He came to me, then, fully dressed and without the cat ears, collar, or tail, and he cupped my cheeks with his hands.
I looked down at him, just in time for him to kiss me sweetly.
“Goodbye,” he whispered.
Then he was gone.
19
RYDER?
“We know something bad happened to you.” My mother rested her hand on my shoulder, pretending not to be hurt when I flinched. We both knew better. I could see it in her eyes, the way she agonized over what had happened — that she hadn’t been able to stop it, even though she didn’t know whatitwas. “Please, Ryder. Just tell me.”
“I can’t,” I said hoarsely for what felt like the thousandth time since going home.
“Why not?” Some of her frustration spilled over into her voice, and she continued, “I want to help you, but I can’t help you if I don’t know what happened.”
“I’m fine,” I told her. And I was, physically. I wasn’t malnourished, I hadn’t been beaten bloody, and there were no signs upon my body that anything had ever happened to me. Mentally, though, I didn’t know what I was doing.
I’d thought going home would be a relief, but it was turning into a nightmare.
Everyone wanted to know where I’d been, and it hadn’tbeen until I’d snapped at them that they’d clued in to the fact that whatever it was, it hadn’t been good.
Whatever it was, it hadn’t been because I’d wanted to disappear.
They were on a witch hunt, and they wanted to find out what had happened so they could retaliate against someone or something on my behalf.
What they could never understand was that as deep as the mental scarring went, I wasn’t going to tell them who had done it. I wasn’t going to give them any details that might let them put the pieces together either. I would stay perfectly silent about it until they finally gave up.
If they ever gave up.
It had been two weeks, and the pleas and even threats hadn’t stopped for even a day. After the initial shock of my return, everyone had been so determined to find out what had happened that they didn’t give me time to even breathe. It was overwhelming, and I hid in my room as much as they let me — which wasn’t much.
She had arranged for me to see a therapist, but he wasn’t having any luck getting anything out of me either. I didn’t know when they’d understand that I was never, ever going to tell them, but it was starting to seem like they were just as unlikely to give up.
There was no meeting in the middle for either of us. It was all or nothing, and none of us were willing to yield even a centimeter.
“You aren’t fine,” she said, her eyes filling up with tears. “Ryder, you need to talk to us, to someone. You can’t keep going on like this.”
I reminded myself that she was only this insistent because she loved me and wanted to help me, but there wasa part of me that resented the incessant questioning. I just wanted to be home living the life I’d been stolen away from.
But that life didn’t exist anymore.
Everything was tainted by the specter of my disappearance, and no matter what I did, I couldn’t get away from it. My family’s incessant questioning, the news vans eager to cover my return, the way people gaped at me in public and speculated about where I’d been…
Most of them had decided that it had been a prank, that I’d run away from home and decided to come back, but my parents knew better. They’d seen the haunted look in my eyes when I’d first collapsed into their arms, and they’d heard me cry when I was supposed to be sleeping. Over and over, they tried to help.
Over and over, I pushed them away.
And I started to realize there was no going back.
Classes were over, my apartment was gone, I didn’t have my phone and didn’t even care, my girlfriend had moved on, and my friends were more interested in trying to get the dirty details than they were in letting me move on.
Maybe there was no moving on.
“There’s nothing to talk about,” I told her even as my mind drifted back to Griffin. I wondered how he was doing. I wondered if he’d locked himself away again.
I wondered if he’d found someone to replace me.
