With his teeth caught between white sheets, Cato mumbles an essential question: "What is love?"
His quiet words fly out the door and windows and rebound off of the edges of the world to come hit him again. He jerks back.
Clove snorts and turns over. "Ask your mum."
"Even she wouldn't know," he jokes. Parents are usually jokes around here.
Cato tries to think of something else to say, but she is quiet and he's talking to a wall.
.
When he wakes up, he instinctively reaches over to hug her closer, but his arms grapple at thin air. He's no longer sleepy; the poking feeling in his chest wouldn't allow it. He doesn't know why she's not there, but if he asked her, he doesn't think she'd care to answer, not that he'd blame her.
He promises this is the last time that she'll hurt him. They're nothing more than friends, only sometimes with benefits, and he feels absolutely nothing.
For Clove's birthday, he almost gives her the crystal he had found in a cave when he was eight, but instead he buys her some store credit at her favorite protein-shake shop.
He doesn't know what he can say or do, and he can't help but feel that the course of the relationship is going to be all in Clove's hands, and he doesn't know how he feels about that or if he would mind at all.
He can't go on any longer, but he doesn't want to be hurt.
Cass gets injured a few weeks before the reaping. As she rages, her trainers remind her of how they told her to stretch every day and to always have a spotter.
Clove looks mad with glee. Cato studies her face and realizes that for the first time, he has seen her expression unguarded.
That night, Clove calls him and tells him that she, as the replacement, is indeed going into the games. "My parents will finally have the money they need," she tells him.
Cato tries to be happy about it, but the next day he falls off the net.
He's not hurt.
He hasn't fallen off the net in three years. The trainers stare at him. Cato was always their favorite, since he was twelve. He always did what he was told and he always did it well.
His instructor gives a crude gesture of his hand and mouths the words, "what's wrong with you?"
He's eighteen and this is the last chance he has. And with how much he's been training, he should have the best chance.
Cato stops falling off climbing nets.
.
The next thing he does is open his wallet. He doesn't know what he thought that would work, because his money paid for nothing but a bloody nose and a broken finger from the wrong end of the table, and Clove is still unscathed.
.
His Plan C is really Plan Y but it's much better than Plan Z.
"Can you wait a year?" he asks, pushing the words out between his teeth before he can take them back.
She laughs. "You think they wouldn't just send me off to be a Peace Keeper if I refused? You know they would."
.
So he tosses her off the roof.
They were up there to watch the stars but Clove doesn't care about the stars so much as imagining that they're little eyes watching her and him sin on the rooftop. The sky gets a different kind of show.
He has inched his way to the edge and Clove doesn't mind. She always liked testing boundaries.
While she's tracing her tiny fingers down each bump on his spine, he wraps his arms around her legs and tosses her, with perfect technique.
He hears her scream and she hits the pavement 1, 2, 3 counts later. With luck, she'll have only a broken limb or two.
What is love?
Baby don't hurt me, don't hurt me, no more.
Meme me