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“Three guys? I mean, you could save one or two for other girls,” she replied, then turned to me and squinted. Not out of anger, but because the light still hurt her eyes. She was smiling, though, and I saw a glimpse of my friend in there. “You’re pretty greedy. Why not just take them all?”
I sucked in a long breath and thought about my answer. I’d thought about it a million times when I was in the Pit and somewhat sane. Why did I want three of them? Why wasn’t I content to stick with Alexander?
I realized it was simple. My heart already felt like it knew Luke and Rome like I’d been entwined with them in the past, and I needed the familiarity of having them by my side. I knew so much about them, things they hadn’t yet revealed to me here. Little things, like how Luke would sometimes sense his twin sister’s presence even though she was far away from him. Or how Rome could make the most amazing coffee in the world by adding some secret ingredient that he never told me about.
I didn’t know Alexander, though, not in the way I knew them. Alexander was bound to me, and there was no escaping the marriage. Even though I liked him now, and my body responded to the heat between us, I was still wary around him. I needed the balance, the two guys who supported me and I knew, and the one who kinda terrified me as the third point in the triangle.
I didn’t know why, but it made sense to me.
“It makes me feel safe,” I said and shrugged nonchalantly. “After the accident, and now after the Pit, I need them to help me deal with the fears.”
Her face shut off again, and something slid down over it, cutting her away from me. “I understand that part,” she said and shuddered quietly. “I don’t know if I’ll ever feel normal again.”
“Then you know what I need,” I replied. “You know I need something more to get over this hurdle.”
“I still don’t know if you were in the Pit for that long,” she replied, eyeballing me from the side. “You still look too good.”
“You’ll understand once we get you your treatment,” I said and reached for the cigarette. “Now share that thing before I lose my mind smelling the smoke. I need the zap in my head.”
She nodded, knowing exactly what I meant. That electrical sizzle deep inside the neuron when you craved something you couldn’t have.
I took it from her, sucked in the smoke, and let it stay for a moment. I let out a low sigh and exhaled, adding my smoke to the fog.
“That’s better,” I said and took another drag, exhaled, and immediately relaxed. I handed it back to her and squared off my shoulders. “Okay, let’s plan this attack. We’re gonna get you healthy whether or not they want it. I feel guilty for getting you sent to the Pit, and you feel guilty for getting me sent to the Pit. Obviously, the only way to ease all this guilt is to fix the thing that’s causing us harm.”
“You sound very determined,” she said and butted out the cigarette onto the fog-dampened bench. She tucked it back into her cigarette pack and put them back inside her hoodie. “How do you propose we start?”
“We start by promising to never do this again,” I said, motioning between her and me. “If you have a problem with me, promise me we’ll talk about it.”
“And you have to promise that you give me a lot of understanding because I’m a Lower,” she said, meeting my eyes with her stubborn defiance. “It’s not that I don’t want to play by your rules. I can’t.”
“I know that now,” I replied. “It didn’t seem fair at first, and it still doesn’t. But I realize how ingrained the attitudes are and how impossible it is to fight against them.”
“It is unfair,” she lamented. “It’s been unfair since I can remember. If you could see how the Lowers live, it might make you angrier than you are. It might make you as fucking mad as I am.”
“I am mad,” I said. “I really am, but the life of an Upper is very constricted. If we could trade places for a day, we might realize there isn’t much difference in the end.”
“If you slept on the dirt floor of a cardboard shack in some shantytown outside of Boston, you might have a different view,” she scoffed again, this time a bitter sound of disdain. Not at all like my friend, the one she’d been before the Pit. That was her now after she’d been broken by her own mind. “And we were lucky. We had walls and a roof. I had seven siblings to keep me warm. Some of the people here? They didn’t even have that.”
I wondered why I hadn’t heard about this, or perhaps I’d known before the accident and just didn’t care. I didn’t like to think of myself like that, knowing about such suffering and inequalities and doing sweet fuck all about them. But if Victoria had been one of my closest friends, I couldn’t imagine I was anybody else.
“Are we comparing sob stories?”
My head whipped around, and my heart gave one heck of a leap in my chest when I saw Luke Lancaster’s face.
He had the power to make everything good again.
CHAPTER6
Luke pushedthrough the hedge on his side, his mouth pulled into a smile, but his flat eyes told a different story. I never heard anything about his life outside the Academy. He wasn’t one to talk about the darker parts of his time away from here. I wondered if he’d been one of the unlucky ones, the kids who didn’t have the house, as shabby as it was. All I knew was that he had a sister, a twin who had disappeared the night of the accident. And I’d known her, supposedly.
Had I done something? I didn’t want to think about it, and I couldn’t let myself go there. Being in the Pit had changed something in me, so in that at least they had succeeded. I was no longer as confused or cynical. I was determined to accept this reality, to fully lean into who I was, the ugly parts and all. I wasn’t given to cynicism without action anymore, and there was no point in being darkly sarcastic, dropping astute observations, or zingers without doing something to change the issues.
“Willow here was trying to tell me how terrible it is to be an Upper,” Harlow said, raising an eyebrow as she stretched her mouth into a sardonic grin. “Can you believe the balls on this one?”
She coughed weakly and covered her mouth. I winced and put my hand on her back out of reflex. She pulled away, but I kept it there to steady her. And to face the fact that she was simply skin stretched across her skeletal frame. I could feel her vertebrae bulging through her hoodie.
“She does have massive lady balls,” Luke said with a wink. He reached into his jacket and drew out a pack of cigarettes. “You want one?”
