Instead she met Ash, inexplicably walking back across the icy gravel of the playground to the school.
“Hi, Holly,” he said, unfailingly pleasant, trying to smile at her. Ash was the only one of the Lynburns who had a face that seemed human, handsome but not like a painting or a statue.
Right now he looked as if he wanted to feel better. “You look like you’re having a worse day than I am,” she said. “Want to go to the pub and have a chat?”
* * *
They had to go to the Water Rising, because the Mist and Bell was closed. There were a lot of people in Sorry-in-the-Vale lying low these days.
But the pub was noisy, as if there were a lot of people in town craving an escape. Not only Martha and Fred but even Jared seemed busy, moving among the customers and working the bar. Holly caught glimpses of manically cheerful faces, smiles stretched too tight, and she focused her smile on Ash.
He bumped shoulders with her companionably. “How are you feeling?” he asked her. His voice was warm and sympathetic, and exactly what Holly did not want. She didn’t want to let anything slip: she wanted a distraction.
She slid her fingers over the back of his hand, circling his wrist under his sleeve. Small intimate touches that could be passed off as casual, and thus seemed even more intimate, had served her well in the past.
“I’m feeling fine now.”
“Your parents are sorcerers working for my father,” Ash said, his voice still gentle, as if he could see that she was in pain. “But your brothers and sister are just like you. They can’t do magic. They won’t be on the front lines, and they’re probably scared.”
“Who says I’m scared?” Holly asked. She took a deep swallow of her ginger ale and continued to flirt her fingertips along Ash’s pulse.
She knew Ash felt it: it was in the way he smiled and looked down, then back into her eyes. Holly leaned forward. She saw him take in the significance of that move too, but he didn’t make one of his own.
So she made another. She leaned forward and pressed a kiss on his lips, light as a casual question, and drew back to wait for his answer.
“I’m glad you asked me here,” Ash said. He kept trying to be so considerate, Holly thought in exasperation. As if he cared about her. As if they were on a date.
Holly’s smile pulled tight against her teeth. “So am I.”
“Because . . . ,” Ash said, and looked down at the table. “I mean, I’m sure you noticed that I have family issues as well. I’m sure you’ve noticed that my family has more issues than the Times.”
Holly did not laugh. She didn’t want to talk about her family, or about his; she didn’t want him acting as if she’d asked him out because she liked him. She’d thought that, well, he was a Lynburn, one of the family who had come to town and ruined everything. He’d come very close to hurting Angie once: it didn’t much matter if Holly hurt him.
Ash put his free hand over Holly’s, and her clasp on his wrist went loose.
“If you want to talk to someone,” Ash said, “I’m here.”
“I’m sorry,” Holly said, standing up. “This was a mistake.” She tried to think of a way to tell him that she was leaving because she didn’t want to be cruel, because he was better than she had thought he was. Finally, she said, “I don’t want to talk. That’s the last thing I want.” She turned away, heading straight for the bar. All she wanted was to con a drink out of somebody so she could try to forget about how terrible the whole world was, including her.
Holly leaned against the bar. At the same time, Jared came over and dumped his empty tray. There was snow on the ground, but he had the sleeves of his shirt rolled up past his elbows and a couple of buttons undone. He looked overheated and overtired, but aside from that, Holly didn’t know if he was feeling anything at all. He wasn’t like Ash: he was like the other Lynburns, with faces cold as stone and eyes cold as steel.
There was a splash of what seemed to be lime cordial on his open collar. When he dumped the tray, he pushed his hair back and looked at her. “You look like you could use a real drink,” he said indifferently.
“Please,” Holly responded.
Jared leaned over the bar and tipped some whiskey into Holly’s glass. Holly drank it.
“Thanks.” Holly looked up from her drained glass into his eyes. She realized he was looking at her with a certain consideration.
There was no sweet curl to his sullen mouth, no excitement and no nervousness betrayed. He looked just like she felt: as if he would do anything to feel differently than the way he did now. His eyes were beacon-bright. He looked like driving too fast down a dark lane.
Holly met his eyes, and did not look away. Jared put his hand out over the corner of the bar and drew her slowly toward him. She let him do it because nothing about his demeanor suggested that he would care if she pulled away.
“I can’t hurt you,” she asked. “Can I?”
Jared murmured, as if he was telling her a secret: “You’re welcome to try.”
Then she was flush against his body, the corner of the bar digging sharp into her back and his warmth going through her, turning into heat.
Jared leaned forward and set his mouth against hers. The kiss turned deep almost instantly, his hands clenched in the curly weight of her hair. The noise and lights of the bar faded away to a buzz in her ears, light dying behind her closed eyelids.
When the kiss broke apart, Holly’s mouth was stinging and she was staring up at him.
Jared looked down at her. “Want to go up to my room?”
Holly said, “Yes.”
* * *
Jared didn’t kiss her on the stairs or in the hall, didn’t touch her hand or even look at her until he had turned the key in the door. Then he turned to her, motions as mechanical as they had been with the key, and Holly stumbled across the floor of the room with his mouth on hers again. She hit the bed on her back, half bouncing and half arching from the mattress into his body over hers.
He had his arms braced on either side of her body, kissing her as if he wanted to drown in it. Holly grasped his arms, fingernails digging into the tense muscle beneath the cotton, and kissed him back. She was writhing on the bed she hadn’t seen, encouraging him to drown and take her with him.
He pushed Holly’s T-shirt up, making a sound against her mouth that sounded wild. Holly tore his shirt open with shaking hands, steadying them by pressing her palms against his skin and sliding them down the sleek muscle of his chest, the ridges of his abdomen, and against the slight rasp of hair. He kissed her again and again, his mouth a brand on hers.
She made a noise of her own, urging him on, greedy as her hands on his skin, reaching to pull open the button on his jeans, though his hands had not gone near hers. She was desperate to be hurt or used or anything, as long as she wanted it, as long as she could prove it was only this she wanted.
The thought was a cold shock that made her turn her face away, flushed cheek against the heated pillow, and stare at the wall. Messing around with boys was often an escape, but it had always been fun before.
The weight of his body was still pressing down on hers, muscles straining, and she almost turned her mouth back to his.
Jared breathed, “We can’t do this.” He rolled off Holly and went to sit on the window ledge. Holly pushed herself up on her elbows against the pillows and nodded silently.
“I can’t care about you at all,” Jared said.
“I wasn’t exactly asking you to,” Holly reminded him.
His swollen mouth curved. “That’s not what I meant.” Holly looked around the small room: one wall stone and the other plaster, a dusty mantelpiece piled with old books. A naked bulb swung from one of the beams and cast yellow light on the tangled sheets and the thin chain around Jared’s neck.
“There’s this book,” Jared said. “And in the book a guy said that he would rather touch someone’s hand if she was dead than another girl who was alive. It’s creepy. I know that.” He was staring off into spa
ce, as if at some private nightmare. “Nothing matters in comparison. Nobody is real but her. So it feels sometimes as if nothing else matters at all, including other people. She wouldn’t like that. Other people should matter.”
“I shouldn’t have done this,” Holly said. “Kami’s my friend.”
“She won’t care,” Jared said. “I was in her head, once,” and there was feeling in his voice for the first time: longing. “She didn’t want to be tied to me, didn’t want me hanging on her like a parasite anymore. She said that. And if she didn’t want it, I shouldn’t have wanted it either, should I? But I did. I still do.”
So he loved Kami. Holly had never doubted it; she didn’t think Kami had doubted it before the link was broken. But what she couldn’t tell from his words, and what she remembered Kami wondering too, was whether Jared actually wanted her, the way any guy might want any girl. The way he’d wanted Holly the first time they had met and moments before on the bed. She didn’t know if he loved Kami like that. Maybe it didn’t matter, if what he felt was too warped and twisted to be of any use to anyone.
“It must be nice,” Holly said tiredly, “to know exactly what you want.”
“Not when you know what you want, and you know you can never have it again,” Jared told her. He sounded tired too, his voice so worn it was almost soft.
Holly found herself almost wanting to laugh at how badly her attempt at an escape had gone.
“Men,” she said. “Always going on about feelings all the time. I have to go.” She felt a moment of pride at getting out the clever retort, and she was smiling slightly as she tugged down her wrinkled shirt and opened the door.
She found herself staring down into Kami’s startled face. For a moment, Kami looked only startled, her dark eyes bright as if she was expecting something lovely to happen. She had Jared’s ever-present leather jacket over her arm, and her free hand was lifted as if she’d meant to knock. Then the light in Kami’s eyes dimmed. Holly could see the whole thing through those eyes: the rumpled bed, Jared with his shirt and jeans undone.
Jared was absolutely still, staring at Kami.
Kami was the first one to speak. “I’m terribly sorry,” she said, her voice almost ludicrously polite. “I just wanted to give this back. I’ll go.”
“Don’t!” Jared said, his voice too loud, as if giving an order. Holly turned at the sound: he caught Holly’s eye, and flushed so red it made his scar burn livid white. He looked away.
“Please don’t go on my account,” Holly said, and then her attempt to be casual collapsed. “Oh God,” she said. “I’m really sorry, this isn’t—”
“It isn’t any of my business,” Kami told her with conviction. “And you have nothing to be sorry for.”
“I was just leaving,” Holly said. “I’m sorry. I’m going to go now.”
Kami’s hand went to Holly’s sleeve, as if she might ask her to stay. The idea was so hideous that Holly dodged around her and hurtled down the stairs, through the pub and into the street, where she started to run.
Holly didn’t even know where she was going until she found herself in front of Angela’s house, staring at the blank black windows. Angela wasn’t in. Holly didn’t want to stop, or admit to herself what she was doing, so she barely halted before the gate. She just turned around and headed for the grocer’s shop. Rusty and Angela were always training, and must be doing so now more than ever: Angie must be there.
Holly ran so fast she was panting, and if the pants sounded a little more like sobs as she went, she told herself that it didn’t matter. The grocery was dim as she walked through it, shelves stocked with shadows. Holly was relieved when she got to the stairs. She ran up the steps, then stopped dead with her hand on the door.
Through the wire-meshed glass, Holly could see Rusty and Angela sparring on the mats, fluorescent lights giving the turquoise room the appearance of an aquarium in the night. Rusty had his back to her, though she could hear the rumble of his voice. He must have been saying something funny, because Angie was smiling.
Angie was wearing a ponytail, the shining-straight length of black hair spilling over her shoulder. Her mouth was gleaming, her teeth a glint behind the glossed curve of her lips, made up even when she was wearing sweatpants and a tank top. She always looked like a girl in a movie. She made the world act like she was in a movie, everything else going out of focus as the camera slid from the dark fall of her lashes against her cheek to the pale slim line of her neck and the shadowy dip of her collarbone, the soft swell and gentle curve inward of her body under the stretched white cotton.
Except there wasn’t a camera, and this wasn’t a movie. It was just that Holly was looking.
Holly sat down on the top step and put her head in her hands.
She wasn’t sure how long it had been when she heard the creak of the door opening and felt her body tense and then relax as Rusty said, “Holly? What’s going on?”
He sat down on the step beside her, big shoulder jostling her as he settled, and Holly looked up at him. Her lashes were sticking together with tears, and in her spangled blurry vision she saw the angled lines of his cheekbones and the sometimes-curling, sometimes-tender line of his mouth. He was like Angie, but he was a guy; a ton of girls in school had a crush on Rusty Montgomery. It would be perfectly all right.
And maybe because of that, and maybe because she was frightened, Holly lunged forward and grabbed Rusty’s face in her hands, bringing his lips to hers.
Rusty almost started out of his skin. He grabbed her shoulder and held her back. “Whoa,” he said. “Steady there. What are you doing?”
Holly’s shuddering breaths turned to real sobs. She couldn’t look at him: she buried her face in her hands again.
“Hey now,” Rusty said, and patted her on the back in a slow rhythm. “Easy. No need to get so upset. It’s only natural to crave a taste of my sweet, sweet love. You are by no means the first.”
Holly hiccuped out a laugh between sobs and between her fingers, and Rusty laughed with her, steady and calm, like the hand patting her back.
“And I am always flattered,” Rusty continued, “but I love my sister. Not in an ‘I love my sister and I want to make out with her’ way, that would be terrible and disturbing, but in an ‘I love my sister, and I’m not going anywhere near the girl she likes’ way. Be a big mess. Life is hard for me, with all my irresistible sexual magnetism. It’s a real problem, almost as bad as the fact that my steps are now the number one crying spot in Sorry-in-the-Vale. I have to maintain control of the situation at all times or my life would devolve into a nonstop romantical frenzy.”
Holly tried to swallow her hiccups down. It was ridiculous, how Rusty could sit there at perfect ease, completely aware of how Angela was and not even seeming to mind. Her family would have minded a lot.
“You don’t understand,” she said.
“You think I underestimate the effect of my appeal on the general populace?” Rusty nodded thoughtfully. “Could be.”
“Some people are that way,” Holly burst out. “And it’s okay. It’s okay, if that’s how you’re born. I know that. But what if you weren’t born that way, what if you were just some sort of freak, if you’d been with a ton of guys and you still liked guys and then if you were . . . if you started noticing, what does that even make you? What kind of person can’t just choose to be one way or the other?”
“Uh, bisexual people might be the kind of person you’re thinking of ?” Rusty suggested. “I’ve also heard it called ‘sitting on the fence and admiring the view on both sides.’ Holly. Being able to love more than one kind of person, in any kind of way—that doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you. There’s nothing wrong with you. Well, you are pretty hair-trigger with the whole kissing thing; you should learn to check that kissing is cool in the future. I was fine, obviously, but others have nervous dispositions and might well be taken aback.”
He kept talking, rubbing soothing circles on Holly’s back, as if what she h
ad said was no big deal at all. He was such a weird guy, so casual about everything: maybe nothing she could say would upset him.
“You don’t understand,” Holly said, and began crying harder. “I can’t.”
Rusty fell silent. After a moment, he got up and Holly heard the creak of the door opening and closing again.
Holly was not surprised when someone else settled on the step beside her. Angela was careful not to lean against her, but every molecule of Holly’s body was aware of Angie’s.
“Holly,” Angela said, her voice low. “What’s wrong?”
Holly looked up again and saw Angie’s face this time, not anyone else’s, just Angie with her dark intent eyes, looking at Holly as nobody else in the world did, as if she took her seriously.
“You can’t tell anyone,” she whispered, leaning in closer.
Angela blinked, mouth tipping at one side as if she might be about to make a joke about pinky swears. She nodded instead.
Holly looked at the hands she’d been cradling her head in, her damp cupped palms. There were teardrops glistening on her fingers.
Each of the teardrops burst silently into a point of light, lucent and shocking. Fireworks, contained in the curve of Holly’s hand. They were beautiful, but Holly didn’t even know who she was anymore.
“I’m a sorcerer,” she said, very quietly, as though if she said it in a lower voice, it would be less true. As though it might not change her life.
Angie slid an arm around Holly’s shoulders gradually, making sure Holly was all right with it. Holly leaned back in the circle of Angela’s arm and closed her eyes.
Chapter Sixteen
A Preference for Breathing
There was a small mirror hanging on the stone wall of the little inn room. Kami looked into it because she had to look at something else when Jared was doing up his jeans. Her face in the glass looked young and small, as if she didn’t have a clue about the world, as if life was never going to stop surprising and hurting her.
“Well,” she said, smoothing the jacket over her arm and then laying it on the tangled sheets. “Now I’ve returned this, I’d better get going.” She was reluctant to let go of the jacket, her fingers lingering stupidly on its scarred brown surface. “Sorry again.” She let go of the jacket and stepped away from the bed.
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