He stepped toward me and stopped again. “Show me. I need to see.”
I thought about showing him. I wondered what was running through his mind just then. Was he angry for me? Sorry for me? Merely curious? “Never mind. It doesn’t matter.”
“It does. You should at least let me—”
“Leave it.” I clenched my teeth and took a breath to keep from shouting. “I don’t need help.”
“You are being stubborn. I merely want—”
“Leave it!” I glared up at him, but my shouting didn’t make him step back or flinch. His expression was the same one he made when contemplating how much milk to pour in his tea. “I know what I do and don’t need. It’s my body, and I say it doesn’t matter.”
“If you don’t need help, why are you here?”
“Great question.” I started to stand, but my stomach -muscles cramped up, forcing me back down into the chair. I rested my forehead on the table again and waited for the cramping to pass. Lock took yet another step toward me, but I slammed my fist onto the table, and he stopped. “I don’t know!” I yelled into my chest. “I don’t know why I ever come here. To be studied like a rat? To play this bloody game with your bloody rules that mean nothing to anyone! Or maybe I just love the way you refuse to act like an actual person, even for a moment.” I glared up at him again. His face was passive. “More awkward staring? Is that all you will ever have for me?”
He said nothing.
“Is it? I asked you a question, Sherlock. Can you not answer me even a simple question?”
I was being completely unreasonable. I knew I was, which was worse—like being forced to watch someone who is not yourself using your body to be cruel and bitter and ridiculous. Lock only repeated his question in his same stupid, emotionless voice.
“Why are you here?”
“I don’t know!” I stood up, staring him down.
I realized then that my face was completely exposed to him. And instead of hiding, I reached up to push back my hood, offering him the full effect of my injuries under the bright kitchen light. He didn’t flinch, didn’t soften. His face didn’t even hint at an expression. He just stared down his beakish nose at me, as though not even my pain could faze him.
But I needed his reaction for some reason. Needed to know I could hurt him. It was ridiculous and petty, and so much more important to me than it should have been. I was willing to do anything to get at him, apparently, because in the next moment I caught myself saying whatever came into my mind, which ended up being nonsense. Or truth.
“I’m here because you’re here.” I tried to stay angry, to cut that statement with something mean, or at least cheeky. But, instead, I left the words to echo between us.
“Why?”
I shook my head. I had no answers for what I didn’t know myself.
“Why me?” he asked. “You must have other friends. Actual people.”
Internally, I winced at the way he lobbed my words back at me. Still, I took what I deserved. He was right, in a way. I knew loads of people from school. There was a time when I was never home before curfew, barely checked in on weekends. It felt like a very long time ago, that. I had Sadie and others, in fact, but I hadn’t called a single one when my mom got sick. I suddenly wondered what that meant.
I didn’t speak for a long while, and every second of the silence felt like a twisting cloth, coiling tighter and tighter, until the very air seemed to pulse like the throbbing in my head. Finally, he spoke.
“I don’t matter to you,” he said, in his very best fact-listing voice. “That is why you come here. You can do what you like and show me the bad things that might drive someone else away, because it doesn’t matter to you if I leave. You wouldn’t care were I gone tomorrow. And that is why—”
“You’re wrong.” I hadn’t spoken loud enough to interrupt even his quiet little tirade, but the sound of my voice stopped his. “You are so very wrong.”
I felt a wave of emotion well up inside me, and closed my eyes to quash it, to no avail.
“I’m never wrong,” he said.
“You are always wrong.” I forced my eyes up to his, wondering if there had been, perhaps, a crack in his stoicism from my words. He quickly covered if there had.
“Then—” His brow furrowed before he stared again. “Then answer me why.”
“You,” I started, as my mind reeled with a hundred things I wanted to tell him, and a hundred I never would. When I did finally offer an answer, he was standing much closer than I remembered, and that made it harder to speak than it should have. “You have somehow become the first and last place I run to.”
“When things are bad,” he said.
“Good, bad . . .” My shoulders slumped, and it felt like all my remaining strength whooshed out of me with my next exhale. “I think of you first. I need you to know and hate to tell you. You are the only person I can tell, but . . .”