feel the heat of his side so close to mine, as if he radiated it. As if the golden light that lived under his skin was really a fire, banked now but steady. Eternal warmth.
“Good place for what?”
“For you to find yourself. Your true self.”
I didn’t respond.
“You’re going to have to do it sometime, Lora. I can help you with it. Some of it, at least. It’s going to happen whether you will it or not. Better to plan ahead now, don’t you think?”
I stared down at the twill covering my knees. I stared hard at the tufts of wool that poked out here and there, the sturdy, diagonal weave of brown over brown.
“We can meet down here on weekends or after your classes. We might consider the woods, too, but there’s always the danger there of someone passing by.”
“Doesn’t anyone else ever come here?”
“No. People say it’s haunted.”
I looked back up at him.
“By a single ghost,” he explained, the corners of his lips lifted. “A very gentle one. I’m sure she won’t mind sharing the space with us.”
“I—I honestly can’t tell if you’re joking.”
“Either way, does it matter? I told you you’re safe with me, and I meant it. The grotto is perfect for us. It’s secluded but still open enough to hide something … large.”
“I don’t understand. What is it you think I’m going to be able to do? I’m just a girl.”
“To begin, you can stop thinking of yourself as just anything. I have a word for you, one I want you to keep in your heart.” Jesse unlocked his arms and turned to face me fully, holding me in a gaze that resurrected that shiver of before.
“Drákon,” he said.
And I knew it. I knew that word, even though I was positive I’d never, ever heard it fall from anyone else’s lips.
Drákon.
If the beast inside me had still been raging, it would have sucked on the word like Jesse’s sweet cherry wine. It would have gotten drunk on it.
“That’s what I am,” I said, as the truth of it rolled through me over and over, riding that cherry-wine crest. “That’s what we’re called. My—my kind.”
“Yes.”
“How did you know that? How do you know any of this?”
His hand lifted, a graceful palm cupped toward the ceiling, toward the universe we could not see beyond water and rock.
“Is there a word for you?” I asked.
I glimpsed a dimple in his cheek with his wry new smile, one I’d never noticed before. “Jesse.”
I heard myself say, “Are you going to kiss me again?” and realized, horrified, that maybe I was the drunk one.
“Yes,” he answered.
“Er … soon?”
“I hope so. But not right now.” He climbed to his feet, reached out a hand and pulled me to mine, looking down at me ruefully. “Next time I’ll definitely remember to bring the water.”
• • •
God, he hated tea.
Armand Diego Lorimer Louis stared down at the steaming liquid in its cup, wan brown with little chewy bits of leaves mucking about near the bottom, and came to the conclusion that it was actually more than he could bear to lift the cup to his lips to drink.
There was lemon or cream to add to it, if he wished. Sparkling white sugar. All of it set out in silly little china containers painted round and round with podgy, smirking cherubs.
But nothing helped tea. It simply was what it was, which was boiling hot and flavorless.
Tea was the beverage, Mandy thought, of dreary, civilized people. People who would never lie without guilt, never steal without reason, never fornicate anywhere but in their own beds. With the curtains closed. In the dark.
He shouldn’t have stayed. He should have gone home after leaving her room. Truth was, his hair was mussed and his cuffs were damp and she wasn’t even present, and now here he was trapped beside Chloe yet again, suffocating in her noxious perfume. Pretending to listen to her natter on about a dress or a hat or her new gloves—it was always a dress, a hat, or new gloves; all right, and sometimes shoes—with his spoon gripped so tightly in his hand that his thumb and forefinger had gone white, and the tea bits whirling about in some awful, endless pattern, everything the same, every day the same, just as it always was. Just as it always was going to be.
He had a swift and utterly lucid vision of himself in this position in thirty-odd years.