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He turned around, in her arms.
She sighed against him, laying her head against his huge, huge chest. “Do you want to stay? I’m not working tomorrow. I took off for the holidays.”
“You’re really confusing me right now, Hiljd.” His voice was raw.
She looked up at him. “Oh.”
He cupped her face. “Uh… I think I’m going to go.”
“Really?” It was like a slap. She recoiled from his hand.
He pulled his fist into his chest. “It’s only… if you don’t think this could ever work, and I… Fuck, Hiljd, I’m halfway in love with you already, but you don’t even like me, and you think I’m this horrible person who can’t even admit it to himself, and… I think I gotta protect myself a little bit here. You’re already fucking me up. A lot.”
“Oh,” she breathed. “I’m sorry.” She pressed in close to him, putting her hand over his curled-up fist. Had she forgotten he had feelings? He was aperson. He was huge and strong and he projected all this bravado and he had infuriating ideas, but… he had feelings.
He swallowed hard.
She shook her head at him. “I don’t think you’re a horrible person at all.”
“But you just said—”
“I thinkeveryonehas it internalized,” she said. “Do you get that? Like, it’s not something wrong with you personally, it’s just wrong with everyone.”
“That’s supposed to make it better?”
She tried to think about how to explain this, since he seemed to be intent on not understanding her, but seemingly just out of some defense mechanism, not because he was too stupid or too willful to get it. He was just protecting himself. She worried her bottom teeth against her upper lip. She thought of three ideas and discarded each of them, furrowing her brow even deeper. It wasn’t just him, she realized, it was everyone. It was just society, people in general. They wanted to blame other people.
“What?” he said.
“I was going to say, like, war crimes? You know, if you were a Nazi, and you were just following orders—but then I remembered that we punish people for war crimes.”
“I’m very confused right now.”
“So, then, I was going to talk about imperialism, the spread of the Greco-Roman world to Britain, and the rise of the elves and the fae, and all the things they did hundreds of years ago, but I realized… we all—those of us who aren’t fae, anyway—blame them.”
He took a step back. “That’s how you feel? As a woman? You feel like that? Like all men are elves?”
“Obviously,” she said with a little laugh. “How could you have not realized this before?”
He stroked his beard. “But that’s not even the same thing. I mean, men aren’t—” He broke off. “Wait, what if the elves don’t mean it either?”
“Why would they?” she said. “No one asks to be born into privilege. And suffering is universal, so it’s not as if living in a privileged position means you never suffer.” She shrugged. “It’s not as if being an orc is, you know… it’s not like we don’t have privilege too.”
“Do we?” he said.
“Obviously,” she said. “And I’m privileged because of being brought up in a middle class family, and because of having a family that encouraged me to further my education, and because of all sorts of things. I have a lot of advantages I was just born with. Not everyone has all the advantages that I have.”
“Well, sure,” he said. “But what are you saying? Because if you’re going to say that we just need to make everything equal between everyone, I think I’m going to have to point out that those kinds of social revolutions never work out in the end. Someone always builds a guillotine.”
“Here we go, back to politics,” she said.
“Yeah,” he agreed. “We’re getting lost in the weeds.” He shrugged. “Okay, look, you want me to admit that some parts of my life were easier than other people’s lives? That’s it?”
“That’s it,” she said.
“You want me to feel guilty about that?”
“No,” she said. “I don’t. It was out of your control, and you didn’t have any choice in whether you got advantages or disadvantages. There’s no reason to feel guilty about something that’s not your fault.”
