Page 62 of Real

“That’s okay. Dorian was a jerk. Good riddance.”

“But what does that mean? What am I? What is my purpose? What was I created for?” Buddy pulls away from me as he says this, looking for an answer in my eyes.

“What if you’re just a person? Not a skatt, not a magical mate. Just Buddy.”

Insecurity flashes in his eyes for the first time in this conversation. “Who is Buddy?”

“Buddy is still figuring out who he is like every other human being out there. He doesn’t have to know everything right away.”

His attention turns back to the painting of the fox. “How long does it take to figure it out?”

“A lifetime, I think.” I probably shouldn’t be giving anyone advice. I don’t know much about who I am either.

Buddy holds out his hand to me. “I… want to show you something.”

He leads me through the living room to the kitchen where he probably spent a lot of time cooking, until we reach a wide hall. At the end of the hall he stops in front of a door.

“What’s this?” I ask.

He wraps his arms around me and holds me so tight I can barely breathe.

That’s when I realize what this is.

It’s his closet.

“Do you want me to open it?” I won’t do it without his permission. These are his demons we’re dancing with right now, and he gets to decide how close we get to them.

He nods against my shoulder.

I twist the knob and slowly pull the door open. It’s no bigger than a standard coat closet with a shelf that’s too low to allow an adult to stand up. The closet reeks of Buddy’s slick, only this slick doesn’t smell sweet and wonderful like it did in the car. It has a horrible edge of something else.

On the compound they say an omega’s slick goes sour if they’re unhappy. Maybe that’s what it is.

The walls of Buddy’s closet are lined with pieces of paper. On them are drawings of the ocean, elegant cranes, and Candlewick’s face. Or not drawings, per se. The pictures aren’t made of lines. They’re a compilation of colored-in spaces.

Almost like the way Illusors create images with their light.

“I don’t want to feel trapped ever again. I want to be free,” he whispers.

“Okay,” I say. “What does being free mean to you? Going back to the Illusors?”

“If I were free, I would be with you.”

I hold Buddy for a long time outside his closet. We don’t talk about the fact that his body is still plastic and always will be if he doesn’t bond to an Illusor. We don’t talk about the things Dorian said before he died. We don’t even talk about how unbelievably tired we both are. At four o’clock in the morning, when I’m about to collapse on my feet, Buddy leads me to a room on the other end of the house.

“This is the guest room,” he explains.

We lie down on the big, luxurious bed and Buddy snuggles into my arms.

I know I’m not supposed to think this moment is perfect. There are so many things wrong that we’ll need to fix, and I probably won’t get to keep Buddy for long, but holding him close in this bed is probably the closest thing to perfect I’ll ever get.

I close my eyes and drift off to sleep.

27

Buddy

I wake on a soft bed in Timothy’s arms. Sunlight pours through the window of the guest room. We must have slept all night.

---