“I…” My head whipped around just as a heavy thump reverberated through the narrow tunnel as he collapsed onto his knees, his head dropping forward.
I screamed, scrambling back toward him.
“Go, Lou. Go,” he forced out.“Do not fucking die here.”
“But it’shere,” I sobbed. “It’s here. It’s right here. See?”
Screaming as I pushed my body beyond all human endurance, I shoved back what I thought was the last stone.
Only to reveal more stone. Cold, dead stone.
I collapsed. Gasping, I turned around, hoping to see any trace of hope left in his eyes.
But his eyes were turned away, unable to focus on me. He was clinging to consciousness by a thread only. “Lou,” he rasped. “I’m… I’m so sorry…”
“Don’t,” I choked out. “Don’t youdareapologize.”
I turned to him, vision blurring as I cupped his face between my hands, marred beyond comprehension as it was.
The eyes were the same, though. Even in darkness were his eyes that had once been light, light to astound and baffle andtransform me, even as they wore amber-gold rings of sorrow. Eyes that deserved so much more thanthis.
“Freedom.” He choked out the word. “What’s that, anyway?”
Ordinarily, I might have laughed at his casual brushing off of one of the fundamental pillars of being human. But now I could only choke and weakly suck more poison into my lungs.
“I already almost died a dozen times this week,” he said. “And if—if the only reason I survived any of that is just so I could die here with you—then I’m glad—I’m glad I survived.”
“What’s your name?” I asked him, gently brushing my bloody fingertips over the place where his hair should be.
“What?”
“Your name. Please. I’ve never once asked, ever. It’s not for me to ask. But I want to call you by it. I want toknowyou. Just once, before—Tell me.”
His eyelashes fluttered weakly before his eyelids came to rest. I didn’t expect them to reopen.
“What—what do you want it to be?”
“You—you can’t be serious.”
“I am.” He gasped. “You—you made me a person, Lou.”
“You werealwaysa person.”
“You know what I mean. Just?—”
“I couldn’t. You?—”
But of course I knew. I’d known the moment it came to me, long ago, when I lay in his arms, trembling and ecstatic, a billion years before now. When he’d first given me an orgasm in that stupid, frilly pink princess bed that symbolized everything that didn’t fucking matter—and somehow, everything that did.
And he knew I knew. He’d known it all along.
“Whisper it.”
He was so close, yet I could barely hear him now.
“Whisper it, and—and maybe?—”
“Yeah?” A tear slid down my cheek. Then another. The fact that I could still cry at all was a miracle in itself, but the idea that I’d evernotcry for him was more preposterous still.
