How could she ask that? For five years I’d been waiting for this. Convinced myself all too well I’d been seeing a ghost. But he was real, he was bone and skin and blood and here, and I was going to take those things from him, one by one.
“I can’t make that promise.”
“At least for tonight. God.” Her face was an alabaster mask but I heard the crack in her voice. “How many fucking times am I going to lose you?”
Fury drained. I released, and her fingers trailed down my arms.
“Promise me,” she whispered.
“Fine. I promise. For tonight.”
She pushed me back onto the couch. Sat on the coffee table, took my hands in hers. There was something so familiar in this. Like that night, years ago: me, broken, and her picking up the pieces. Building a weapon out of them.
“So. Adam’s back in town.” Her fingers tightened on mine. “Now how are we going to kill him?”
—4—
Laney was alone when I arrived. We sat cross-legged on bare hardwood, her cat curled in her lap. Sun painted stripes of gilt over his orange coat, and the smell of smoke and soap blended into bittersweet perfume. Their energy mingled here—Blythe’s fire, Laney’s ice—resulting in something volatile but contained, a hurricane trapped under a glass. Blythe said their crazinesses balanced each other out. Armin called it codependence. It was just love, I thought, between two broken girls. Two forces of nature meeting, wrecking each other, spinning out the bright shards of their mutual destruction.
Maybe I had issues with love, too.
Orion, the cat, watched me through slitted eyes as I spoke.
“I get why you didn’t tell me about Crito. I understand it very, very well. Because someone else from my past is back, and I need help before I do something crazy.”
Laney nodded as she stroked Orion’s head. “This is what I like about you.”
“Emotional instability? A hair trigger for violence?”
“Total lack of bullshit.” She set Orion on the floor. “Come on.”
We stepped onto the balcony. Windy today, a whirl of invisible blades slashing at our hair, our skin. Laney huddled in her flannel, so small and frail-looking I felt an impulse to sling my arm around her—no matter that she was one of the most powerful people in town, the black hole center of our universe. That she could crook her finger and destroy a man’s life. And had. Still, in all her willfulness there was something vulnerable. The wounded warrior, doomed, hell-bent on taking everyone else down with her. Or maybe I was projecting, like Armin. Seeing the person I used to be.
Below us the streets rushed with endless streams of light, electric veins twisting through the city’s neon heart. Laney lit a cigarette and exhaled.
“What do you want to do to him?”
“Kill him. In the most painful way possible.”
A ring of fire ate its way down her cig. “That’s pretty crazy.”
“I’m not going to sugarcoat it. I need this, Lane.” I leaned on the railing, scraping my nails through thin frost. “I wouldn’t ask if there was any reasonable alternative.”
“Are you sure it’s him?”
“Yes.”
Months ago, when I first thought I saw him, I’d told her, Either I’m losing my mind or he’s back. She didn’t judge. She didn’t try to convince me otherwise. She believed me.
Being believed feels almost as good as vengeance.
Laney ashed and the wind shredded it into a little blizzard. Her face was blank but I saw the war in her eyes. Finally she said, “I can’t. I want to, but I can’t.”
“You owe me.”
Her forehead creased, a fine fracture on a porcelain doll. “Black Iris is a house of cards. Threats leaning on threats, lies built on lies. He’s connected to Crito, Ren. They’re old friends. You know that. Messing with him right now could destroy everything I’ve been building up. Those cards could collapse on us instead of them.”
“You owe me,” I said again.
Her eyes closed. She sighed. “I know.”
Inside the apartment she moved pensively, aimlessly. Out of character. Delaney Keating always had a goal and always poured every ounce of energy into that goal. Now she drifted, scattered. At last she grabbed her coat and keys.
“Where are we going?” I said.
“I want to show you something.”
We took a bus east, got off in hipster wastelandia, thrift stores standing cheek to cheek with pricey bistros. Laney led me to a café that looked like a page from a Restoration Hardware catalog. This was Ingrid’s milieu. A place where people who were marginalized—but not too marginalized—could meet and talk. Queer white kids with trust funds, like her. We used to argue about it endlessly. My money doesn’t matter, she’d said. You have male privilege and straight privilege. But I will always be a woman, and a lesbian.
It’s not the Oppression Olympics, I’d said. Being a trans guy isn’t easier than being a queer girl.
She’d shaken her head. Margaret Atwood said the difference between men and women is that men fear that women will laugh at them, while women fear that men will kill them. Do you get that? I’m on the side that laughs. You’re switching to the side that kills.