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“Yeah, I’m still here. I don’t see him—”
“Doesn’t mean he’s not still there. Do you think he’s dangerous?”
That gave me pause.
Did I?
“That hesitation doesn’t sound good,” Sam said quickly. “Stay in the classroom. Do not open the door for anyone.”
If I wasn’t so terrified, I would have sassed him. I would have told him he couldn’t boss me around like this. That I already knew all these things from the zillions of lockdown drills the school put the teachers and students through.
But I wasn’t feeling confident or sassy.
I was feeling scared.
And when I was scared, my possible responses to anything were whittled down to a singular, pathetic-sounding, “Okay.”
The afternoon light flickered through the blinds.
“I think he’s back!”
“You’re safe in the classroom,” Sam reassured me. “I’ll be there in a minute, I see the school.”
“Okay, please hurry,” I whimpered.
I sank behind my desk.
This was ridiculous. I shouldn’t have been afraid of Grayson.
But this wasn’t Grayson. This was a shadow version of him; the enhanced incarnation of everything wicked about him.
And I was scared of that.
I’d spent the entire week trying to get back with him, holding onto the mirage of what I had with the real Grayson. The good parts.
But Ink-Grayson wasn’t the good parts. He was the bad parts; and the best he got was the spaces in between the good parts and the bad parts.
Last weekend when Bo sat me on that park bench and tried to explain this to me, I didn’t fully grasp it. How could I, without experiencing it myself? Now I understood why it was so hard for him to get rid of his last ink-ex:
In the absence of a steady stream of goodness, you were forced to salivate for the okay-ness. And at the end of the day, you realized you were in a fog—a never-ending gray area.
It took Effie to point that out to me yesterday. She noticed that I’d been hiding in my room after work, smiling less, and seemed spaced out when she’d talked to me this week.
It wasn’t like I could tell her I’d been spending time with Ink-Grayson, trying to hold onto a shade of my relationship with Real-Grayson. She would have lectured me, and if I told her the whole truth, she would move Grayson from her shit list to her hit list.
I didn’t need to involve her. I didn’t need her to put herself at risk.
I could clean up my own mess.
But, I did need help from someone.
Someone who wouldn’t judge me.
“Grace, you still there? Stay with me.”
“I’m here,” I answered. “I’m scared.”
“I’m pulling in the parking lot right now.”
