“Sure. Yeah. Of course. Okie dokie. Alrighty-roo. Fo sho. Roger that.” I saluted him without looking back, dabbing away my tears as I tried to will my eyes to suck them back in.
“Spider,” Niall said heavily, his arm looping around me and even though I resisted, he was too strong and he pulled me right out of my seat into his lap.
I looked up at him with a tightness in my throat, not knowing what to do with the big emotions muscling their way into my chest like two rhinos and an elephant. There wasn’t room in there for them, and now Glenda was dead, who was going to look after them?
“It ain’t you, love,” Niall said, stroking my cheek with his thumb. “I tainted the good in ya. You’re a dark creature in ways, but you’re so innocent in others. And now I’m the ruin of that innocence and I never wanted that. Never,” he said fiercely and I tried to force words past the lump of coal jammed in my throat.
“I’m not innocent, Hellfire,” I said, giving him an imploring look. “I know I like to play games and dance and do stupid shit, but I’m an adult. A killer. I hold onto the magic in the world because there’s so little of it that’s truly there. So I create it for myself instead. I run and play and skip and do whatever the fuck I like because I don’t have to do what society expects me to do. I’m free of those binds, unlike every other adult on this planet. I didn’t conform. I don’t school my features, or tuck my head down when someone looks at me weird. I don’t correct my behaviour, I don’t try to fit in. Because fitting in is so very fucking boring. It’s a cage that everyone walks so willingly into just so they don’t stand out. Teenagers put their dolls down, hide their favourite toys and cringe if their friends ever find them. But why do we have to put the dolls down, Hellfire? Why can’t I like glitter and fairies and jumping on trampolines just because society decided I’m not allowed to play anymore? It’s crab shit.”
Niall’s eyes softened as understanding poured from him. Because of course he knew. Me and him were the same.
I barrelled on, knowing I was probably babbling but I needed to let it all out.
“It’s not about being a grown up, it’s about doing whatever we feel like doing, because why the hell not? Why should we put ourselves in a box, dampen our smiles, hold back the skip in our steps when our feet itch to dance? Why shouldn’t our emotions pour out of us whenever the wind changes? If I get mad, I wanna be ragingly fucking mad, and if I’m happy I want to be ragingly fucking happy, Hellfire. I don’t want to hold it all in and pretend I’m mature, because no one’s really mature. They’re all just playing the biggest game of pretend in the history of pretending. And everyone just…goes along with it. They let life grind them down into a ghost of the fun person they used to be, the one who followed their dreams and whims and never gave a shit if some boring Betty told them not to. But eventually, bit by bit, they gave into the pressures of society and one day, poof, the real them disappeared. And maybe eventually they’ll look up and realise how much time they wasted pretending to be as dull as everybody else. But not us, Niall. Not you and me. We’re free. Everyone can judge us and point and stare, but we won’t stop playing because we know the truth.”
“And what’s that, Spider?” he asked, seeming enraptured by me.
“That nothing matters. None of it. If I walk down the street tomorrow wearing a huge crown, a bright pink ball gown, have my face painted up as a lizard and do a rumba for a mile, people will look and judge and maybe even laugh, they might even go home and tell all their boring little friends about it. But I won’t remember them, and not a single thought they think about me will ever affect me. See, we figured out the key to life, didn’t we? The second you stop giving a crap, it all slots together. Because in a hundred years we’ll all be dead and gone anyway and everything everyone thought was important wasn’t. It was all just a veil upon a veil of societal bullshit that suppressed generations of people who kept handing it down to each other time after time, blinding them to the truth. We might be cracked in the head, maybe even as crazy as a bag of coots. But when I die, I’ll know I burned every last drop of fuel in my soul and felt that fire blazing each day I drew breath on this earth. I’ll know I was real and never held myself in check for the sake of suiting someone else’s expectations. So please don’t pull away from me because you think I’m innocent. I’m not, Niall. I’m just free.”
He frowned, brushing his fingers along my arm, opening his mouth to speak but I kept going, unable to stop now that I was on a roll.
“After what happened when I was younger, I thought I’d never, ever want anyone to touch my naked flesh again. But after a while, I started thinking about it, dreaming up scenarios with the only person who I could imagine touching me like that. And he was the Devil.”
Niall released a breath of amusement, but his face soon fell flat again.
“Until I met you and Mateo…”
Niall’s eyes darkened at the mention of Mateo’s name, but I was baring my truth and it included my Dead Man. And maybe a side of AJ, but I hadn’t figured that out yet. “You gave me a home, and a space to be myself unconditionally, as crazy loo as I liked. I’ve never gotten to be me for so long without making everyone around me run away. Freedom is great, but it’s sure lonely. But now it’s like…like being me is finally acceptable. And not only that, but I think maybe, possibly, you and Mateo and Jack…”
“What, love?” Niall pushed when I faltered, his thumb moving to my chin and skimming along there in a slow line.
“Like me,” I whispered, not daring to say it too loud in case the moon listened and she decided to make it not true.
Niall’s jaw flexed and his fingers pushed into my hair, drawing me closer so we were eye to eye. “I don’t like ya, Brooklyn,” he said gruffly and Glenda twitched on the floor, her little duck feet flapping as she came alive long enough just to die all over again. “I fuckin’ adore ya.”
Glenda rose to her feet like a duck touched by an angel, a glow surrounding her and a choir singing her name as a happy quack burst from her beak.
“You do?” I breathed, not daring to blink away a single millisecond of this moment as I drank in those words, playing them on repeat in my mind, wanting to make sure I had them perfectly remembered for if I ever ended up back on the streets with nothing and no one for company.
“I do,” he answered. “I’ve met a lot of people in my line of work. And they tend to get real chatty when they’re gonna die. They start tellin’ me all sortsa things about themselves and I’ve come to realise I don’t relate to a single dot of it. I’m a different species to them, we’re speakin’ different languages, and that’s something I’ve known my whole life, Spider. It’s what makes me a powerful tool for my father to wield, and it’s why my siblings hate me down to my roots. Because I’m not one of them. I’m not the same as these other humans who go about feeling for things I have no care for. And I thought I was the only one of my kind until I met you.” His hand skimmed down to my throat, his fingers grazing my rampant pulse as he lowered his voice to a whisper. “We look like them outside, but on the inside we’re black as tar and full of ideas and desires they can never understand. We’re the point one percent. The reason people lock their doors at night and set up cameras on their property. We’re the unspoken fear that lives in the shadows of society, because there is nothing more terrifying to them than someone like us creeping in their window at night and playing butcher with them until dawn. Because everyone knows, deep down, once someone like us is in their house, it’s already too late. By the time the police arrive you’ll already be dead, and we’ll have taken our dose of pain from their flesh.”