Page 104 of A Promise of Peridot
“I think I’m going to bed,” I said.
But Griffin had finally dozed off. His golden hair fluttered across his forehead with every unhurried exhale, his face melting into his hand, which sat propped on the chair’s stiff, cracked arm.When I stood, I noticed a spine-creased book next to the chair that had become his home, tucked beneath one of its clawed feet.
I smiled. Griffin must have been the most fiercely loyal person I had ever met. He was honest beyond belief, probably to a fault, but still. He didn’t suffer from pride or ego. I was lucky to call him my friend. So was Mari.
I stood and kissed her forehead before walking back to my small, book-filled alcove.
The bed depressed under my weight and my eyes fell to the glass doors of the balcony before me—the soft blue curtains that hung imperfectly around them allowing a single sliver of the world outside to slip through.
I rolled to my side, cool sheets on my face like a kiss.
But sleep never came.
“You’re terrified of letting yourself feel anything real.”
“Nothing matters if you’re going to die.”
I turned to my back and let my eyes focus on the dainty cobwebs and cracks on the ceiling above me. I had loved Kane, once. And he had broken that. Brokenme.Lied to me, used me, tricked me, stolen me away—
But even as I rattled off his offenses in my mind as I so often did, they carried little weight. Maybe I had spent too long blaming Kane for every profoundly awful thing that had ever happened to me.
And worse than blaming him for my misfortune, maybe I had been usinghim.
Using him as a catchall for my pain, my suffering. As a punching bag when I needed to feel fury. As an answer when I wondered,Why me? Why did I have to die?
And buried deepest of all, bared wide open in the silent, darkroom that smelled of bound leather—maybe I had been saddling Kane with all my pain, using him to diffuse it, long before the battle of Siren’s Bay.
At Shadowhold, when so little made sense to me. When the world as I knew it was being dismantled minute by minute, piece by piece. When all Kane wanted was to show me the rest of the blossom while I was fixated on the stem. And I had fought him tooth and nail.
Maybe now that he had done the one thing he always swore he wouldn’t—try to let me in, allow for the vulnerability he always saw as weakness—I owed him some vulnerability of my own.
Or at least an apology.
I couldn’t watch him fight for me, protect me, desire me from afar—all while I hid my feelings for him. That was true cowardice.
What those feelings were, I didn’t fully know. Attraction, chemistry, friendship... I wasn’t sure I could feel anything the same way I once had. Not when this numbness, this darkness, this bleak, revolting dread slithered through my veins.
But maybe I’d say exactly that.
That I hadn’t figured out what I wanted or how I felt—but that I missed him. In the depths of my soul, in my hands when they twitched to touch him, in my ears when they searched for his voice in every room.I missed him.If it wouldn’t be too wrong to ask him to be patient with the selfish, fragmented parts of me. To give me a chance to discover what I wanted, even if we both knew I didn’t have much time left to do so.
Maybe I’d just ask him to try.
It was all he’d ever asked of me.
30
kane
It had been hours since dinner, and the manor was cloaked in sleep. The very bricks of the walls might’ve been sighing in peaceful slumber. I, on the other hand, hadn’t slept since the night before Reaper’s Cavern, and feared I wasn’t likely to ever again.
My next swig of bitter lavender spirit burned considerably less than the first. I sank deeper into the couch, watching the low, crackling fire. It flickered and twirled like a beleaguered dancer, once passionate but now half-hearted and lazy—tired of its own routine.
I was tired, too.
How could I have raged at Arwen like that back in Peridot?
I had been nasty, crude, entirely immature—
