Page 34 of Twice as Twisted

“Oh,” he says slowly, nodding. “You’re pissed. What did I say?”

“Nothing,” I say. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Come on, tell me,” he says, lifting my cat to his cheek and looking up at me with a pair of puppy dog eyes that can melt even a paper heart like mine. “Kitty says it’s only fair. If I said it, I should get a chance to make it right. Your approval might not mean much to Baron, but it means something to me.”

“Why would you care?”

“I want you to like me,” he says, like being that honest is normal for him. “Otherwise what happens when you and my brother get serious? He’ll ditch me to hang out with you all the time. Wouldn’t it be more fun if we could all hang out together?”

“I’ve heard all about your idea of hanging out together,” I say. “I told you, I don’t even like to be touched. This is a pointless conversation and a pointless idea. That’s why I told him no in the first place. I don’t know why you’re even here.”

“Ah, so that’s what you’re pissed about.”

“I’m not pissed.”

“You don’t like that I said sometimes I like to forget who I’m fucking.”

I search for a reason, something a normal girl would say, that doesn’t make me sound crazy, but I can’t think of one. I remember what Carmen said about them one day in class, so I go with that.

“Those girls are trying to help you cope with your sister’s death,” I say. “And you’re trying to forget them while you’re still inside them.”

“Wow,” he says. “You really don’t sugar coat shit, do you?”

“I don’t see the point.”

“Maybe that’s how I cope.”

We stare at each other for a minute, and I see something stubborn in the set of his jaw, his dark eyes with the tiny gold flecks that I’ve never noticed before. Something immoveable and permanent. I don’t like it. It’s unsettling, to think of him putting down roots here in my refuge, refusing to leave, not swayed by my words. I want this pushy boy out of my bed, out of my house. I didn’t agree to this. I didn’t agree to any of this.

I wanted his brother.

“It’s not fair to take advantage of someone’s feelings,” I say quietly.

“Maybe they’re taking advantage of mine,” Duke says. “You don’t think it’s fucked up that girls throw themselves at us ten times more now that we lost our sister? That they shoot their shot because they see that we’re grieving and our defenses are down? Just because I don’t have feelings for every girl I fuck doesn’t mean I don’t have feelings. I’m not a monster.”

Suddenly I think he might cry, and a bubble of shame rises inside me, one I never knew lurked there, preserved in strands of silk and long forgotten. I don’t feel for other people. That’s an expenditure. I absorb things, preserve whatever is input like flies into my web. I don’t expel things, don’t reach out, don’t output parts of myself.

But my brain is telling me to offer something, to rebalance the equation now that he put so much on his side.

“I might be a monster,” I admit, sinking onto the bed beside him and stroking my cat’s soft fur as he curls in Duke’s lap.

“I’m a bit of an expert on monsters, and I can say with a good amount of certainty that you’re not one.” His sober mood slips away, and a smile replaces it.

The relief is instant and freeing, a weight lifted from my conscience. “How are you the expert?”

“I come from a long line of monsters,” he says. “Both my parents are monsters, and my grandparents before them. I myself am a chaos demon, but everyone is their own type of monster.”

“What kind am I?”

“The best kind,” he says, leaning closer, a smile still teasing the corners of his lips as his gaze dips to mine. “Not a monster at all.”

“It’s almost eight,” I say. “You should go. All I have left to do is my hair.”

“You’re not wearing makeup?”

I scowl at him. “I never wear makeup.”

“You don’t need it,” he says, rolling up from the bed. “You’d just be covering up your natural beauty.”

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