Page 64 of The Luminaries
“Okay.” He lifts his hands in surrender. The bow rises toward the sky. “They might make you, though, if you become a hunter. It can be dangerous to have glass near your eyes. But forget I asked.”
“I will.” She doesn’t like touching her eye, and as unstylish as her glasses might be, she can’t imaginenothaving them.
She grabs another bolt. Her face is going numb with cold, but the rhythm of reloading is keeping her fingers warm. Again, she nocks the arrow, takes aim, shoots… and miraculously hits the target where she’d aimed—well, mostly. She wanted the stomach; she probably hit the bladder.
“I like you in glasses,” Jay adds. His hands are down now, and he sets the bow onto the table. “Just so we’re clear on that. I, uh… really like you in glasses.”
Something about the way he says “really” makes Winnie glance his way. But he’s not looking at her. Instead, he’s watching one of the hunters glide up a rope as easily as if she were attached to a pulley.
The Fridays really are the best.
Winnie wonders what Jay would look like climbing that same rope. For some reason, it makes her blush.
She grabs for another bolt. “Remember when I asked you about… the Whisperer?” She’s not going to be ashamed.
“Yeah.” Jay saunters toward her. “And Lizzy told me why you came over yesterday.”
Winnie nods. He is moving dangerously close to her, and they aremoving dangerously close to the accusations she’d flung at him from the top of the stairs. She doesn’t regret saying any of that stuff. It felt good to get it out after four years. Shedoesregret that Jay had nothing better to offer in his defense.
“Have you seen it yet?” she asks. “On the hunt Friday night, maybe?”
A frown. “No. Have you talked to Mario about it?”
She scowls and reorients herself to the target. She pretends it’s one of Mario’s bubbles. “It’s out there, Jay. Iknowthe Whisperer is out there. But no one will do anything about it.” She nocks the bolt. Aims. Releases. And misses the throat via a shoulder.
Jay is now standing very near to her, and after a murmured “May I?” Winnie nods. But where she expects him to take the weapon from her, he instead moves in to adjust her stance and nock another arrow for her.
Suddenly, she is painfully aware that, yet again, she smells like old sweat while he smells of lime and bergamot and forest. He braces his chest against her back and loops his arm over her shoulders, adjusting her grip and her stance and the angle of her body toward the target. Subtle movements that Winnie is pretty sure she won’t be able to replicate without his help.
“Pick your target on the body,” Jay says. He is a vague shape in the corner of her vision, hazy like forest trees at dawn. Yet as real and sturdy as them too.
Nonsensical,she thinks.You’re being nonsensical.
“Heart,” she says, and with Jay’s finely honed muscles to guide her, she finds the right spot on the target. It is a fraction of a hair higher than she would have aimed.
“Shoot,” he tells her. His head is beside Winnie’s, the heat of him warm against her.
She fights the urge to click her teeth or swallow.
She shoots. The bolt hits the heart.
Before she can move, though, and release the sudden brilliance in her veins—I hit the heart! I hit the heart!—Jay’s grip on her hardens.
“Don’t move,” he tells her. “Hold the position. Just a few beats after you’re done. It’ll help your muscles learn where they’re supposed to go.”
“Right,” she says. “Hold it.”I hit the heart! I hit the heart!
“You’re a natural, Win.” His voice tickles against her ear. “Justremember that: the hunt is in your blood. You belong out there and always have.”
Winnie’s throat swells up at those words. It might be the nicest thing anyone has ever said to her. She twists her head to peer at him. His eyes are right there, the pupils reflecting her face back to her. “Thank you.”
“Yeah” is all he offers in reply. Then very slowly, Jay peels away from her. First his fingers, next his arms. And finally his face and body, too. Cold scrapes in. The heat of him recedes. “Good job. You can move now, Win.” And there’s his soft laugh—although Winnie doesn’t think it’s aimed at her this time so much as cutting inward.
When she does finally release the pose to study him, she finds his hands in his pockets and his pewter eyes skating toward the trees, reaching for the forest.
CHAPTER33
After target practice, they run the Friday obstacle course (Winnie doesn’t even getcloseto climbing the rope, and to her weird disappointment, Jay doesn’t try), then finish with basic conditioning. In other words, Winnie gets hit repeatedly all over her body.
