Broken(24)

    —I’d made that walk with him before, but neither of us were stumbling—

    —They were kissing, deep, passionate, excited—

    —The way I’d never been able to with him for fear of his life—

    And when they were inside, clothing was shed, and she halted, just for a second, her age showing in the crinkling of the crow’s feet around her eyes. Her voice was throaty as she broke away from kissing down his neck and chest. “You don’t have a girlfriend or anything, do you?” Zack paused, opened his eyes and looked down at her, and his mouth opened, but nothing came out. “I mean, I don’t care if you do—” she said and went back to kissing him just below the collarbone.

    “No,” he breathed at last, and she came up to lock lips with him. “I don’t have a girlfriend,” he said as they broke apart, and he ran his hands down her bare back, skin to skin. I watched them collapse onto the bed, in each other’s arms, watched them intimate in a way I had only been with him once, and closer than I had been able to achieve without hurting him seriously—

    —so many kisses, so much touch, his flesh to hers, no barriers between them—

    I wanted to be nauseous, I wanted to be murderous, I wanted to intervene, to hit them both, to destroy the room around them, but I couldn’t. I stood there, watching, as ephemeral as the air, as they made love, slowly, passionately, her cries of pleasure echoing in my ears and giving voice to the scream of agony that wanted to claw its way out of the throat I didn’t presently have.





11.





    I awoke in my own bed, a ragged scream on my lips that I killed as surely as I’d killed Parks and Clary. I fought for even breaths, slow, stable ones that didn’t have me gasping as I sat there. My bed stunk of sweat, as though I’d gotten in it after my fight with Clary instead of waiting until after I’d showered (which I had). I looked at the wrist that he’d broken and it pulsed instead of throbbed. All my pains had become aches in the aftermath of the fight, well on the way to being back to normal. Light streamed in through the curtains at the sides where there was a gap between them and the wall. I’d moved the armoire that used to block the window after I’d started making the house payments with my Directorate salary.

    The sheets were wet around me with the sticky sweat of my skin, alive with the smell of that dampness, and I looked over the remains of my room. Other than changing the positions of the furniture so I could see out the window, all my stuff was still mostly where it had been. My minimal personal belongings.

    The last remnants of my sheltered life.

    The bookshelf was filled to the brimming with books, all the volumes I’d spent my time with when I wasn’t learning the basic skills mother expected me to pick up. There were novels, hundreds of them, all the books on which I’d based my outlook on the world when I wasn’t pulling it from the hour of TV I was allowed to watch every day. I got out of bed and wandered idly over, paging through the spines as I ran my index finger over them. Fantasy, romances, science fiction; I’d read them all. Mother used to bring home a crate of used books every month or two, and I’d go through them, reading them one by one. I’d have to give up a crate to get another, though, because she always claimed we hadn’t enough space to simply keep acquiring them. Once my shelf was full, I had to start cutting the ones I wanted to keep, until finally I had a shelf so filled with my favorites that every choice I made to give one up was as painful as saying goodbye to a dear friend. Every book I got rid of in order to add a new classic was a sacrifice. It had been the only way I’d felt emotions, other than through TV. It was the only way I’d felt connected to people. I was a mimic, and I tried to match how to feel with the way people felt in the stories I read and watched. I wondered how well it had translated.

    Seeing the memories from Zack’s unguarded moments told me that it had not translated well at all. I’d been a freak from the beginning, ill-equipped to do anything but snarl at the people around me at the Directorate. I swallowed and felt that lump in my throat again. He hadn’t ever really been ‘into’ me. He was paid to feign interest by Old Man Winter.

    I felt the burn of bile in the back of my throat.

    That’s right, Little Doll. Now you see how the old frost giant pushed you all along, manipulated you, played games with you.