All of them were flesh and bone. And now gone.
“What happened to them, Adam?”
Is that your name? I don’t even know. I don’t want to know you, what you’re capable of. Not really. Part of me could stay here with you like this forever, in this limbo of not knowing. In the fiction of us.
“I offered this to them. This safe space, away from the modern world. It’s so ugly out there, so fake. Here, this place, it’s freedom.”
“And what happened?”
“They didn’t want it.”
Your voice has gotten tight, the first sign of your anger. Robin wanted to know if I had seen your darkness. I think I did. I think I saw it first—in that grainy image, in your Rilke quotes. Worse still, I think it’s what drew me to you.
“So what did you do?” I keep my voice light.
The air expands. I have a mental model of the room. The gun on the table, the bullets on the floor, the keys still in the pocket of your pants that are in a heap at the foot of the bed. Will the car still run with the airbag deployed? I have no idea. That’s a thing I’d instantly Google—but my phone is a junk pile.
My head is still on your chest, the way it was the night I shared myself with you. I know if I were looking into your eyes that they would reveal nothing. “I let them go.”
“You let them go.”
“That’s right.” You lift your palms, then drop your hands back to where they’d rested on my hip, on my shoulder. “What else? Love lets go, Wren. It doesn’t hold on.”
But the brand of love I know from men is one that holds on tight. It strangles. Of course, I don’t believe you.
“They’re all gone though,” I venture. “No one ever heard from them again.”
“I never heard from them either,” you say. “They left me. They didn’t want this life. They thought they did, at first. But eventually the world, their ties to it, pulled them back. Not everyone can walk away. You know that.”
“So you let them all leave,” I say.
“You can’t make someone stay where they don’t want to be. You can try, but they’ll just hate you for it. Didn’t your mother hate your father at the end?”
The mention of them stings.
“I don’t know if she did hate him,” I answer. “I don’t think she ever stopped hoping that he’d be the man he was when she first loved him. Even in those final moments, I think she still saw him for what he was deep down.”
“But the world. It destroyed that man, left a monster in his place.”
A monster. A raging ghoul wailing my name.
“He wasn’t a monster,” I whisper, though I’ve called him that myself. “He was broken, not evil.”
“What the difference?”
“Is this a philosophical discussion?”
“Isn’t everything?”
I don’t answer you, because I know when you get like this the conversation can wind on for hours, diving deep into perception and reality, that house of mirrors.
“Wren?” you say into the silence. “You wanted to know what I planned to ask you.”
“Yes?”
“Will you leave the world behind and stay with me?”
I let the part of me who wants to, that dark, secret part of me, answer.
“Of course,” I say. “Of course I’ll stay.”
Your arms tighten around me. You believe me. I almost convince myself.
“You won’t be sorry, Wren. I love you.”
“I love you, too, Adam.”
The words have the ring of truth because, sadly, they are true. I know what it is to love darkness, to love the pain someone can cause you, to crave the person you see beneath the ugly. It’s a familiar feeling, a home I have chosen.
We lay there until you’re softly snoring, until your arms have fallen slack and you release your hold on me. You seem deeply asleep, but I know you wake easily.
Quietly, I rise. In the dark I gather my clothes, the gun, the one bullet I can find quickly. I slip my keys from your pocket, careful not to jingle. In the hallway, I wiggle into my clothes, and move softly down the hall. A floorboard creaks but I keep moving. Across the great room, shouldering into my jacket as I go. My feet are bare, no time to find my shoes. Doesn’t matter.
I reach the door and find it locked. Dead bolted with a lock that needs a key. And my heart, which has been a caged bird in my chest, sinks deep into my belly. I lean against the door and feel how solid it is, how heavy, how cold from the air outside.