn, infinitely more. The girl who didn’t know was a dream. You’re awake. You’re real. You’re choosing me. There is no contest. There was never a contest.”
She presses her forehead to mine, careful, both of us soaked, and for the first time since a needle went into a girl’s neck at a fight, there is nothing at all between us. No mask. No stalker. No lie.
Just the two most unchosen people either of us has ever met, finally, deliberately, choosing each other in the light.
It is the first honest thing I have ever done. And it is worth every single thing it cost to get here.