Don’t believe it, his soul urged him,there’s got to be some mistake. The rest of him knew the truth. The rest of him knew everything he’d felt and seen and been the last month of his life was a lie. A beautiful, poisoned lie. He couldn’t have possibly told anyone how long he’d been out there by the time a tall liar in a black dress broke the wall of grass to stand above him.
They stared at each other in silence. He had nothing to say. He had a million things to say. For her part, Samantha was unreadable. Her walls protected her.
“What do you want me to say?” she asked, her tone even and crisp.
“What the hell kind of question is that?”
“I don’t know what you want from me.”
“Tell me it’s not true.”
Silence.
“C’mon, Samantha.” He rose to his feet, not caring how desperate and pathetic he sounded, even to his own ears. “Tell me. Tell me it’s a lie. You didn’t mean it. You really love me, and this is a bad dream and I’ll wake up.”
Silence.Somehow deeper than before.
“You could at least explain yourself.”
“I did what I had to do.”
She had the audacity to shrug. Shrug, when he’d been humiliated in front of everyone she knew for the sake of winning somecontest.
“Christ!” he exclaimed, throwing his hands in the air. “I wanna shake some sense into you.”
“Daniel!”
“Don’t give me your fucking cool, collectedbullshit. You felt something. This”—he waved between them—“is real. You can’t fake what we have, Samantha.”
At this point, his anger was no longer about the contest. Maybe she’d fallen into one of those movie things where she agreed to go out with him as a bet but fell in love with him for real. He could live with a bet. His desperation now came from his refusal to believe he’d been fooled.
He thought she loved him. He bought it, hook, line, and sinker.
“I lied, okay?” She spoke in straight lines, as if she were ten feet above him and wearing a crown. “I lied, and it was fake, and I don’t feel anything for you.”
“I wanna shake you until you fall apart and have to pick that heart of yours off of the ground. At least you’d finally know it was fucking real.” He took her shoulders and pressed his forehead against hers, imploring her to return to earth, to not break the thing he’d given her so freely. “This isn’t you, Sam.”
“Yes.” It was less of a word and more of a lead bullet. “It is. This is me. There is no hidden Samantha, no warm and fuzzy romance novel bullshit underneath. I wanted a family, and I had to get into the Animos Society to get it. A month ago, my father wouldn’t even look at me, and now he treats me like I count. Like I matter.Thatwas what I wanted. Not a love song. Not a boyfriend. Not a Cinderella story. I wanted a family, and I did what I had to do to get it.”
“It was a lie, then? It was all a lie?”
“It was a challenge and I had to—”
No more.He kissed her, breathing life into her, challenging her to deny him. But the harder he kissed, the less she moved. The less she responded. The colder she felt under his hands. He pulled away as fragments of his heart flaked away into a pile of debris at his feet.
“Nothing? You don’t feel anything?”
“No.”
Daniel was a poet. A writer. A lover of words and connecting them until they created a tapestry. But there were no words to describe this moment.
She was a statue and he was begging her to love him. Marble doesn’t suddenly open its arms and take you in. He could beg and plead and cry and thank her for breaking his faith with love. But she would not be moved. He realized it now. And hated himself for not waking up sooner.
It all made sense now. Her insistence on coming to this party. The way she swanned him around Oxford and pranced him around in front of her friends and always ran when Animos called. God, now he even understood why she wouldn’t have sex with him. It wasn’t because she was shy or trying to take her time or wanted his first time to mean something. It was because she didn’t want to get her hands dirty with her fake boyfriend.
It was all a lie. A joke pulled on him, so desperate to believe in love and sex and magic that he would fall for the punch line hook, line, and sinker.
“Then you were right.” He shoved his hands into his pockets and began his exodus. Daniel couldn’t believe he wasn’t crying. “You really don’t believe in love. Maybe I don’t, either.”
