It’s hard for me to stay still and silent with him breathing hard behind me. I can feel how upset he is, and it’s agony. But I have to give him time to process this idea.
Eventually he says, “I’m sorry. I know I make life hard for you. I do see that, Lucas.”
“Roman, no. You don’t make life hard for me. You make life the best thing it could possibly be for me, and I don’t want you to change. I just want you to be … god, I don’t know. I want things to stop hurting quite so much.”
He takes a deep breath and lets it out. “I don’t see how I could do that. Talk to someone, I mean. I don’t see how it would help.”
I turn in his arms and tilt my head back to look up at him. He’s troubled. I can see it in his eyes. So even though I want to push, I know it’s not the moment for it. Maybe we’ll talk about this again sometime, when he’s ready.
“I love you just like you are,” I tell him, because though I think he knows this, I don’t want this conversation to put doubts in his head. “Thank you for letting me talk to you about this.”
Most people, I think, would have gotten upset. Defensive. But Roman isn’t most people. He makes space for the things I say, even if they’re hard.
He takes my face in his hands and strokes my cheekbones with his thumbs. “Why are you so good?” he asks.
It makes my eyes sting because I know it’s not true. “I’m not,” I tell him. “I’m selfish. I won’t let you go. You’re mine, Roman, and nothing gets to take you from me.”
A breath stutters into him. His eyes dart back and forth over my face. Roman doesn’t hide his emotion from me, and I’m so glad. I love that about him. Ilove so many things about him. Tears well in his eyes, making them well in mine.
He pulls me closer, wrapping his arms around me. I hug him back, holding on as the tremors pass through him. I soothe him with my hands, but mostly I just let him feel what he’s feeling. I know that he knows that I love him, but I feel it going deeper into his body.
I’ve known from the beginning that our love is deep and strong, but it’s really beautiful to learn that it can get even stronger. It makes me imagine twenty years from now, even forty. It makes me imagine what we could be, and I’m determined that we’re both going to see it.
FOURTEEN
Roman
Some people say they know when they’re dreaming, but I never do. I can’t even imagine having that awareness. For me, it’s simply reality, easy to slip into, easy to believe.
***
I stalk along the dark corridor. Stone forms vaguely and vanishes. Mostly, it’s just darkness. I sense a threat, but I don’t know what it is. I’m not even sure if I’m hunting it or if it’s hunting me.
It doesn’t matter though. I’ll kill it either way.
I’m deep underground. I feel the immense weight of earth above me and around me. I feel the isolation, how far I am from anyone or anything.
Anything except whatever this threat is. It’s a presence more than a person. Something bad. Something evil.
The corridor opens abruptly and spits me out into the fighting pit. The sand and circular walls are familiar, but the walls climb impossibly high, and whatever is at the top is lost in darkness.
There’s someone in the middle of the pit. He’s on his knees in the sand between two posts, his wrists locked in the shackles. He’s naked, his bare back facing me, his head hanging.
Heis the evil thing. I can feel it.
As I stalk toward him, I realize that I have a whip in my hand. I unfurl it. It slithers like a snake in the sand.
I stop some way behind him. I raise the whip. The tail of it hisses through the sand then curls silently into the air. I snap my wrist and send the lash sailing toward him.
It cracks across his back, black and sharp and vicious. His skin splits, opening to muscle and bone. He doesn’t react to it, like he doesn’t care, like he’s dead. I whip him again, opening another window in his flesh with the black lash. But he still doesn’t react.
It makes me so damn angry. I keep whipping him, again and again, harder and harder, until he dissolves into a sloppy, bloody mess of ruined flesh, still silent.
There’s no satisfaction in it, no relief. I turn, hunting for something, anything—and I find it.
It’s him again. Me. The same me I just obliterated in the stocks. But now he’s free and walking my way. What confuses me is that my perspective starts shifting. I’m in my body then his, then mine again, then his, until I don’t know which I am, or which I ever was.
I don’t even know which of us is wearing the electric collar that I feel around my throat. I only know that I need to kill him.
