Page 140 of The Nightmare Before Kissmas
“Are unworthy of being a part of that future. Is that it? Prince Coal, the joke, good enough to screw around with but too much of a screw-up to trust?”
His eyes fly open. “Don’t twist this,” he snaps like he has any right to be mad at me. “Don’t you dare hide behind your insecurities. That’s not what this is. You have to think—”
“I’mhiding behind my insecurities? What about you?”
“What about me?”
I gape at him. He’s the most infuriatingly self-aware person I’ve ever met, and he’s truly asking me that?
“Who is putting this pressure on you to choose your duties over yourself? Who put the pressure on you to bow to my dad’s threats? It’syou.You’re the one choosing not to try to fight for us. You can stand here and tell me this was always going to end helplessly but I know this meant something to you, and I know you don’t think for one second that I’d have let you leave here on Christmas Eve or any time and bedonewith you. Could you leave here and be done with me?”
“I need you to have something that you can be proud of.” He bypasses all my questions, ignores them with a rising snarl. “I cannot leave knowing that you are stifled here when I have seen how capable you are of such resonant greatness. I need you to behappy.”
He says it like he’s accusing me of something.
My eyes shift through his. “Okay,” I say slowly. “I need you to be happy too. That’s what I’m—”
He rips his hand up, makes a fist, grimacing, breathless in a surge of such anger that I go silent again.
“The only thing that has mattered in my life for the past two and a half years has been Halloween. I have devoted myself to making it the best it can be for the people who need the joy we offer, because I’ve been consumed by how frantically needed our type of joy is. To find joy in fear and darkness, to scratch out some semblance of happiness in grief and absence. To look at something that is only terror and danger and find itbeautiful,not in spite of the things that make it horrifying, but because of it. Since Raven’s death, I have understood my Holiday on a primal level I never could before, so I committed to it. It iseverything.
“But since coming here, all I can think about, my every waking thought consumed and clouded by, isyou.You being happy. You having what you so deserve.I need you to be happy,Coal. I need to know that you’re taken care of, or at least on the path to being taken care of, so I can bewholeagain. I need you to be happy so I can stop being plagued by you. I will handle whatever fallout comes from your father. It’s long past time that I did—please,pleasedon’t give up on the winter Holidays collective.”
The pieces of his logic puzzle together in my head and it’s the most toxic tapestry of hope and agony.
“You don’t think you could do both—be with me, and do what Halloween needs you to do?” I am being depleted of emotion. “Look into my eyes and tell me that you’d never think of me again if you knew Christmas was secure and made me happy.”
He’s fuming. At himself. At me, for forcing him to this, and his eyes snap to the side. “It’s not that simple—”
“You love me,” I tell him. “You love me and you’re kidding yourself if you think everything we have would go away with you being content in my happiness over myduties.Because you know what, Hex?I won’t be happy without you.Christmas could be idyllic and I’d be miserable without you.”
“That.” He points at me. “That is where you’re wrong. We have responsibilities. Love doesn’t change who we are.”
“It changed who I am.”
He digs his fist into his stomach, I can see the effects of this in the set of his shoulders and the clench of his lips and I know I should feel pain too, but my body has gone numb.
I step closer to him. Just enough that he has to look up.
“Say you love me,” I beg him. Order him. He could change everything with those three words.
“Say you will continue with the winter Holidays,” he returns.
It would destroy him. His Holiday. It would only end in disaster because that’s whathappenswith me, disaster, and he thinks he can endure it now, but—butIcan’t.
We hold. Waiting for the other to break. Giving it another moment longer, one more second, please,please—
“You said we have responsibilities to help bring the world joy.” I finally crack the tension, and Hex’s eyelids pulse, a wince. “But I’ve never had responsibilities beyond myownjoy, and that’s why I didn’t think of Christmas’s future when my father was threatening everything I care about. I only thought ofmyfuture. I only thought ofyou.I was selfish and stupid, like I always am, like nothing’s changed, because apparently nothinghaschanged.”
Hex yanks in a breath that pinches into a moan, and this anger he’s showing me is his façade. He’s hurting behind it, keeping up this shield, and I realize that, but it does nothing to stop the hole of blackness sucking up everything in my chest.
“Coal,” he tries, “this isn’t how I wanted this to—this isn’t—”
I pin my eyes to the wall behind him. One last shred of stoicism centers me, a lifeline thrown down into my abyss and I cling to it with all my strength. “My father is sending you home. You can leave now.”
“Not like this. Coal.Look at me—”
He reaches for me but I put my back to him and get thehell out of there,slamming the door behind me.
