“You are in a dungeon. One that you have fashioned for yourself from the stone blocks of your secrets. Maximus King, you fill me with great sadness.”
“Don’t be so dramatic. I’m not in any kind of prison. I’m here of my own free will. No one has forced me into anything.”
“I did. With chloroform.”
“You are far too proud of your chloroform, Annick. I could have left at any time if I wanted to.”
“Can you? Would you always see bars?”
“See bars?”
“It is reading I did,” she said. “About kittens.”
“And what do kittens have to do with bars?”
“It is what kittens have to do with us, I think. If they are raised in cages, even when they are freed they see the bars before their eyes. They do not truly ever see themselves as free. They know captivity. They exist in it even after the walls are removed. Do we do that? I wonder.”
“People? Or us specifically?”
“You and me.” She put her hand first on her chest, then on his. “Maximus and Annick.”
“I’m just doing what I can to make the imbalance of the world right again. It takes a lot of bad being removed to begin to make up for Stella being gone.”
Annick nodded gravely. “She must’ve been very good, your Stella. To lay claim to your heart once and forever.”
“She was.”
“She is not using your heart, though. And you could maybe use the return of it.”
“It isn’t that simple.”
She shrugged. “Me, I find most things are actually quite simple.”
“Yes, but that simplicity is unique to you, Annick. You act as if you can just say whatever you want. Do whatever you want. Chloroform whoever you want, and it will fix your problems.”
“Ah, my life is not so complicated. I might have felt like I could not be myself, but at least I knew what to do. Survive. That is a very simple life. To survive. It is this wanting that I find complicated, Maximus King.”
“What is it you want?”
There were many things she wanted, but few of them were possible. For now, she would stick with possible. “I think...more pastries. And then I will have some more of your body.”
“Is that so?”
“It is so,” she said, nodding definitively.
She couldn’t fix the past, not for either of them. But for the moment she felt soothed. For the moment she felt like she might even have a real friend. She was sad for him. For all that he had lost. But it made him kindred in a way. In a way that no one else she knew was or could be. He was broken. Missing pieces of himself. And so was she.
“Then that is what you shall have.”