'M' is For: Thomas's POV (Bonus)

Would you believe I had a hard time writing the moment Thomas and Mallory reunite after the events of the main story? I did an exercise to try and get into his head to figure out what kind of tone or approach he might have the next time he has the chance to talk to her.

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Mallory was gone. At last, the dance they’d played was over, and everything could go back to the way it was before she’d come into his life. Except…there was no going back, was there? Something had broken between him and Missy, and in the weeks that followed after her New Year’s party, it became only clearer.

It was like they didn’t see each other anymore. The other was just a body to be used. He used Missy to prop up his self-worth, and she used him…she used him in many ways. While he hadn’t minded being claimed, and even enjoyed some of the pomp of it, the humiliation she put him through each week now stung in different ways. He told himself the games were meaningless, just part of the play they’d always done, but at night he felt the wounds inside his soul as he lay in bed beside Missy. He felt adrift, moored only to his memories of what they’d once had together. And that was the problem, wasn’t it? The best part of them was already in the past. He was starting to come to terms with the words Mallory had fired at him on the rooftop, words that when he’d heard them had made him cut and bleed. I think you should be demanding more.

I love Missy, Thomas told himself, and she loves me. Isn’t that enough?

The silence of the night held no answers for him.

And then, finally, he’d had it. He came back from work, wrung out by his day job, to find Missy waiting at her apartment with two of her boytoys. She wanted to play. He hadn’t. The evening ended in a shouting match between them in which she hurled ugly accusations at him, and he did something he never would have thought possible. He lost his temper and shouted back.

The next day, he took packed everything he could into a black duffel bag and backpack. Missy pleaded with him at the door, but it was over, and they both knew it.

Thomas left.

And in the weeks that bled into months that followed, he tried to rebuild the pieces of himself that he liked. He hung out with some of the friends he’d made at modeling and went to the birthday party of a co-worker. Still, he didn’t feel he belonged in either place, not really. He’d always been awkward and shy when it came to making new friends: that had always been Missy’s domain. He preferred to take long walks around the city, discovering the unexpected green areas that sprang up between older, dilapidated neighborhoods and the bright steel of new construction. When he found a particularly interesting gem, he ached to share it with someone. Maybe someone in particular, with clear gray eyes and an easy laugh.

He still had her number in his phone. He knew all he had to do was text her, and despite how they’d left things, she’d respond. But the idea of her seeing him sent shivers of apprehension through him. It’s too soon, he told himself repeatedly. Much too soon. She’d seen him at his worst. He wanted to show her a better version of himself. A version that she could be friends with. A version that she even might fall in love with, some secret part of his mind whispered.

To cut off temptation, he deleted her number from his phone. That didn’t stop him from checking any of the unidentified messages he got, but they were all from spam numbers or people he didn’t know. He erased them as soon as he got them.

He took up those coding classes that he’d always talked about. Slowly, he became reacquainted with a different version of himself. Thomas, who was always helpful on those group projects. Thomas, the co-worker who could fix the computers and weather the office politics. Thomas, who liked a good burger and long walks.

An old friend of his that he’d made back in the Missy days asked him along to a party. He wanted to say no, that he wasn’t ready to dive back into the scene, but he told himself that he ought to go if only to keep an eye out. This friend was a little bit newer to things, and no one knew better than Thomas just what trouble an innocent person might fall into if they weren’t careful. So with that excuse in mind, he dragged on a plain T-shirt and dark jeans and headed out. If he suspected that he was secretly hoping he might see her again, he didn’t acknowledge that to himself.

And like some puckish joke, there Mallory was, at her most confident, beautiful best. She commanded the attention of everyone in the room with her unaffected grace and beauty, her natural kindness and intelligence tempered by the feline hunger she wielded like a whip. She seemed comfortable with all the eyes turned her way, as though this were simply now part of the natural order of things.

Seeing her stole his breath away, and it took everything he had to not immediately turn tail and flee at the sight of her. He didn’t want to watch other men approach her and flirt. They had no right, some primal part of him howled, but he knew the truth in his heart: he was the one didn’t have the right.

But when a gap in the crowds left her alone at the bar, he found himself moving toward her despite himself. If she was a fey enchantress, he had fallen under her spell a long time ago.