“I’ll protect you.”
“It’s not just me I’m worried about, Bram.”
“You should be—they let me live. Clearly, they can’t let me go.”
“And has them not letting you go been a barrel of laughs for you? Maybe this was just meant asyourpunishment. Leaving you here all alone, in hell. Or maybe not alone exactly, I mean you must have—” she said, embarrassed by what she had just suggested. By the presumption of it. But he didn’t even wait for her to finish.
“There’s never been anyone else but you,” he said, calm as you like.
And in the ringing silence that followed, she tried to take it a different way.
Because you couldn’t risk it, she told herself.Because you didn’t have a chance, she told herself.Because they would never know the real you, she told herself. But really, she knew the truth. Thirty years of torment and torturous sleep and pretending to be someone he wasn’t.
And he just couldn’t be with anyone else.
He couldn’t allow himself even a moment of it.
“Not even someone putting their arms around you?” she asked, thinking of at least some comfort for him. But even that made him shake his head.
“Sometimes it happens when we win a match. Although to be fair most of the time I’ve numbed myself so hard to get through any possible bloodshed that I don’t really feel it. And even if I did, it’s not as if I particularly like the people who do it.”
“Yeah the game sure does attract a lot of arseholes.”
“Because the goal is to hurt other people.”
She heard him swallow thickly, when he said it.
Though she would have known anyway how he felt about that.
“God, you must fuckinghateit. How do you even do it? Youused to save spiders from drowning. Sometimes you half starved because you’d try to sustain yourself with slices of black pudding, from the cafeteria. I remember you being horrified when you thought saying my dress seemed very tight was a compliment, then discovered it wasn’t.”
“I’m still agonized about that now, honestly,” he said, with enough of a laugh in his voice that she felt a little better. Or at least, felt relieved that he was feeling so. And to the point where she could laugh, too.
“The explanation was very good, though. In fact, I think that’s why—”
“You kissed me, that first time. Yes. Yes, it was. I fumbled through trying not to say what I meant, and you knew. You knew it was more than books and kindness and affection between us. That I wanted you.”
“Lord, you did. And god knows, I wanted you.”
“We couldn’t keep our hands off each other.”
“Not even in lectures. Do you remember that time when Hargreaves caught us canoodling and called us a disgrac—”
She stopped cold, the word half unsaid.
Both of them knew what the word was, though.
And they knew what it meant. “Oh my god. It’s her. Of course it’s her,” he said, while she was still sat there, frozen. Mind going back over a million snide comments and pinched looks. Before finally, fury thawed her enough to burst out with words of her own.
“Honestly, I have no idea why we’ve been wasting our time thinking of anyone else,” she said, caught between punching the air and putting her face in her hands. “She hated us. She hated me then. She hates menow—oh mygodthe other day she told methat I was fraternizing too much with you! You need to consider where such things lead, she said.”
“Youcannotbe serious. Why didn’t you tell me that?”
“Because she was kind ofright, at the time. I thought I was in the middle of a horny toxic spiral with a psychopath. I’ve never wanted to fuck someone so much in my life, despite the incredible threat of murder. What she said almost sounded wise. Instead of what it is now: an intense flashing warning sign.”
She made said “intense flashing warning sign” with her hands.
It made sparks fly from the ends of her fingertips.
