Either way, I didn’t answer Black. I’d decided I’d give him a curt answer when I absolutely had to and steer the conversation elsewhere like last time. But I couldn’t. Because another letter came the following day.
I asked you a question, Emilia. Do you think wars can be just?
—Black
Now I definitely knew who he was, and every time I sat next to him in Lit class or saw him down the hallway, I looked the other way, somehow feeling angry with myself for talking to Black so freely. It was like Vicious had an intimate piece of me, now that he had access to my unabashed truths. Which was, of course, stupid. And as if there was any doubt left, my next letter from Black came to me two days after, but it wasn’t waiting in my locker. It was sitting on my desk, in my room, at the servants’ apartment.
Why do you never fight back? I stole your book. I bully you. I hate you. Fight me, Help. Show me what you’re made of.
—Black.
We exchanged blank pages for the remainder of the month. My letters to him were devoid of words, though I sometimes doodled something offensive when I was particularly bored. His letters to me contained nothing at all. I sometimes smelled the pieces of paper he sent me. I sometimes rolled them between my fingers, knowing he’d touched them too.
And then I started dating Dean.
I felt bad about it the whole time, but I did it anyway. I wasn’t using him, because I did like him. I didn’t love him, but love wasn’t something I necessarily thought I should feel at such a young age. It might’ve been easier to think that Dean didn’t love me either. Besides, we were good together. We had fun. But we both wanted to go to out-of-state schools and it made things lighter and less serious between us. At least I thought so.
Shortly after I started dating Dean, Black began writing again.
Can you tell the difference between love and lust?
—Black
I humored him, not because I wanted to, but because I relished every chance I had to talk to him.
Lust is when you want the person to make you feel good. Love is when you want to make the other person feel good.
—Pink.
The next time I got a letter from him, my hands shook. And they would continue to shake for the next few months as Black crawled into my soul and took a seat in the pit of my heart, making himself comfortable.
And if I want to hurt the person, is that hate?
—Black
I answered:
No, it’s pain. You want to inflict pain on the person who caused you to hurt. I think if you hate someone, you just want them gone. Do you really hate me, Black?
—Pink
It was the bravest question I’d ever asked him. He took the whole week to get back to me with that one.
No.
—Black
Do you want to talk about it face-to-face?
—Pink
Another week passed before he answered.
No.
—Black.
We ping-ponged for the remainder of the year, talking about philosophy and art. I was dating Dean, and Vicious was sleeping with everyone else. We never mentioned our real identities again. We never admitted to one another, not in person and not in the letters, that we were who we were. But it was becoming clearer that we were compatible.
And every time I saw him walking down the hallway with his lazy smirk and a harem of cheerleaders or his football crew trailing behind him, I smiled a private smile. A smile that said that I knew him more than they did. That they might hang out with him every day and attend his stupid parties, but I was the one who really knew the important things about him.
Even when he tried to kiss me that night, we didn’t discuss Black and Pink. If anything, the next week, he wrote to me as if nothing had happened. As if Vicious and Black were completely different people.
The one and only time he’d admitted to being Black was on the day I left Todos Santos for good. Our pen pal project had ended weeks ago, but I still found an envelope on top of my suitcase. The handwriting was unfamiliar, but I still knew who it was from. The outside said:
Open when you feel like you might forgive me.
I still hadn’t opened it.
Not even after we had sex, because I knew that wasn’t about forgiveness. That was about satisfying my need for him. And now? Now I still couldn’t forgive him, but finally my curiosity had won out over my self-control.
I pulled the last letter out of my shoebox, the paper yellow and brittle, and read it.
You were always mine.
—Black
I WALTZED THROUGH THE DOUBLE glass doors of FHH, ignoring the stunned faces of the New York employees who thought they didn’t have to deal with my sour-ass anymore. My face was relaxed, my posture poised. I was the same old Vicious, regardless of what I was dealing with in my personal life. The office was buzzing with post-holiday phone calls, overlapping chatter, the noise of working printers and people slurping their lukewarm coffees from their stupid “Best Dad/Mom/Grandmother” mugs.