“I’d have never told you about Anna if I’d thought it’d inspire this,” Ti muttered, walking beside me in the open night. The Hound shuffled along behind me, waddling its bulk, nostrils flaring, breathing me in.
“I’m sorry.”
“Stop apologizing.”
We walked side by side in the cold, and I wanted to hold Ti’s hand. His scarf was pulled high again. My gloved hand reached for his, and too late I remembered I was on his left side, and the hand that I held was most likely not his either.
For most of a mile, silence ruled. Some few people were out on the streets. Whenever they saw Dren, they seemed to veer away, sometimes at right angles to their current path. They never made eye contact with the Hound, as if the Hound were too horrible to exist at all. I could hear it behind us, nails clicking on the sidewalk, preventing any escape.
That entire time I held Ti’s hand I tried not to think about where it’d come from. I felt like I was the star of some cheap horror film, where the call was coming from inside the house—only in my case, it was coming from inside my boyfriend.
At the train station we took the stairs down, and the Hound followed us awkwardly, leaping past us to land on the platform below. We took the next train, even though there were people in it. At Dren’s entrance, all of those sitting stood, and all of them now standing turned to look away, showing us only their backs. The doors closed, and the train rattled along.
It was then that I turned to face Ti. I opened my mouth to ask how. But then I realized the better question was: “Who?” I shook the hand that I held, so he’d know what I was talking about, and wondered how loudly I’d scream if it up and fell off.
“I have a friend who is a cop. I help him take care of problems, sometimes,” Ti said, deliberately slow, his S sounds sibilant. He, or what remained of him, looked down at his still left hand that I held. “Nerves take the longest to regrow.”
“You … just killed someone. Today. For me?”
“I didn’t kill him. I just took his face and broke off his arm.”
I blinked. “Is that supposed to make me feel better?”
“He was alive when I left.” Ti shrugged, then continued, “It’ll be hard for him to make meth anymore, missing an arm.”
And he thought Anna was atrocious! He gets to rip off someone’s face, just because they run a meth lab? “You’re the monster.”
Ti’s bearing stiffened at this, and he turned away to look resolutely out a nearby window.
What else was there to say? Nothing. I couldn’t go back in time and undo what he’d done, or change what I’d done to set him in motion before that. I thought about all the things I should have done differently, when I’d had the chance—but I realized that this conversation here, now, had been deliberate. I’d known things were wrong for almost a mile. But I’d waited to have this conversation until we were stuck in the train together, when he couldn’t leave me, even if I wanted him to. Because deep down, I didn’t want him to go.
“Is s-s-someone having a lovers-s-s’ s-spat?” Dren asked. I glared at him, and saw his lips curve into a vicious grin. The lights in the tunnel passing outside glinted off his fangs and his hand stroked the holster of his sickle in a suggestive manner. I could see the Hound out of the corner of my eye, its clawlike hands fluttering together over its bloated torso. I swallowed, and looked back to Ti, who was still staring away from me, chin high.
“I have a thing for monsters, remember?” I said quietly. He turned to look down at me again. I pulled his scarf down and leaned up. I kissed him full on his strange new lips, which parted as he drew me near. His tongue was cool like I remembered, and I tasted metal. I pressed into him before we parted. “You’re my monster, all right?”
He nodded into my hair. “All right.”
Because the monster you knew was always better than all the ones you didn’t.