Page 10 of Renata Vitali (The Five Syndicates)
Touché.
The pain in my back should have been a reminder to build higher walls. Instead, it torched them to the ground. The dangers of letting her see me in a vulnerable state didn’t deter me, and something in her eyes begged me to believe she wasn’t the enemy here.
Did she see my loneliness? Did she connect with it? It couldn’t be fun stuck in that room all day.
I opened my mouth to speak, but she cut me off. “It’s okay not to hate me. It’s okay not to like me, too.” She dipped her eyes to the blanket that had pooled at her lap before returning them to me.
Had it been wrong to give her the blanket? I was an asshole, yes, but Mama raised a gentleman.
My eyes followed hers to the blanket. “Hate would require emotions, and I—”
“—don’t possess anywhere I’m concerned. Yeah, I got it. There’s a difference between loneliness and solitude.”
Her words reminded me of choice. I had two. I could be lonely, I could have solitude by choice, or I could chase the outlet she gave me. The cure. And I made my choice the next night, when I returned to the library, and we read Infinite Jest together and argued over the psychological consequences of having absent parents.
This isn’t a big deal, I told myself as we walked back to our hall. It’s just an outlet. Just an outlet.
I wondered what she told herself.
Trust is like a mirror. You can fix it if it’s broken, but you can still see the crack in that motherfucker’s reflection.
Lady Gaga
I could ask myself what I was doing here a thousand times more, and I still wouldn’t have an answer. Reading a book is like peeling the pages back on your soul. For eighty-thousand words, you become someone else. You bare yourself to the words, and you feel what the character feels. When you share that experience with another person, it’s like sharing the same soul.
For the past three weeks, I’d been sharing the same soul with Damiano De Luca. I didn’t trust him. Hell, I barely even knew him, but there are people I’ve known all my life that I wouldn’t trust to water my plants let alone spend night after night reading with.
Yet, like clockwork, when the clock beside my bed had turned to one a.m., I had slipped my sheets off and wandered down the hallway. Damian sat on the divan with a book in his hand and an identical copy for me. I eyed the paperback in his outstretched hand. Atlas Shrugged. Ayn Rand.
I took a seat but didn’t touch the paperback. “No.”
It was an impulsive reaction. A need to feel power after feeling so helpless in my decision to show up here. The best explanation I could come up with was, my father had taught me to build walls around myself. That included my heart, which seemed too interested in Damian for my own good. Attraction could be brushed off. But this need to seek company in him? Unshakeable.
Trust no one, I reminded my heart, then begged it to listen.
Damian laid the paperback beside him. “No?”
“Nope.” I popped the P.
“Why not?”
I flummoxed for a reply. “It’s in third person.”
He looked unimpressed. “You read The Brothers Karamazov just fine.”
My shoulders shrugged, and I tried my best to look like I wasn’t pulling excuses out of thin air. “That was Dostoevsky. He’s in another league.”
“This is Ayn Rand.”
“I can leave if you’re committed to reading Atlas Shrugged.”
Damian stared me down. I wanted to give in, because yes, I was so damned lonely in that room all day. I couldn’t afford another hour alone. It would drive me insane. As Damian stood, I almost backtracked, but I shut my mouth when I realized he was making his way to one of the shelves.
He pulled out a paperback and approached the divan. Junot Díaz. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. If anything, this made it worse. It meant he wanted me here just as much as I wanted to be here.
“There’s only one copy. I’ll read.” Damian opened the book.
It was on the tip of my tongue to ask him why he was doing this. Instead, I swallowed the words down as he read. Damian had a voice like Zachary Webber’s, and when he read in his light Texas accent, I swore he ruined me for audiobooks. No one could compare.
