“King,” I said, my tongue thick in a mouth full of sand.
“Cressida,” he replied cautiously as he took the seat across from me.
His impartiality glanced off my heart like a blow but I absorbed the pain and moved on because I deserved it.
I tried to speak without sobbing, realized that wasn’t an option, then swallowed convulsively a few times until I felt I could try again. King watched me, unsmiling, his face hard. I remembered Lysander’s face growing hard like that after years in prison, petrifying more and more every time I saw him until he seemed made entirely of marble. I couldn’t imagine King like that, my smiling, charismatic, rebel with any cause but me, King rotting away in prison for years of his precious life.
“I can’t believe this,” I breathed shakily. “I can’t believe you’re here.”
He didn’t say anything. I stared at him with everything in my eyes, begging him silently to see my words of apology, the promises of eternal devotion I held for him. He refused. It made me realize how much I’d hurt him when I’d ended things. It seemed like a lifetime ago that I’d been that weak, that cowardly, but I realized with an acute pang that I was being just that pathetic now by not giving him the words, by expecting him to read them the way he normally did, like subtitles beneath my silent lips.
So, I sucked in a deep breath that tasted like prison and tried to write King a verbal apple poem.
“Before you, I lived a boring life without passion or turmoil, just the same quiet existence that so many people spend their entire lives living out. It wasn’t enough for me and I didn’t know why. My only escape was through my books. They made me think that life could be made of cotton candy castles and white knights in shining armor. They told me that love was always good in the end, and relatively easy to obtain as long as you were a good person, which I was. Then I saw you in the parking lot and I fell in love you in a way that I’ve never fallen in love with anything before. You changed my life, catastrophically and fundamentally, like a warm water hurricane, and you didn’t even have to open your mouth to say anything except to laugh.
I’ve learned since then that life is messy. It’s soaked in sweat and steeped in tears. It stinks of sex and beer. It means loving so much it burns you down and hating until you fly into a rage. It’s grotesque but beautiful, a creature you can’t even recognize, can’t even name until you have it for yourself and then, you aren’t ever willing to let it go. You, my eighteen-year-old student, taught me how to live and love until I ached with it all and instead of telling you how terrified that made me, how exhilarated and alive, I let fear rule me and I let you down.”
I licked my lips, looked up at him from under my eyelashes to see him sprawled in the uncomfortable metal chair the way he would in his desk at EBA. For some reason, the sight made me want to cry.
“You are the king of all the fears that ruled my life, a man of ferocity and passion and balls to the wall determination and endless, boyish enthusiasm. You crack the soul of life open in your palms and drink your fill. A man like that needs a Queen by his side,” I murmured, repeating my excuse for our breakup back to him in a way that had his eyes clicking to live like flashlights. “And I’m that Queen. I will match your ferocity. I will exceed your passion and challenge your balls to the wall determination. I will see your boyish enthusiasm and raise you my newborn love for life. I will stand beside my biker King and be his rough and tumble Queen, even if it takes me the next ten years to convince you to take me back.”
When I looked up into his eyes again, I saw a passion so fierce I felt his desire echo through my body right down to my toes.
He leaned forward slowly, almost menacingly, until his forearms rested on the table with a clang as his cuffs settled. “Was never gonna let you go, Cress babe. Knew it that day in the parking lot just like you did. There was never a moment after that day that I doubted it.”
“Despite everything, because of everything, I love you,” I whispered as my hands shot out over the table to clutch his.
I ran my fingers over the cold metal shackles, and then spread his hands palms down, on the metal surface so I could trace them with a tender touch before doing the same on the other side. I remapped the ridges of calluses on the pads and base of each finger, the life lines that bisected each palm and the tender network of periwinkle blue veins that spread from each wrist into his hands like tangled roots. It was such a strange thing to be sentimental over, his hands and their amazing beauty, but I found myself finally crying as I took them in a firm grip and brought them to my tear-painted lips.