Collared(61)

He glances around my room for a moment. I wonder if he’s thinking the same thing. I wonder if he knows the exact spot where we had our first kiss, cross-legged and laughing on the floor.

“So I noticed you’ve been avoiding the world lately.” He backs into the closet doors and leans into them. My bed’s in the opposite corner.

“The world can just kiss my ass.” I settle the stuffed elephant back onto the rocking chair.

Torrin notices it, something flickering in his eyes. “Do you want to talk about it?”

My exhale comes out in a huff. “No.

“Good.” He claps and continues. “So let’s move on to the reason I scaled your roof.” He holds my eyes, not letting them wander away from him. “Why have you been avoiding me?”

I wander my room, not sure where to go now that he’s here. I’m not sure where I fit now. I’m not sure where I fit in his life.

“You know why,” I say quietly. “Could have saved yourself the scaling.”

“I want to hear you tell me why.”

“Why?”

“So I can change your mind.” His hands slide into his front pockets, and the sunlight catches on his dad’s watch and casts golden beams through the room. It lights up like someone just lit a million candles at once. “I can’t do that unless I know exactly why you don’t want to see me.”

“Because I don’t want to drag you into my mess of a world any more than I already have. Because I don’t want to smear you through the mud on the media’s march to burying me. Because I don’t want to hurt you—again—and because I want to protect you.”

“I can protect myself from them.”

I shake my head and cover my chest with my hand. “To protect you from me.”

Torrin’s jaw hardens. He works it loose the moment after. “I don’t need protection from you.”

“Everyone needs protection from me. There’s something dark in me now, Torrin, and I can’t get it out. It’s growing, spreading, and I don’t want it to infect the people I love.”

He pushes off the closet doors and crosses the room before I know he’s coming. “There is nothing dark in you, Jade. Nothing.” He backs me into the wall and stares at me, unblinking. “There is light and good in you. There always has been. There always will be.”

“That’s gone. He took it from me.”

“No, he didn’t.” Torrin’s hand slams into the wall beside my head. “It’s still there. You had to bury it to keep it safe, but it’s still there. You’ll find it. I know it.”

I want to believe him, but that doesn’t make it true. “You can’t find what isn’t there, Torrin.”

“Dammit, stop talking like that,” he says, his jaw tightening. “It’s there. I know it.”

“I’ve tried. I can’t find it.” Even as I say it, I start to feel differently. It’s because of him being so close, saying what he is in the way he is. He’s the tether that keeps me from floating away.

His eyes lower to mine. “I’ll help you find it.”

I feel my heart again. My lungs. Everything else. I feel them waking up after a week. “What makes you so sure you can find it?”

“Because when I look in your eyes, I still see it.” His other hand fits against the wall. “Because when I’m close to you like this, I can still feel it.” He leans a little closer, and I feel something too. “It’s there, Jade. It’s not gone. He took ten years of your life—ten years.” The corners of his eyes crease as an emotion fires in his eyes. “Don’t hand him the rest of it by believing that kind of shit.”

I’m so surprised by his sudden outburst I’m kind of shocked right out of whatever grey patch I’ve been hovering in. The constraints around my chest start to loosen. “You just said shit. Again.”

His brow cocks. “So?”

“You’re a priest. Again.”

The corner of his mouth twitches. He leans in and winks. “I’m not a very good one, remember? I forget the small stuff all the time.”

His hands are stationed around my head, his face aimed right in front of mine. I feel . . . alive. “Like cussing?”

“Like cussing.” His shoulder lifts. “And other things.”

“What other things?”

He leans in even closer, until I can see the flecks of pewter in his light eyes. Then he shoves away from the wall. “You’ll know them when you see them.”

My palms are stuck to the wall, and when I peel them away, they make a sound. It’s nice to feel alive. To feel something . . . for someone. Even if it’s just sweaty palms caused from an intense stare.

“So now that we’ve cleared up all that, you have no reason to avoid me anymore.” Torrin’s fingers brush across my vanity where my dried corsages used to be.

“Nothing’s cleared up. I won’t let everyone think you’re some kind of immoral person because there are pictures of us dancing and someone said you followed me out of a party.”

His eyes drop to the spots on the wall my hands were just splayed across. His head tips, and I notice two slightly darker impressions from my clammy hands. He doesn’t say anything. But that kinda says more than any words could.