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Baz is here.
Baz is here, and the TV light is blinking, asking me if I'm still watching. Baz is here, and there's grease beneath my nails from the popcorn bag, and he's just there. Looking at me, looking at me. Looking at me.
It's late, or early. Penny isn't here. I want to break eye contact with the television, but if I do, I might be letting it win. It knows that I'm still watching. It shouldn't get to ask me like that, and make me feel guilty for sitting here with my wings sprawled out, scraping the butter from the bottom of the bag.
"Are you going to call me a barbarian," I say tonelessly to the telly.
Guilt is a funny thing. It makes you frozen. It paralyzes you like a bug in one of those gruesome sticky traps, and it tells you there's no point in fighting. I shouldn't fight for him. I should let him extract himself from this mess. Beautiful, haunting, starstruck Baz.
He's not starstruck anymore, because I'm not actually the star he thinks I am.
He doesn't answer my question. I might not have asked it. His jeans drag across the sofa. I've got to see what he's doing, what he's up to, but I can't—
Still watching?
"What are you doing, Baz?"
My voice breaks. I said it out loud this time, was somehow loud enough for him to hear me. Back in the care homes, I could cry silently. Nobody would notice me sobbing myself dehydrated as a kid, probably over something stupid and pathetic like I'm doing now, except there aren't any tears.
"Going to bed."
Baz's voice is very frail. I've never heard it like that. I. Can't. Look at him.
"Baz."
I've never had sleep paralysis before, but Baz did, once. I heard him screaming once, thrashing against the sheets, and when he was still half-asleep, he muttered, "Simon, I couldn't move before."
Now I know what it feels like.
"Baz!"
"Yes, love?"
The name neatly impales my heart on a spit and begins to slowly turn it beneath the killing flames.
"Baz."
He sinks back onto the sofa, where I've become melded. I feel the whisper of closeness between his hand and my face, and I can't pull away because I'm still watching, but I do manage to make this awful tiny sound in the back of my throat. The whisper stops.
"Aleister Crowley," Baz says, and his voice is dripping with something, those crisp consonants sliding into lofty vowels, and I want to wrap my hands around it, make sense of it, let it wind carefully around my fingers like a lock of hair. He's always known how to infiltrate my walls. I want him to say something to get me angry so that I'll be able to move. But he won't do it, because he said he—
He wants this.
He can't want this.
Still watching?
"Baz—"
"Simon." His voice snaps a little, and I feel the tiniest shred of relief, because the pins and needles are coming back to my body.
"Don't sleep here. Don't stay here any longer, you don't have to." I can't stand the thought of him here, in this awful seventh circle of Hell. He's angelic; he needs to be somewhere elevated, like he is. He needs to be with someone who isn't like me. Anyone will do, just as long as they're kind to him. They would be, wouldn't they, and they'd make sure to hold him through his nightmares like I always wanted to but never was able to?
Baz hisses out a breath. It unlocks something in me, but I can't get my hands around it. "Ah. All right. Of course." Baz's voice is cold, lifeless, and there's nothing worse than that, because he should at least be telling me how useless I am. He's not. He won't let himself.
"It's okay. You can leave."
He doesn't answer. I heave in a breath, and it winds so tight in my gut, like a spring about to snap. I force out the rest of the words. "It's okay. You need to go."
Baz moves into my field of vision, blocking the Netflix screen, and this wounded, punctured sound rushes out of me, but Baz moves away just as quickly. He's crossing into the kitchen, say things to himself or to me, I can't tell.
"Of course. Sorry. I shouldn't have—of course, I'll go. Okay."
I've never heard him like that.
I try to tell the screen that yeah, I'm still watching, but I'm glued to Baz now, the back of his dark head as he moves in fits and starts. And I've done something wrong again, everything is wrong.
"You shouldn't have come!" I blurt out. "You shouldn't have had to do that."
He whirls around, too fast, and I see the dizzy look in his eyes before he looks at me. I don't know how I missed the wreckage of his expression until now. He breathes once, shuddering in and out.
"Please," he says, and his voice is so soft and careful that I almost don't hear it.
"I don't need anything. I promise."
"Simon, please."
Baz turns off the telly. I gasp.
I can't move, still; just my head. "Please what?"
"Please don't—" Baz breaks off. I look over and see that he's good at silently crying, too. "Please don't say you don't need me."
I stand up. Everything is terrible. "Baz. I couldn't move before."
He makes a sound, a broken sound. Then he's rushing toward me, stopping in front of me. His eyes are unbearably sad.
"Do you want me to go?"
"I don't know."
"I'll go. You asked, earlier. I shouldn't have—"
"Baz, come back tomorrow. Will you?"
Baz smiles thinly, a devastating quirk of his lip and a hastily-crafted lightness in his eyes. "Yes, all right."
…
Father tried to teach me a lot of things. Only rarely did he succeed.
He taught me how to think that I was the worst person in the world, because Father Christmas had not come and my mother was still gone. He taught me how to be the smallest thing in that giant house, obligingly making room for a new family. But he never taught me how to stop loving Simon Snow, even if he tried. He's never going to succeed.
Simon is marooned in the sinkhole of his sofa. The sun might never rise again.
What I want to say to him is, "Don't make me leave. I'll do anything. Let me stay in the corner of the kitchen where you don't have to look at me; I'm good at that. Let me hide behind a smile. Just don't make me go home."
But I don't say that, because he can do anything, anything he wants; he can have the whole world. If it is in my power, I will find it for him. I'm like him and his missions, the ones he used to go on—if he sends me to quest for something, I'll search for a hundred years to find it. He didn't ask me to do that; it's just how I am.
I used to worry myself to death when he was gone, on those missions. Sometimes a storm would slip heavily onto the rooftops, and I'd wonder if he might get trapped beneath its weight, one of these days, if he would never come back.
The door is right there. I can go out.
Simon isn't looking at me. I can always tell when he was. I bet if I give him another minute, he'll be asleep. Fitfully half-dozing on the sofa cushion.
He asked me to come back tomorrow, but one of these days it will be next week. Then in a month. And then he'll forget why he needed me in the first place.
I want to act like I'm plotting something, so he'll be suspicious. I want to say, "Look, look, see what I can do, are you watching?" But Father taught me out of that childish game as soon as Christmas was over.
I touch the cold handle. Suppress a shiver. Think about saying goodbye. Think about turning and saying I love him, just to see what he'll do.
But I won't like it. He'll tell me to leave again.
My hand tightens around the handle. I manage to rip the bandage off and get through it fast, slamming the door behind me and slipping out onto the street, but then I'm just staring at the huge, gaping neighborhood, unsure where to go. I don't know where to go if it's not by his side.
He said to come back tomorrow. I will; I'll come back early enough, quick enough, that he might remember how much I care about him, and then it might be enough. I might be close to enough.
A car horn wails down the street. It's July, but I've never been so cold.
I think about stationing myself outside this door, waiting for him to forgive me. I'm still not sure what I did wrong. It's cold, too cold, so cold.
Sometimes the street lamps malfunction. I wonder how they make them waterproof—or maybe they don't, maybe that's the problem.
I find my way home—or at least, to the understudy of home. It's a poor stand-in. Fiona will be drunk, and soon I'll be thirsty for blood—no, I'm always thirsty, but I only act when it becomes unbearable, when I can bring myself back to a state of semi-humanity. Maybe it's that. Maybe Simon can't stand to look at me because of that.
When I was younger, I tried thinking up explanations for why Father Christmas didn't want to send me gifts anymore. I was so good at filling in the blanks. Now, I can't bring myself to do it with Simon. I can't imagine him cruel enough to hate me. He could never hate anyone.
I knock on my own door. Fiona's passed out—I can hear her faint snoring—so I let myself in with my wand. The magic feels awful in my mouth. I don't deserve it—I don't deserve Simon Snow.
I can walk around in the dark—"Little creep," Fiona used to call me affectionately—so I don't have a hard time making it to bed. If I sleep, morning will come quicker, and I'll be able to go back to him and that terrible deserted flat, and that awful telly, and that beautiful boy.
The sun's thinking about rising. The sheets are too cold. I can't sleep without the lullaby of his breathing. But I know it forwards and backwards—I can recreate it, after all these years.
It's that awful understudy, that shoddy imitation, that finally lulls me to sleep.