I grabbed his near hand, gripping tight. “Stop it!” I said, on the verge of shrieking incoherently. I knew that wouldn’t be helpful, but helpful felt so far beyond my reach, it might as well have been on the moon, so I was tempted to go the other way instead.
My whole childhood, everyone always wanted me to be more like Mum, told me I ought to be; the only person who didn’t was Mum herself. But that insidious message didn’t manage to get too deeply into my head, because I was always wanting her to be more like me. Less generous, less patient, less kind—and I don’t even mean I wanted her to be those things to other people; I’d have been wildly glad if she’d ever have stooped to have a screaming match with me. But right now, with every fiber of my being, I wanted to have all her answers inside me: her clear understanding, what she would have said, the light she’d have shone for Orion onto the despair twisted like dark vines through his head, so he could see it and cut it out of himself and open up the room to grow. The only answer I had to give him was setting New York on fire, and much as I wished otherwise, I could tell that really wasn’t an answer to his problem.
“There’s no such thing as normal people,” I said, a desperate flailing. “There’s just people, and some of them are miserable, and some of them are happy, and you’ve the same right to be happy as any of them—no more and no less.”
“El, come on,” Orion said, with a weary air of being much put upon. I could have frothed in his face. “You know it’s not true. There are normal people, and we’re not. I’m not.”
“Yes, we are!” I said. “And you do want things other than hunting. You’re sorry enough if you miss a meal, and you minded when I was mean to you, and you certainly seemed reasonably interested in the events of the past hour—”
He huffed a short laugh. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you!”
“The only thing you’ve tried to tell me so far is that you’re a hollowed-out suit of armor marching steadily onward through the ranks of mals whilst insensible to all human emotion, so I’m not keen on listening to anything else you’ve got to say!” I said.
“I’m trying to tell you that I was,” he said. “I didn’t want anything else. I didn’t know how to want anything else. Until—”
“Lake, don’t you even dare,” I said, appalled as the full horror dawned on me, but it was too late.
He still had my hand entwined with his; he brought it to his mouth and kissed the side of it softly, without looking at me. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I know it’s not fair, El. But I just need to know. I never had a plan except to go home and kill mals. I never wanted anything else. But now I do. I want you. I want to be with you. I don’t care if it’s in New York or Wales or anywhere else. And I just need to know if that’s okay. If I can—if I can have that. If you want that, too.
“And you don’t need to lie to me,” he added. “I’m not going to do anything different tomorrow, no matter what you tell me. I don’t think I could. Once I’m fighting, I just go flat-out and keep going; you know that’s how it works. I’m not going to play it safe if you say yes, and I’m not going to do anything dumb if you say no.”
“What you mean is, you’ll do an enormous number of truly stupid things no matter what!” I said, mostly on reflex; the rest of my brain was running around in circles making noises like Precious in a rage.
“Sure, whatever,” Orion said. “This isn’t about graduation. It’s about after. After I’m home, and I know—Chloe told me you won’t come to New York. So I need to know if I can get on a plane and come to you. Because that’s what I want to do. I can deal with graduation, I can deal with the mals. I just can’t deal with being out, trying to reach you when you don’t even have a freaking cellphone, and not knowing if it’s okay for me to—”
“Yes!” I said, in a despairing howl. “Yes, fine, you utter wanker, you can come to Wales and meet my mum,” and then, I didn’t add, he could also be shut up in the yurt for a year until she had cleared the rubbish out of his skull, and if this was what Mum had been warning me about, if she didn’t want me bringing her a shedload of work to do, it was just too bad.
I told myself that mostly because I had a dreadful feeling that this was what Mum had been warning me about. I couldn’t help knowing she would have told me off for giving him the least encouragement, in the strongest terms possible for her, and also that she’d be absolutely right: I hadn’t any business agreeing to be with someone who told me in all sincerity that I was his only hope of happiness in the world, at least not until he’d sorted his own head out and diversified.