Good morning, everyone! Happy Saturday! I'm sorry I didn't update yesterday; we took my mother-in-law out for her birthday and we didn't get home 'til late. Hopefully, after so many heavy chapters filled with death and guilt and violence, a little romance will balance things out.

Special thanks to everyone who's reviewed this story so far, followed it and added it to their favorites.

I am not Suzanne Collins, so I don't own The Hunger Games.

Twenty

I'm twenty years old the day he tells me that he loves me.

At first, I don't know what to say. In the past few years, love has become a lot more complicated than it seemed when I was just a little girl. Love could mean many things.

"You…what?" I ask, stalling for time. I need to process what I just heard. Some days, this takes a little while. My nerves aren't what they once were.

Beetee isn't thrown off by my less-than-thrilled reaction. It's like he can see right through my face, see the gears turning in my head, see me trying to work out the implications of what he's telling me. So instead of raging and storming at me, or walking away, hurt and dejected, he merely repeats himself with the calm, unruffled air of someone giving me the weather forecast.

"I love you," he reiterates matter-of-factly, as though this earth-shattering revelation were a routine bit of well-known information, as indisputable as the sum of two and two.

I don't understand. How could he love someone like me? How could anyone, for that matter? I'm broken. Tarnished. I don't finish my sentences, or even my thoughts at times. I'm too short and too skinny, even after two years of rich victors' food. I'm scared of the dark, like a child, because ever since I won the Hunger Games the dark has merely served as cover for the tormenting spirits of the tributes I'd killed, or watched die, or was unable to save.

What would people say if Beetee were to take me out somewhere and try to show me off? People look at me funny here, now—they look askance at me, because they don't know what to expect. Which Wiress are they going to get today? The coldblooded killer who came out on top of a field of twenty-four teenagers, all armed to the teeth and out for blood? The unstable girl who scarcely spoke at all for two months after coming back from the Capitol? The world's most useless mentor, who hasn't brought home a living tribute in the two years she's tried to do so?

I come from nothing. My family went hungry for much of my childhood, and my newfound riches are blood money, won for surviving where others did not. I'm not beautiful, no matter what my mother would say to the contrary if she were still alive. Anyone who's seen some of those tributes from District One wouldn't dream of calling me beautiful, or even pretty. I'm a deep thinker but a terrible conversationalist, and what good are thoughts when you can't get them out of your own head? I'm shy around people I don't know.

Besides, I'm damaged goods. I'm the Capitol's whore, and every so often I get a call and we both know what it means—that someone else has a claim to stake, and I am that claim. What man would want a woman with so much mileage on her? Indeed, it astounds me that even my buyers find something to like in me. It must be the air of vulnerability, so desirable in a paid slave of sorts.

"W—why?" I stammer blankly, focused on the twenty or so reasons why Beetee shouldn't love me, why this is a mistake, and a mistake I wouldn't expect of someone as smart as him. It doesn't matter how I may feel…

It doesn't matter that I feel safe when he's with me, even though I feel safe nowhere else anymore.

It doesn't matter that he's the only one who can make me smile.

It doesn't matter that he's spent the past two years trying to put me back together, even where others would have given up long ago and I wouldn't have blamed them in the least.

None of this matters. There are a million good reasons why he shouldn't love me, and I'm determined that he see this before one or both of us get hurt.

"Why not?" he replies, challenging me to say all the reasons I've been mulling over in my head, knowing that I'd never be able to give voice to them all.

"Because…because I…" I begin, struggling to string my impossibly long list of faults into some sort of cohesive pattern, because it's imperative that I make Beetee see reason.

"You can't give me a single good reason why I shouldn't love you," he adds with a sly smile, and I think I resent him a little right now, because I have a million reasons, but I just don't know where to begin.

"I'm not beautiful," I say shortly, and his eyes widen in surprise. "You're not?" he asks, genuinely puzzled. He stares openly at my face, as though he's making a study for a painting, then peers at me under his glasses in a gesture that is so quintessentially Beetee, comparing the view to what he'd seen a minute ago. "Hmm," he murmurs, "I suppose I'd better get these replaced." He takes off his glasses and looks down at them in his hand, mildly discontented. "The prescription must not be strong enough, because I've been wearing this pair for a while, and I look at you every single day, and every single day you've looked beautiful to me, so there must be something I'm missing."

Momentarily stunned, I try a different approach. "I…I can't…I'm not…"

He doesn't interrupt me or look the least bit irritated at the delay; instead, he waits patiently for me to work my way through the sentence.

"I'm…damaged," I finally confess. He nods slowly, taking in all the possible implications of this terrible admission.

"I'd be worried if you weren't," he says, looking grave. "After all you've been through, if you weren't a little damaged, I'd be afraid you weren't human." He pauses, and the silence between us is a chasm filled with words unspoken. "And besides," he adds at long last, just when I start to wonder if there's nothing left to say between us, "I'm damaged, too. But maybe together, we can be almost whole again."

He's still not giving up, and the tenacity I'd come to admire in so many other parts of our lives together is driving me to distraction because every counter-argument Beetee offers me makes it so much harder for me to reject him, for our own good. Because he's got me wondering, is it really for the best that we both be alone?

"I'm…"

"Yes, what else are you, Wiress?" He interrupts me this time, and I'm taken aback for a moment. This isn't like Beetee, who either waits for me to explain myself or else gently finishes my sentences as if he can read my mind.

"Tell you what—I'll tell you what you are. You're beautiful, with your pretty blue eyes and your radiant smile, but you're too shy to realize it. You're smart, but you feel so guilty about outsmarting the other tributes in your Games that you're afraid of your own intelligence. You're brave enough to face every new day as a chance to change the world. You're kind and compassionate and think of everyone else before yourself. You've got so many special gifts that I count myself lucky just having met you," Beetee finishes, before adding, "And I'll tell you one more thing to add to all this: You are completely and indisputably the love of my life."

I don't know how to respond to this, because there's something else troubling me, even as he chips away at all my feelings of inadequacy.

"But I'm scared," I whisper, because even saying the words aloud is terrifying. Saying it brings the feelings to life and makes them feel so much more tangible.

"Scared?"

"Scared of…what could happen," I try to explain. My mother loved us, and she died. My sister loves Bolton and me so much that she surrendered her childhood to become our surrogate mother. And those strangers in the Capitol…they call it 'making love,' what they bring us there for, but 'hate' is a better word for what I feel every time I'm alone with one of them. Or maybe 'anger.' Or 'contaminated;' that's a good word to describe how I feel on the train ride home every single time. But on second thought, maybe 'love' is a fine word to use in these cases, because after all these years, love has become so tainted by sadness in my life that it can't inspire feelings of joy in me. No butterflies in my stomach; nothing but a dull realization that even something as good as love must come flavored by life's bitterness.

"I'm scared, too. But less so when I'm with you, because you make me feel strong enough to take on anything. I promise, nothing bad will ever come of loving me, because I'll do whatever it takes to keep you safe and happy. I'll always be there to make you smile and dry your tears and listen to you sing while you work and you think I'm not listening."

He even notices the singing. Damn. This is going to be harder than I thought, because I'm running out of reasons to send him away…

"Now, I'm going to say this one more time, and I want you to take your time and really think about it, whether you're willing to take a chance on someone who's every bit as broken as you, every bit as guilty as you, every bit as lost as you are and completely devoted to you, no matter what happens. I love you, Wiress."

Twenty is how old I am when he tells me he loves me and even though I'm scared, I find the courage to love him back. Being a Hunger Games victor is so lonely; I feel like I am watching the world, full of normal people, from behind a thick wall of glass. Impenetrable. But Beetee is trapped like me, trapped on the wrong side of the glass, and having someone there beside me, who understands me, who values me more than I value myself, means more than I could ever express.

Sigh. Love is complicated. When my husband first told me he loved me, I had a similar, rather shell-shocked reaction. 'What should I say?' Sometimes it just takes a little time to process such monumental news...even when you aren't struggling with the aftermath of the Hunger Games...

But you know what's not complicated? Reviewing! I start a new semester of grad school this week, so your reviews might be the only bright spot on the horizon for me for a little while.

We're now halfway through the story! I won't say when the next update will be, because I'm not entirely sure myself. But I will try to update ASAP, I promise.

Until next time,

Delilah