“Which is literally the most ridiculous name I’ve ever heard.”
He scrubs the back of his neck. “It’s a video game character. A random side character from a game I liked as a teenager.”
I laugh, surprising myself. “Of course, it is. Fine, that makes it a bit better.” I purse my lips. He’s not going to like this question. “What was the deal?”
“That’s none of your business, babe.”
I hitch my jaw. “Fine. I’ll ask another question. When did you die?”
“When I was twenty-six.”
“I mean, how long ago?”
“Oh, uh, ten Earthly years, I guess.” He leans forward with his hands splayed on the bathroom countertop, head dropping so we’re gazing into the sink. “It’s…time is hard. It’s a hard concept now. If I didn’t die, I would be thirty-six. But I’ve lived hundreds of years being tortured in Hell.” He shakes his head, peering back up to meet my eye. “I don’t even know how many hundreds.”
My heart aches. I desperately want to give him a hug. He looks like that’s all he needs, just a nice, long hug. Some real human contact. “God, I can’t…I can’t imagine. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. It was my choice. I knew what was coming.”
I rest my chin on my palm as I lean against the windowsill. “You’re surprisingly well-adjusted for all that torture.”
That cracks a smile out of him. A horrible thing to joke about, but sometimes that’s what’s needed, right? A little humor in the darkest of places.
“I know time is long and screwy, but how long have you been a demon? Because, I mean, you spent all those years getting tortured as a human soul. Was the demon thing inevitable, or a choice?”
“A bit of both, I guess. Not everyone gets turned into a demon, especially as quickly as I did. My torturer took a liking to me, I think for the reason I was in Hell in the first place. He became set on pressing all the right buttons to contort my soul in a very specific way, shredding it to bits and sewing it up again, Frankenstein-style. There came a point where he gave me an option: keep getting tortured or completely lose myself. I could hardly think straight at that point, myself already mostly lost. He offered me an out, and I took it.” He clicks his tongue. “I’ve been a demon for four years now.”
I cock my head to the side. “That Garficious guy said you haven’t been to Hell in four years. Did he mean Earth years or Hell years?”
“Earth years. I pretty much went through orientation, and as soon as they let me back up here, I stayed.”
“Why?”
“Hell is Hell, Lacy. Icannotgo back there.”
Kit keeps saying he has no humanity left, but all I can see in him is the humanity grasped firmly inside. He’s not nearly as lost as he thinks he is. I wonder if there is a way to find him again. A way to find Christopher and hold on to him as tightly as I can.
But no, that’s impossible. Kit is a demon. Maybe one day he’ll have a body of his own again, but from what he has said, he’ll be so far gone into demonhood by then that any trace of my Kit will be long gone.
“I have one more question,” I say.
“Yeah?”
“Where are you from?”
He smiles softly. “Sacramento. Ever been?”
“No. I haven’t even been to California.”
“Well, I’m full of recommendations if you ever decide to go.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” I drum my fingers on the glass, unsure of where to go from here. “Want to watchFriends?”
twenty
. . .
Another episode ofFriendsstarts,that familiar theme song that I know word for word reverberating through my otherwise quiet apartment. I hear Kit humming along to it. I can’t resist a reaction as well. Whenever I hear that famous clap, I always tap whatever I’m closest to on the beat. My stomach, my leg, my other arm, the couch. This is why I laugh when out of the corner of my window, Kit does it too on the seat of the couch. I wonder if that’s something he always does, or if he somehow picked it up from me, like a muscle memory he inherited.
