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“Can you just —”
“But I’m not completely irrational either, you understand. I can be persuaded to have mercy.”
“I don’t —”
“So if you tell me that you won’t care if he dies, that you won’t even go to his fucking funeral let alone cry at his death, I’ll pick option one. I’ll make it easy on him. So,” he gets even closer to me, dipping his beautiful face so he can look me in the eye, “which option is it going to be? Option one or two. It all depends on you now.”
“One,” I blurt out.
A muscle jumps on his cheek at my reply. “One.”
“Y-yes.”
“Why?”
“Because I won’t cry.”
“At his funeral.”
“Yes. I-I won’t even go to his funeral.”
“You won’t.”
“No.” I shake my head frantically. “I don’t even care about him, okay? I don’t…”
“You don’t what?” he bites out, that muscle in his cheek still jumping.
If anything, I think I’ve managed to make him angrier, but I don’t understand how that’s possible when I’m giving him what he wants. When I’m playing along with him in this twisted game that I don’t even know the rules of.
“I just… Just don’t hurt him, okay?” I say then, pleading. “I’ll do whatever you want me to do. Just don’t hurt Ezra. Just —”
“That’s what his name is,” he says, his jaw ticking. “Ezra.”
“Yes.”
“Who the fuck is he?”
“N-no one.”
He grinds his jaw, his eyes flickering all over my face before saying, “You don’t expect me to believe that, do you? After you’ve so beautifully begged for his life.”
“I-I just —”
“Pro tip,” he says, coming even closer, dropping his voice even lower. “You don’t want to beg for another man’s life in front of me, if you in fact want to save it. It’s only going to make me kill him more. And that’s saying something because I already wanted to fucking erase him from the world because you were smiling at him.”
“What?”
“That’s what you did, didn’t you,” he rasps, his eyes narrowed. “You smiled at him. You gave him what belongs to me.”
Wait a second.
Just fucking wait.
Is that what this is about?
Is this about jealousy? Is that why he’s so angry and acting like an unhinged serial killer?
While I still hate to think about the very complicated past between us — I’d rather pretend that it never happened and that we went our separate ways after that one disastrous night three years ago — I will say that this isn’t the first time. That he’s been jealous, I mean.
Although ‘jealous’ is probably the wrong word here.
What I always thought was jealousy and took as a sign of his secret affection for me — because clearly he wasn’t saying anything out loud and so I had to make assumptions — is simply his ego talking.
I’ve always said that I’ve never met a guy like Ledger.
He’s intense, more intense than anyone else I know. He’s competitive, again more than anyone I know. Probably even more than my own brother — but please don’t quote me on that because my brother has done some fucked-up shit in the name of their stupid rivalry.
In any case, this is not jealousy. This is his Neanderthal response.
To seeing someone else play with his toy.
Which is what I am to him.
Or I was for the longest time and due to my own foolishness.
So the fact that I’m feeling satisfaction right now is stupid. There’s no need for that. There’s no need to feel excitement or thrill or any of those old things that I used to feel back then.
What I should be right now is enraged.
Which I am, of course. But it’s polluted by other things.
Still I focus on my anger and say, “No, it doesn’t. It never did. So I want you to stop throwing your weight around and step away from me.”
The muscles in his raised arm strain. “Tell me who the fuck he is.”
I raise my chin. “No.”
His eyes are this close to turning into slits. “Don’t fuck with me right now, all right? I want you to tell me who he is or I’m going out there and beating the shit out of him until he tells me himself.”
I glare at him too. “First, you won’t do anything like that. Because even though you think you’re a god or whatever, you’re not. What you are is a celebrity. You can’t beat someone up and get away with it, okay? Not even you. In fact, it’ll only hurt your reputation and your career and —”
“Fuck my career.”
“What?”
“And fuck my already fucked reputation.”
“What does that mean?” I ask, confused.
“You’ve got five seconds to tell me who he is or I’m going out there.”
“What do you mean already fucked reputation? What —”
“One.”
“What?”
“Two.”
“Are you —”
“Three.”
“No, you aren’t.”
“Four.”
“Tell me you aren’t counting right now.”
“Five.”
Time stops, it feels like.
The earth stops moving too. The people outside cease to exist and I think, crazily, that there’s just the two of us here. There’s just his pitch black eyes looking into my gray ones, and his cinnamon scent – the scent that I sometimes dream about – mingling with the scent of cotton candy.
