Page 7 of The Love Interest
He’s staring at me with one eyebrow slightly raised, but the corner of his mouth keeps twitching up, so very close to a smile. “Maybe you are Nice after all. Maybe I should be worried.”
He grabs the chair and swings it around so the high back faces me. The legs screech against the concrete. Then he sits down, with his chest pressed against the chair’s backrest and his hands propping up his chin, which is covered in a few days’ worth of black scruff. A large patch on his right cheek is totally hairless.
He looks me in the eye. His eyes are a rich, earthy brown, so startlingly normal that they’ll probably be changed. Brown is too boring for a Bad. I hope I’m wrong, because he’s incredibly handsome already. Any improvements would just increase the chances of her falling for him at first sight.
“I realized something,” he says. “This is the last moment we have to be ourselves. As soon as they call us, we’ll stop being us and we’ll start being Love Interests, with our whole identities changed to fit what she wants. So I want to take this moment, the last moment of being me, and avoid all that competitive bullshit and spend a second saying what I truly think. And seeing as you’re here, I want to have, like, an actual conversation with you. My—no, our—last one. So what do you say? Would you like to talk, properly talk, with me?”
I’m a bit weirded out by his friendliness, but I definitely don’t want to hurt his feelings, so I just nod.
“Great. So, what makes you tick? Like, seriously. Not the answer you’ll give Juliet. What do you really feel? About yourself, about this place? About anything.”
He can use this against you.
“You first.”
He nods. “Fine. If I had a choice of anything to do with the rest of my life, I’d want to be a paramedic. I like the idea of the adrenaline, but also that I’d be able to help people. I’m really bummed that it’s too Nice a profession for a Bad. I like comic book movies but I can’t be bothered to read the books themselves. I spend an embarrassing amount of time thinking about my parents. Actually, the amount of time I spend thinking about them isn’t embarrassing, but what I think is. I’ve convinced myself that I was stolen from them and that they’re out there right now, desperately hunting for me. I know it’s optimistic bullshit, but no matter how hard I try I can’t shake that image of them. Lastly, the thing that scares me the most about this whole thing is that for me to survive, you have to be destroyed. Like, best-case scenario for you if you lose is mind-wiping, and even that’s unlikely—so I’d probably be sending you to your death. The fact that I want you to go through that so I don’t have to terrifies me, man. So… what about you?”
The rational side of me is telling me to keep my mouth shut, to use the information he gave me to derail his efforts to make Juliet fall for him. It’s also possible everything he said was a lie, a way to get a head start before the game has truly begun. I shouldn’t trust him. Yet this other, louder part of me is looking at the guy in front of me and seeing something other than competition. Someone who knows how I feel. Someone who’s been through everything I’ve been through. Someone I don’t have to lie to because we both know what we are.
I look down at the table. “Most people think I’m a kind person, a genuine Nice, but I know I’m not.”
“Why is that?”
“I… I know the cost of my survival and I still really want to live. So I guess all you need to know about me is that I’m capable of hurting you to ensure I win. I’m dangerous, I know I am.” I catch his stare and hold it. “You should be afraid of me.”
“If you’re not a nice person, why are you a Nice?”
“They think I’m Nice, and I’m not in a position to correct them. Do you think they’d let you switch if you wanted to become a Nice? They have plans and expectations for all of us, and I want to survive, so I’ve learned to act like I am the boy they want me to be. So far it’s worked out pretty well.”
The light on the ceiling flashes.
He points at it. “Well, that’s us. I guess this is it for now. So say good-bye to this face, Nice guy, and I’ll see you out there, I suppose. And don’t feel bad about trying to win. I think that’s the only way we’ll make it through this with our sanity intact. Let’s give it our all and let her decide. That way she kills one of us, and neither of us has to feel guilty. Because I wouldn’t be able to cope if I had played any part in killing you, even if you wouldn’t feel bad about killing me. So do we have a deal? We’ll both give it everything we have? No regrets, no backing down, and no guilt when she makes her choice.”
I wish my brain worked like that, like I could just say no regrets or guilt and then not feel it. But I know myself, and I know the guilt will crush me if I win and he dies. Still, he wants to pretend it’s that simple, that our emotions can be contained by a spoken contract, and I’m willing to entertain him. Plus, if I’m being totally honest with myself, I want to keep pretending for as long as possible that I don’t care at all that he could die because of me.
So I accept his offer, and it feels like the contest has truly begun.
CHAPTER
THREE
I’m naked on a steel slab. I’m nothing more than a chunk of beef. Meat to be sliced and chopped and turned into something usable. All offcuts will be discarded.
My arms and legs are bound to the table, encircled by freezing stainless steel bands. The bands pinch at my wrists and ankles, pulling at the strands of hair they trapped when they snapped shut. Above me are two circles of white light. A man wearing a surgeon’s mask advances toward me holding a black marker. He places the tip of the pen right on my hairline, then scrapes it across my skin, all the way down to the middle of my eyebrows. I close my eyes slowly and lick my dry lips.
He tilts his head to the side, inspecting my face. He reaches forward and grabs my bangs. “We’ll change his hair. And his eyes. Get the needle.”
I strain my eyes to keep watching him.Like looking at him is going to stop him.
A nurse swings a boxlike metal contraption around so that it hangs above my face. It’s attached to a long metal arm that connects to a white machine that stands beside the table. I stare right into the pointy ends of two shiny silver needles. I exhale and try, unsuccessfully, to make my body stop shaking.
“How blue do you want?” asks the nurse.
The doctor peers into my right eye. Even though he’s wearing a surgeon’s mask, I can smell his breath, which reeks like the bottom of a garbage bin. He moves across and looks at my other eye.
“As blue as the ocean. I want her to think of water when she looks him in the eye.”
“What about his jaw?”
