“Maybe we all do,” he says quietly.
“I’m no use to you anymore,” I whisper. “Royal doesn’t care about me. I’m dead to him.”
“Do you think you could stay one more night?” he asks, the ache of his vulnerability making my chest contract painfully. “Just let me hold you one more time.”
I nod, my eyes burning. He slides onto the chaise with me, fitting his body along mine. He doesn’t put the mask back on, and he faces me, but he closes his eyes, as if he can’t bear to see my face now that I’ve seen his. I turn toward him in the chair. I run my fingertips over his unmarked cheek and then his scarred one. Finally I lean in and brush my lips over each eyelid. The contrast brings tears back to my lashes.
“Thank you for saving my life,” I whisper.
The corner of his mouth tugs up the slightest bit. “Ditto.”
I let out a quiet laugh through the tears. “I didn’t do anything.”
“You never know.”
Sometimes you do, though.
*
For months, Mr. D woke me up to fuck every morning. Since returning to him, he hasn’t touched me. Not that way. On the first day I planned to return to Faulkner High, the first day of classes at Willow Heights, I wake to the sun streaming in the wall of windows. We came down after dark last night, and he lay me in bed between his high thread count sheets. He didn’t take pictures. We didn’t talk. He just turned off the light without replacing his mask.
This morning, he’s still asleep, his terrible, scarred face even more heartbreaking in the light of day. I get up and shower, since I didn’t get a chance last night. When I come out of the bathroom, he’s sitting up in bed, his mask over his face again.
“One more time, for old time’s sake?” he asks, patting the bed beside him and giving me a tentative smile. It’s different, though. We’re real people now, not marionettes. He hasn’t fucked me in weeks, since I told him I wouldn’t be his whore.
“Can I get my scholarship back?” I ask.
It’s too late for me anyway. I’m already a whore.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he says with a little smile, like he’s thinking about the same thing, like he wants to assure me it’s not a trade for sex.
I’ve been considering this since I started making up the work, debating whether I’m strong enough. I’ve finally decided.
I’m notstrongenough.
I’mbrokenenough.
If I could bear the brutality of the Dolce twins and their friends for one night when I was whole, I can bear to see them every day now that nothing matters. I might have freaked out when I saw Royal, but that’s because I loved him once. He won’t be at Willow Heights, though. If I do this, I will never have to see any of them again in my life when it’s over.
If this is what I have to do to leave this place and never look back, start over somewhere far away, where no one knows my name or my body, I will. I once felt a kinship with Mabel Darling, but now I truly understand. Now I know what would make a person change their name and disappear like a ghost, cutting ties with even their family. Some rottenness is too severe to fix, and the only way to live is to cut it all away, like a gangrenous limb.
And I’m just numb enough to cut away mine.
I climb onto the bed and sit back on my feet. “Take off the mask,” I tell Mr. D.
He hesitates, and I watch his Adam’s apple bob as he swallows. Then he reaches back and unties it, dropping it onto the nightstand before reaching for me. He pulls me into his lap, then grabs the lube in his top drawer. I catch his wrist.
“Do it right,” I say, sliding off him and pulling him back down on the bed.
He draws the covers over us and scoots close, until our bare bodies are pressed together. I try not to think about all the things we said to each other in those messages, so many months of messages. It doesn’t seem real, that he can be the same person. He’s not what I pictured at all. But maybe no one is.
He presses his lips to mine for the first and last time, cupping my cheek in his hand, saying goodbye. The ache in each slow kiss twists tight inside my chest until I’m sure my ribs will crack. He slides his other hand between my thighs and touches me, and when I’m ready, he rolls onto me and pushes inside me.
“Good girl,” he says, his lips skimming mine. “So fucking good.”
I close my eyes. “Mr. D,” I whisper, as if to make it more real.
He lets out a little laugh of breath. “You don’t have to call me that when I’m inside you,” he says. “It makes me imagine you’re picturing my dad.”