Page 52 of A Heart of Bluestone

Lips just parted, the soft pink of his mouth brushes against hers. Her tongue flicks gently, teasingly, over his. Noses grazing, her hand pushing up against the front of his sweater, then sliding along the smooth neck of his sunkissed skin.

Still, he watches me.

Those blue eyes scrape over me, like shards of glass pressing too firmly against my skin, scraping along the bone of my exposed clavicle, flickering over the hemline of my skirt, dragging across my mouth—

And my breath is pinned to my throat.

A hot flush steals me, fast, like I am the direct line of the fireplace and the flames roar violently in the hearth, roasting me.

But that heat is coming from elsewhere.

His mouth moves with hers, his lips grazing hers, his grip flexes on her thigh,but his eyes…

I swallow, thick, then wrench my gaze away.

I turn my hot cheek to his stare. “Let’s go.”

Courtney nods. She leaves the canned booze on the table, only some sips gone from it.

I’m quick to scramble out of the chair and snatch up my bag from the table.

I rush out of there like my ass is on fire.

9

I’m grateful that we leave the village before the rush, the last hour the gondolas are on for the day.

If anyone misses that final gondola, then it’s an after-curfew infringement, driven back to the academy by security, and a good solid week in detention.

So I’m glad to be ahead of the rush, even if it’s Dray’s stare that ran me out of the village. It leaves an uneasy feeling in my gut—and another feeling I don’t care to acknowledge.

I say nothing about it. Not to Courtney who, as we climb into the gondola, decides that she is going to look for James in the infirmary, since he didn’t show in the village.

Courtney’s worry has her hands wringing on her lap the whole gondola ride. And when the carriage jolts to a loud, groaning halt at the station by the fields, she clammers out in a hurry.

I keep her pace through the halls and corridors.

But my mind won’t release Dray.

I need to soap up a rag and climb into my skull and scrub my brain clean. But even that won’t erase the memory seared into my mind. The diamond gleam of his eyes, a sharpness that sometimes pierces through the misty veil, the soft pink of his mouth brushing over another’s lips—but watching me.

I’m glad that I have to run to keep up with Courtney all the way to the infirmary, because it excuses the hot, ugly flush that burns my face.

Whatever that was with Dray, I don’t know. A mockery, of course. Some way to torment me, make me squirm—but why it has me so flushed, I would hate to know.

I do all that I can do, just push it with a surge of violence out of my thoughts.

My bootsteps come down on the floorboards extra hard, the thumping enough to knock the brass frames on the walls, to rattle the vases tucked against the wainscotting.

By the time we get to the infirmary, my hands are fisted and my chest is flushed. My boots stagger into a slowed pace.

I follow Courtney through the heavy wood doors, wide open, and one step into the infirmary, I notice that already most of the sickbeds are occupied. Some students are wrapped up in leafy casts, others wear the brownish gleam of a burning ointment over fresh wounds, but most have the black cast, the one for broken bones.

Guess there were more than justsomeaccidents on the slopes today.

James is one of them, the black cast crew.

Halfway down the infirmary, he’s slumped on his pillow, his casted leg elevated by the attached white strings that unravel from the ceiling.

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