Page 92 of Left In The Dark

“It won’t be ideal, no.”

“Then don’t.” I lift myself higher, reaching for his face.

“Don’t take off the mask?”

“No. Don’t let me go.”

“But I should,” he retorts.

“But do you want to? Answer me honestly.” I pinch the thick material of the mask between my fingers.

“No,” he says with his voice trembling.

“What do you want?” I wait with bated breath for his answer.

He lifts a hand over mine. “You . . . I want you.”

“You do?” My head spins and his face inches closer to mine.

“Yes. More than anything.”

“Then don’t let me go and I can always be yours.”

“It’s not real.” He shoves my hand away. “What you’re feeling for me isn’t real. You’re confused.”

“I was confused at first, but I’m not anymore. I’ve given you so much trouble but it never deterred you. It didn’t matter what I did. You wanted to keep working through it with me. You wanted to still be here for me. What would I even go back to at this point?”

“Your family,” he says.

“What family? No one is really looking for me, are they?”

“No.”

My throat tightens. “Then if I don’t matter to them, why should they matter to me?”

“What about all your friends?”

“They only cared about what they could get from me. The only person who cared about what I got from something was you.”

“What about Logan?”

My hand lands on his neck again. “What about him?”

“You two had something going on between you, didn’t you?”

“I . . . I don’t know what we had. Whatever it was . . . I fucked it all up.”

“Maybe he messed up too.”

“He was a bit cruel at times, but I deserved it.”

“No. I thought you deserved it at the time, but you were just being the only way you knew how to be. What others showed you to be. You give what you’re given. It’s hard to treat other people right when you don’t know what that means. You’ve never had it before.”

“I thought,” are the words I’m stuck on the most as I tug on the bottom of his mask, slowly lifting it up and off his head. I gasp. I already knew, didn’t I? I kept going back and forth in my head, but deep down I knew. “Logan.”

“Yeah.” He takes the mask from my hand, looking down at it. “How am I supposed to let you go now?”

“You aren’t.” I tug his face to mine, pressing our noses together. “If I want to stay here and you want me to stay here, then I will.”