I nod, trying to hide my disappointment. “Okay. I understand.”
“I’m sorry, sweetness. We’ll find another way. I promise.”
“Okay,” I say again, believing him—but doubt is still creeping in. It doesn’t seem like he’s looking for another way.
“So, tell me,” he says, squeezing my hand.
“Tell you what?”
“Everything. I want your favorite color, favorite food, best memory, worst memory. All of it.”
“Fine, but you have to return the favor.”
He releases my hand to hold out a pinky that I hook my own around. “Deal.”
We talk for hours, trying to cover as much as we can, taking this opportunity to get to know each other in a way adjacent to normal. Kit focuses more on his life as a demon than his life as a human. I think because it makes him sad, knowing that is a past life. Though, he does tell me that the scar on his upper lipis from an accident with a fishhook. He was fishing, he tripped, and the hook went through his lip.Ouch.I ask why he is here of all places. He explains that he took a portal from Hell to Earth that dropped him in Bridgeport and that’s the only reason he’s in Connecticut. He’s gone other places in the world, but he keeps ending up back here.
He asks about my childhood, so I tell him about when my dad died, how that’s when most of my anger-management problems started. I had always been prone to sticking up for myself and others, though. Mainly August. She was bullied in grade school, but I put an end to it. I was bullied in high school, mercilessly, but as hard as she tried, she could never return the favor. High school bullies are a different breed than grade school bullies.
I share things with him that have never left my lips before, like how I’m terrified every time I get in a car, or how if Meggie doesn’t respond to my texts right away, I freak out, or how I am fully aware I need to go to therapy, but I’ve been embarrassingly resistant. My willingness to share this surprises me, but I want him toknowme.
At one point, I say, “I think the reason I feel so alone all the time is that so many permanent people have left suddenly. Cancer killed Dad in less than six months, and August was happy and alive one day, gone the next. I don’t trust the world to not do that to me again.”
He kisses my knuckles a second time. “Maybe because you view it as leaving.”
“What do you mean?”
“They didn’t leave you, baby. Not by choice. They weretaken, your dad by illness and August by an accident. If they had a choice, they would still be here.”
I open my mouth then close it. “Semantics,” I eventually mutter. But I suppose he’s right—neither of themchoseto abandon me. But, if I look at it like they did, I can feel angry and betrayed, and those emotions are so much easier than utter sadness and powerlessness.
He frowns. “It’s horrible, feeling alone.”
“You know the feeling, right?”
“I do. I-I think I always felt alone as a human because I was living with the full knowledge of my timeline. I feel alone now because…because I’m shit at being a demon.”
“Selfishly, I’m glad for that,” I admit. “How…” I start before I trail off, unsure of how to ask this question.
“How…?” he questions back, brow furrowed.
“You don’t have to answer this question.”
“Okay, but you do have to actually ask it.”
I chew my lip. “How were you tortured? Like, poking you with hot sticks?”
“Poking me with hot sticks?” he repeats with an amused lilt. “Is that your image of Hell torture?”
I shrug self-consciously. “I don’t know. Waterboarding? I’m not a torture expert.”
“Thank goodness.” His lips purse as he swallows, taking his time. “It was mainly psychological—making me watch my family die over and over in millions of different ways. Tricking me into thinking I was alive and well before pulling that hope and relief away from me over and over again. The sharp objects would come out when my mind was strong enough tounderstand that what I was seeing wasn’t real. I was sliced open physically and mentally, then patched up sloppily, until anything left ofmeslipped away.”
“Kit,” I mutter, palm on his cheek, thumb stroking softly. “I’m sorry.”
His eyes squeeze shut. “Giving me a taste of life then demolishing it is what convinced me to become a demon. Balores framed it as another form of living, and I was sodesperatefor a life. I suppose this is, in a way, but it’s not enough.”
I agree with him on that. “It’s better than being in Hell, right?”
