The door opened.
Levi came out and his expression was the one Asher had been afraid of.
It was stripped raw, scrubbed clean of every defense by something he couldn’t unsee. His eyes were red. His cheeks were wet. His jaw was set in the way that meant he had been crying, stopped crying and was holding the stop in place through sheer force of will.
He looked at Asher.
Asher looked at him.
The ventilators hissed through the open door behind Levi. The hallway was fluorescent. Neither of them spoke.
Then Levi hit him.
The fist connected with Asher’s jaw, not in the practiced punch of a person who had ever been in a fight. Levi’s thumb was inside his fingers, which was wrong, and the impact traveled up Levi’s wrist in a way that made Levi gasp and shake his hand immediately after. But the punch was real. The force was real. Asher’s jaw snapped to the side, the inside of his cheek split against his teeth, and he tasted blood.
He didn’t try to block it or flinch. He just took it.
I think I earned that.
“You lied to me,” Levi said in the same soft voice he used before he cut his own throat in the resort.
“I never lied to you.” The words came out immediately and certain because they were true. The rule wasI won’t lie.The rule did not sayI will volunteer everything.The rule saidask me anything and I’ll answer honestlyand Levi had not asked the question that would have required the answer Levi just learned. They had abandoned that whole structure as soon as Levi agreed to live with him.
“You told me the NPCs were amalgamations.” Levi’s voice was shaking but the blade was still in it. “Horror archetypes. You started to saynothing based on— and then you asked me about dinner with Paul. You redirected me.”
“There were different NPCs before…they just took their places. I didn’t lie. You never asked if they were real people.”
“That’s the same thing, Asher.”
“It’s not.”
“The same thing,” Levi said, his lower lip trembling. “I asked you about Jasper. I told you he’d be a good friend to have out here. And you…you sat on that couch and you let me say that when you knew he was—”
“Yes.”
“When you were cooking me eggs? When you were feeding me ice cream? When you were tying my hands to the bed?”
“Yes.”
“Did you think about telling me?”
Asher looked at Levi. At the red eyes and the wet cheeks and the jaw holding the crying at bay. At the face that might be the last time this face looked at him.
I won’t let it be the last time. He’s not allowed to leave. But this will be better if he stays willingly.
“No,” he said honestly. “The only thing that matters is you. I don’t care about them —”
He stopped. His jaw was working. The blood from the split cheek was in his mouth, copper and warm.
“I thought about killing them,” he said.
Levi stared at him, and the look on Levi’s face was the look of a person staring at the full shape of something they had been touching the edges of in the dark. All of it. The complete architecture that was Asher Kane.
“They went in to save you,” Levi’s voice broke onsave.“Every one of them. Tyler and Owen and Zoe went in because they wanted to bring you home and you killed them until their brains stopped working. And then Jasper and Maddie and your brother went in and the same thing happened and you — you didn’t know, I know you didn’t know, but Asher, they’re in there —”He pointed at the door, his hand shaking. “They’re in there right now! Breathing on fucking machines, Asher, because they loved you enough to try to save you! And…and the game you built destroyed them for it.”
The wordlovedarrived in Asher’s chest and tried to find somewhere to sit. There wasn’t a shape for it. The shape would have to be a room he didn’t have built yet —they came in because they loved me?— and the room wasn’t there, and the thought tried to settle into the absence of the room and slid off, because there was nothing to settle onto. The word stayed in his chest, restless, looking for a place.
He felt himself fail to hold it. The failure was physical. The word was somewhere in his ribs and he could not get his hands around it from the inside.
