All my breaths freeze. My heartbeats freeze.
A chill runs down my spine, making my skin coarse with goosebumps.
“What?”
The clench of his jaw is the only indication that he’s feeling something. That there’s something going inside of him.
That he’s not dead or wooden.
“There’s a thing in acting called committing to the moment. Well, it’s a general term and can be used for just about anything. But in acting it means giving yourself to the role you’ve signed up for. It means committing to it, taking it to the end, seeing it through.” Another jaw clench. “Next time, when you play a part, try to stick to it. You want to seduce the principal, then fucking seduce the principal. You want to play him, you fucking play him. Next time, Poe, smile at the fucking camera when you spread your legs for me.”
I shiver.
My legs throb.
I open my mouth to say something but he keeps going, “So it’s more convincing to people, yeah? That the tyrant principal of a school is seduced by a siren of a teenager. As it is, if I didn’t know about the camera already, your bad acting would’ve given you up.”
“Please, let me explain, okay? I —”
“So what was the plan?” he asks, cutting me off. “Get me to kiss you, record it and then what? Show it to the world?”
He waits then.
And I know this could be my chance to explain things to him. Not that it would make anything better at this point, but I realize that I can’t speak.
I realize that I’m too shaken, too shivery, too fucking miserable to say anything.
To do anything but stare at him through my tears.
“Or maybe not,” he goes on in the face of my silence. “Maybe you wanted to keep it. As evidence.”
I flinch and give myself away.
“So that was the plan then,” he says, his voice still wooden and without feeling. “To use it against me as blackmail.”
At this point, I’d rather have him angry.
I’d rather have him screaming at my face, snapping at me, punishing me and hurting me.
But he doesn’t.
He simply stands there, all shut down and apart.
A tear streams down my cheek and I jerk out a nod. “Yes.” At my lonely yes, more tears come and I say it all. “I was going to record it and then use it to get what I want. To get my money. All of it, even the chunk I was going to get when I turn twenty-one so I didn’t have to deal with you anymore. So I could just get out of your life and have you out of mine.”
It’s true.
I wasn’t going to stop with only getting half of my money. I was going to demand all of it so I never had to see his face again.
Just the thought makes me ache so much that I have tightened up my whole body so I can keep standing.
Because there’s more.
“But that’s not all,” I say, tears streaming down my face. “I also wanted to run away with him. To go on the road. He’s going on tour in a couple of weeks and… I wanted to go with him. And I knew that you wouldn’t let me. So I came up with a plan. I came up with a plan to befriend you. To make you trust me. That’s why I came up with the whole ‘taking a break’ idea. So you could tell me all your secrets. So you could confide in me and I could use your secrets against you. But then I couldn’t find anything. I couldn’t… So I came up with this idea. Of creating evidence against you. I was going to convince you to kiss me. And then when you did, I was going to blackmail you with it. But the thing is…”
I take a deep breath, or try to, but it turns into a broken sob. “I couldn’t. When the time came, I couldn’t make myself do it. I couldn’t…” Another sob. “No matter how much I hate you and how much you control me and take all the things away from me, I could never ruin your career. I could never ruin something that I know you’ve worked and you work so hard for. I’ve never met anyone like you, Alaric. So dedicated and hardworking. I don’t even know how you do it, all these things that you do. So yeah, I’ve never met someone like you. Someone so fucking alone and tortured and mysterious. Someone with so many secrets. Someone so intelligent and smart and so fucking intellectual. But more than that I’ve never met someone who believed in me. Someone who made me feel so confident in my own abilities. Someone who set me free. You set me free, which is…”
I chuckle and sob as I go on, “Which is fucking ridiculous because you’re the one who trapped me here, but I’ve never felt this free in my entire life. This past week, I… I got so addicted to showing you my designs and talking about them and making them. I’ve never sketched so much in my life before and it’s all because of you. And I… I could never ruin you. I could never ruin the man who gave me myself. Who changed things for me. Because you did. You changed things. Between us.”