He wants to know exactly what I can see and what I can’t. Probably so he can learn to trick me better.
“Cold,” I say. “Calculated. Uncaring.”
Now I do look at him, because I want to see if he’ll admit it.
“Yes,” he says, unblinking, unashamed. “I’ve always been this way.”
I dab the paint on my demon’s tail, bringing out the highlights on the scales. I can feel Cole pacing behind me, though I can’t actually hear his light footsteps on the wooden boards. He’s disturbingly quiet. It unnerves me when I can’t see where he’s at in the room. But it’s worse trying to talk with that burning black stare drilling into me.
“Have you ever loved anyone?” I ask. “Or were you just voicing a theory?”
I can sense him going still, considering the question.
This is one of the things I like about Cole: he doesn’t just say whatever pops into his head. Every word that comes out of his mouth is deliberate.
“I don’t know,” he says at last.
I have to turn then, because that answer surprises me.
He’s got his hands in the pockets of his fine wool trousers, looking past me out the window, lost in thought.
“I might have loved my mother. She was important to me. I wanted to be near her all the time. I would go in her room in the morning, when she was still sleeping, and curl up on the end of her bed like a dog. I liked the smell of her perfume on the blankets and on the clothes that hung in her closet. I liked the way her voice sounded and how she laughed. But she died when I was four. So I don’t know if that would have changed as I got older. Children are always attached to their mothers.”
I feel that sick, squirming feeling in my stomach that always accompanies conversations about mothers. As if my demon’s tail is lodged down in my guts.
“You loved your mother,” Cole says, reading my thoughts. “Even though she was a shit parent.”
“Yeah, I did,” I say bitterly. “That’s what’s fucked up about it. I wanted to impress her. I wanted to make her happy.”
“Loving someone gives them power over you,” Cole says.
When we talk like this, I feel like he really is the devil, and we’re battling for my soul. Everything he believes is so opposite to me. And yet, he can be horribly convincing . . .
I hate that my mother had power over me. I hate that she still does.
“She trained me from the time I was little,” I say. “She was always the victim, everything bad that happened in her life was someone else’s fault—especially mine. And the thing that makes me angriest is that it fucking worked—I still feel guilty. Every time I ignore her emails or block her calls, I feel guilty. Rationally, I know she’s the fucking worst and I don’t owe her anything. But the emotion is still there, because she conditioned me like a rat looking for pellets. She pressured me and manipulated me and fucked with me every day of my life until I got away from her.”
“Distance is meaningless when she still lives in your head,” Cole says.
“Yeah,” I admit. “She dug trenches out of me. I keep waiting for it to go away, but it doesn’t. Because scars don’t heal -- they’re there forever.”
Recklessly, I swipe my brush through the black, adding billowing smoke flowing up from the bottom of the canvas.
“I fucking hate her,” I hiss.
I’ve never actually said that out loud. Usually I don’t talk about her at all.
“She’s a perversion of nature,” Cole says, in his calm, reasonable tone. “Mothers are supposed to be nurturing. They’re supposed to protect their children. Sacrifice for them. She isn’t a mother at all.”
I turn around, annoyed that he’s finagled me into discussing this yet again.
“What about fathers?” I demand. “What are they supposed to be?”
I’m already well aware that Cole loathes his father. Despite the fact that Magnus Blackwell has been dead for ten years. And the fact that he was the Thomas Wayne of this city—his name is on a dozen buildings, including a wing of the MOMA.
“Fathers are supposed to teach and protect,” Cole says.
“Did yours?”
“He did one of those things.”
When Cole is angry, his lips go pale and his jaw tightens, sharpening the lines of his face until he hardly looks human.
He frightens me.
And yet, it’s the terror that heightens every moment in his presence. I can smell his scent, hot and exhilarating. I can see the veins running up his forearms, and even perceive the pulse of pumping blood.