He took a long, shaky breath. “Listen, I…  I need to tell you something. Promise me you won't do anything rash. I'm only telling you this because I care… About you.”

I slipped off of my branch, landing in front of him on the forest soil. The dead leaves of winter gave way under my feet, cracking, crunching like tiny bones. It was cold, but the warmth in Boyd’s eyes made being out in the blustery weather worthwhile. Even after he shaved his head, acquired a drunken tattoo that ran the span of his entire left arm, and pierced a hole through his lip, the light in his shining eyes never ran out. Even when they were full of pity, locked onto my small form in a way that made me want to squirm.

Boyd was light, and light was Boyd, and Boyd was Boyd as certain as he was not consumed by the darkness he pretended to shroud himself in.

I reached my hand up, resting a tiny palm against this hulking bear of a boy’s cheek, and I couldn't resist the urge to smile as I felt the slight instinctive lean of his head into my touch. Another constant of Boyd was that, though his eyes were fireplace warm, his dark skin was always cold to the touch.

“I think,” I said, “I know what you're talking about.”

Bright eyes, tired eyes, captured my stare in a way that my detached mind likened to the caress of the ocean, or a lover. His voice seemed to breath life into the frosty air.

“You do?” he whispered. The forest had never existed around us, nor had the cool December winds. It was just Boyd and me, or, more properly, my delusional mind and my heartbroken smile.

I tilted my head, a small grin fluttering across my lips. I loved him, I think. At 15, I knew Her. And a gaping hole in my sternum had been filled by one of her son’s arrows.

I replied, “You aren't real.”

Boyd recoiled as though he had been struck. “Wh-what?” he asked.

I took a step forward, and then another one, quickly, as he took a step back. I grasped at his hands before he could pull away.

“Don't leave, please!” I implored, though it came out more as a question than a demand. “I still need you.”

He shook his head roughly, as if attempting to free his mind of such thoughts, but he let his fingers remain in mine, ghosting over my skin even as I stopped clutching them so tight. “You don't understand,” he said.

“I think I do,” I answered.

“No.” He shook his head again. “You don't. I-” His voice cracked, and he seemed to struggle with words for a moment. “I was… I was going to tell you that you-you don't exist. There's no Parker City on the other side of this forest.”

I closed my eyes, allowing the words to sink in. His hands began to rub mine in circles, soothing.

I opened them again, and blinked at him.

“How would you know it doesn't exist if you've never been on my side of the forest before?” I asked.

The shapes on the back of my hand stopped.

He frowned at me. And then he said, “You've never been to Pierson Hills, either.”

“Well then,” I admitted, “I suppose we’re in a bit of a dilemma.” I had looked up the town the teen claimed to have come from after the second time he met. There was nothing anywhere close to Parker. Nothing at all.

The corners of Boyd’s eyes crinkled when he squinted them in thought. His lower lip popped out just the barest of a centimeter.

He said, finally, “It can't be a coincidence that I met you in the middle of the forest when I was at my worst. Three times. Every time I ran away, into this enormous patch of green, you were there.”

And your eyes, I thought. They saw me bruised and beaten and they looked upon me with the same warm pity that I have grown accustomed to.

“I was at my worst, too,” I said. “It was the dead of night in the forest I'd been warned away from since before I could walk. I didn't expect to be found, but you found me. Every. Single. Time.”

He grabbed me, suddenly, and held my cheeks with his cold, cold hands, directing my gaze to meet his own. I hadn't realized that I had looked away.

“Look at me,” he pleaded. “No one’s ever looked at me twice, except you.”

I pulled his hands from my face, wrapping mine around his long forefingers. “I'm real,” I said, and repeated it again for good measure. “I'm real.”

He pulled my hands up, pressing them against his lips. “I am too.” His cold breath sent shivers from the pad of my middle finger to my heart, and then down to my toes.

“That settles that, then.”

I hoped that my smile could light a candle to his glorious laugh.

Maybe, I was out of my mind. Maybe, during that first night in the forest, I had fallen, and my psyche afforded me this as I lay unconscious. Maybe, I had found a window into another land, one that connected lonely people who craved others like them.

And maybe the entire world wasn't real, just the fever dream of a tortured soul.

But I heard the truth in Boyd's voice, saw it in his eyes. He was just as real or imaginary as I was.

And it didn't matter as long as I was with Boyd, as long as I could go into the forest and escape my life for a little while longer and travel into a dream of my own making.