I sounded raw, far more pained than I’d meant to. I had to wait to open my eyes again. When I did, he was watching me without expression.
“It’s hard, isn’t it?” he said.
“What is?”
“Being here. Being around all of them. Knowing that none of them, not one, has ever known what it’s like to go without.”
I shook my head, which wasn’t an answer really but all I could muster.
I did not want his pity. I did not want to evoke that sweet, melting look in his eyes. I didn’t want to feel this unexpected sorrow mixed with trepidation and something else—desire, insisted the fiend—that grew with every shared glance between us.
Mad, get mad, I thought to myself, but it was no use. I didn’t feel angry.
I felt … different. Drowsy but wakeful, nervous but lulled, a victim of the soft sliding light and the candle and the calm, patient way this particular beautiful boy, this dangerous flame, was looking at me. As if he was waiting for me to figure out something he already knew.
I wanted to kiss him. I wanted him to kiss me.
The thunderstorm chose that moment to save me by rousing again, boom-boom-boom-boom! I angled in my chair to find it, but the crickets chirped on, and the woods remained unflustered. No rain, no lightning, no gusts. I glimpsed teasing patches of amethyst through the crowns of the trees but nothing else.
“It’s the Germans,” Jesse said. “Airships. They’re bombing the coast.”
That brought me wide awake. I leapt to my feet. “What? Now?”
“They’re not near. The channel intensifies the sound. Believe me, no one else around here will even hear them. They won’t make it this far west before dawn.”
“Oh, I …” I blinked at him, replaying his words. “What do you mean, no one else will hear them?”
“Just that. Only you and I hear them tonight. I’d guess they’re somewhere over Sussex right now. Brighton, maybe.”
Again, I could not speak. Jesse’s calm expression never wavered.
“It’s all right, Lora. You can relax. You’re safe with me, I swear it.”
“What do you mean,” I asked again evenly, not relaxing, “that no one else will hear them?”
His gaze angled away from mine; for the first time, he looked uncomfortable. He leaned forward to pull out some flowers from the jar, just as I had done. Long, tanned fingers began to weave the stems together, making a braid of blooms. Drops of water beaded the wood.
“All the world is like an ocean,” he said. “All of it, not only the water part. And nearly everyone skims along on just the surface of that ocean, accepting what their eyes and ears show them as truth, even when it’s not. Even when it’s merely the bright skin of the ocean covering the truth. Entire lives are spent skimming that skin, person after person bobbing along the surface of things like driftwood, never sensing aught deeper beneath them. To them, real truth remains unfathomable.
“No one else hears the bombs, Lora, because almost everyone else around us is driftwood, basic human. You and I are the only ones right now who break the ocean skin to glimpse the deep. We’re the only ones who can hear the bombs because, from here, they’re beyond human hearing.”
I allowed the crickets to fill the silence, ardent behind the glass. Jesse’s fingers wove in and out between the flower petals; he was shaping the braid into a half circle upon the table, smearing the water beads. He did not glance back up at me or smile to let me in on the joke.
“You’re not human, Eleanore Jones. I think that somewhere inside you, you must know that. You must always have known. You’re not made of ordinary bone or blood but of something else completely.”
“Really. What am I of, then? Kelp and jellyfish, I suppose?”
“You are made of magic.”
He said it in an absolutely unremarkable way, as if instead he’d just said, I had coffee this morning or the floor needs mopping.
His hands stilled and finally he looked up at me. No smile. I saw nothing but that infinite patience etched on his face.
He wasn’t joking.
Everything seemed to slow down, the seconds dragging out into a creeping crawl. My pulse slowed, and the dance of the candle flame slowed, and the wind outside slowed. I could not move or even swallow.
I wanted to respond with something cutting and urbane, something Sophia might muster at the drop of a pin—You are stark mad, Mr. Holms—but my mouth felt frozen shut.