Page 86 of A Promise of Peridot
“It was extremely complicated,” I said, thinking of my conversation with Kane before we entered the caves this morning. How sometimes I had a tendency to see things in black-and-white.
Fedrik’s brows knitted inward. “You must know...” He pressed his lips into a line as if debating his next words. “You must know he’s madly in love with you, right?”
I felt my eyes go wide. It wasn’t that I hadn’t had the thought. I just hadn’t expected Fedrik to be the one to say it.
I had hoped as much, once. Wanted it to be true more than I wanted my heart to beat. But the energy between us, the jealousy and possessiveness, the constant poking, taunting, the push and pull—it wasn’t what I imagined love to look like. And truthfully, he had needed me to serve a purpose. That was what drew him to me. My life—mydeath, rather—was what he had always been after. Somewhere along the way he had become attracted to me, and then—
“No.” I shook my head. “He’s not.”
“Wen—”
“I’m like a plaything to him. A game. And he doesn’t like to lose.” I bit my lip. “Or have other people play with his toys.”
Fedrik’s eyes glowed with heat. “Are you implying I want to play with you?”
Had I not seen the clear desire written across his face I would have flushed with embarrassment. But lately the only tonic to my misery was being bold. “Don’t you?”
Fedrik laughed, a little guilty. “I don’t wish to interfere somewhere I am not wanted.”
Did I?
Want him?
Not really.
I liked Fedrik immensely. He was sophisticated and kind, worldly and easygoing. And he offered me something nobody else in my life could: the ability to see myself through the eyes of someone who didn’t know my fate. I had grown so much in the past few months I felt like stretched-out skin—so worn from the changes I’d been through that I wore them across me in long pale streaks.
Fedrik made me feel supple and new.
But still... No. Try as I might, I didn’twanthim. Not wholly and thoroughly the way I always wanted Kane. Not even in the childlike way I had wanted Halden—longing for what he could be one day rather than what he was.
But before I found the right way to say all of that—if therewasa right way to say any of it—he gave me the slightest catlike twitch of a smile, mistaking my silence for affirmation, and leaned in to brush his mouth against mine.
26
kane
Rain pelted my face as I finished pissing and pulled myself back into my pants.
The bottle of bourbon still dangling from my hand was mocking me. I had been determined to drink less, but today happened to be one of the more unpleasant of my life, and I needed something to take the edge off. Or several somethings, to take off several edges.
Grief was a curious thing. After so many tenuous years of it, I’d come to recognize what might induce greater pain than usual. I didn’t avoid those prompts—the mention of my mother’s or brother’s names, playing the lute. I had built up enough scar tissue that such heartache now only felt like a twinge. The dull scraping of a butter knife.
The true threat, I’d realized, was when Iwasn’tprepared: when something wholly unexpected conjured them to the forefront of my mind. Then that butter knife became a battle axe.
Trying—and failing—to drink less produced one such unforeseen, agonizing ache.
My mother never drank. Not in celebration, not in misery. Not even for show. I didn’t know if she enjoyed spirit but abstained for some surely admirable reason, or if she loathed the stuff entirely. If I could have told her I was trying to kick the habit, and for a woman, no less, she might’ve doubled over in fits of laughter. Yale would’ve without a doubt.
Or she might’ve been hideously proud. Pulled me into a hug I knew I was too old for, but would have accepted nonetheless, and assured me I was capable of anything I set my mind to. I’d try to change the subject—move away from praise I didn’t deserve—but she’d proceed as if I hadn’t said a word. She’d ask me when I knew I was in love. When I’d introduce her.
But my mother would never get to see how being in love changed me, for better or worse.
She’d never get to meet Arwen.
And it was those thoughts that ripped at the wound in my heart, cleaving it open anew.
A sudden chill swept through the wide, flat leaves surrounding our camp and splattered me in sideways rain. I took another pull from the bottle.
