Unravel Me (Shatter Me, #2)(79)

I’m silent a moment. I frown at the floor. “It must be great to go through life with so much confidence.”

“You are confident,” he says to me. “You’re stubborn and resilient. So brave. So strong. So inhumanly beautiful. You could conquer the world.”

I actually laugh, look up to meet his eyes. “I cry too much. And I’m not interested in conquering the world.”

“That,” he says, “is something I will never understand.” He shakes his head. “You’re just scared. You’re afraid of what you’re unfamiliar with. You’re too worried about disappointing people. You stifle your own potential,” he says, “because of what you think others expect of you—because you still follow the rules you’ve been given.” He looks at me, hard. “I wish you wouldn’t.”

“I wish you’d stop expecting me to use my power to kill people.”

He shrugs. “I never said you had to. But it will happen along the way; it’s an inevitability in war. Killing is statistically impossible to avoid.”

“You’re joking, right?”

“Definitely not.”

“You can always avoid killing people, Warner. You avoid killing them by not going to war.”

But he grins, so brilliantly, not even paying attention. “I love it when you say my name,” he says. “I don’t even know why.”

“Warner isn’t your name,” I point out. “Your name is Aaron.”

His smile is wide, so wide. “God, I love that.”

“Your name?”

“Only when you say it.”

“Aaron? Or Warner?”

His eyes close. He tilts his head back against the wall. Dimples.

Suddenly I’m struck by the reality of what I’m doing here. Sitting here, spending time with Warner like we have so many hours to waste. Like there isn’t a very terrible world outside of these walls. I don’t know how I manage to keep getting distracted and I promise myself that this time I won’t let the conversation veer out of control. But when I open my mouth he says

“I’m not going to give you your notebook back.”

My mouth falls closed.

“I know you want it back,” he says, “but I’m afraid I’m going to have to keep it forever.” He holds it up, shows it to me. Grins. And then puts it in his pocket. The one place I’d never dare to reach.

“Why?” I can’t help but ask. “Why do you want it so much?”

He spends far too long just looking at me. Not answering my question. And then he says

“On the darkest days you have to search for a spot of brightness, on the coldest days you have to seek out a spot of warmth; on the bleakest days you have to keep your eyes onward and upward and on the saddest days you have to leave them open to let them cry. To then let them dry. To give them a chance to wash out the pain in order to see fresh and clear once again.”

“I can’t believe you have that memorized,” I whisper.

He leans back again. Closes his eyes again. Says, “Nothing in this life will ever make sense to me but I can’t help but try to collect the change and hope it’s enough to pay for our mistakes.”

“I wrote that, too?” I ask him, unable to believe it’s possible he’s reciting the same words that fell from my lips to my fingertips and bled onto a page. Still unable to believe he’s now privy to my private thoughts, feelings I captured with a tortured mind and hammered into sentences I shoved into paragraphs, ideas I pinned together with punctuation marks that serve no function but to determine where one thought ends and another begins.

This blond boy has my secrets in his mouth.

“You wrote a lot of things,” he says, not looking at me. “About your parents, your childhood, your experiences with other people. You talked about hope and redemption and what it would be like to see a bird fly by. You wrote about pain. And what it’s like to think you’re a monster. What it was like to be judged by everyone before you’d even spoken two words to them.” A deep inhale. “So much of it was like seeing myself on paper,” he whispers. “Like reading all the things I never knew how to say.”

And I wish my heart would just shut up shut up shut up shut up.

“Every single day I’m sorry,” he says, his words barely a breath now. “Sorry for believing the things I heard about you. And then for hurting you when I thought I was helping you. I can’t apologize for who I am,” he says. “That part of me is already done; already ruined. I gave up on myself a long time ago. But I am sorry I didn’t understand you better. Everything I did, I did because I wanted to help you to be stronger. I wanted you to use your anger as a tool, as a weapon to help harness the strength inside of you; I wanted you to be able to fight the world. I provoked you on purpose,” he says. “I pushed you too far, too hard, did things to horrify and disgust you and I did it all on purpose. Because that’s how I was taught to steel myself against the terror in this world. That’s how I was trained to fight back. And I wanted to teach you. I knew you had the potential to be more, so much more. I could see greatness in you.”

He looks at me. Really, really looks at me.

“You’re going to go on to do incredible things,” he says. “I’ve always known that. I think I just wanted to be a part of it.”