Page 54 of Caging Darling

“Whatever you want to tell me,” Peter says, “I’m listening now.”

“Whatever I want to tell you?” I keep tracing in the dust. “I doubt that very much, dear.”

There’s a pleasant smile, even in my tone. The smile on my face the same as my mother so often wore.

“Wendy Darling, I wanted to tell you earlier…”

“But you needed to sleep with me first.”

Peter breathes heavily. “I think we both know that I could have slept with you any time I wanted, and I waited…waited until…”

I spin around to face him. “Want to know why I slept with you?”

He’s breathing hard, his chest heaving. He looks me up and down as if in the shadows, in the folds of my attire or the curves of my hips, he’ll find the answer.

He bites the inside of his cheek and turns to the side, crossing his arms at his chest.

He doesn’t ask why I slept with him. I suppose he doesn’t really want to know.

There was a time when my bargain would have kept me from telling him. But I’m tired of what it means to choose Peter.

Language is funny that way. What does it even mean to choose someone? I’d thought I’d known. Thought it was being everything Peter wanted from me. But magic is fickle, and Peterwas too dull to make our bargain specific. It’s not bound to specifics like my bargain with the Nomad.

Choose me. I’ll rewrite the meaning, twist it until it fits my own agenda. Just like he’s been twisting me.

“I chose you that night, Peter. I’d been holding out for him to come back for me. But I overheard in the washroom from another woman that he’d been in Chora. That he was on his way to Kruschi, on the other side of the world from the warping. He moved on. I’d been waiting for him, but I decided I was tired of waiting for someone who didn’t want me back. So I chose you.”

The next best thing. The second choice, is still a choice, is it not?

“You’re angry with me,” says Peter, swallowing hard. His fingers are tapping at his hips.

I laugh and cock my head at him. “Am I, dear?”

There was a time when I would have thought the bargain a curse. Chains holding me in place, keeping me from screaming at Peter. From telling him how much I hate him.

But that would be such a waste. I can do so much more damage this way.

“Why don’t you just tell me how to feel?” I say, and my voice comes out so eerily sincere, in a way I wouldn’t have been able to act on my own without this curse binding me.

I revel in it.

“Wendy Darling…I think you need some time to process.”

“Good.” I say. “Tell me what I need, too.”

Peter grits his teeth, takes his fingers to his furrowed brow and pinches. “I’m going to make this up to you.”

“I’m sure you’re capable of that.”

“I didn’t mean to kill him, Wendy,” Peter says, his voice desperate now. He’s trying to keep calm, but he’s squeezing his arms so hard his knuckles are turning blue.

“I never said that you did.”

Peter approaches me, desperation in his crazed eyes. “I know you’re mad. I know you think you’ll never be able to forgive me. But please, Wendy. Please, I’m begging you.”

When I lean forward, I smile at Peter. “I choose you, Peter.” My smile is the edge of a razor, dulled by time and depression and faerie dust.

But don’t they say that the dull knife is the most lethal object in the kitchen?

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