Page 51 of Scary & Bright
She nodded, still with her head facing away from me. She tilted her eyes toward the ceiling as if she were trying to stave off tears.
“He does that to ensure that it’s done before it’s too late…” I debated internally if I should reach out and touch her, pull her into me, hold her hand, anything to communicate that I wasn’t trying to hurt her, and I definitely wasn’t trying to make her upset. I had just lived this life for so long that I knew Mister’s theory was a suggestion that required many moving parts to work out just perfectly. “Mister’s idea that you can take a name off the Naughty List by redeeming their character is one that, I’ll admit, does make sense on paper… It’s just that I’m just not the only one that needs convincing.”
“So, we convince Santa Claus as well,” Holly insisted, finally turning to look at me with her cheeks aflame with frustration. “Santa has to have some sort of kindness within him. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be the Santa Claus. Maybe he’ll be happy to hear us out. Maybe all of this has been hard for him, too.”
“Maybe,” I lamented as my hands naturally gravitated toward the collar around my neck. “But I hope you can understand why I find that concept a difficult one to believe.”
As soon as the words left my mouth, I knew I had made an already difficult situation even worse.
“Oh…” Holly muttered.
She must have believed the same thing I did because the tears began to flow freely down her face. She crawled over the blankets toward me and slumped into my lap.
“I’m sorry,” she said between quiet sobs. “But I’m also not sorry. I just so badly want this to be okay. I want to stay here with you.”
I ran my fingers through her hair gently, doing my best to comfort her while feeling tormented by the same feelings she was experiencing. I didn’t want this to end. The happiness and companionship were more than intoxicating. They were now necessary. Before Holly, I was barely hanging on to this life, gliding through it like a ghost that knew nothing of the world but pain, loneliness, and remorse. To have her here now showed me this new world and this new way of living where waking up every morning wasn’t the most excruciating thing but rather something to look forward to.
“I want you to stay here, too,” I said in a near whisper. “I want it more than anything in the entire world.”
“Then why won’t you try?” She was becoming frantic again, her breaths speeding up, almost as if she were hyperventilating. She sat up again, and her eyes were red and puffy. I hated seeing her like this. “Why won’t you believe there’s a chance?”
“Because I’m scared!” I said in a harsher voice than I was prepared to use. The floodgates were open now, and all the truths of my anxieties rushed to the surface. “Because my brother has kept me in line for centuries by simply the threat of this collar. I’ve never once let it go off for fear of what it would be like, but I am prepared to experience it for you, Holly! Don’t you understand that?”
She moved off my lap, and I threw my legs over the side of the bed to stand. I couldn’t sit still with the adrenaline pumping through me as it was. As terrible as I felt about acting like this and raising my voice, I also felt comfortable enough to let it out for the first time.
“I don’t want to put any faith into Mister’s theory because… What if he’s wrong?” I marched toward the end of the bed and faced her as she sat against the headboard with her legs pulled into her chest. “If he’s wrong, the heartbreak would be a fate worse than an eternity of torture.”
My eyes began to burn as I looked at Holly, her eyes still puffy, looking incredibly defeated. She reminded me of a dove with clipped wings. There was so much going on in her head that I could see it printed across her face. Her pupils stared intensely toward her feet, her mouth was scrunched to the side in thought, and for a while we just sat there in tense, awkward silence. The only discernible sound was blood rushing through my head and the beat of my pulse pounding like a battering ram against my chest. I leaned forward and placed my hands on the mattress and began counting my breaths to ground myself as I had done so many times before, considering all the ways this situation could end.
One. She’s giving up on me. She’s going to isolate herself away from me to save her own emotions from further turmoil.
Two. She’s angry with me and is trying to find the words to cut me down. She’ll never forgive me, and she’ll never understand.
Three. She’ll find me weak and unworthy of her affection. If I was unwilling to take the leap with her, then that meant I was unwilling to love her the way she needed to be loved.
Four. She’ll understand. The most unlikely of outcomes, but the one I hoped would come to fruition.
“So…” Holly’s voice cracked. “We know what would happen if Mister’s theory is wrong. But what if it’s right?”
This girl was not going to give up. Not on me, and not on the hope that we would be okay in the end. My heart physically ached inside my chest as I began to feel myself tear in two different directions. Truthfully, I’d never wanted Mister Bear to clue Holly in on the path he’d been trying to talk me down all these years because I knew she would cling to it, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to tell her no.
So, rather than continue to argue what I felt in my soul was a moot point and push her away from me, I chose to take the easy way out. I chose to remain as neutral as possible. It wasn’t quite diving in with both feet, and it wasn’t quite denying her the opportunity to feel right.
“I guess we’ll find out.” I sighed, forcing a sideways smile.
“How long until we do?” she asked, her expression still wrecked with sadness. “How long until we find out?”
I didn’t even have to look at the calendar. I’d been counting down the days since the moment I’d laid eyes on her in the dank basement cell.
“Less than a week,” I said, hating to say it out loud. Verbalizing our timeline made it feel real, and I had gotten quite comfortable pretending it didn’t exist. “Five days, maybe.”
Holly sighed and wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands. “Then I guess we’d better make the most of them.”
“I guess so,” I added as I climbed up onto the bed on all fours and carefully rested my horned head in her lap. She began to pet me between my horns.
“I’ll hope for the best,” Holly said, running her fingers through my hair. “Even if you don’t.”
I closed my eyes and cringed, fully hating myself for my inability to put my own fears aside and join her in her faith.