Page 93 of Wicked Vile King
"What's wrong is you will never feel for me what I feel for you," she says, tears wetting thin rivulets down her beautiful face, her cheeks flushed and bloated from crying.
"Explain," I say.
She laughs but there's no amusement in the sound. "See, even now, even after everything, you still can't understand!" She rakes her fingers across her face before she drops them and shrugs. "It's not your fault, Saint. Your brain just isn't wired that way."
"What don't I understand?" I ask, stepping toward her as the damned itching creeps back up again. "What do you feel for me, pretty girl?"
I tip her chin and make her look at me.
"I . . . I . . ."
"Tell me," I command.
I need to hear her say it.
She gets that glare in her eye, the same one she had when I stole that first kiss and took a piece of something much more valuable too.
Shemustsay it. I need her to say it.
"I love you, okay?" she whispers on a breath, spitting out the words like it pains her to utter them. "I love you, and right now, I hate myself for it. I was born the daughter of a businessman and a beauty queen. I was supposed to love a normal boy with normal problems, Saint, like problems about deciding which college to go to or how to get his GPA up. I was never supposed to fall for you."
"Normal boys are for normal girls, pet, and neither one of us is normal."
"But you are sick, Saint!" she nearly sobs. "I shouldn't love you, but the worst part is I don't hate you for it, not for locking me in the dark or collaring me or cutting me or any of it. How can I when your brain makes you what you are?"
She shakes her head viciously, like she's trying to clear the static from her skull.
"No," she continues, "I hate myself instead. I hate that you do little things that make me forget what you are. They're so tiny, so inconsequential to you, yet they mean something to me—like when you paid off the student guide because her parents disowned her for homosexuality or when you told my father that I didn't need his love anymore after he made me cry. Your actions meant something to me, even when you didn't intend for them to mean anything at all, and that's the worst part. You didn't want me to fall in love with you, and you will never, ever love me back. You just can't."
"You love me," I repeat.
It's not the first time I've heard it. Past pets have confused worship for love, Alice, especially. Still, it's oddly nice to hear it come out of her delicious mouth.
She starts to cry again, and I let her.
She's a sopping mess with an injured shoulder—beautiful, bleeding, and all mine.
"Just because I don't feel things the way you feel them," I tell her when it looks like she's gotten through the worst of it, "doesn't mean I don't feel them too."
"Your brain prevents you from feeling love," she says, still sniffling. "That's the literal definition of a psychopath, Saint."
"That's not true. I still feel things . . . maybe not the same way you do, I'm guessing, but I do. Don't put me in some Hollywood-ized standard of a psychopath."
I lean forward, kissing her left cheek and licking away her tears, and then move onto her other. She shivers against me and only when I taste every single one, do I back away enough she can see me again.
"And I love you too, I think, in my own way, pet," I say. "I respect you. I'm grateful for you. I'm proud of you. I would've never made you your own collar otherwise."
"You made me my own collar?" she asks.
"Yes, special, just for you." I tuck her hair behind her ear. "I knew you weren't like the others, obedient and boring. You were different before you ever stepped foot on campus. And then you arrived, and my world changed. You were everything I hoped for and more."
Of course, I made Willow her own collar. She's rare, my most prized pet. I need her to understand!
THE. ITCHING.
She doesn't answer, and I continue.
"I wear a mask, Willow. Every minute of every day. It shows the world that I don't give a fuck, that I don't care if I get out of here in nine months or get sent upstate to some other facility, but I do. I don't want to end up rotting in a mental institution. And if the mask doesn't fool people, then I tell them what they want to hear, that they're interesting, loveable, beautiful, smart, whatever it is they hate most about themselves, and then eventually they come around. But I won't wear a mask with you, if that's what you want, and I've never offered that, not to anyone. It may not be love to you, but it is something to me. I'm offering you vulnerability, Willow, and I don't offer that, not ever. "
