Re: Guest Room Hallway, Fourth Floor
The hurt that showed so plainly in her expression made him regret his barbed remarks almost immediately, but it was too late to take them back. Luke managed to keep from looking away, too stubborn to relent, and he almost wished she had insulted him in return. It would have made it far easier to maintain his anger. He wasn't sure if he believed her, not when she said he hadn't been holding her back with such calm, like it was something done merely to placate him. "You didn't give me much to go off of," he shot back, defensive. "I had to try to figure out why all on my own." He had to fight to keep his voice from shaking, surprisingly angry that she was turning this around on him, like he was the bad guy, when she was the one who'd left without an explanation. "No, Wren. I never pretended. Unlike you I meant what I said." That was assuming a lot, he knew, but he thought if he provoked her she might give him a real answer instead of making him doubt himself. "You being a prostitute has nothing to do with it," he snapped. "You took off without warning, or any indication of why, and you never came back. What am I supposed to think, Wren? At first I thought, well, maybe it was something I did, but I couldn't figure out what. Then I got to thinking maybe I hadn't been careful enough, that someone threatened you, and that was why you left-- but I couldn't find any evidence of that either." He took a deep, deep breath and tried to get himself back under control, furious with himself for failing to maintain the same exterior calm that she could manage, but these were extenuating circumstances. Normally he never let himself get this far. "If you'd cared about me, even a little, you wouldn't have left," he said, quieter than before, less angry and more hurt.
He didn't know what to make of that, though he did manage to refrain from pointing out that she wouldn't have had to survive if she'd stayed. "So did I," he said, after a long pause. It wasn't a lie. Luke had learned how to live day by day, and eventually it got a little easier, despite having lost a lot of the purpose he'd once had. "Obviously, or I wouldn't be here." Yes, he'd left New York, but he wasn't going to tell her why, or just how far he'd fallen once he was on his own. Maybe that would have hurt the most, for her to hear about what he'd done, but he didn't want to risk receiving her pity or even her disgust. He wasn't the same boy she'd known all those years ago, but then again she wasn't the same either. No amount of wishing things were different could change that.
Luke looked down at the key, seized by the sudden urge to kick it down the hallway and into the shadows. It would have been so much easier to have never known that she was here. Maybe he could leave, find somewhere else, and with time she'd fade from his memory and become a thing of the past. Even as he thought it, he knew that wouldn't happen; he'd never forgot the ones he left behind in New York, despite not having spoken to them in years. "I don't want it," he said, nudging it back towards her. "It's yours."