Suresh: Do you regret anything?
Xia: That’s a complicated question.
—On Reclaiming Stories:
An Interview with Felicia Xia
Excerpted from Tell Me A Tragedy
Hayden and I made a show of handing over a small slip of paper, shielded from the cameras. He was back in the ruined lab, and therefore so was I—he’d come willingly, but I still resented the startling cruelty of forcing him to stand where his father had died. If it bothered Hayden, he didn’t let it show. We didn’t talk, much. Mostly worked in silence, knowing what was to come. That was when it sunk in properly: that after this, we wouldn’t see each other. Possibly ever.
I wasn’t sad. I wasn’t happy. Mostly, I was numb, like someone had unspooled all the organs from inside me, leaving nothing but an empty husk.
He passed the slip of paper over, but his fingers lingered on mine, a voiceless question.
Was this the end?
I didn’t know. His other hand traced over the contours of his own neck—something he had done often through the night, and I knew he was thinking of Elsinore, of himself, of all the things locked inside him that he never wanted to show me. But there were parts of me I didn’t want to show him, either. The two of us, made new by this night, rendered strangers to each other.
Before I could think better of it, I slipped out the sheaf of papers I had stolen from Charles’s office.
I didn’t know how Hayden was going to react, but I thought he deserved to know. He, of all people, deserved to know. I couldn’t have lived with myself if I sent him away, out into the wilderness of the world beyond Elsinore, without knowing.
But if Charles saw—if Charles saw, that would ruin the whole plan.
I thought: what worked last time must work again. I don’t know if that was an excuse or not.
I grabbed Hayden’s lapel and pulled him towards me. I crushed his lips to mine. It felt less intimate, somehow, than my fingers on his wrist, but I brought a hand up to his cheek and angled the kiss deep and harsh. Hayden made a soft whine, a surprised sound, but he leaned into me so easily. I swept a finger against the edge of his brow, barely touching his skin, and Hayden shivered. With my other hand, I slipped the pages and data card into his pocket.
Hayden was the one who pulled away first.
Not entirely. He touched his forehead to mine, eyes half-lidded, and I knew it. So, this was goodbye. In the quiet, both of us were breathing a little too heavily, a little too intimately. I dug my fingers into the soft underside of his jaw, where his pulse lived, and I pressed as hard as I dared, because I wanted him to know that I’d seen all of it. I did understand, to some degree. Maybe in another world, we could’ve made something from this place together, him and I.
He straightened. His gaze, for once, was bright and clear. His hair was matted halfway across his forehead, falling in his eyes, and the bridge of his nose was shadowed by a mottling bruise. But he looked like he could handle whatever came next.
I tucked my hands back into my pockets and nodded. I didn’t wait for him to say anything before I turned away. It was almost over. We were almost done. After the exchange, after one split second of deceiving Charles, we could both walk away from this tangled web, this tangled love. And whatever else this night had to throw at Hayden, he could survive it. Which was everything I needed.
The last time I had left him behind, when we were both younger and stupider and all I knew was that I couldn’t survive the festering thing that was growing between us, I wasn’t as certain.
This time, it would be the end of it.