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"Let me," Peeta practically shouts and is on her feet and running out of the room before I can stop her.
And I'm alone in the room again.
The darkness descending on me.
But not for long.
"That guy is a fucking dick," Bikini Girl hisses, storming back into the room, grabbing her dress off her bed and pulling it back over her head. "Doesn't know a good deal when he sees one. Hope that Luna girl knows what she's in for."
Right on cue, Kingsley appears at the door again. "Luna. Come on. Just talk to me for five minutes."
"This is the women's dorm, asshole," Bikini Girl hisses at him, and pushes past him out of the room.
"Luna, she practically groped me out there," Kingsley loud whispers, when she's out of earshot.
"Lucky you," I reply before I can stop myself.
"Two words.Progress."
I throw him a glare. "Wrong."
He steps into the room, hands in pockets, shoulders dropped. "Can we please talk?"
"What's there to talk about, Kingsley? Did you or did you not have a private investigator look into every aspect of my life?"
Fear anchors on his face. "I did. But..."
"And did you not hear me when I told you that I hate that, I hate ever feeling like I don't have my privacy. That I spent my life jumping from place to place because I never felt safe anywhere? Because everywhere I went, I felt like the past was chasing after me?"
The fear on his face mutates into abject regret before my eyes. "I heard you, Luna."
The admission shatters whatever vestige of hope that this was a misunderstanding I have left. And the world darkens. "Is thereanythingyou know about me that you didn't learn from a report? Is there anything about me that you learned because you listened? Because you paid attention? Cared? Because youworked to learn about me? Or am I just a top sheet of a financial report to you? A questionnaire of my favorite colors, and most hated ice cream flavor?"
He winces and grabs his chest. "No. God, no, Luna. It's not like that. Nothing I know about you that matters, I learned from that report. That... it was just for your trust. I promise you."
"I... I don't believe you, Kingsley."
He exhales, his entire body sinking onto itself. "I know. And I'm sorry. Can we just go? Let's go home, and I'll answer every question you have. And I promise you'll understand why I did what I did."
I shake my head. "I'm not going anywhere with you, Kingsley. I told you. I'm done. And if you don’t understand why, then maybe you didn’t know me after all. I guess that wasn’t something you could learn from a PI report."
"And I'm not leaving without you, Luna. I mean that. I'm not going anywhere."
Two hours later, I'm still lying on the bottom bunk of the bed, Peeta is lying on hers, panting her nail as she tells me about the escapades over the last few weeks since I've been gone. Thanks to the bank of Kingsley, she’d had the money to go on a few pricier day trips, and is trying to convince me that she made out with one of the princes from Andorra when Kingsley appears at the doorway.
His shirt is wrinkled and he looks like he's aged five years in the space of a few hours.
"Luna. There's a guy snoring really loudly in my room and I can't concentrate on my work."
It sounds so pathetic, I almost laugh. Instead, I get up and rifle through a drawer that we've dubbed the Get Your Junk OuttaYour Trunk drawer where passing travelers leave the things they don't want to lug around on their back, and pull out a mismatched pair of ear plugs.
I pick up his hand, desperately trying to ignore the way his skin feels like home against mine, and drop the ear plugs in them. "Here. You can leave, or you can use these."
He looks down at his hand like I just dropped a vial of smallpox on his palm. "You're kidding. These look like ground zero for a syphilis outbreak."
I return to my bunk and lie down, staring at the bottom of the bunk on top of mine. "Then go home."
"I told you, I'm not leaving without you."
