Interlude: Peeta
Then
Existing.
They could not have picked a crueler word if they'd tried.
That's all we're doing, isn't it? You can't call it living, not really. Not when your days are cycles of aimlessness and futility. Not when you have to force smiles that ring false and your laughter shatters like a stack of dropped glass.
Not when she tells me she loves me for the cameras and then pushes me away once they are gone; not when her lips touch mine and I can't stop myself from wondering if she can still taste him on her tongue.
I have never been the one who keeps secrets. She would fight me on this, would point out indelicately that I was the one who tilted the balance of the first Games in our favor by pulling them out of my pocket like some magician producing a seemingly never-ending stream of scarves.
None of it was ever a secret, though. Just because she didn't see it doesn't mean it was hidden.
Sitting in the dark, I see a slumped shadow pass by my window, and like a recovering alcoholic drawn to a bottle I creep to the glass and watch her as she climbs the steps to Haymitch's porch, see the triangle of broken light as the door opens and he lets her in, as she goes to seek his advice before she'll let herself accept my comfort.
Everyone in the world thinks that it's not a secret that I am in love with her. They would laugh if I suggested it and then wink at me in dismissal. "That's not a secret," they'd say conspiratorially. "We've known that forever."
Maybe everyone else has known, but I am only just now learning that it's true.
The words that warped like they were coming from a distance, that hit like tiny pieces of sleet and then like a sledgehammer: Quarter Quell. Reminder to the rebels. Strongest among them. Power of the Capitol.
Existing pool of victors.
Me. And Haymitch.
And her.
Existing.
The cold wind on my face and the door that Haymitch yanked open before I could even turn the knob; the buttons on his shirt that hung torn open; the lamp lying haphazardly on its side with its cord pulled taut; the picture on the wall slashed nearly in half.
The dark liquid that was slowly oozing across the wooden floor, the acrid scent of hard liquor, the tiny pieces of shattered bottle that glittered like fallen stars.
"She lives," I'd told him, the only thing I could think to say so the one thing I just kept repeating. "She lives, she lives, she lives."
Haymitch, with a cocked eyebrow: "You're awfully careless about your own mortality."
Begging, shameless, helpless, hopeless. Listing the reasons she should be the one to come home: She likes her tea with mint, she always pulls off her right shoe first, she covers her mouth with both hands when she sneezes.
A thousand reasons she should live, and not a single reason why she should die.
It's my choice, I'd argued. He picked her the first time. Now he owed me.
She lives, she lives, she lives.
It's my job, not his. I will keep her safe. I will die because she sleeps with one leg outside of the blankets and uses soap that smells like apples and puts jam on her toast but butter on her muffins.
Finally the understanding that dawned on his face.
You're in love with her. It's not some schoolboy crush on the girl who, what? Sang some goofy song about birds? You're. In love. With her.
She kisses me with lips that are stiff with indecision and sits at the table during breakfast with her eyes looking anywhere but at me, and when she smiles it is with a shine that is so cheap it rubs me raw.
But.
But.
She is the laughing girl in the snow who, for just a second after she kissed me for the cameras, looked at me with a tiny teardrop sparkling at the edge of her eyes and made me realize that maybe she wasn't always with him, that there were times she was with me instead, times when she wanted to be.
She is the girl who takes the offered pieces of my life as solemnly as if they are gifts: the color orange, the canvases painted with oils that might as well be blood, the confessions whispered late at night of cruel parents with indifferent eyes, of burning bread and futile dreams and the way her fingers felt against mine when our costumes caught fire and I knew even then that I'd rather burn alive with her than be alone in the cold without her.
She is the girl who makes me dream of autumn: her hair the blossoming sweetness of persimmon, her eyes the smoldering fire of burnished coal, the look on her face in the middle of the night when she wakes up and finds me next to her, the smile of relief that sears like apple cider laced with a kiss of cinnamon.
So what if I am in love with her?
It's not like it's a huge secret.