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"There's nothing to be afraid of, baby girl," he murmurs to me. "Don't you want to go back upstairs?"
I look at him, my teeth chattering. "What?"
"This is it, Firefly," he tells me. "You've come so far, baby girl."
"What?" I ask him. This is too soon. He said a week, maybe more. Four days isn't long enough.
"The police are being called in. Saint's girlfriend, Willow, overhead a couple of guards in the girls' dormitory talking about it. I guess your dad is insisting on it. They are going to start searching the campus. Headmistress can't keep them out much longer, and eventually, they will find this place. I don't know how many days we have left together."
"Left together?" I ask, my shivering becoming even more violent beneath the chill of his words.
"Well," he tilts his head at me, "I'm pretty sure I'm either getting sent upstate to one of the permanent asylums or to prison when they find out what I did."
"That's your plan?" I gawk at him. "To fix me and then abandon me?"
"Not by choice," he says.
But that's not acceptable. Ineedhim.
"I won't tell them it was you," I blurt. "I'll tell them I came down here by myself."
"Why would you do that?" he asks me, looking down the line of his nose at me.
"You know why I would do that," I murmur.
"I'm going to need you to say it."
My teeth chatter even louder, filling the silence, and I bite down hard, silencing them. "Because I . . ."
"Because you what?"
"Because I like you, I guess," I manage. "I'm grateful for you as fucked up as that is. No one's ever gone to the lengths you did, not for me, not ever. Even though what you did was colossally fucked up, at least you tried.
"When it gets hard, my dad just ships me off somewhere new, and the docs don't care, not really. They barely learn my name before he decides it isn't working and transfers me. I'm just a dollar amount to everyone—the schools see what they'll earn and my father sees what he'll spend. You did all of this for me, and for once in forever, I can finally look in a mirror and not hate myself. I can eat something and not hear my mother oinking at me, well, at least most of the time. Maybe I'm developing Stockholm Syndrome. I don't know, okay? I just know that I sort of don't think you're a total creep anymore."
He laughs, throwing his back, and the sound fills the room. I think I like it when he laughs.
"Don't discredit yourself," he shakes his head, sending stray tendrils of hair into his eyes, which he swipes away. "We both know you are too strong for that shit."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean that whatever you're feeling, you're feeling it willingly." He pins me with a stare. "Thank you, Firefly."
I giggle. I can't help it. Of course, the psychopathic pyromaniac would respond by thanking me. I confess my maybe-feelings, and hethanksme.
Awesome.
"You sure you don't want to add anything else to that?" I manage through my chattering teeth.
"I said I'd never lie to you, Avery," he warns.
I'm not going to lie. It stings.
"Oh o . . . o . . . k . . . kay," I say, biting my teeth together once more.
He frowns at me. "You misunderstand. I'm saying your words are inadequate. I'm saying I feel more."
He feels more, and I feel like the air has been sucked out of my lungs.
